The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  FRED: Dr. Brookner, no one with half a brain gets involved with gay politics. Anyway, what I think is politically incorrect.

  EMMA: Why?

  FRED: Gay is good to that crowd, no matter what. There’s no room for criticism, for looking at ourselves critically.

  EMMA: What’s your criticism?

  FRED: I hate how we play victim when many of us, most of us don’t have to.

  EMMA: Then you’re exactly what’s needed now.

  FRED: I tell you, nobody will listen! This group does not know how to play follow the leader!

  EMMA: Maybe they’re just waiting for somebody to lead them.

  FRED: I don’t want to lead them! Wouldn’t it be better coming from you?

  EMMA: Doctors are unfortunately conservative. When you make too much noise you get treated like a nutcase just when you’re needed most. Don’t you know that yet?

  FRED: Needed? Needed for what? What exactly are you trying to get me to do?

  EMMA: Tell gay men to stop having sex.

  FRED: What?

  EMMA: Someone has to. Why not you? It only sounds harsh now. Wait a few more years, it won’t sound so harsh.

  FRED: Do you realize that you are talking about millions of men who have singled out promiscuity as their principal political agenda, the one they’d die before abandoning? How do you deal with that?

  EMMA: Tell them they may die. Are you saying you can’t relate in a nonsexual way?

  FRED: It’s more complicated! They think sex is all we have. We’re not exactly allowed to live out in the open like human beings. You want me to tell every gay man in New York to stop having sex?

  EMMA: Who said anything about just New York?

  FRED: You want me to tell every gay man in America …

  EMMA: In the entire world! That’s the only way this disease will stop spreading.

  FRED: Dr. Brookner, isn’t that just a tiny bit unrealistic?

  EMMA: Mr. Lemish, if having sex can kill you, doesn’t anyone with half a brain stop fucking? But perhaps you’ve never lost anything. You can get dressed. I can’t find what I’m looking for. Goodbye.

  FRED: Is it contagious?

  EMMA: I think so.

  FRED: Then how come you haven’t come down with it?

  EMMA: Because it seems to have a very long incubation period and require close intimacy.

  FRED: It’s like some sort of plague.

  EMMA: There’s always a plague. Of one kind or another. I’ve had mine since I was a kid.

  THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY IS A CLOSETED GAY

  FRED AND HERMIA TELL US HOW NEW YORK CITY GOT ITS USELESS HEALTH COMMISSIONER

  “I don’t want to know about it” will be Kermit Goins’s favorite expression. He’s the mayor of New York City and has been since I moved here. He’s not making any statement on behalf of gays, or what is happening to us, and apparently, he isn’t going to. I’ve tried to contact him a number of times, telling his secretary I’m the “award-winning filmmaker,” and drop in names like Sammy Sircus and Randy Dildough as if they were my buddies, just like Moses Rattner taught me to be pushy. No dice. That pisses me off. I’ve supervised movies that have cost millions of dollars and I’m not used to not being able to get big-deals on the phone.

  I know Kermit Goins is gay. I know members of his staff. I’d been to bed with one of them who had dinner with him every week. I don’t like getting treated like shit.

  I was losing a friend or two each week and hearing about a couple others. A guy named Leo, from Montreal, just called me from there to tell me about the time we made love under the stars at Fire Island and he loved me then and loves me now but it was too late. He was rattling out his words with increasing incomprehensibility when the phone dropped and was picked up by his father, who said I was the only man his son had ever loved and what was this he just died from that turned him all purple blotches.

  It’s scary. It’s increasingly scary. I’m scared. No mayor, no president, no New York Truth, no gay leaders, no anything. Except dying friends.

  I realize Kermit Goins is the reason this shit is becoming so bad in New York City. Did he call and ask the president or anyone else for help? Did he put out a health warning to all his constituents? I’ve never hated anyone but I now begin to hate him big-time. Dr. Herta Glanz told me every time he tries to talk to the mayor he says, “I don’t want to know about it!”

  Kermit Goins has appointed Dr. Herta Glanz to be this city’s health commissioner. Why did Kermit Goins do this? Dr. Herta Glanz is a medical idiot.

