The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  PHIL: I put the phone on service. You guys should get some rest. We don’t want any burnout.

  TOMMY: Good night, Phil. Thanks.

  (Phil leaves.)

  Phil got diagnosed today.

  BRUCE: No!

  TOMMY: Richie Faro just died.

  MICKEY: Richie!

  BRUCE: Mickey, why aren’t you on vacation in Rio?

  MICKEY: I was in Rio. Gregory and I, we just got there, day before yesterday, I get a phone call, from Glanz’s office, I’m told to be in his office, right away, this morning …

  BRUCE: From Rio? What kind of meeting? Why didn’t you call me?

  MICKEY: Because unfortunately you are not my boss!

  BRUCE: What kind of meeting?

  TOMMY: Take it slowly.

  MICKEY: I get to City Hall, Herta keeps me waiting forever, finally he comes out and says the mayor doesn’t want to see me anymore. I wanted to scream, I haven’t slept in two days, you dumb fuck! but I didn’t. Instead I said, please sir, then why did he make me come all the way back from Rio? He says, “I’m afraid he didn’t take me into his confidence,” and he walks away.

  (Waving a copy of The Prick)

  Fred’s article attacking our gay mayor and his gay assistant my boss Hiram Keebler just came out!

  Fred, having entered, is seen standing on the side, listening.

  FRED: What about it, Mick?

  MICKEY: You keep trying to get us to say things we don’t want to say! And I don’t think we can afford to make so many enemies before we have enough friends.

  FRED: We’ll never have enough friends.

  MICKEY: We can’t like magic all turn into nuns!

  FRED: A Canadian nun in Haiti just died after making love only once in her life. Ray Schwartz just died. Terry Spalding is calling all his friends from under his oxygen tent to say goodbye. Tibby Maurer took an overdose. Hal Schecter has stumps for feet. Frannie Santuzza has lost his mind.

  MICKEY: What if it turns out not to be spread by having sex?

  FRED: Then we won’t have to cool it anymore.

  MICKEY: STOP IT!

  TOMMY: Mickey, are you all right?

  MICKEY: I don’t think so.

  TOMMY: Tell Tommy.

  MICKEY: Why can’t they find the virus?

  TOMMY: It takes time.

  MICKEY (going through a stack of Pricks): I’ve written about every single theory in my health column in the Prick. Repeated infection by a virus. New appearance by a dormant virus. Single virus. New virus. Old virus. Multivirus. Partial virus. Latent virus. Mutant virus. Retro virus. Animal virus.

  TOMMY: Take it easy, honey.

  MICKEY: And we mustn’t forget fucking, sucking, kissing, blood, voodoo, drugs, Dridgies, needles, Africa, Haiti, Cuba, blacks, pigs, mosquitoes, monkeys—what if it isn’t any of them!

  TOMMY: I don’t know.

  MICKEY: And our own government! COD says it’s fluoride in the water, HAH says it’s a fungus, FADS says it’s rough sex upsetting the body’s equilibrium! The Great Plague of London was caused by drinking water from a pump nobody noticed. I don’t know what to tell anybody. And everybody asks me! They’re calling me from all over the world! I don’t know—who’s right? I don’t know—who’s wrong? I feel so inadequate. How can we tell people to stop when it might be caused by—I DON’T KNOW!

  BRUCE: That’s exactly how I feel.

  MICKEY: But maybe he’s right! And that scares me, too. Freddie—you scare me!

  TOMMY: Easy, Mick.

  MICKEY: Do you think the president really wants this to happen? Do you think the CIA really has unleashed germ warfare to kill off all the queers Senator Vurd doesn’t want?

  FRED: Mickey, try and hold on.

  MICKEY: To what? I used to love my country. The Prick received an anonymous letter describing top-secret experiments at Fort Detrick, Maryland, that have produced a virus that can destroy the immune system. Its code name is Firm Hand. They started testing it in 1975—on a group of gays. I never used to believe shit like this. They are going to persecute us! Cancel our health insurance. Stone us in the streets. Quarantine us. Put us in camps. And you think I am killing people.

