by Larry Kramer
INT. CONGRESSIONAL HEARING. DAY.
Dr. Omicidio is being questioned by Rep. Ted Weiss (D. NY); Fred in audience with Tommy and Dr. Monserrat Krank.
REP. WEISS: Dr. Omicidio, your drug selection committee has named twenty-four drugs for investigation. Why the delays?
REP. NANCY PELOSI: Assume that you have UC. You know the NITS delays and that patients are finding black market ways to try anything on the streets. What would you do?
OMICIDIO: Congresswoman Pelosi, I probably would go with what would be available to me, be it on the street, or what have you. I do not believe anything on that list is worthy of testing with the small amount of money I’ve been allotted.
CUT TO:
Same room. Another hearing. Dr. Monserrat Krank is questioning Jerry. As with all who testify, she has an identifying plaque by her microphone.
MONSERRAT: So, what is happening? We got you money for research. I personally appealed to Senator Kennedy. Where is the research? Where is anything?
OMICIDIO: I don’t have sufficient staff, Dr. Krank.
MONSERRAT: How can that be?
OMICIDIO: Your research money does not allow for staff, Dr. Krank.
MONSERRAT: Why have you said nothing?
A JEWISH VISIT
In Boro Park, New York, the Moses Adonai Medical Center was ghastly. “Jewish boys do not get sick with this, Mr. Lemish. Jewish boys are never homosexuals. Jewish men do not perform anal intercourse. Rectums are not kosher. They are used only for dirty pooh-poohs. Jewish boys are never fegalim. Homosexuals are big pooh-poohs.”
Who talks like this in this day and age?
Well, this guy does. Rabbi Dr. Goldenrod. A rabbi and an M.D. all rolled into one. Goody.
At their temple avec conference center, the 5,904th Conference of Rabbis Who Care is transpiring. It has been billed as an “International Conference.” I was asked to come and speak here, following Rabbi Schwartzer Starker’s keynote address to some five hundred rabbis, which is entitled “Jews Do Not Get The Underlying Condition.” It is a horrible speech. “Those so afflicted have been punished by G-d and quite evidently they must die for their sins. G-d is speaking very plainly and clearly and distinctly and loudly.” Five hundred bearded rabbis, all in black, wearing tiny caps unattractively out of scale with the dandruffed scalps they rest on, listen to hours of speeches just like Starker’s in this large new edifice adjoining their Temple Bathsheba Rehavotna. After several hours the hall reeks of the body odor of five hundred sweating rabbis. They have placed me last on the program. And I have sat here for these hours. Someone speaks in hateful tones; then they pray; then they stand up and pray; then they sit down and pray; then someone else speaks another hateful version of the same. I think I sat there because I couldn’t believe there was so much hate in one place.
Rabbi Starker finally acknowledges me from the podium. I can see the hate in all the eyes staring at me. I could walk across the stage and say a few words. There is silence while they wait. I see a door. I walk to that door. I open that door. I leave by that door.
I hear someone call me as the door closes behind me.
Shmuel Derektor is here. Another analyst I started seeing after I tried to kill myself at Yaddah. He is very old now. “You look older,” I say to him. We are standing in a vestibule. Over the years, he’s been helpful to me.
“Who does not get older?” He is here as an observer only, he says. “I only consult now. I come and listen to the meshugas. They too are my clients. They too need help.” Then he gives me his look, that knowing nod of his head.
“I am truly sorry things go poorly for you, Fred. This is not the place where you will find help for your cause, however. You are right to leave. The Orthodox are nothing if not … orthodox. Business for me is good. These men here believe that you will destroy the world. That what you represent will set fire to all the good they have done for many centuries. They look upon gays as Hitler looked upon Jews.”
“Hitler looked upon gays in the same way.”
“There you have it, then. I rest my case. You do not know you have been chosen to advocate for the despised. I do not think you know this.”
He’s slipped a lot into those last sentences. He did that a lot in our sessions, as I now remember. Out of nowhere, he slips something in.
