by Larry Kramer
“Well, fellows and gals,” Leisha McGonigle starts each of the Jerry daily meetings jauntily, “where do we begin today?” Chief Nurse Leisha is very officious. “Someone’s got to be,” she says right to anyone’s face. “I’m attractive enough to get away with it, but not so attractive as to make them want to fuck me,” she told me. Good old Leisha. We’ve been through a few wars together and she’s the real thing. Jerry’s lucky to have her. Not that he knows it. Not that he knows he’s lucky to have me, too.
Gretta is the first to get herself chosen a PI. She used to be prettier. She’s a tough cookie. It’s a good thing I never fucked her. I couldn’t have kept it up for her, and she’s the kind of broad who would happily pass that kind of info around. She’s also the kind of gal who, when she passes you by, says something cute and snappy like “How they hanging?” Dash Snicker is not happy with her patient population. “I mean, they don’t even speak English.” She snaps back, “I do, and that’s all you have to worry about.”
Dash not only doesn’t like her patient population, he decides they’re all too sick, with indications of illness, so he announces, “I have said I will not allow any entrants into any Greeting trial who evince any sign of anything. And I mean it. Period.” Dash knows in advance what he wants the results to be. They just have to be “official,” meaning that the government is paying for them and G-D can’t be accused of juggling the data. Ha ha.
So that’s how we started in on our ZAP clinical trials. And each of those PIs is starting a similar study in their own medical centers across the land. Two hundred and fifty patients in each.
“Stop the presses! Hold everything!” Dash Snicker isn’t ready again.
Now he only wants to do two test arms. One in Miami with Gretta and the other in San Francisco with Farrell Obernought.
Jerry has told me he doesn’t like me “being so constantly negative. Go cut up another body.”
To be continued …
SAM SPORT TALKS TO HIMSELF
They are all fuckers. The whole fucking world. But I can fuck them all. I’ll find a law anyone’s breaking so I have them over a barrel. Otherwise they’ll go to prison. No one treats Sam Sport in any way he doesn’t want to be treated.
My clients control 34 gay bars in Washington, 134 in New York City. I get paid for every drink every faggot drinks. We own the bathhouses. What gay power I have! I enjoy thinking about this. I enjoy being the most powerful prick in their lives. Nasturtium had to be put down for telling Purpura all this about her buddy Sam, his old fuck buddy. I’ve got plenty of shit on her including her being a cocksucker with a dyke mother. But now she’s shitting too far and wide. God only knows what she’ll do next. Moose is a shithead who can’t be trusted. He’d have me debarred in a minute if it weren’t for my friendship with Purpura. Edgar warned me about him. Edgar was always right. Roy said always listen to Edgar. So does James Jesus.
Moose wants to be cut in on ZAP and G-D. He’s looking for something to do after he leaves the White House. He ordered me to arrange a meeting with Snicker and Greeting. First of all, I don’t take orders from anyone. Second of all, my Mob clients are already into G-D. They see how much my faggot brothers and sisters drink up in their bars. They see them beginning to not look so healthy and the bar business slipping away. We have to keep them boozing and fucking! Sex, drugs, and rock and roll! Give them more of what they want!
I trust my Mob friends more than I trust my president and his fucking first lady. As that good old honest blowhard Joe Kidney’s been trying to tell us, Ruester’s not the one who’s running this country.
Dereck, I got to give Dereck more lessons. I recognize the real snakes when I see them. He’s going to be king of the heap. He wants to learn all my tricks. He begs me. I sure would like him to fuck me. He won’t, and his orgies are all filled with big-titted cunts.
ARE YOU FOLLOWING THE BOUNCING BALL?
You close your eyes and you can have too many memories, as Fred does. The scenes of sex that were so touching and felt so good. This is the history that made us, these memories, these experiences, into what we are today. They are the foundation stones, the building blocks on which we all stand. These memories are not just wisps of remembrance; they are poured into the concrete of the plinths of our lives. They’re as firm as the facts in any history. Supporting evidence, Fred calls them.
Hateful and vengeful and angry memories, why should they be less plinthful, to coin an ugly word to hold them?
We’re arriving at the moment in our history when the whole crude scientific apparatus around UC, the corset, is being created, more concrete’s being poured. PIs up the ass are suddenly visible and audible. PIs will become more and more competitive, particularly when a rival pharm’s drug being tested leaps a few steps ahead of the one you’re working on, particularly when that other pharm was one you worked for, or who fired you. There is no love lost in this rat race, no matter which side. Fred hadn’t seen that coming—that it would be a rat race. Fred really thought people would care and help. “I really thought people would join together to fight, like a band of brothers. I still have a lot to learn. Only yesterday no one wanted to touch this shit. But now strange men are coming closer!” And as they do, conflicts of interest start plopping out of assholes like rotten tomatoes from an overflowing overturned wheelbarrow. That, in the history of drug trials, is evidently “the way it’s always been.” Who knew? PIs plopping their contributions into the concrete plinth of drug testing are our next destructive guarantor of getting nowhere. Principal Investigators, a.k.a. People without Principles.