  FRED: That is not what I said!

  MICKEY: You did, you did, I know you did! I’ve spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love wherever, whenever … and you’re telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong—and I’m a murderer. We have been so lonely and oppressed! And one day we found the arms of another man, and another, and another, and we thought at last we’d found freedom! And heaven! I worship men! I don’t think Fred does. I don’t think Fred likes himself very much!

  FRED (through gritted teeth): Fred likes himself just fine.

  MICKEY: Can’t you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding, without guilt? Can’t you see that? Can’t you?

  BRUCE: I can.

  MICKEY: I went to the top of the Empire State Building …

  TOMMY: Mickey, come on. I’m taking you home.

  MICKEY:… to see if you can jump off when no one is looking.

  TOMMY: Let’s go home.

  MICKEY: Fred, I’m not a murderer. All my life I’ve been hated. For being gay. For being short. For being Jewish. Fred … someday someone is going to come along and stick the knife in you and tell you everything you fought for all your life is SHIT!

  Mickey lunges furiously for Fred, only to be caught in time by Tommy and Bruce.

  TOMMY (cradling him): Tommy is here. It’s all right. I’m taking you home.

  MICKEY: Take me to St. Vincent’s. I don’t want to go home.

  TOMMY (comforting Mickey in his arms): We’re all real tired. We got ourselves a lot of bereavement overload.

  (Snatching coats, Bruce hands him one.)

  MICKEY: We’re the fighters, aren’t we?

  TOMMY: You bet, sweetness. And you’re a hero. Whether you know it or not. You’re our first hero.

  Tommy takes Mickey out.

  Fred and Bruce are alone.

  FRED: I wonder if we’re all going to go crazy, living this plague every single minute, while all the rest of the world goes on as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it’s like, what we’re going through. We’re living through war, but where everyone else is living it’s peacetime, and we’re all in the same country.

  Suddenly he gives a big smile. Felix Turner, a very handsome man, has been in the back listening.

  Let’s go home, honey.

  MORE SKINNY ACCORDING TO ANN FETTNER

  PART THREE

  Okay, Fred, here’s where we are, research-wise. The crazies are coming out of the woodwork. God help us:

  UNDERLYING CONDITION: the illness, the disease, the epidemic now manifesting itself, which seems to challenge the system and which for reasons still not fully comprehended is capable of shutting the system down. What is the system? Indeed. You would think it is the body, or rather, the body as composed of all its various systems: respiratory, digestive, immune, etc. But with UC it is possible to observe—Dr. Stuartgene Dye is maintaining this (though it’s rumored his experiments, which he has not shared, have been extreme)—that the system can be shut down even if all or most of its component parts are operating normally. As Dr. Sheldon Grebstyne of NITS has reported in The New England Journal of Vel (NEJV), it is also possible to have a vel count of zero and still feel and look fine, with full energy. Vel has been considered the gold standard for measuring the body’s health ever since Dr. Sister Grace Hooker discovered it in 1951 (and received her Nobel for it in 1956). Nothing in the intervening years has replaced vel as the yardstick for measurement of the body’s current situation. Dr. Sister Grace Hooker does not fight for her discovery’s place in the sun so much as demand it and disappear when challenged. Now we are seeing people with no vel who feel fine. This hadn’t been observed before. And now we are also seeing people with no vel who are dying, as the ex
pression goes, like flies. So the first thing one might think by way of explanation is that maybe vel is worthless, or not the right yardstick to measure strength and health. But no one allows themselves to think this way. One can’t. Vel has been the only measurement. There isn’t any other measurement. If vel wasn’t used, then how could anything be measured? Just about every experiment and God knows how many medicines for many ailments are based on the results of vel counts. So either vel is right and we still haven’t found out what’s going on, or vel is wrong, which might explain … what? We have not seen enough of anything yet to make such a blanket statement; the longer a disease hangs around, the more time for mutant something or others to show up. So it’s possible to have UC and have a perfectly normal vel, if anyone knew what a perfectly normal vel count is: One thousand? Ten thousand? One million? Ten million? (Would that Dr. Sister Grace responded to the pleas for help.) There are UC cases from each of these numerical categories walking the streets feeling fine. Or sick. You can feel awful with twelve hundred and fine with ten. Which makes you wonder. Or should. But wonder what precisely? Besides, of course, why this whole thing is so lacking in sanity.