He continues: “Why else am I here but to point this out to you?”
From inside the conference hall, as if on cue, comes a resounding hallelujah or trumpet voluntary, or perhaps both, to end the session with a crescendo.
“You see,” Shmuel says. “Even the heavenly choir knows what I’m talking about.” Then his smile turns serious.
“Please, I beg of you. Be the fierce and, yes, avenging angel. We deserve it. The Jewish people deserve it. They have forgotten already. Stand on their ramparts of hate. You will be good at it. Come talk to me whenever you like. I miss you. We can plan and plot.”
INT. CONGRESSIONAL HEARING. DAY.
Another hearing. Monserrat is questioning Jerry. Fred and Tommy are here.
MONSERRAT: So, what is happening? Where is anything?
OMICIDIO: Your grant does not include labs and desks. I don’t have enough space for the workers I hired with the money.
MONSERRAT: Again, you said nothing? Your inability or unwillingness to tell anyone what you need is inexcusable.
Fred is fuming. Tommy calms him down.
EXT. HEARINGS. DAY.
Monserrat and Rebby, Fred and Tommy are exiting the building with others. A man in a minister’s collar and with a GOD HATES FAIRIES crudely executed poster is speaking on a portable mike.
MINISTER: Save your money. I have discovered the cure for UC. Here it is: ‘If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.’ And that, my friends, is the cure for UC. It was right there in the Bible all along. Leviticus 20:13. We can have a UC-free world tomorrow.
DAME LADY HERMIA IS WAITING
Fred Lemish, you are taking too long. Fred, you need to be more consistently and visibly angry! I have read all you have done so far. Your center does not hold. In fact, I cannot locate your center at all. And neither can you. It is all a bit, how shall I call it, neither here nor there. Grace said that you were very shy as a child. Is it not time for you to grow up and focus!
AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. JERROLD OMICIDIO FROM FRED LEMISH
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND THE VILLAGE VICE
Dear Dr. Death:
I write to you yet again.
It’s imperative to have a top NITS scientist to properly shepherd the government’s research process against UC. You’re supposed to be that person. You fucking son of a bitch of a dumb idiot, you expect us to buy your garbage bag of excuses for what you are not doing and why! Your National Institute of Tumor Sciences is an Animal House of Horrors.
I call the decisions you are not making acts of murder.
At recent congressional hearings, after almost eight years of the worst epidemic in modern history, perhaps to be the worst in all history, you were pummeled into admitting publicly what some have been suspecting since you officially took over three-plus years ago.
You admitted that you are an incompetent idiot.
Over these years $374 million has finally been allocated for UC treatment research. You are in charge of spending this money. It doesn’t take a genius to set up a nationwide network of testing sites, name a principal investigator, commence a small number of moderately sized treatment efficacy tests on a population desperate to participate in them, import any and all possibly interesting drugs (now numbering approximately two hundred) from around the world for inclusion in these tests at these sites, and swiftly get into circulation anything that remotely passes muster. Yet you have established only a system of inactivity, chaos, and uselessness.
And four years later you are forced to admit you’ve barely begun.
It doesn’t take a genius to request, as you
did, 126 new staff persons, receive only 11, and then keep your mouth shut about it.
It takes an incompetent idiot!
To quote Rep. Henry Waxman, who asked you again at a hearing: “As best I can tell, six of these drugs have been waiting for six months to more than a year for you to test them. I understand the need to do what you call ‘setting priorities,’ but it appears even with your own scientists’ choices, the trials are not going on. Why the delays?”
Your defense? “There are just confounding delays that no one can help … We are responsible as investigators to make sure that in our zeal to go quickly, we do the clinical study correctly, that it’s planned correctly and executed correctly, rather than just having the drug distributed…”
Are you sure you’re the right person for your job?
You had come bawling to Congress that you don’t have enough staff, office space, lab space, secretaries, computer operators, lab technicians, file clerks, janitors, toilet paper; and that’s why the drugs aren’t being tested and the treatment centers aren’t up and running and drug protocols aren’t in place. You expect us to buy your bullshit and feel sorry for you?
