The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I could tell you stories about all of them. I wondered if I had anything to do with … These kinds of thoughts were creeping into my consciousness little by little.

  Everything had exploded after a session with Dr. Homer, who said, “Fight for what you believe in! If you think something is wrong, then fight to right it!” It seems simple and obvious, that advice, but you have to be in a place to listen to it, and I guess he worked me up to being in that place. So I wrote the above “1,112 and Counting,” and Orvid Guptl published it in The Prick, and then something like two dozen other gay rags across the country ran it. So it got around. People talked about it, thank God. People began getting frightened, thank God. I hadn’t intended that, but I was to discover that fear is the best motivator, bar none. Not enough people were getting frightened yet, but they would. They would. They must!

  I realized soon enough that one puny article in The Prick wasn’t going to be enough. For one thing, not many read The Prick. Not like they read The New York Truth. For another, the mayor still hadn’t said anything, The New York Truth still hadn’t said anything further, the president still hadn’t said anything publicly at all, and each day I heard about a few more dead friends. Once there were five in one day. How do you deal with that? Which monster do you go after first? And I was realizing that so far I was one of only a few bellying up to the bar to fight. I couldn’t be the only one losing friends. I wasn’t, of course. As much as I found these deaths hard to take, that so few of us were reacting visibly and audibly to the deaths of their friends was coming to be just as hard on me. All this, all of this, was new to me. It was a long way from writing shitty screenplays about mixed marriages in Outer Mongolia.

  They were still coming after me, those that considered me some sort of Antichrist, like Pubie and Jervis Pail, both particularly persistently hateful. But just knowing that my article, mirabile dictu, was being passed around all over the country made my mouth open up and I began working it all over the place. It was like I discovered I had a new organ. Woe to anyone who stopped me in the street and asked, “How are you?” I let them know in no uncertain terms what I was doing and what I thought they should be doing too. People thought I was crazy, again and/or still. GMPA was slowly growing as more people knew more dead friends, but our president, Bruce Niles, was definitely opposed to my big mouth and its association with this organization we had founded together. If I heard one more time that “honey gets more than vinegar” I think I’d slug the speaker (not Bruce, of course). But Bruce was handsome and popular, a gay icon. I was the crazy person. Except for Tommy, GMPA was in Bruce’s corner. And he was in the closet.

  I could see soon enough this growing number of GMPA volunteers weren’t fighters. They were like church parishioners, quiet do-gooders, and we certainly had much for them to attend to, even quietly and invisibly as was their style.

  I had never thought much about closets and what they meant. Now I could see—clear as day—all of us flushing our dead selves down the toilet without a peep from our gay mayor or our president with his gay son. God knows how many other closeted gays in high places were just like this.

  I only knew how to write. What could I write? Novels take too long and I’d already written one. Plays? The only one I’d written had closed on opening night. That left movies. I could write screenplays in my sleep. And had. I still had a few contacts in that business. And I had crossed paths with a few gay moguls along the way. Randy Dildough, of course. I’d made a pass at him once in Hollywood. Sammy Sircus and Trafe Elohenu were his good friends, as powerful in the film industry as Randy. I knew them all, sort of, from my Hollywood days with Rust Legend. Publications in “the mainstream” would not name names for fear of being sued. We were still a few years away from throwing out the old hoary traditions of not yanking our own out of the closet. I wondered how useful these three would be anyway. I knew the answer but went into my own denial. I would beg them for their support! I would get down on my hands and knees and beg them. That’s what I would do! Randy and Sammy and Trafe, you can see what’s happening. It could happen to you. You have to help your brothers. You have to help your people. You are each exceedingly rich and powerful. If you were Jewish—which, actually, all of you are—you would be major donors with your names on bronze tablets in the temple. Your mothers would be proud of you. Aren’t we all in this together? Aren’t we all—somehow—brothers? I was beginning to talk of “us” like that. My brothers. My people. Film my fucking movie script!

