The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Junior has known he’s homosexual for as long as he can remember. The first naked body he responded to was his father’s, not in the flesh, but in an old film he saw when he was three. His father, in the film, was in his twenties, and his chest was smooth and strong, and he was tall, and his hair was plentiful and styled and glistened from some beautician’s goo, much as it still looks today, so many years later and still the same shade and still smelling of the same goo. Junior’s three-year-old dingle tingled. He made his parents run that movie for him all the time, for years, and they thought it was so cute that he was so interested in seeing his naked pop in a pool with lots of other naked men in the background.

  Then one day his pop took him into a locker room because he felt Junior should get used to being with the boys, being one of the boys, listening to the talk about getting laid. In the locker room he could really see the cock of the man who might become president of the United States.

  Is it a federal offense to describe the cock of the man who might become the president of the United States?

  His cock is like a rope. It’s long and floppy and it sort of coils up when he sits down on the wooden bench in the locker room, and it coils around and settles notably in the mesh pouch when he puts on bathing shorts. But I liked it best when we took showers together when I was just a youngster and I stood beside him and my face was at the same height as his cock. It swayed back and forth right in front of me like the pendulum of his grandfather clock, back and forth, under the shower, back and forth, side to side, and when he lathered it up with soap all the bubbles and foam made it slippery against my body, and I had to hold on to his leg or slip and fall down. He would laugh and soap me all up too, and we would slip and slide together. He never fell down, of course, but I did, and then he would bend over to help me up, and that rope would flip-flop in the air, bending over me too, and as he pulled me up I could almost taste it in my mouth, my mouth would be open, almost automatically, like I was going to be fed, like some food I needed to stay alive. Like babies suck their mommy’s tits.

  Then his cock became like a thick stick. I didn’t know what that meant. When it got that way Pop would immediately turn off the shower, grab huge towels for himself and me, and scoot us out. Our warm and soapy time together was over. This is all stuff I dredged up when I got into therapy and lay down on the couch of Dr. Rivtov at Yaddah.

  “I can’t turn this in for Daily Themes!” he yelled when I told him it was great. “I can never write anything at all forever because all I have to write about is my life, which is what Daily Themes is teaching us is what every writer has to write about, his life. There’s no hope.”

  I hug him close and of course he pulls away.

  He refuses to see me anymore.

  He broke my heart.

  People always ask me if Junior was gay. Of course he was gay. But what good is saying that when he ran away from the only world he really wanted to live in.

  * * *

  I am happening so quickly that I cannot keep up with me! I am now on my way to touching every single gay man in America.

  BUSTER STARTS TO SENSE HIS SHITTY SITUATION

  Buster Punic doesn’t like it that his visibility is being curtailed even before Peter’s sworn in and he himself will officially get to work. Buster Punic and Manny Moose were meant to be Ruester’s two personal chief hatchet men, and Buster was going around trying to talk Peter up when all of a sudden Manny forbids Buster from talking to the press. “In fact, to anyone.” Buster knew that Purpura didn’t like him, trust him, or want him around. She would have canned him except that his wife, Carlotta, is Purpura’s best friend. Carlotta had begged Purpura to find something, anything, to get Buster out of the house. Purpura owes her one for her sublime taste in making Purpura over, not an easy task.

  Buster didn’t come to Washington to shut up. He even bought a fancy house in Rock Creek Park. He wonders if it was a mistake to arrive so early from Beverly Hills and set himself up for a scene that is not quite ready to shoot. He makes a bigger mistake when he meets Claudia at Doris Hardware’s. And starts going there every night and a few afternoons as well. He doesn’t have anything else to do. He has too much time on his hands. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. He is falling in love with Claudia. Not good. He wants Peter to appoint him an ambassador to Britain or France. He’s too spoiled to know this is not the way to get it. The Punics have always gotten what they wanted, ever since the American Revolution, or was it the Mayflower? There are a lot of old families now. All here a long time. All very rich. “Old blood” doesn’t mean much anymore and Buster doesn’t know that either. Dumbo is Buster’s nickname for Peter Ruester. Would that it had been his nickname for himself. If it had been, a few people might still be alive.