  DAME LADY HERMIA RESPONDS

  My dear Freddy Fredchen, New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Herta Glanz, will hear these words of denial many times from his boss. Dr. Herta Glanz himself will eventually go on record that your mayor is “a beast of selfishness and there is little I am able to do about it. When he sees me coming he heads the other way. Mr. Orvid Guptl writes in his newspaper The New York Prick that I don’t know how to fight back, and that I am a born victim. I have been in the Public Health Service a long time and that charge comes with the territory. People get sick and die. I am not God. I cannot save them by myself.”

  In his years in public health, Dr. Herta Glanz has failed upward, each step taking him one step further into hell. His career is part of this chapter about your mayor in my history of evil. Backstories are so important. In fact all history is backstory of one thing or another.

  Dr. Herta Glanz (the name, both first and last, is Obsidian, as in some Baltic island I cannot locate, and his medical degree is from some university there) first encountered COD recognition and promotion as a young man (you say he now looks one hundred and is counting the days until his retirement and pension), when a contagious and often fatal illness then known as “the nigger problem” was dumped in his ambitious lap. Negroes, “well, there are simply too many of them and the best way to get rid of anything you’ve got too much of is to kill ’em off, and since this here is a country that has laws against doing acts like this too openly blatant we just try to figure out a way to do it less so.” The speaker was a Southerner who was Franklin Roosevelt’s health commissioner for the underprivileged. It should be inconceivable to us today that such a high government official (his name was Dr. Elphonse J. Richardson II: Roosevelt had a way of slotting into his government men he thought to be of “his own kind,” as not a few of his biographers concede) could speak this way but that is the way things were. It should also be inconceivable that scientific experiments were undertaken by the United States government utilizing an entire unknowing population that was—for the next forty years—systematically allowed to suffer and die from syphilis without any treatment at all. That was the study Dr. Elphonse J. Richardson II was talking about. Its code name was “Fetchit.”

  How many of the chief perpetrators of this mini-mass-murder-cum-tragedy-cum-farce can be identified now? Troublesome names and records always, always, conveniently disappear. All that’s left is a bunch of old lackeys who ran things, many, sadly, black themselves, too accustomed to the weekly bribes their salaries amounted to, which had caused them to turn on their own and keep them quiet over all these years. But at some point in the latter years of this “study” (1968 or so), Dr. Herta Glanz managed to eliminate from all files all references to himself as a vital participant.

  But Fetchit was not to be the only scandal in his career. No sooner had Fetchit sunk in the south than the SLAKE flu suddenly presented itself as a “National Disaster” farther north.

  I cannot tell you how long it has taken me to unravel all these tributaries, to sort out the relevant paperwork, its trails, its false trails, all its roads to nowhere. The imagination involved in getting this following story “lost” is most impressive. I have yet been unable to locate who was calling the shots.

  Epidemiologists on the staff of COD under the supervision of Dr. Herta Glanz come forth with the information that all the flu that is suddenly occurring at Washington’s Mea Montezuma Hospital porten
ds awful things, indeed a possible plague. “These are among the worst sets of sputum slides I have ever seen,” said Dr. Trace Understeer of the National Society of Sinus Specialists to The New England Journal of same. Dr. Understeer named the flu strain SLAKE. No one now has any notion why, or why he put it in all caps. He is not heard from again. But enough is out there publicly for Senator Paul “Porky” Pollen of Mississippi to send out emergency reports underlining Dr. Herta Glanz’s warning. There are more citizens from Mississippi in Mea Montezuma than from any other state, and while Mea Montezuma was a wretched hospital for patients and doctors alike, as we all know it remains, it was better by far than anything in Mississippi. Sick people actually migrated like the sharecroppers and underground railroaders of old to Washington, figuring that Uncle Sam as a last resort would help with whatever it was that was making them feel so awful. Suddenly all of Washington was in an uproar over these sputum studies, which were on everybody’s desks, and everybody was petrified that in no time flat whatever was in that sputum was going to get into the system of The American People. Senator Paul “Porky” Pollen orchestrated all this with his well-known bureaucratic sleight of hand. Mississippi’s budget left him no other choice: the feds demanded each state pay for its own illnesses, and to pay for this spreading SLAKE Porky would have to stop building all those casinos on the Gulf.