  Which leads to the logical next question. Can there be another system at work here? Dr. Itsenfelder now believes this is the avenue down which success lies. More and more he is using the word multifactorial, which automatically places him at the top of the “crazies” list. “Whoever heard of such nonsense!” cry not a few famous scientists. Nobody pays attention to Rebby Itsenfelder (although his patients are reputed to live longer). His medical degree is from South Africa.

  One thing that can be said about this UC: a lot of “facts” that were taken for granted before it, in every field you can imagine—immunology, pathology, infectious disease, certainly hematology, even biology—are now going to be up for grabs. It will be interesting to watch, should this scramble for newer, “higher” ground show up. But don’t hold your breath.

  Dr. Jerrold Omicidio, one of the few meant to be smart enough to realize that no one is making any sense, nevertheless appears to have become fiercely motivated by some patriotic conviction that as the government’s top UC man (so far—who knows what President Ruester will do to him if and when President Ruester realizes what’s going on) he must not be perceived as wrong and that he must also be the one who finds the cure (that’s right: THE cure). Obviously this is a very ambitious man. There is nothing wrong with that. So many others unfortunately are hiding for some reason, possibly because their hands are empty and they’re ashamed that after three years they have no idea what’s going on and are afraid to say so. Omicidio sits on the sidelines, saying nothing but sitting tall though he is a short man, eyes front and center, waiting for his chance to jump in. One has yet to discern if he’ll have the necessary luck, for if there is one obvious fact in scientific life at NITS it’s that brains and abilities are not sufficient to make dreams come true. So as a deposit against that great future deed he’s preparing to take credit for when and if it happens, Omicidio declares up front that at the moment we just have not figured out how all the pieces fit together. This is hardly news, but he is the only official to say so bluntly. Most doctors listen to Omicidio. It is simply safer to do so. He has emerged, somehow, and somewhat mysteriously (in that it’s happened before our eyes and no one knows why and/or how), as the government’s chief, and only, spokesperson on UC, not that he’s saying anything (for want of a better word) definitive (read “helpful”). Drs. Dye and Gist and Middleditch and Grebstyne are not saying anything at all. So for a sane person, and of course there must be one somewhere in all this, though which one, or ones, will only be known after these early shakedowns (if even then), Omicidio is all there is to bet on, mainly because he’s publicly saying that he’s not really saying anything, for there is nothing to be said. Congress loves his double-talk. The White House and its inhabitants appear never to have heard of him. My Deep Throat buddy at NITS is keeping me abreast.

  If ever a plague wasn’t talked about among those charged with its supervision, this is that plague. It’s because of President Ruester and the entire stigma his stance and his staff have about showing any interest in UC at all. He’s already said, or Moose said for him, that he’s “unalterably and irrevocably not interested in homosexuality.” This country, since its founding in 1776, has held on for dear life to an aversion to dealing with the truth when it’s unpleasant. So much for Public Health and the glory of serving it. When, as now, it can’t be—well, not much gets done. This can only augur bad things. And lots of name-calling.

  Everything in math, in economics, in the determination of what’s happening to populations that are getting sick, the testing of almost anything, must be partnered with numbers, so an artificial determination of the definition of UC has, out of the blue, been “set” by the Center of Disease (COD): a vel count of two hundred or less is bad. It will mean you have UC officially. Until last year it was a vel count of three hundred or less. But now there are so many UC cases that COD was ordered by Dr. Ekbert Nostrill (everyone is under HAH) to somehow lower the number of UC cases, and the obvious way to do so was to decrease the “official” definition of who is considered “infected,” if that’s what’s happening, and if vel is accurately responsible for the measuring, neither of which it should be clear is clear. President Peter Ruester is also said to not want it known that America’s such a sick country. Apparently no one has told him that, UC or no UC, it’s already too late to worry about that. It’s also said that the president doesn’t even know about UC.

