by Larry Kramer
Anyway, I’m stalling again. I did talk to Grodzo. I found his office after that meeting—I apologize for not telling you—and I said, “My name is Daniel Jerusalem. I have a twin brother, David, and I believe he was in a concentration camp in Germany. Might you know anything about him, or how I can find out about him? I know the war is long over, but he did come back and now he’s disappeared.”
He was silent for the longest time. He probably wasn’t used to this kind of confrontation now that he was in the good old safe USA.
Finally he held his hand out. I didn’t want to offer mine but found it impossible not to.
“Dr. Jerusalem. Yes, I knew your brother. I am happy to hear he got back to this country alive. I will be honest with you. During my long silence before answering, I was thinking that I would deny any knowledge. That would certainly be more safe for you and for me, and it was quite some time ago and old men do not remember so well, except that in this case I do. It is a horrible story, the Mungel concentration camp, where we both lived, your brother and I, in a sort of … barracks. He was not in danger. He was there safely. I do not know the details of why he was there. We all learned not to ask questions, about anyone or his situation. We all had different rules to live by that kept us alive. I believe he was hidden away there by somebody for the duration of the war, out of harm’s way, you call it. Outside was much worse than inside for many of us, if you can allow that.”
I followed up with a barrage of questions. He pleaded ignorance, but I could tell he wasn’t ignorant about this at all. He just wasn’t going to say any more. I asked how long they had shared their “barracks.” He looked at me silently before he finally said, “It was a long time and we became good friends. When David came to Berlin he was a boy, and he was not released from Mungel until the last minute of the war, in 1945, when he was already a young man. Now you must forgive me. I have already said more than I am allowed to say under the terms of my permission to live in your country. I signed many papers to live here with you. I am not permitted to talk about the old days.”
“Who was your sponsor?”
“I am not permitted to tell you.”
“What kind of science are you involved in that America guaranteed you such safety? No, I know the answer. You are not allowed to answer that either. I didn’t know that NITS was involved in such top-secret work, but that’s probably naïve of me.”
“Yes, I am afraid it is.”
I just turned and left. I didn’t say goodbye or thank you or see you around. I was at a loss for words of any kind. Shaking and sweating, I walked out of his building. Here was a person who had the information I valued most. I couldn’t find out what Grodzo was doing at NITS. Even Omicidio wouldn’t tell me. I could usually get him to tell me things. Or rather, he said he didn’t know about any of this but he said it in a way that I didn’t believe him. Well, I realized that I now wanted my brother back.
The next time I went to find him, Grodzo’s building had been declared off-limits to unauthorized personnel and I didn’t have the right kind of ID to get in. And he no longer came to Dye’s weekly meetings.
This has obviously been haunting me and I don’t know what to do about it.
ADREENA SCHNEEWEISS!
I, little Fred Lemish, who still might be found dancing around his bedroom to her recordings, spoke to Adreena Schneeweiss for two hours on the phone!
When my agent told me to expect her call while he was taking me to lunch, I lay down on the floor of the restaurant and jiggled all over in excitement and glee! The most wonderful singer and … actress (?) and director (?) and personality in the world, the gay man’s idol, wants to make a movie of my movie of my play about Felix and GMPA and Emma and Tommy and our plague and gays being treated like shit!
I am so excited! If she makes this movie then EVERYBODY in the whole wide world will see it. They will see two men in love. They will see two men kissing each other. They will see two men living together and in bed together like in all those heterosexual movies gays are condemned to watch where straight people do all this, feh!
Question: Is she any good as a director? Answer: Who knows, and if she fucks it up and makes a gookie movie, who cares, because if she makes it then EVERYBODY in the whole wide world will see it anyway. And all my messages about our plague will get out.