YOU FUCKING SON OF A BITCH OF A DUMB IDIOT, YOU HAVE HAD $374 MILLION AND YOU EXPECT US TO BUY THIS GARBAGE BAG OF EXCUSES!
For agonizing years you have refused to go public with what was happening (correction: not happening), and because you wouldn’t speak up until you were asked pointedly and under oath by a congressional committee, we lie down and die and our bodies pile up higher and higher in hospitals and homes and hospices and doorways and, yes, in the streets.
Meanwhile, drugs we have been begging that you test remain untested. The list of promising untested drugs is now so endless, and the pipeline is so clogged with NITS and FADS bureaucratic lies, that there is no Roto-Rooter that will ever be able to muck them out.
You whine you are short of staff. You don’t need staff to set up hospital treatment centers around the country. The hospitals are already there. They hire their own staff. They only need money. You have money. YOU HAVE 374 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!
The gay community has, for five years, told you what drugs to test because of what we hear from our own contacts. You couldn’t care less what we say. You won’t answer our phone calls or letters or listen to or meet with anyone in our community. What tragic pomposity!
To quote Rep. Waxman again: “Aerosolized pentamidine was named High Priority and there are still no people in trials.”
How many years ago did we tell you about aerosol pentamidine, Jerry? That this stuff saves lives, and deaths from that pneumonia which is our worst killer opportunistic infection. And we discovered it ourselves. We came to you, bearing this great news on a silver platter as a gift, begging you: Can we get it officially tested, can we get it approved by you so that insurance companies and Medicaid will pay for it as a routine treatment?
You are a heartless murdering monster.
We tell you what the good drugs are, you don’t test them, then YOU TELL US TO GET THEM ON THE STREETS! You continue to pass down word from On High that you don’t like this drug or that drug—WHEN YOU HAVEN’T EVEN TESTED THEM! You pass down word from On High that you don’t want “to endanger the life of the patient.”
THERE ARE MORE UC PATIENTS DEAD BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T TEST DRUGS ON THEM THAN BECAUSE YOU DID!
The cries of genocide from this Cassandra continue to remain unheard. And my noble but enfeebled community of the weak, the dying, and the dead will continue to grow and grow—until you and your system diminish us out of existence.
DEEP THROAT TELLS FRED ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE OF THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Hello, Fred. I’m glad you reached out to me confidentially on Jerry-built matters, as Ann Fettner hoped you would. I wish your friend, Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, were as open to my thoughts. He is suspicious of me, as he becomes too close to Jerry to be objective.
Jerry could not tell the hearings that he’s revving up for testing ZAP. Remember, ZAP itself has not yet been seen or approved by FADS. In other words, he’s breaking the law. I have no idea why, although I suspect Greeting has something to do with it.
Farrell Obernought, Gretta Lell, Pansy Merridew, Tyrone Coffin, Max Blatz. PIs and blowhards all. Interested in only one thing: themselves. Howie Hube is already hostile to them. He thought he would be in charge of them, but they all outrank him and certainly aren’t going to respond to him. Not that Hubie’s any wunderkind, but Jerry’s put him in charge of this network of UC clinical trials that he is finally setting up. That only these five have surfaced to be PIs is scary. It’s not as if PI positions are in great demand. So how did these five show up? They’re certainly all “distinguished,” in that they’re well known in their fields and neighborhoods. I’m not saying these are a bad lot of choices. I am just saying they’ve appeared out of nowhere. I am of course suspicious of things that appear out of nowhere. I suspect each of them has a strong affiliation with a major pharmaceutical house. That is increasingly the way of the world. I’ll bet every one of them is too chummy with G-D. In other words, they too are breaking the law.
