The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  The cadre of Homo Haters that enunciate on Peter’s behalf protects him. “Homosexuals are never numbered among The American People for the simple reason that The American People doesn’t have any,” Linus Gobbel writes in Capital Hill Jesus. There’s no one on staff that’s a Homo Friend.

  It’s finally being asked, how can so many dead bodies remain hidden from sight?

  Well, they are.

  His Homo Haters know this. You and I both know that all the best presidents have them.

  They know they’re successful in what they’re doing. When you aren’t besieged by a multitude of calls, letters, and criticism in the media objecting to your actions, as you know that’s like money in the bank.

  You know Washington is now the place to be. Swarms of worker bees continually arrive to join Ruester’s efforts in one office or department or division. You can just feel the almost tangible electricity. They have a leader they can follow. They now can believe openly that what they are doing is for the health and good of America and The American People. What they are doing is the will of God. Homosexuality is a crime and a sin. This becomes an established ideology. It’s worse than what you warned me about.

  It’s being called in certain circles the Grand Elimination.

  And hanky-panky is brewing among several of the pharms.

  Stay tuned.

  INT. OLD BELLEVUE HOSPITAL MEDICAL AMPHITHEATER. DAY.

  A huge, ancient amphitheater once used for med school lectures. It is quite beautiful. Emma is making a presentation to Dr. Omicidio and other officials. She’s been coughing and wheezing and will use a nebulizer to control it. Various slides of incomprehensible data are flicking on the large screen overhead. The hall is filled with observers: some we have seen before at NITS and COD; some are staff from the hospital and medical center, of course, but also a large group of Emma’s patients, in various stages of health, sitting up front with Buzzy and Fred and Tommy. Daniel Jerusalem is also present in a far corner at the back. Mickey and Bruce also sit removed from Fred. Bruce looks terrible.

  EMMA: We have more data of every kind, and, I humbly submit, more experience. I am confident that our persistence and enthusiasm will yield results.

  Emma finishes her remarks, smiles, and nods to Omicidio. There is wild applause from her patients.

  CUT TO:

  Omicidio and his group have been studying some papers.

  OMICIDIO (looking up finally): Dr. Brookner, the government’s position is this. There are five million dollars in the pipeline, for which we’ve received over fifty-five million dollars’ worth of requests.

  EMMA: Five million doesn’t seem quite right for some two thousand cases. The government spent seven million investigating seven deaths from Tylenol. We are entering the third year …

  OMICIDIO: President Ruester has indicated he will veto …

  EMMA: It looks like we continue to have a pretty successful stalemate.

  OMICIDIO: Well, that is not what we’re here to discuss, is it?

  EMMA (sensing what’s coming): Go ahead. At your own peril.

  OMICIDIO: We have voted to reject your application for funding.

  EMMA: Oh? I would like to hear your reasons.

  OMICIDIO: The direction of the research you’re suggesting is imprecise and unfocused.

  EMMA: Oh, it is, is it? You don’t know what’s going on any more than I do. My guess is as good as anybody’s. Why are you blocking my efforts?

  OMICIDIO: Dr. Brookner, there are now other investigators. It’s no longer just your disease, though you seem to think it is.

  EMMA: Oh, I do, do I? And you’re here to take it away from me, is that it? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, Doctor. You can have it. I didn’t want it in the first place. You think it’s a privilege to watch young men die? Oh, what am I arguing with you for? You don’t know enough to study boiled water. How dare you come and judge me!

  OMICIDIO: We only serve on this peer review panel at the behest of Dr. Dye.