  My people. Are we a people? The first time I called my people my people, the audience of gay men I was trying to rev up at one of the many gay organizations I went to plead with started giggling, then laughing, then laughing harder and not stopping. It made me want to hide. When I was in junior high school I was in a pageant about the Declaration of Independence, the actual document, on a train ride across America. I came out onstage and proclaimed, “The Freedom Train is coming to your city!” The audience went into convulsions of laughter. The kids wouldn’t stop laughing. While I stood up there marooned on the stage, a shit-eating grin on my face, waiting for quiet so I could continue my speech, a plea to them to go and visit this fucking train ferrying the Constitution and Declaration at Union Station. I got through the performance somehow. Then I retreated, mortified. Lester had named me a sissy and here was yet another example of it. No, I do not like to be laughed at. And my people didn’t want to be called my people yet. Just like my people didn’t want to know about this shit.

  Had I really thought this “people” stuff out carefully? Probably not. I was now punting from the gut, to use butch football terminology. What do I know about football? Football was Seth’s game. Seth. My brother Seth, the jock, the honor student, the football player, the boxer, the tennis star, the stud, the rich white straight man.

  How interesting that suddenly I was thinking of myself as part of a bigger something or other. Now I just had to figure out what it was. And I had other, more pressing issues. It did not occur to me that these two issues—our sense of ourselves as a people and this new disease itself—could be and should be and must be combined. It was my people who were coming down with it. True to the history of all peoples, our heads were still in the sand. Sooner or later something was going to have to give. Somehow. Wouldn’t it? This shit could not take over the world. God, what an awful thought.

  And good old Dr. Homer was pumping me up every day. I was back to going five times a week. I had not had that kind of weekly workout since my days in London with Dr. Gillespie or my days with Rivtov at Yaddah, or with Shmuel here in the city. Hurling words like responsibility at me, Odysseus really rode my ass.

  There were many more men I slept with during this year. Yes, I had sex with other men. That was what we still did. Before we were forced to acknowledge that the law of averages we were counting on could no longer protect us. How long did it take before it sank into my own thick head, as thick as everyone else’s, that we couldn’t do what and when we wanted to do just because we wanted to do it? Many of these faces are in front of me still, before my eyes, evidently not to be lost. Good. I want to remember them. They are a part of me. I have the semen of some of them inside me. If not their semen, then the saliva of their kisses. And they had my semen inside them. And my kisses. I was always a big kisser.

  These thoughts. All these thoughts.

  * * *

  You are getting so far off the track that my heart beats with joy. You still know nothing about me, where I am from, how long I have struggled, where I have visited, indeed what I truly look like. My future is assured.

  DR. BOSCO DRIPPER, DVM

  Today Veronica, one of my young chimps, died. She had been sent to me by the Washington Zoo.

  DR. SISTER GRACE HOOKER

  I have confirmed “this shit” in the vaginal discharges of five women in Partekla. Fucking A!

  In my female patients at Partekla I verified my earlier instincts. Many of them were secreting large amounts of vaginal discharge w
ith similar blood impurities. Dr. Dye is not interested in my pursuing this either, even though I also discovered these women were contagious, that this discharge was hence a sexually transmitted disease akin to syphilis and gonorrhea. Women patients were sneaking off and fucking in corners with men, health-care workers on staff, who promptly came down with whatever this fucking shit is that we are seeking. I have just been suddenly personally called by the White House, a Mr. Gree Bohunk (boy, does he sound like a piece of fucking work), who more or less ordered me to “cease any investigations involving women.” Ruester does not want the country or the world to know that there are any sick women among The American People, “and I would watch my step, young [hah!] lady, if I were you.” You see, Hermia, why I am becoming frightened. I know too much. I first put out my report on all my various suspicions in 1969. Vitabaum at HOW said then he had no money and had more pressing worries. How and why is the White House taking this stand now? And in this obnoxious and insulting and fuck-you fashion?

