The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  He’s hard in his pants now, thinking of her, dead or not, thinking of her. He walks faster through the woods, stumbling down the hill toward the main road below. Claudia thought he was handsome. You are a handsome man. He would take her to foreign films starring men who she said looked like him: big hulking blond bears, a kind of actor more popular abroad. American male movie stars are all small, or perhaps short is the better word when talking only of height. Peter was tall, and he once confided in Buster that he’d not become a really big star because he wasn’t short enough for all the actresses. Along with Manny and Purpura, Carlotta was furious when she heard he’d been seen publicly with Claudia. That was the only time he found Carlotta remotely interesting: when she was furious. Sometimes he hit her to shut her up. Once he slipped her a mickey and fucked her up her ass. She liked it! When the mickey wore off she kept screaming at him. God, could she scream! “Get that goddamned pipe away from me!” she screamed that it scared her to think anything so big and alive could be inside her. Why do we get ourselves into marriages like this? Why do we get married at all? If he were only younger, he wouldn’t have to get married. It was okay not to get married now. He could have had even more of Claudia. His cock gets harder and harder until it’s painful to walk. Get home. Get home fast.

  His house isn’t far from the park. It’s her house, really. The house he bought for her that she refused to live in. She always went back to Doris’s. Somehow, running and stumbling, he gets himself to the front door and finds a key, his hands trembling. He enters. Carlotta would have brushed the burrs from his tweeds, made him wipe his feet. “Did you have a nice walk in the park, dear?” She wouldn’t care about the blood on his underpants. She’d be happy if he were dead. She’d be the richest widow in Washington whose husband got his dong bloody from jerking off too passionately over a hooker who’d also slept with Jerusalems, Lucas and Stephen and … Only Doris knows for sure who else, but the who elses are no doubt a Who’s Who in D.C. His cock is harder than ever and his eyes are pouring tears and the strange combination of sex and sorrow makes him churn inside. He finds himself in a dark corner, and he cries standing up, facing the wall, like a bad boy.

  And there he whips out his huge cock still sore and bloody from using it and he pulls at it, jerks it off again so brutally that it will hurt for days, jerks it and tugs it and punishes it, pretending she’s down there on the floor, lying down under him, looking up at him, still with him, never leaving him, I will always remember you! I will always love you! AAAACH! He collapses in his own come, mixed with the blood of his cruel ministrations and that last tortured, torturing orgasm with Claudia last night. It was his birthday and she finally let him inside her.

  Bismarck comes in and stands beside him, coughing and drooling and finally spitting out a diamond clip for his master. On the back is engraved the date they first made love, if love you could call it (that’s what he calls it now), if what bonded them could ever be called love. Yes, that’s what he calls it now, and will always call it as long as he lives. Yes, I loved her! Goddammit, I loved her! I would have married her if Carlotta hadn’t … He’d married Carlotta in California: the wife gets half of everything. Half of Buster is half more than Buster is willing to relinquish. No! I would have married Claudia! We didn’t need my money to be happy. We had love! God, how fast myths begin. Love? Before now he called his obsession with her torture, agony. I can’t get rid of her. She’s worse than crack. She’d let him love her. An ice queen bestowing knighthood on the morganatic. He knew she fucked with many others; she was a hooker, for Christ’s sake. “Do you enjoy it with me?” he once asked her. “Of course not” was the answer they both knew she would give. And she gave it.

  Buster briefly wonders if he should inform the White House. Purpura won’t like it. Dredd Trish, the snotty vice president, hates him as only a rich well-born gentile snob can hate a richer well-born Jew. The vice president’s father and grandfather had worked for the Nazis. Brinestalker, who’d worked in Berlin, had confirmed it, “for a fact.”