  Senator Paul “Porky” Pollen knew what to do when government interference from HAD and NITS said to him, “Aren’t you overreacting?” Locate an expert. Calling Dr. Glanz. As fate would have it, he’s free. Fate has made him available. Can we swiftly arrange his transfer onto this problem full-time? Call Dr. Nostrill at HAD. Dr. Ekbert Nostrill, newly under the tight reins of Manny Moose and his draconian budgets (all those dire Perdist Poll predictions must be rigidly righted), prohibits spending any money on anything, and this SLAKE could be expensive. Chevvy Slyme, Ruester’s assistant, doesn’t allow expensive anything. Nostrill issues a directive ordering Glanz to “somehow” get rid of this SLAKE. Senator Paul “Porky” Pollen scores again. Both he and Nostrill are Brothers of Lovejoy.

  COD’s Dr. Pewkin is now warning Glanz that if he didn’t get to work posthaste to keep The American People from dying he’d never keep this reassignment, “which is so vital to COD’s historic reputation as the disease warriors of the free world.”

  Manny Moose decided to make use of all this growing grumbling and spend a few bucks to build his new president into the champion of public health. “It will be well spent,” he told his ol’ (read “new”) “Jew buddy” Jakie Flourtower, who then wrote the now infamous New York Truth editorial “We Are 100% Behind President Ruester on SLAKE. Thank you and God bless you, Mr. President.”

  Word of course was out in Spanish that there was free medical care courtesy of Uncle Sam, and Mea Montezuma was now overloaded with various hideous immigrant ailments from “all those spics using that shithole as a free hotel.” (This was a Senator Vurd.) Evidently medical centers around the country, because they received only $0.97 per patient per day supplemental governmental funding (as against $4.10 in D.C.) under the McCarren-Frail Act of 1947 (rev. 1967), would be forced to fork out their own money for their own “spic welfare,” should all this SLAKE take firm hold anywhere out of the District of Columbia, which was what “all the experts” were beginning to fear. Their response is the shipping out to D.C. of everyone sick on welfare. I hope you’re beginning to see how complicated your “public health” can be.

  How to get Glanz going? Doing what? Puff and Porky knew Dr. Glanz could not stand up to the barrage of high-powered phone calls that Puff and Porky “request” top board members and rich powerful patients made on the behalf of SLAKE flu and the Ultimate Danger (read “Death”) it presented to The American People. When one of these calls came from Dr. Stuartgene Dye himself, Dr. Glanz immediately knew that he was cornered before he began. Great Humanitarian World Doctor descriptions of him were not presently in the cards. He must get his own plan going. After some forty years in the Public Health Service, he knew: always be ready with a plan. What was the poor man thinking? He was probably already on his way to losing his marbles. The trouble with marble losing is that it’s hard to notice in doctors. They’re usually so quiet.

  So Dr. Herta Glanz invented the SLAKE Flu Serial Shots. The entire country would be inoculated with .47 cc of inert Vertibronsky focum (IVF), manufactured by Greeting-Dridge’s German Bohunk Vernissage. Harmless stuff, and actually used in place of cod liver oil among the Eskimo children, or so it is stated in a study in The New England Journal of Eskimos, your useful yardstick of northern North American health. President Ruester now ordered SLAKE flu serials for all The American People. So SLAKE flu serials all The American People would have. No one had told your citizenry this could cost $4.5 billion. There is no record of Stockman’s response.

  A Bohunk factory in Meddling, Mississippi (where else?), was turned over to emergency manufacture of inert focum (G-D had the patent on ert focum, so it wasn’t hard to reverse all the machinery to make ert inert) and in no time at all every doctor’s office and every pharmacy in the entire country was swimming in SLAKE flu serials. People lined up everywhere for the shots: free in clinics and emergency rooms, five dollars a set everywhere else. Tens of thousands were quickly inoculated.