Question: How do you feel when you talk to her about gay sex and photographing it for a Major Motion Picture for the first time and she says she’s not sure she wants to show all that, feh! She said “Feh.” And then when we meet and I give her a very artistic book of photographs of men making love, this time she says FEH! FEH! POOH! And she throws the book down on the floor from the sofa where we sit looking at the pictures. I am in her house in Malibu. I am sitting next to her. Her skin is so beautiful. Fred, get real. She has just thrown down on the floor (maybe it slipped from the sofa) this beautiful picture book of men making love that you brought her from New York, saying, Feh! Feh! Pooh! And her own son is gay! Why didn’t you say: Adreena, but this is what your son does when he is in love! I did say that. And she answered, “But he has never been in love, or so he tells me.”
Answer: I will convince her gay sex is just as romantic as straight sex and show her how to film it beautifully. I will write her a screenplay that will delicately outline and describe for her how to light the scene and move the camera and place the actors, a star playing Fred, a star playing Felix, two stars for the first time playing gay men in love! How can she say Feh! Feh! Pooh! about the sex her own son enjoys, if only once in a while? I’ll bet he says Feh! Feh! Pooh! about the sex she has. Or had. And wants to have again. She says she’s looking for a boyfriend too.
But why do I feel that I am a whore here?
Adreena said to me: “When are you free to start work on the script?”
I guess I should stick in here somewhere that my play is running in New York and it has been running for this past year or so, and if I have not sounded like I’ve been doing much it’s because I have been tied up down there, at the Public Theater, where I go and watch my being thrown out of GMPA acted out for me. It often makes me cry because, well, that is why I wrote it, to make people cry, and I guess I succeeded. It is fun to watch when Fred kisses Felix for the first time. You can hear the proverbial pin drop. People are often taken aback. But by the end of the play, when Felix dies, they are very moved. Every single performance is sold out and receives a standing ovation, and if I have not been filling you in on every iota of UC dish, this is probably why. Although I think I have not been doing so badly, filling you in. But I do need to do something less heartbreaking than sit around making long endless lists of all who have died for this new book I’m writing.
THE CONTINUING HISTORY OF ZAP
In the citation for her Nobel Prize for vel, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker had been additionally commended for “the participatory inclusion in the genealogy of this discovery, the heretofore unknown protein, Zinander Alpha Periculosa (ZAP).” This would be the primary ingredient for G-D’s first drug to fight The Underlying Condition, which Von names ZAP. Orvid put a large mock bottle of ZAP with a big bow on the front page of The Prick. “OUR TIME TO LIVE OR OUR TIME TO DIE?”
Through her lawyer, Lucas Jerusalem, Grace was about to challenge G-D’s right to release this medicine, a by-product of her Nobel Prize. She knew it wasn’t ready. She’d seen Oderstrasse’s warnings.
Then Dr. Schwitz Oderstrasse released his bombshell. He publicly accused Dr. Sister Grace Hooker of “murdering” patients while doing research work at Partekla, some twenty-five years ago.
“This drug will not cure or even stop UC,” Grace had told Lucas. “Talk about murdering!”
“Then best to ride this out and see,” Lucas had advised. “If you say that now it will only look like sour grapes.”
“But it’s only going to give a lot of people false hope! At the most! Just like garbage-shit Geiseric and his phony cockteasing innuendoes. It will … kill … a lot of them. I hate to
say these frigging words. I hate to be frigging Cassandra.”
She hated Dodo. He was the liar and the murderer. Why isn’t Oderstrasse out to silence him?
Dr. Sheldon Grebstyne stepped into the fray, defending G-D, and defending ZAP as a product owned by the United States government and developed with taxpayer money by Dr. Arthur Kittering, who worked at NITS in 1950.
Speaking for G-D was its vice president, Dr. Dash Snicker, the supervising executive for upcoming clinical trials of ZAP on “desperately needy victims of this wretched new disease. Nothing must stand in the way of this humanitarian challenge to it that G-D is providing.” His mission, and his determination, to dictate and control every aspect of ZAP’s birthing are sounding dictatorial already.