  Buster rushes to Doris Hardware’s. He cried in his house, and now he cries driving to Doris’s. This is the time of day when he would have been with Claudia and tried to have sex with her. He’s got a gaping hole inside him. He’d thought he’d be relieved of it. But he’s never missed anyone before. The feeling surprises him. He’s overwhelmed by the notion that he’s crying. There’s not a human being he’s ever cried for. Carlotta the unfuckable? That’s every marriage he knows. All the jokes in all the locker rooms aren’t about wives but other women. You find yourself a Claudia only if you’re lucky. Otherwise jerk off alone. Rent porn films and jerk off alone or stop and let it shrivel into old age like Peter.

  He’s terrified of his future.

  Claudia always asked him, If you’re so uncomfortable with Carlotta, why do you persist? Then marry me, Buster begged. Don’t be silly. Her favorite expression. And then she’d touch his face softly. No, he can’t understand why he stays with Carlotta, who gives him no joy whatsoever. Men think Carlotta gives him joy because she keeps a lavish house superbly well. And Carlotta is Purpura’s best friend. Which means a lot of invitations to the White House and everywhere else. But Purpura is a bitch and Peter is stupid and their parties are boring because everybody kisses so much ass, pretending they’re all good enough to run the world. He knows that he’s just a billionaire who wants to spend all his time with a hooker in a whorehouse. He never considered that pretending at all.

  Only now the hooker’s dead.

  Buster hopes like hell the tape is still in her rooms. He’s on that tape. Eating out Claudia. It was sort of awkward watching his naked bulky body lapping her up, but it’s a precious memento, this tape, because it’s all he’ll have of her now. He can count on one hand the number of times she let him inside her in all these years. And he tried not to look at the attorney general, also on the tape. Who is fucking someone. And there were other fucks going on, several members of the White House staff fucking several women Claudia brought in for the night, a couple of them black. For these, the attorney general thanked Buster especially. What a joke. Moose couldn’t keep it up and couldn’t keep it in. It kept plopping out.

  Why had they made the tape? Why had they done that? Buster doesn’t want to think about it. Manny made it for the president!

  What if it falls into the wrong hands? How many copies did Manny Moose make? It could destroy a lot of people, like an atomic bomb.

  Doris keeps a safe house. No one gets anything on Doris. But this tape was filmed at some house in the woods.

  “And they won’t!” Doris said when he told her about it. “I’ve got something on every one of them, or on somebody related to every one of them. It’s a small town. It’s a small country. Hell, it’s a small world. The people who actually do things aren’t that many. They all know each other. One way or another they’re connected, like the Mississippi and its tributaries. Yes, I’m a completely safe woman. There aren’t many of us. Jackie Kennedy was safe, before she married Onassis, after which nobody cared. She’d achieved the ultimate sellout. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, I think perhaps she was safe, though it’s difficult to tell with Oriental women. There’s always the chance of inscrutable danger, like in those Anna May Wong movies. Anyway, nobody remembers Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She was very important in this town once. I guess Lucille Ball is safe. At least she’s funny. God, how I wish I were funny. Purpura is not funny. Why am I thinking of Lucille Ball?”

  She is babbling on. And she knows it. She’s an old lady now. She didn’t need all this as a capstone for her great and profitable career. They are sitting in her living room. She’s trying not to talk about what happened, what’s in the air of this house, along the garden pathways, in the bedrooms and suites of the other women. She’s redone her living room, using Swish Turtell, who specializes in chintz and overstuffed furniture and big-based lamps with huge shades. “It’s known as the British Style.” She sighs and plumps up the pillows behind her on
some enormously long and flowery chaise; she sighs and wipes tears from her red haggard eyes. She fears that whatever the reason for this death, somewhere, in the heart of something—this house, this calling, Doris herself—there is some due cause that might implicate her in guilt. She’s never killed off anyone before. Even the African girls from Madame Rose were nipped in the bud by being married off.

  “The British Style. The British in Washington have always been among my best customers. The Brits have the most fucked-up of all sex lives…” And she’s off. Buster sits there. Shut up, he wants to say to her, stop yakking. “The French—there’s no rule of thumb with the French. One does not generalize about the French … Yes, that must be the point.”