  Buster felt sorry for Peter. Peter needed all the help he could get. Buster knew what it felt like to be married to a bitch. Carlotta had put him in a closet the day after they were married—the morning after their wedding night on which he fucked her for the first, only, and last time. He had an enormous penis and she couldn’t take it, and she told him so to his face: “You are never going to stick that thing into me again.” Buster had told this story many times because he thought it reflected well on his manhood. He can’t remember why he’d wanted to marry her. As a Catholic, she had extracted many guarantees from him before they married, like his converting, which he still felt guilty about. The Punics never liked Catholics. Back in the late 1960s he and Peter partied around together. Peter liked to watch Buster use his enormous penis on hookers. Somehow in the course of their activities Buster sensed Peter’s coming rendezvous with destiny and told him about it more and more. Peter enjoyed hearing about his rendezvous with destiny. He certainly wasn’t hearing it from anyone else. Except Purpura, but she was his wife. Carlotta wasn’t telling Buster about his rendezvous with anything. But she was Purpura’s best friend. That was why he married her. He knew Peter was going to be somebody. And he needed a somebody if he wasn’t going to stay an anybody.

  Buster had recognized that Peter had been a poor candidate (meaning he didn’t have any money); but he didn’t recognize that when you are a poor candidate, and what candidate for president is not poor in some way, that’s when others are paying for your ride and you can’t complain about the fare.

  It wasn’t long before Buster was left alone with his big penis. Manny tells him to his face that Buster’s around only because Carlotta begged Purpura for this one favor, get her sex-starved husband off her back. (Literally. When she wouldn’t take him in front he had attempted rear entry.) Purpura was grateful that her own biggest bonus in marrying Peter was how undersexed he was, so she felt free to have sex anywhere she wanted. Peter had a pornography collection. It was a secret hobby that only Buster knew about. Whenever Peter and Buster did get together now, all Peter talked about was what it had been like to be a movie star. Finally Buster knew enough to say, as he did to Claudia, Boy, is Dumbo going to be one dumbo of a president. Now that he is exiled before he began, he’ll have to find a way to show the world that Buster Punic was worth having around. Or else. With all he knew about “those two,” he figured he should be able to come out an ambassador.

  No one wanted to know about Buster Punic and his messing around with Claudia Webb. Manny Moose had the media in his pocket. He’d raised a lot of money to play with, Manny had. But that wasn’t the only factor. Nobody wanted to know about it because it was so tacky and trashy and disgusting and The American People will want to give their president-to-be the benefit of any doubt so early in his new reign. Buster’s messing with Claudia should have been major front-page dirt for just about everything now being trumpeted as “The New Agenda for the New America,” which is what Manny is launching as “Our Thrust.”

  “God, it is such a good story,” Anne-Marie Wallende will write in her The Punic Scandal: My Biggest Story Never Told. “Who are my sources? I’ve really got to reveal them? Well, for starters, Claudia told Daniel and Daniel told old Wa
shington royalty Ianthe Adams Strode and Ianthe told yours truly. I will have said much of this (except for naming my sources), and a lot more, in my article in Vanity’s All, which was expanded into a book nobody paid any attention to, either the article or the book. So what good are ‘sources’? At least I beat Kitty Kelley out on this one.”

  What good are books? What good are readers? He really will be Teflon, that Ruester.