  A WEDDING CELEBRATION

  There is no question that the Jerusalem brothers have been falling apart as brothers. Daniel saw and spoke little to Lucas, whom he grew up worshipping and who is now particularly withdrawn, and he had no contact with Stephen, who has no interest in anyone. And all three are still ignoring David’s existence, almost dutifully, as if he had been a genetic malfunction in the family. (Shades of Rivka living all those years with Philip, knowing all that she did.)

  And Sara, Stephen’s wife, has always seemed to Daniel aloof and high-and-mighty. She never invites him to dinner or talked to him when there was one of the law firm picnics Daniel used to go to.

  Sara’s story begins, or rather ends, at a party given by her uncle by marriage, Israel Jerusalem, whom she adores. His last son from his Nobel wanderings is getting married. She is talking to her husband, to whom she often doesn’t. They are in their Jaguar nearing Israel’s house when she decides to bring up what’s on her mind.

  “Why are you fucking her?” At last she confronts her husband. She knows it can only be a fruitless conversation, getting her nowhere (where does she really wish to go?), only revealing her own hand, only hurting herself.

  “Who says I am?”

  “Why have you been fucking her for so long?” She feels very small. All these years and so little fighting back. “Don’t you ever get tired of her?”

  “I won’t dignify that by responding,” he says.

  “You were fucking her the night your son was born. You didn’t even come to the hospital.”

  “That’s not true!” He is thrown by this accusation so late in the game. Their son is in his teens, he thinks. He pulls up in front of the house and relinquishes his Jag to a valet.

  She looks for the host, his uncle, her beloved uncle who insisted on not canceling this party because of all these strange new cases from fucking that keep him so busy at Isadore Peace. “But I have much to celebrate. The last of my unmarried adopted children.”

  Her husband can talk to anyone here. He has enough clients to say hello to that he won’t feel stranded. She on the other hand, who rarely goes out, who rarely socializes with him, is a stranger here and enjoys her anonymity.

  These days he doesn’t even have his breakfast coffee at home.

  The day before yesterday, Sara Jerusalem turned forty-two years old. Around her was a crowd of varying degrees of closeness who brought her gifts and best wishes. She’d studied the mountain of generous gifts, most of which she’ll return or give away because she knows they’ll be tasteless junk from the privileged investors Stephen allows to participate in his Masturbov syndicates, tokens that shout, Remember me next time you need a few million. Everyone wants to be remembered. Everyone knows his partner is the creepy, repellent, and powerful Sam Sport. Sara feels contaminated every time Sam’s in her house. She never wanted the party. Stephen just threw it, as he’d always done for her birthday, a strange activity from a husband who finds few other ways to stay at home.

  A live string quartet commandingly knifes into her self-pity with the opening cries of its adaptation of the last Beethoven piano sonata. Only Uncle Israel would have them play such a selection. Thomas Mann wrote movingly about this sonata, so misunderstood for so long, he said in Doctor Faustus. She tries to remember what he had said exactly. She can only remember that he said the sonata was misunderstood. For a long time. So now we can all appreciate it properly. If we read Doctor Faustus. She’d enjoyed Doctor Faustus. But wasn’t the last Beethoven sonata really not the last sonata, only the last to be published? She’d read that somewhere too. Mann was no doubt dead when this was discovered. Man is always dead by the time many facts about his life’s obsessions are at last discovered. She reads too much. Books are her only friends.

  She’d been in England last summer and she’d found an old paperback about the Profumo Affair. How fascinating! A woman’s vagina brought down an entire government. She had read about men who have such lusts that they go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy, that this applies to men in positions of power particularly, that whatever a man’s tastes there is always somebody willing to supply his indulgence … that deep within most men there lurks a response of fierce joy to the shame and pain of others … She thinks she’s recounted accurately and with justice what some Jew who wrote this book had said. His name was Levin. Like in Anna Karenina. Was Levin in Anna Karenina Jewish? Do Jews understand sex better? The man who has broken my heart is a Jew. I have ruined my life because of a goddamn Jew.