  No official will take the responsibility of classifying UC as a plague. It is difficult to comprehend the reluctance of the American government to speak out on this matter. Dr. Grodzo says that German officials leaped at this kind of “wonderful opportunity” to inform people that they were facing danger and possible death. “The very Krankhaftigkeit—you say, I think, morbidity—of this opportunity was very appealing to German sensibility. We have a distinguished heritage of dealing with such symbolic morality tales, from Lembeck through Goethe to Wagner and Nietzsche and Mann to Hitler.”

  If you think water is being treaded, you’re right. In government it’s usually important that one is thought to be slogging the good slog.

  It ain’t happening here.

  INT. CORRIDOR. ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL. DAY.

  Fred walks down a hallway with a bouquet, looking for a room. Gregory is sitting outside Mickey’s room.

  FRED: Hello, Gregory. How’s Mickey?

  GREGORY: He’s very sedated. I hate you.

  FRED: I’m sorry to hear that.

  GREGORY: Don’t you ever consider the effect you have on people?

  FRED: Me? I don’t believe anybody hears a word I say.

  GREGORY: I find that hard to believe. You terrorize people. You’re a monster.

  INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. DAY.

  Mickey is in bed. Fred hands him the flowers.

  GREGORY: Fred, go away somewhere and leave us alone.

  MICKEY: You disgust me. I’m ashamed we ever were friends.

  FRED: Bruce looks bad. They need you. They need a board member to speak for them.

  GREGORY: You’re taking away our lives. And you’re giving my lover a nervous breakdown.

  MICKEY: I’ve known you since I was in med school. You were living in London and I was there for a summer program. We went to bed once. Do you remember?

  FRED: Yes.

  MICKEY: Why are you saying what you’re saying?

  FRED: Why aren’t you saying it, too? We are infecting each other.

  MICKEY: We don’t know that yet! We can’t say that yet! I am not going to write and say that. You’re as bad as Bruce being in the closet.

  INT. FRED’S LOFT. NIGHT.

  Fred and Felix Turner are naked, having made love. The walls are filled with bookshelves.

  FELIX: That was very nice.

  FRED: Yes. It was.

  FELIX: You know my fantasy has always been to go away an
d live by the ocean and write twenty-four novels, living with someone just like you, with all these books, beside me writing your own twenty-four novels.

  FRED: If you really feel that way how come you write all that society and party and fancy ball-gown bullshit for The Truth?

  FELIX: Don’t you gobble it up every day?

  FRED: I do. I also know a lot of people who have died.

  FELIX: I’m sorry. I don’t write much about parties now. Mrs. Ruester has made me off-limits. She didn’t like what I wrote about her.

  FRED: When I came to your office at The Truth it was only a few.

  FELIX: Is that why you agreed to our date?

  FRED: Do you know that when Hitler’s Final Solution to eliminate the Polish Jews was first mentioned in The Truth it was on page 28? And on page 6 of The Washington Monument? And both papers are owned by Jews. The American Jews would not help the German Jews get out! Their very own people. Jewish leaders were totally ineffective, Jewish organizations constantly fighting among themselves, unable to cooperate even in the face of death, Zionists vs. Non-Zionists, Rabbi Wise vs. Rabbi Silver …

  FELIX: Am I at last seeing in action the real Fred Lemish I’ve heard about?

  FRED: Aren’t there moral obligations, moral commandments to try everything possible? Where were the Christian churches, the Pope, Churchill, Roosevelt! A few strong words from any of them would have put Hitler on notice. Dachau was opened in 1933. Where the fuck was everybody for eleven years? And then it was too late.

  FELIX: Look, I told you this when you attacked me in my office. Flourtower would fire me on the spot, so I’m not going to tell The New York Truth I’m gay and could I write about these cases of a mysterious disease that seems to be in the way of our fucking again even though there must be half a million gay men in this city who are fine and healthy. And this is not World War Two. And all analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, and a major turnoff.

  FRED: Are they?

  FELIX: Boy, I have found myself a real live weird one. I just called you weird.