  EMMA: Another idiot. And by the way, a closeted pervert doing everything in his power to sweep this under the rug. And I vowed I’d never say something like that in public. How does it always happen that all the idiots are always on your team? I am taking care of more victims of this plague than anyone else in the world. How can you not fund my research or invite me to participate in yours? Your NITS received my first request for money over two years ago. It took you one year just to print up application forms. It’s taken you three years from my first reported case just to show up here for a look. The paltry amount of money you are forcing us to beg for, from the four billion dollars NITS receives each and every year to protect the health of all The American People, won’t come to anyone until only God knows when. A promising virus has been rumored, in France. Why are you refusing to cooperate with the French? Why are we told not to cooperate with the French? Just so you can steal a Nobel Prize? While something is being passed around that causes death! Women have been discovered to have it in Africa—where it is clearly transmitted heterosexually. It is only a question of time. We could all be dead before you do anything! You want my data?

  (Hurls out files.)

  You want my ideas?

  (Hurls out more files.)

  You want my patients?

  (Hurls out more files.)

  Take them! TAKE THEM! Just do something with them! You’re fucking right, I am imprecise and unfocused. And you are all idiots!

  She has hurled masses of papers and files out into space, toward the doctors. She rises from her wheelchair, only to fall on the floor. Omicidio tries to help her.

  EMMA: Don’t you dare touch me!

  Fred and Buzzy and Tommy run to gather her up. She is sobbing.

  THE FIRST LADY TALKING TO AND ABOUT HER HUSBAND

  “Yes, Mommy will be home to shoot you up again and dress you for tonight’s performance. Yes, it’s a new costume. Yes, the Marine Band will play you in. Yes, there’s a long long long red carpet. Yes, you’ll be on during prime time. If the media asks about anything, just play dumb like you do so well on Iran. Then you can play with your dirty pictures. Yes, Mommy is still going to fire … Now, don’t cry. Stop it! Remember, you must say directly to the camera that you believe it is a tragic illness but yes you still believe they should remain illegal. And never ever say the letters UC or the word homosexual! Now go upstairs and watch General Hospital. Yes, I’m still at Uncle Foppy’s. No! No, listen to me! I’ve been a good girl since … Kiss-kiss, Pootie Pie.”

  She disconnects. “Oh, God, I need it. Can you see how passionate I feel?”

  “Yes. I do,” responds her Foppy.

  “Do you know what it’s like to really need it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “The latest problem is he mixes up his movies with real life. He plays with his footballs in his bathtub and wakes up in the middle of the night to see if his leg is still there. His leg! The hardest thing I’ve had to deal with in over thirty years of marriage is his leg!”

  “That is exceedingly desperate.”

  “Every time he passes an American flag he salutes it. Do you know how many American flags there are in the White House? Seven hundred and twelve.

  “I don’t know why everyone thinks this job is so much fun. Everyone thinks it’s all free dishes. Everyone thinks it’s all mink coats and Russian presidents’ wives. Everyone thinks it’s all Frank Sinatra for long private lunches upstairs with my door locked. Everyone thinks it’s all parties parties parties and balls balls balls. Well, it is. He said all he wants now is to live the quiet life again. Horse shit on the hacienda at our ranch high up in the middle of nowhere. Our mingy two-bedroom split-level featuring furniture from his childhood back home again in Indiana. Or was it Illinois. Carlotta Punic throwing it up to me on every phone call, ‘I have a hundred million dollars, how much do you have?’ The sacrifices I’ve made to go into public service! But I’m making the best of it! Lady Bird planted her pansies on the highways. Eleanor
Roosevelt was a lesbian with bad teeth. Mamie was a lush. Betty Ford was such a mess she opened her own cure. Rosalynn was Attila the Hun. Pat Nixon pleaded a bad heart and she certainly had one. Who even remembers Bess Truman? All she was was just a wife and mother. I’m better than all of them! Mrs. Wilson ran the country, so can I! Why don’t I get as good press as Jackie? I dress better and my husband is faithful! Should I run for reelection? You bet your fucking ass!”

  TESTIMONY BY BRADEN BENNETT, M.D., PHARM. PH.D.

  CONGRESSIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE CHAIRED BY REP. HENRY WAXMAN (CA)

  In science, you need never be wrong. That’s why there’s never a real “cure” for anything. Because there really are no true absolutes in scientific research. Every scientist wants you to think there are, but there aren’t. All there are are various degrees of possibility. And, also, you can never admit you wasted so much money finding anything. Yes, of course you have to attempt to justify your work’s efficacy, no matter how rotten the shit is. But most times, you really can’t. In the end you are going on hunches, and some sort-of-interesting, often half-baked research done by lab interns who oftentimes don’t even speak English. So a lot of lying goes on. And most of it passes by unnoticed, unattended to, mostly because everyone knows it’s going on. Oh, once in a rare while FADS gets into the act, or is forced to get into the act. I was on many a FADS committee where an “approved” drug got caught with its ineffective pants down killing a few folks and the attitude was “Oh, shit, do we have to deal with this old turkey again!” Instead of “Oh my, someone has died; what can we do to make the product safer?” Safety is not the name of the game in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. I wish the world would know that and stop being naïve. People want “cures” and “relief,” etc. These do not come unalloyed without the odd nightmare. They just do not. That is life. On the whole, until recently, the pharms have had a fair record of the occasional amazing result. Those days are not gone, by and large; they are just increasingly hard to bring off. People want too much assurance. They don’t want to face up to the fact that it’s all a craps game, what we do. And rule number one in the drug-manufacturing business is never admit you’re wrong. That way lies bankruptcy. And we want to make money more than we want you to get better and live. But that is capitalism. And until the government is in charge of all this, and really takes charge of the health of its people, it is going to happen that every major pharm will have, every once in a while, something that turns into poison for them, and of course for those who take it.

  And the pharms demand their payoff, or else they won’t do anything. They’ll just keep churning out new kinds of aspirin if they don’t get their payoff. That’s all you really need to keep the stockholders happy, another “improved” aspirin. No problem advertising it. No side effects. No R&D costs. No royalties to divvy up.

  Payoffs usually lead to drug approvals from FADS. From, currently, Dr. Heiney Halfender, formerly the CEO of Acme Trucking Company (the “Dr.” turned out to be from a business school). Payoffs mean tacit agreement to an article in The New England Journal of Spots that says the new shit was tested on 356 patients at the University of Coconut Grove Medical Center by Dr. Gretta Lell and that, lo and behold, thank you, Jesus, all 356 got up and walked. So gimme the fucking license because, don’tcha know, Greeting-Dridge spent $120 million of its very own money researching and developing this shit for twenty years at least. And they have a hundred lobbyists to convince every official that this is all true.

  The pharms don’t think of anybody or anything but the pharms. They certainly don’t think of the sick, and they don’t consider anyone’s pocketbooks. All these guys—and the pharms are always guys—ever think about is WINNING. The insurers will pick up the tab, if you can only get the shit to market, approved by FADS.

  Sooner or later some square peg is going to fit in some round hole. These guys work on the law of averages. Spend a hundred million bucks, a few million on a hundred different possibilities. One of them has to hit. Figure out the highest possible amount of dosage the body can humanly tolerate each day without keeling over. This is how chemotherapy was developed. Every cancer is treated with some kind of combo that, by itself, didn’t work for squat in the beginning. There probably never has been a chemo since time began that’s worked on its own the first time around. Before any results are ever found it’s got to be administered in voluminous amounts and in combinations with something else.

  That’s what will probably happen with UC. We just need a couple of things to pump into the patient. On their own each can be shit. But together they are less shitty. That’s what medicating people is all about. Finding the less shitty. NITS has never actually found a cure, a real cure, a total cure, for anything. But you didn’t know that. Nobody seems to.

  Combo. Combos. Voluminous amounts. If the right shit is pumped in, it might only need to be minute amounts of whatever will do the trick. But pharms secretly know that their patented chemicals work much better in smaller doses than voluminous amounts. But chintzy “humanitarians,” which is what every pharm advertises itself to death to be, know there ain’t no money in small doses. You can reason that more people living on smaller doses bring in more money than fewer people keeling over after voluminous amounts. But statistics prove this isn’t so. Actuarial tables indicate that while it’s a long time dying from small amounts, if you calculate the cost of money and interest, it’s not that much less of a long time to the payoff of a lesser number dying from voluminous amounts. Go for the gold. What’s a few more dead bodies? Cancer is supposed to kill you.