  Buster waits to see if she will finally say, okay, let’s talk about her. But she isn’t allowing it, though her voice is now harsher, the eyes more red than wet. “I wouldn’t mind catering to Aussies exclusively. No fuss, no bother, nothing too out of the ordinary … Which leaves our beloved countrymen.” Now she is crying again. Doris is not the kind of woman one expects to cry. Ordinarily she can be counted on to be the brick who keeps everything from getting messy.

  “The American male. What about him? He can be everything, anything, and nothing. Our men are the weakest, least trustworthy, most cowardly.

  “BUSTER!”

  Finally she’s run out of steam and screamed his name and he feels pain everywhere inside him. They rush to embrace each other.

  “I want to go to her room,” he says. “It’s a demand, not a request. You stay here.”

  She watches him go. She’s been through Claudia’s rooms carefully. Her cop contacts called as soon as Claudia’s body was found. Claudia was here for seventeen years. Claudia came here like a girl goes into a nunnery. She just wanted to get away from the world. That was my reason, too. It doesn’t make sense to everyone but it makes sense to some. Claudia understood exactly what she understood. Claudia understood it all.

  In Claudia’s suite Buster starts to cry again. He knows its feel and smell and he can walk around it in the dark without bumping into things. He knows the patterns of the flowers on all the chintz as if he planted them. He gets down on his knees, tears running down his cheeks uncontrollably, and pulls open the bottom drawer of her biggest bureau and starts crudely yanking soft clothing items aside.

  “Buster, if you’re looking for a souvenir, tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. But don’t muss.” Doris is there bending down beside him, then both of them sitting on the floor, she wiping his cheeks dry with her tiny handkerchief, then she crying too, then both of them holding each other tightly for a moment or two.

  “I was only looking to see if there’s anything that might lead the suspicious to me.”

  “I’ve been through everything. There are only some clothes, some underwear, some shoes. There’s nothing else.”

  “Have the police been here?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t let them come in here. I showed them another room.”

  She leaves him alone again. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. He throws himself on her bed. He buries his face and nose and tongue and teeth in the pillows. He pretends she is there. He tosses and turns and tears off his clothes and holds the pillows to his naked body as if they are her, rolling around and practically strangling himself in her sheets, pumping and pumping his already woefully manhandled member until he has the most painfully erotic orgasm of his life. He gasps for breath. “Don’t leave me!” He screams so loudly that the whole house must have heard him.

  In several weeks, Buster is appointed ambassador to Great Britain.

  THAT TAPE

  The tape starring Buster Punic and Claudia Webb and Manny Moose and an astounding assortment of supporting players cavorting through imaginative scenes in delicious costumes is being lapped up by the president of the United States, Peter Ruester, who is sitting in his rocking chair in his darkened office (there is never any work that takes much time; his “team” already knows he does nothing but nap), leaning back, rocking, holding his long rope of a flaccid cock in his hand, still hoping he can get it up again, Please God, one more time before I die.

  But this is really too funny. Manny Moose under a girl in leather! Manny!

  Peter hoots so loudly his secretary outside can’t imagine what in the world’s so funny.

  Manny has just signed an ordinance prohibiting the public sale of pornography. No more Sexopolis. No more Playboy and Screw and Hustler. The world will be a cleaner place.

  Manny turns around and watches as that young Dumster fucks the ass of some voluptuously tushied bimbo. He looks at the camera and gives a lascivious wink as if to say to Old Peter, Remember when we could do that, too?

  This makes the president a little harder. His hand swings into immediate action. So rarely does the blood reach his cock these days that when a driblet of it does, he knows he has work to do. His eyes stay glued on Manny Moose and Manny watching Dumster’s huge cock, and the memories of the president of the United States go back to their young days out west together, when Peter was running for his first office and Jules Stein—the Big Jew, Peter calls him now that he’s president and Jules is dead—sent him Manny Moose to manage everything and Peter Ruester and Manny Moose fell in love and became lovers for a few days and fucked their young asses off—goodness, we were handsome young men!—and whoops, I’ve just climaxed, and look, I even have a few drops of gism still in me. Manny, I love you still.