  A BRIEF INTERNATIONAL TREMBLE

  In Geneva, Dr. Herschel Vitabaum, American representative to and president of Health of the World (HOW), the international organization of nations united for protection against infections, looks at his pile of accumulating daily teletypes and at the pins sticking in his wall map of the world and acknowledges to himself that yes, he is seeing at least five hundred new infections of unknown origin and that most of these pins are stuck in the Especially Poor Places (EPPs). These new infections can’t all be the same thing, can they? Sure, some of them could be from the growing amount of syphilis since the war. Fucking hookers are everywhere now. But he has multiplied the common vector (.023) by the overall poverty surge (123.45654) and divided it by the number of countries he supervises that do not have running water (107) and divided this by the number of medical centers that actually have a full-time doctor or nurse on staff (120) and then factored in the number of Adult Potentials (APs) in millions (111,879) and realized that no matter which way you fuck up the math it can only be a plague. He peers into the future and he trembles. He has trembled mightily for quite a few of the years he has been headquartered here in Geneva, which is twenty-six. He has seen epidemics come and go. One plague at a time. No, that’s not true. There are usually a couple of them running at the same time. Over the years he’s trembled so much and alerted so much and complained so much that he finally decided to shut up and wait and see what the Americans do. Which is never very much. The American political hierarchy is never interested in world health. This guy who’s been running for president is already threatening to withdraw from HOW. “We are not in the business of being doctor to the world,” he had announced somewhere on his campaign trail, “and the world better get used to it.” Tremble tremble. There goes our future. There goes the Health of the World. Up until now, America’s been the only member country that has dutifully paid their share of HOW’s upkeep.

  So if whatever he sees is now happening, the rest of the world is not going to know it for a while. If ever there was an international humanitarian organization more hamstrung than even its EPPs, it’s HOW. If ever there was a bureaucrat so weighed down with the problems of the world that not only can’t he stand tall, he can’t even look anyone in the eye, at any conference, in any country, or in any language, it is Herschel Vitabaum, M.D. Herschel is a bent-over man, both physically and emotionally. The childhood scatosis that gave him a curvature of the spine has been partly eradicated, even (thanks to him) in the EPPs, but that just makes him feel awful when he sees little black babies in deepest Ethiopia and Somalia who still have it. He really shouldn’t be head of HOW anymore, but that’s true of a lot of the bureaucrats in world health. After a while you just go numb to tragedy, there’s so much of it that no one cares about, and it’s harder to keep your sanity. But as always when his term of office is up and it’s time for a new election, no one anywhere, in any country that belongs to HOW, wants the job, so he’s reelected by acclamation and it’s four more years of Vitabaum. And he really doesn’t have it in his heart to leave all his EPPs with their unknown or unrecognized diseases and epidemics and plagues. After all, vitabaum means “tree of life.” He feels the weight of his obligation, if nobody else does.

  Whom should he notify, anyway, about his exploding pins? The United Nations Ministry for the Eradication of All Illnesses is worse than even HOW. They can’t agree on anything. For every country that supports someone or something there’s a country that hates the same. The Geneva Conference for World Blood, Sweat and Tears (originally financed by the music industry to deal with drug problems among their membership)? Worse still. There are many organizations concerned with world health and he knows that none of them is any good. None. Tremble tremble tremble. “Fools! They are all run by fools! I shall sit down and compose a report on my findings and send it to that soon-to-be president and his fine soon-to-be First Lady back home where I never can seem to get reassigned and perhaps I’ll receive a nice plane ticket to meet with them and their now-being-handpicked administrators to discuss my daily mounting pins. Perhaps my assessment will worry them as it worries me.”

  That’s what he tells himself and that’s what he does, send out his alert. He’s that desperate and naïve to actually think someone will do something, like answer him, which would be a first. Plague is not a word that HOW likes to use. Nor does HAD. Or NITS. Or FADS. Or COD. It scares people. You say “small outbreak,” or maybe, if you have to, “epidemic.” Best is “a few cases.” As long as he’s been in public health Dr. Vitabaum’s never seen the word plague used, even when that’s what it is. Maybe pandemic. That’s a useful word that no one understands. But all these pins look to already be much more than that. How can you call a plague of wall pins an ice cream cone? Well, you can’t. And he knows it. It will have to be described in just this fashion, i.e., not really described at all. And he knows it. Childhood dreams of being a doctor to the world have long since been retired, as he so longs also to be.