  Statistics can say anything you want them to.

  Thus you never are wrong.

  Do I think the present system works? Of course not. Do I think it should be replaced? You bet. Do I know how to do it? Nope. And neither does anyone else.

  Not anyone that I trust, anyway. Not that trust plays much of a part in anything. Luck is what plays a part in everything.

  What was that last question again, Senator? Do I believe we can find a cure for UC? Well, as I’ve said, and I hope you were listening, cure is a funny word. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. I wager that not a few of you here secretly hope and think that the best cure for UC is no cure for UC. I suspect that what with one thing or another this is what we are going to see for a long time. So do I believe we’ll find one? No.

  Now, I’ve heard scuttlebutt that Dr. Geiseric has said that he has found a putative virus that probably is the cause of this shit. Forgive me, we have been calling it “this shit” for so long it has become a habit. For The Underlying Condition. As I understand it, NITS, with some twelve thousand employees, has had only one lab actively working on this for the past four years, that of Dr. Geiseric. That is not a way to cure a plague. And as I also believe, there is not much interest among scientists or pharms in researching UC. If it is this viral agent causing UC, as most expect it to be, that only makes matters worse, since it will be poison and fearful to handle. And, most important, drug companies consider the potential market for any treatment of this population to be a small one.

  I am going to predict something else, if I may. Despite all the putative “knowledge” that Dr. Geiseric is intimating is so, the fact remains that there will be increasing worldwide disagreements as to who did what and when. And these are going to wind up in courts, in lawyers’ offices all over the globe. Knowledge is never free. And I do not see the current purveyors of putative knowledge, like their heroic forebears, such scientists as the Curies, or pharmaceutical giants such as George Merck, who provided the results of their discoveries for free for the good of humanity, doing any such thing here. In fact, I predict that each of our current crop will become so selfish and greedy and determined to own the legal outcomes as their own that absolutely nothing will be done for years until this is all resolved. Lots more dead bodies while they work it out.

  I work for one of them, so I know.

  Thanks for the use of your hall.

  DA
NIEL THE SPY

  For some reason, Dodo blabs to The New York Prick.

  “Of course anybody can get UC! Anal intercourse is probably the most effective way to catch it. And of course straight women already have it. I’m working on it. Stay tuned.”

  One wonders why Dodo chose this paper to say all this. “They asked me questions and I answered them” is his defense, when confronted (see below) by Slyme et al. “I’m told nobody reads it anyway.”

  Dingus and Slyme, with big tough bozo Gobbel, showed up at our morning meeting today. In front of all of us, Gobbel took Dodo by his necktie and yanked him up out of his chair and said he was going to see him hanged if he publicly said the things he said in the Prick. It’s nice to know that they’re reading The Prick up there in the White House. “I will see personally that you are hanged by the neck until you are dead if I see one more reference to the very idea that anybody except fags and niggers and junkies can get this shit. There is not one woman in our wonderful United States who has it or will have it. Do you hear me?” Dodo just stared at Linus, whose face was in his face. Then Dodo said, “You are crazier than I am, and that is saying a lot.”

  Rep. Dingus just beamed. For whatever reason he has the hates for Dodo. He now confronts Dodo: “I am preparing an investigation into your work and your laboratory and your staff and anything about you that I can investigate, including the size of your cock, because I hear you are fucking certain persons not your wife in your lab, which is government property. I need not remind you—well, perhaps I need to remind you—that fucking other women not your wife, shit, fucking anybody on government property is against the rules and you know it, sir, and if you don’t know it, sir, you better know it now, sir.” And Slyme and Gobbel marched out. There was even some applause for the performances. We’re getting to be the hot ticket. People come to our meetings just to catch the fireworks. “Best show in town.”