The news about ZAP’s forthcoming debut is in The Truth, The Monument, and the press of the world. Almost overnight huge waiting lists clamor to get on it—at NITS and at first six but then fourteen other sites around the country where Jerry will place his principal investigators (P.I.)
Grace had asked Lucas how one fights back against all of this. “Her” ZAP would now be accused of “murdering” a lot of UC patients. Getting old is awful. She thought she’d earned a better old age than this.
Well, now she’s dead and few people know it.
In case you’ve not kept counting, this makes three unexplained dead people from our current cast of important characters, Garrie Nasturtium, Herschel Vitabaum, and dear Dr. Sister Grace.
* * *
DAME LADY HERMIA: I am investigating this! Through my tears.
DEEP THROAT CONTINUES THIS HISTORY
As with Greeting’s, ZAP’s history has been only somewhat told.
Every scientific lab, every pharm, every medical center, every university must deal at some time with the troubles inherent in the launching of new products. Bottles and powders and formulas and frozen test tubes of stuff from the beginning of time—no one dares to throw anything away for one reason only: somebody may own it and lawyers are known to suddenly appear with demands. Medicine and medicines are a most litigious part of life. You can’t just say that it was one of those things found on the shelf. Which in this case it was, or at least seems to have been.
G-D is now fighting for its turf. There are already problems crying out for possible litigation. One of ZAP’s patents is in the name of Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, from its association with her Nobel Prize.
Yes, you could say that the genetic predecessors of ZAP evolved from, say, Fruit Island. You could even say it came from the ancient world, Abyssinia, Egypt, mummies in their tombs. Who really knows where aspirin came from? Or who owns it? Mr. Bayer? Mr. Anacin? Dr. Middleditch had claimed Dr. Joseph Apfelfinger was the discoverer of ZAP. Who is Joseph Apfelfinger? Well, his name was on the bottle in the closet. Because Middleditch found some ZAP in a NITS closet, its formula, which, when fed into his new computer, as he was doing with the several thousand formulas he also found in all the NITS closets, which as you can imagine is a lot of closets, actually shows some effectiveness against cohorts of this “thing” that Dodo is currently claiming is “the cause of UC.” What is Dodo claiming this week? He is not permitted to tell. Middleditch, rather swiftly, gives ZAP—yes, gives it, for free—to Von Greeting with the proviso that he gets it out there “swift as lightning! ZAP’s analogues and Dodo’s dirms match up!” Who was Joseph Apfelfinger? Dr. Middleditch had filled a name in where a name was needed.
Middleditch was like a nervous father of the bride. He told Von and Dash Snicker, “Test it on patients fast! You’re famous for your fast-tracking. Omicidio and Debbi Driver and Hube will get us plenty of patients for the trials. I have chosen G-D because you are mean and nasty enough to get this out there fast no matter what.” Was he finally receiving pressure from someone to get his ass in gear? “I am not at liberty to discuss that.” Five thousand COD-counted cases can do that.
In almost every sentence of the above resides a lawsuit coming down the pike, and if not a legal obstruction, then certainly a public relations nightmare. I’ll wager dollars to donuts that ZAP will become one of the most hated, nay loathed, feared, and mishandled medicines to ever come down that pike.
Deep Throat is telling you all this. You heard it here first.
THE AWAKENING OF DARCUS CHARLES GRAVES?
“Some eighty-nine percent of all people of color believe UC is something the white man invented to get rid of us. Most of those didn’t know what UC is or meant but if it means something bad it was invented by the white man.”
When Darcus Charles Graves hears a Dr. Abernathy say the above to a group of blacks, Darcus gets up and yells, “Makes sense! Doctor, you make sense!”
He’s so overcome by his explosion that he collapses to his seat. But he’s covered with people in an instant, black people, all clapping him on the back. He starts to laugh, very happily.
“You’re right, brother, you’re right. Makes sense! Makes sense! Makes sense!”