  He pulls out his handkerchief and wipes the few drops away and sticks his old cock back in his presidential jeans and pulls his cardigan closer around his body. He is still chortling with pleasure. He goes to the phone at his huge clean uncluttered desk and presses the button for the attorney general.

  “Manny, I just did it again!”

  “Did what?” The squeaky voice of Manny Moose pierces the air with a worried sound. “You haven’t gone and done anything half-cocked?”

  “No, I did this one full-cocked.”

  “Petie, what are you talking about?”

  “I just got my first boner in years and I jerked off and I even came a few drops and it was all because of you. You can still do it to me. Yes, you really can.” He shakes his head from side to side with that disarming grin of mock disbelief that has won his country’s heart.

  “You got a boner? I’m so glad!” The voice has lowered substantially, but its enthusiasm is real. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” It is a sweet admission.

  “Yes, and I got it looking at you in some sex orgy. They all seem to be heteros. Manny, what were you doing with them?”

  Now the voice is back to its hysterical high. “Sweetie, I want you to listen to me carefully. That tape is very dangerous and extremely valuable and it could destroy your reputation for all time. Keep it hidden where only you know where it is and I’ll be there immediately! Do you hear me?”

  “I love it when you order me around. I’ll be here, sweetie. Hurry, hurry. I love it when you call me Petie.”

  DANIEL: Do you remember Arnold Botts from Masturbov Gardens?

  FRED: Vaguely. Wasn’t he the creep?

  DANIEL: The dangerous creep. He’s become a very important person. He’s starting up a pharm.

  TIME, GENTLEMEN, TIME

  Doris allowed herself to feel and show her terror. She trembled uncontrollably.

  She’d been unable to locate the tape Claudia told her was hidden in the special compartment under her rug. It was empty. Did her murder have anything to do with this theft?

  She went to her own special hiding place, which is not under her rug but in the base of a Chinese porcelain lamp. She took out a key and used it to unlock a panel in her wall. She reached in to press a button, and the entrance to a hidden office slid open. Here were all her files, years and years of them, not only on personnel but on customers. These files could bring down governments, a feast for historians of any era. She had also kept an ongoing ledger of the activities of her house day by day, a ledger that
would do the best bookkeepers proud. Now she entered the office to find Claudia’s file. She wanted to know if there were any next of kin who should be contacted.

  Claudia’s file was missing.

  All the files were missing. The shelves were bare.

  A large drawer was still open—the drawer that contained the most recent records. This drawer was completely empty too. Every single customer’s account, his name and proclivities, was now out of her house and into the world.

  The possibilities for damage of all sorts are enormous. Blackmail, murder, war. At one time or another over these years the world’s most important men in any and every field had come to her house, this house, to fuck. They thought they were safe. She always had prided herself on keeping a safe house. Sam and Abe helped keep it safe. There was no way anyone could know how to get into this room. It has no entrance other than the one she’d just used.

  How long would it be before she started to hear of the damage? Perhaps someone will contact her for some sort of ransom. No, that’s unlikely. This isn’t about money. This is about power or revenge. Everything in Washington is about one of these or the other. Or both.

  How long did she have?

  She went to her room and watched herself do what she was doing from somewhere outside of herself. She pulled the alarm. All over the house, the former house of somebody’s God, clangings and sirens erupted as a loudly amplified impersonal bass voice commanded, “This is an emergency. Please evacuate immediately. This is an emergency. Evacuate immediately.” Voices were heard, questionings, hastenings, curses. She pulled another alarm. Again the urgent impersonal voice, amplified even louder: “Attention. You must evacuate immediately. This is a fire alarm. There is a fire. Attention, attention. You have no time. Evacuate immediately.”