  Then a few people suddenly die. Five hundred and twenty-four (it is reported in The Truth), and they apparently die without reason except they’ve all been injected with SLAKE. Several thousand more become dizzy or show minor symptoms of discomfort. Seventy-seven suddenly can’t use their left arms, for anything. (Shades of whatever happened to Dr. Sister Grace?) These left arms (interesting it is never right arms) suddenly just hang there, swinging in the breeze. And one hundred and ten men become impotent, or claim they do. No one knows how to dispute them. But the number is not “statistically significant” enough to make courts of law believe them, as six of them discover when they unsuccessfully try to sue Uncle Sam. When a few hundred more people die, Ekbert Nostrill, now in full charge at HAD, calls the whole show off. “Did you have to do it so soon?” Manny Moose yells over his secret Code Red phone. (Records still exist of all Code Red calls.) He’d loved his notion of making Ruester a health hero. Ekbert doesn’t hear him because he’s so terrified when the Code Red phone rings that he immediately evacuates his entire building, including himself. (The Washington Monument has a lovely wide picture spread of all HAD’s employees out in the street.)

  The total damages the government is forced to pay out to the dead and the dizzy and the swinging-limbed amount to $184.9 million (not counting the amount to G-D for its manufacture), and Dr. Herta Glanz is up for reassignment in the Public Health Service. (Public health officers can’t be fired.) He becomes known as “the doctor who created the epidemic that never was.”

  This flu strain of course by now had passed into oblivion as most flu strains are wont to do.

  But no good deed goes unrewarded, as we know. For reasons unfathomable to anyone with any functioning thinking mechanism, Dr. Herta Glanz, by now considered a true medical moron, is hired in 1981 as health commissioner of New York City by your mayor, Kermit Goins.

  There. Phew.

  It scares me, too. And I worry about you muchly. Please take care. As we Brits say: Good luck and God bless. Glad to have you back on our case.

  THANKS, HERMIA. HERE’S SOME MORE.

  There are a lot of reasons why I think Kermit the shithead kept his mouth shut. He had to protect the tourist industry. No one would come here if they thought the city was sick. He was also in hock to the real estate powers that put him in office. Real estate powers don’t like faggots. We’ve gobbled up too many of the city’s rent-controlled apartments. So he had a city to safeguard, which could only be done by someone lying. He already smelled “this shit” about to burst into full and stinking and puking bloom, and so he needed somebody to be the fall guy to take the blame. SLAKE flu was an epidemic that never was, and the plague of “this shit” looked sur
e as shooting on its way to mowing us down one by one. Get the biggest schmuck in the field of public health and see if he can fuck this one up too, and Kermit can blame the feds and their stinking Public Health Service.

  I think Kermit Goins appointed Herta because Kermit Goins is a closeted gay man and he knew this shit was hitting gay men and he was scared shitless that

  (1) he would catch it; and/or

  (2) it would force him out of the closet; and/or

  (3) he needed a fall guy to make a truly great fuckup of everything so Kermit could look blameless for not doing anything (and he planned on not doing anything; how could he, it would nail him as gay for sure if he did anything); and/or

  (4) he needed a dumb asshole who could see to it that his former boyfriend, a twerp named Nathan Perch, who has come down with something strange, would die from it in Crewd-Harbinger before he could announce to the world that he had been Kermit’s sweetie, which Nathan Perch was coming close to announcing to the world because of one Fred Lemish, who was looking for someone to announce publicly that Mayor Kermit Goins is a closeted gay and helping to murder his gay brothers.

  All of the above, which of course are all the same thing.

  Kermit Goins is more frightened of being identified as gay than he is of what is still called “this shit.” Kermit Goins is the really sick man here. And if UC continues to grow, sicko Mayor Kermit Goins will be looking even sicker.

  * * *

  I sure hope so.

  MORE OF JOE KIDNEY’S VERY BAD DREAM

  Finally, someone was located to become President Ruester’s secretary of Health and Disease (HAD). Arrived in Washington was one Hoidene Swilkers, along with her husband, Roddy, both from Pulce, Nebraska. In return for a $57,000 contribution to President Ruester’s campaign fund, Hoidene has been appointed secretary of HAD. Roddy brokers wheat, flour, and pigs. Hoidene has never been to Washington, never worked in medicine, public health, government, or a bureaucracy, indeed has never held a job or employed more than household staff of half a dozen. When her predecessor at HAD, who spent four years trying desperately to do good deeds, and who knows a good deed, meets and talks with this person who will replace him in charge of America’s health, he actually throws a book at her, the Federal Register of Offices and Their Holders. Hoidene had stopped by for “a peek-a-boo howdy.”