He is at a Brotherhood for Black Men support group that Maureen, his wife, told him about. He didn’t want to go. But since Felindus Max died, all kinds of voices telling him all sorts of things haunt him. “Get your act together.” He hears that voice a lot. That seems to be the dominant theme. Dr. Abernathy had said, “Our brothers, we must never forget that these are our brothers!” Darcus had brothers (he guesses he probably still has them somewhere) but they never made him feel anything but inferior because they’d worked so hard to please Felindus, which none of them had anyway. The one sister, Alethea, said, “Not a one of them has amounted to much, Darcus Charles. What about you? I run my own little business where I run up sweet dresses for young ladies. What do you do?”
He had to tell her that he was a chauffeur to a very rich and important white man but that the man was evil, and he had to find something else. “I been to an Abernathy meeting that changed my life.”
“How so?”
“It makes me want to do something to help our people.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I hear the ghost of our pappy in those words. Be careful. Helping people gets you in trouble.”
“How so?” it was now his turn to ask.
“People don’t want to be helped, it’s been my experience. Nobody trusts a free meal. Something always comes along with a free meal that doesn’t go down right.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I tried, too. I joined the Sisters of Abernathy.”
“The preacher who is so good with words?”
“That’s him. I had two abortions because he’s so good with words. So it’s just me and my Singer sewing machine at present. He gave me that, at least. Good to hear from you. Let me know what you figure out, if you figure it out.”
“Don’t you want to see me?”
“No. I don’t want to see you. You will make me cry for what might have been. I have been working on trying not to do that anymore. I blow you a kiss, though.”
He heard the kiss and he heard the hang-up.
The medicine Sam got for Darcus is making him feel strong. Sam wasn’t feeling or looking so good, though. He was taking this medicine too. It was sent over by special messenger from the White House.
Darcus often found Sam spread out unconscious on the floor. Sam won’t even leave his house to go to the office. He doesn’t know what he’ll do without Sam, but Maureen says, “It’s the best thing that could happen to you.” He was back at home and they were living together and yes, she knew he was sick and he was very touched how considerate this made her toward him. He actually liked living at home with her now.
“What are you going to do with all of this?” she asked him.
He nodded, but no words came out.
DAVID REVISITS “SCENES FROM THE CRIME, MY LIFE”
Someone is watching me. I wondered how long it would take before this would happen. I still remember what it feels like, being watched by the unknown. Someone is there now.
I earned a degree in chemistry. As I said
, my Mungel teachers instructed me well. I also studied history. And law. I am now a lawyer. It is as if I can’t take enough courses! There is so much to learn and I want to learn it all.
I am fifty years old now. I think.
Grodzo is seventy years old. He’s lived in America since 1945. He has more than eight hundred patents listed in his name and in the name of the places he’s worked for, Greeting-Dridge, and BaxxterGreetingDridge, and now NITS. Some of these patents are in partnership with a Dr. Stuartgene Dye and a Dr. Jerrold Omicidio and a Dr. Sister Grace Hooker. I recall her name as a babysitter we had in Masturbov Gardens.
I have seen photos of Brinestalker and Grodzo in the newspapers. They are written about as if they are important people.
I went back to Berlin. I wanted to see where Amos Standing, my father’s lover who came both to Mungel and to Partekla, had set me free. I couldn’t find Mungel. It’s disappeared. No one knows anything about it when I ask. It’s just like no one knows where Hitler’s bunker was. Before he put me on that plane back to America, Amos took me to a place called Einstein’s Tower on the outskirts of Berlin, near his UFA studio. Here he made love to me, the son of his own lover, my father, in this weird twisting modern building full of holes in its walls for windows. We could hear the Nazis outside calling to each other. I held on to him tightly. For those moments deep in those woods full of soldiers running away themselves and the awful sounds of bombs and rifles shooting and the sky bright with fire, I was helplessly in love with him. I have read a lot about the love of young boys for older men and the reverse. It is much more common than is generally known. I still can get an erection thinking of Grodzo. Einstein’s Tower is still there, as is UFA, which is now a huge movie studio where they make lots of movies and TV.