PIs usually get slots because each is able to convince the provider (in this case G-D’s crafty Dr. Dash Snicker) that they personally have a large enough acceptable patient population to fill all the slots in their trials. Most doctors don’t want to provide patients for trials. It’s too tricky. What if they die? These Joe Blows obviously don’t give a shit whether their patients live or die. Gretta Lell told me to “go stuff it” when I queried her interest. They want in for the same reason Jerry does. This is hot stuff, which only a few smart ones smell at present. They’ll be in on the ground floor of what they already see—each has a lot of sick patients. They’re ambitious. Believe it or not, most docs are not ambitious. And since they’re already “owned” by a drug company, having worked with many of them in a “cooperative” fashion, they don’t need to be. G-D will run them like slaves on its plantation but pay them for it.
In case you didn’t notice, this virus wasn’t all that hard to find. Jacquie found it in a matter of months very early on. Then Pewkin’s COD discovered one. Then so did Chuck Salmon, a private doc with a gay practice in San Francisco. What’s delayed NITS is their difficulty with dumb Dodo. He’s worshipped like some Mother Teresa at Lourdes. They don’t want to do anything to offend him until he fixes up his goddamn test and it can be used to enroll candidates pure enough to please Dash Snicker. His champion, Roscoe Middleditch, has been disappeared, as they put it. Too bad. I liked him. Seemed like an honest guy.
Under Ruester the various secretaries of HAH and COD and FADS are coming and going like a game of musical chairs. As Joe Kidney has written, nobody wants to work for Old Peter. Swilkers, Mason, Dietrikson, Ahearne, Noblonski, Velery, Bowen, it’s always a potpourri of nullities running these loony bins.
Daniel doesn’t grasp the effectiveness of this tactic of constantly changing “officials.” Without continuity in an agency’s leadership, no one’s in place long enough to fight for anything, particularly money. Every Request for Funding automatically gets tabled, denied, or lost in the mail. Prepare your buddies to die, my friend. You’re one less problem for the White House.
Okay. Jerry is about to launch his first big trial. Jerry’s young and handsome, which should help make him a good leader. He is a bitch to work for. I say that even though I just know he’ll find a way to get rid of me even though I’m meant to be protected here for life and he’s not my boss. I worshipped him at first. I’m not certain why anymore. I like to worship whom I work with. I’ve worked side by side with a few of the great ones. I may have mentioned them to Daniel elsewhere.
I am smarter than anyone here and I know it and Jerry knows it. It does not pay to be smarter than anyone at a place like this, especially the man in charge.
I don’t think anyone has any idea what it’s like for scientists who don’t know what to do while their boss is out jogging. Well, no one here
knows what to do. Can’t say this enough. Just can’t. “Just test anything! Test aspirin, for Christ’s sake,” Dr. Fellow said, and he was not alone. He was doing his own research, it turned out, that Jerry agreed to co-author, which would result in an actual peer-reviewed article getting itself into NEJS claiming UC was, get this, a fungus. He actually asked Jerry to co-announce this and Jerry fell for it. Arden Morron fell for it. Fellow didn’t last long. Jerry was ruthless about getting rid of Fellow fast. They still make jokes about “Jerry’s fallow Fellow fungus.”
A hundred years ago, when I came back from Africa, I was told by Dye to oversee what still are called “ancillary pathological studies.” The announcement of my appointment was heralded in NEJS. When Jerry came on a few years later The Prick wished me luck, “because we sense Dr. Omicidio is a manipulative charlatan.” They were onto him right away. “He is too cute to be a decent scientist,” they added. You guys evidently have radar for things like this.
Remember, Jacqueline’s virus, Dodo’s virus, Paulus’s virus, Chuck Salmon’s virus, Jesus Christ’s virus, not a one of them has yet received the Good Housekeeping Seal. No journal has given it a blessing. No one is using the words “THE virus.” Amazing to see how much time was wasted while Dodo checkmated Jacqueline’s work, supported by Middleditch, Nostrill, Grebstyne, Dye, et al. Time goes awfully fast, except when it goes too awfully slowly. The lawyers are still in here going through every lab’s haystack.