  Sara Jerusalem, the day before yesterday, was forty-two. Upstairs—the mansion they live in is on Kalorama Road, across from the French Embassy—her husband slept soundly and untroubled, as far as she could tell, having come home long after midnight, dashing out after her birthday party was over, his cock now no doubt tired from being with Claudia. He had been fucking Claudia for twenty years, why hadn’t he married her! Their son, Stephen Jr. (called Stevie), nineteen years old and a day student at George Washington, who she found out after the fact has already done an injury to his penis, necessitating some kind of reparative surgery, claiming, “I just hurt it in football scrimmage, Mom, jeez, you never believe me when I tell the truth,” slept also. Why does he prefer to live at home? He has a trust fund of gigantic proportions; he could build a dormitory for himself and all his friends; he could build a housing development; he could retire some Third World country’s debt. College is for getting away and trying new things, but perhaps, with his endowment, both between his legs and in his trust fund, it’s better that he lives at home. Stephen once alluded to bodyguards hiding in the shadows and she thought he was joking but perhaps not. She has a sense of how truly rich he is. She is married to a man who is exceptionally rich, and who long ago gave her a large bank account in her own name, but who has not given her, at least for the last nineteen years, any physical enjoyment in any tactile way. She was twenty-five years old the last time she felt his penis inside her. In her bed she choked on tears in honor of the barren intervening years, and her sadness, and her inability to confront him with her sadness, and her loss, and his.

  Mr. Bernard Levin’s Profumo book concluded with: “Yet healing is impossible without the lancing of the boil.”

  Somewhere inside her she believes she is courageous. Where? How so?

  How long ago was it that she found her husband’s smallish dark purple lizard notebook. She’d thumbed through it. It was filled with Stephen’s minute calligraphically precise script, and she closed her eyes, for there was Claudia’s name, over and over again. Do this for Claudia. Go there with Claudia. Claudia wants … Buy for Claudia … Claudia and I did this … Oh, she had known it but now she knew it. She had clamped her eyes closed that night too. I thought I knew who I was. I haven’t found out anything at all. If one summons up the image of old Lev Tolstoy, pushing crazily through the winter’s night-cold darkness, away from his Yasnaya Polyana estate, his home for so many, many years, to find peace at the age of eighty-two and a half only through ex
piration and death in the waiting room of the train station at Astapovo, one can more or less see that this search is rarely successful. Not to mention Virginia in her River Ouse.

  So the first infidelity Sara Jerusalem commits in her marriage of more than twenty years occurs in the master bedroom of her uncle Israel’s house on Managua Road while his lavish celebration is transpiring on the ground floor and in the back garden, to the zippy tunes of Beethoven’s last sonata. So much fine food, so many distinguished people! She can hear Israel addressing them all in the garden on a public address system replete with some static. He hopes everyone honors this ceremony by examining their deeds and stays on the lookout to turn away from all evil, for there is greater need of repentance for the sins of which one is uncertain than for sins of obvious certainty. “Now, what in the world does all that double-talk mean?” Mordy Masturbov laughs out loud protestingly. Mordy has begun to appear at family gatherings, at Abe’s request. Mordy is an enigma to Sara, as is his magazine, as is his mother, as is her whorehouse. Israel is always surprising anyone who will listen by quoting interminable passages from one thing or another, not necessarily germane to the moment. He is now talking about his son just married. “I brought five Iwacky boys home with me from the Andes. I educated them and turned them into good Jewish boys, all of whom have pleased their father by becoming doctors. Jacob is the last of my children who have brought me much joy. Please, I ask of you, join with me in enjoying this special day.”

  Her first infidelitor (Sara thinks this rather a charming term), in the master bedroom of the house of her uncle Israel, says he is (he is not) an assistant secretary of state. He calls himself Ronald, which she thinks rather bland, though apt for him (I’m starting off easy, no challenge here) because he is, well, bland: his skin is pasty, his clothes fit badly and are made from awful-feeling material, and additionally, his breath smells of the salami he’s eaten downstairs. Not an auspicious debut. Why is this woman so suddenly intent on fucking herself silly all over this house? Oh, there are too many questions for this poor woman. No! I am not poor. Don’t make me a victim! Her conscience always works so very hard.