  Herschel had degrees in all this. From Harvard. And from Johns Hopkins. What has he learned? That no one ever learns. He trembles yet again. This new one sure smells plaguey, and it doesn’t take a big Jewish nose to catch the whiff of stink. He writes his thoughts in his Your Medical Diary for This Year sent to him annually by one of the pharmaceutical companies that are always trying to get him to buy lifesaving medicines he can’t afford. Tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble.

  Receiving no answer in many months from his new about-to-be-inaugurated president et al., Dr. Vitabaum resubmits his report. Within weeks Dr. Vitabaum receives a letter from a Mr. Linus Gobbel, chief of staff for he who is coming, reassigning him to a post in the Mestazia Peninsula of Lower East (Former) Borneo, in charge of nasal hernias, a local problem in no danger of spreading anywhere.

  Tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble.

  Dr. Herschel Vitabaum decides to take the remaining money from petty cash and go to Washington. Nasal hernia indeed.

  IN WHICH DAME LADY HERMIA OFFERS A FEW WORDS ABOUT HISTORY AND EVIL

  The introduction and arrival of new emerging strains of history are as vital to investigate as they are troublesome to pin down.

  CORAGGIO!

  Are we all able to keep everything, if I may say so, straight?

  WE MUST NOT FALTER!

  (Fred, you should be telling us this!)

  Your great gay writer Melville said, “It is not down in any map, true places never are.”

  Thus we must strive even harder in our study of evil not to take no for an answer.

  For, as your Myra Breckinridge might have said, “If one is right, the unsayable must be said.”

  What is history?

  What historian does not ask this question daily?

  Hegel thought that history was not meaningless chance, that it was a rational process, what he called the realization of freedom.

  Nothing rational is going on here.

  And who has freedom?

  Livy, Thucydides, Herodotus, Gibbon, Tacitus, all were motivated to write their histories by despair.

  Despair!

  Hobbes, on translating Thucydides, used the word silly. “He made me realize how silly is democracy.”

  Let me update my growing view of evil thusly:

  I believe that the acts that most radically alter the course of history are evil deeds perpetrated on others intentionally, and that these perpetrators and these deeds force history to become what it should be recorded as: a narrative of evil deeds.

  Your Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench joins Livy, Thucydides, Herodotus, G
ibbon, and Tacitus in their shared motivation for writing: despair.

  The plague of The Underlying Condition is upon us.

  We are entering the Ruester Years.

  Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter. What did they really do? Do you remember? Truman dropped bombs. Eisenhower kept a mistress, his wife was a lush, and he fired ten thousand gay employees. Nixon told lies. Kennedy got murdered. Ford played golf; his wife drank too much too. Johnson mired the world in Vietnam. Carter grew peanuts and believed too much in God.

  What really changes history?

  It’s not what history thinks it is.

  Peter Ruester will be responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. You do remember Adolf Hitler? In fact Peter Ruester will be responsible for more deaths than Joseph Stalin. Did you even know Stalin murdered more people than Hitler?

  As Edward Gibbon said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

  Read on, Fred’s American People, read on and weep. The era of your greatest heartbreak is about to begin.

  Fred, come back! We must continue to more precisely define and elucidate the particular evil we are dealing with here.

  We need you and your bouncing ball.

  Will I—or will Fred—be of any use in this era of plague?

  THE RUESTERS ARE COMING! THE RUESTERS ARE HERE!

  BY FELIX TURNER, STYLE REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TRUTH

  … Purpura Ruester has brought along her California decorator, Swish Turtell, and “my best boy chum,” Foppy Schwartz, “both possessors of sublime taste,” who, with Purpura’s best girl chum, Carlotta Punic, whose taste is also better than hers (“almost everybody’s taste is thought to be better than hers,” according to Women’s Wonderful), comprise “my own cabinet of advisers.” She goes on laughingly: “Swish is my Secretary of the Interior and Carlotta is my Secretary of Human Services and Foppy is Secretary of Everything Else, which therefore must be State. How can I go wrong?” She laughs again. From Day One, does our new First Lady desire to be such a hoot?