DEEP THROAT
PIs are going to eat Jerry Omicidio for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And Jerry’s going to let them. This is our leader. The PIs take one look at him and know they can take over.
Why didn’t Jerry try to gather the best around him? Did Dash insist on these PIs? But since when is the pharm allowed to control the clinical trials of its own product? Dumb Anyone who asks this question. If the pharm’s going to contribute for free the drugs being tested, disagree with anything they insist on and you’re going to have to pay for them yourself. G-D is simply not giving its approval to go forward with anything they don’t like.
Dash is one rude bastard. He is riding herd on everything as he studies the lists of all the potential trial entrants from each center, those hundreds and hundreds waiting impatiently in the wings all over the country. If all the entrants must be healthy, the results are going to be for shit. Well, all the entrants are going to have to be healthy to be accepted. This is allowed to pass. As Jerry’s never run clinical trials before, he’s not going to listen to the likes of Deep Throat, who more and more is getting on Jerry’s nerves. Jerry calls around and discovers that this is how it is, and that G-D is known to be the worst.
“And what did Jerry do today?” Fred’s always asking Daniel. Fred just knows Jerry isn’t doing anything. He gives lots of interviews. Lots of them. “How can he be doing anything when he gives so many interviews?” Fred asked Daniel. “I thought he takes care of patients. I thought he was looking for a cure. I thought he was in charge of this shit!” What Fred is convinced Jerry is not doing drives Fred nuts. “Well, Jerry plays lots of stuff very close to his chest,” Daniel tells him. “He used to answer his red phone when I was in the office. Now he asks me to leave.” “What does that mean!” Fred asks. “How the fuck am I supposed to know what that means!” Daniel snaps back and hangs up. No, Fred and Daniel are not getting on.
THE MARCH TO ZAP
TOMMY: A new wrinkle. There is opposition to even taking Dodo’s test. Question of civil liberties and confidentiality. You test positive for UC, who gets that info? It will be like a roll call of gays. Employers will love that. Gay lawyers at GMPA are objecting, led by yours truly: before this test can be administered, confidentiality must be guaranteed. This won’t be easy. Senator Vurd’s already thrilled, and his minions are ready to jot down every name they can get. On the other side of the fence, it’s b
eing pointed out by Fred and others that until there’s a useful drug there’s no point in getting a useless test anyway. “Frankly, I’d rather not know” is heard a lot. “Just as long as you’re being careful and using a condom,” I’m still not allowed to officially say. GMPA is not allowed to make any kind of behavioral or therapeutic recommendation.
* * *
DANIEL: Stuartgene turned on me at our next group Do Nothing. “You are our token gay. You are going to convince the entire gay world that they must take this test.” And I am suddenly wondering if that’s what’s really wanted … by someone. For everyone to take a test that’s inaccurate in the extreme.
“I don’t think I can do that, Dr. Dye.”
“Why?”
“Dodo’s test provokes too many false results. I’ve reported on that to you and Dr. Omicidio. Our only recourse is to get Dr. Geiseric to finally do some readjusting. The only one he listened to was Dr. Middleditch, who’s no longer here.”
He looked at me for a long moment of silence before just turning around and leaving.
* * *
FRED: A doctor in Paris is claiming he’s got a drug that stops the virus. Just word of that sends hundreds of guys stampeding to Paris. Rock Hudson is rushed to Paris on a private plane. The lines outside the Pasteur Institute go for blocks. Guys rush directly from the airport to the Pasteur and sleep on the streets. They don’t even check into their hotels. Hell, most of them can’t afford a hotel. Guys keeps running into friends they know from Fire Island or their gyms or the waiting rooms of their doctor’s office. I was in France and England to set up productions of my play. I visited the site. I ran into a guy I went to Sunday school with at Rabbi Chesterfield’s, who reminds me of Tibby, the rabbi’s son. Tibby would have caught this shit for sure. What a dick he had. Too bad he didn’t live to enjoy it at least for a little while.
* * *
DANIEL: Slowly and secretly ZAP is going into a few bodies. Grebstyne announces the results of a six-week study nobody knew was happening. ZAP kept the virus from replicating in fifteen of nineteen patients, raising their T cells, now the official barometer of improvement since Grace and her vel count have bitten the dust. It took sixteen months to do this six-week study.
NITS biostatisticians have somehow interpolated that 70 percent, maybe up to 100 percent, of gay men might already be infected. Just like Emma Brookner predicted. Who’s ready for this? Why isn’t Jerry making this known? I ask him, of course. “It’s just statistal bullshit. Statistics are whipped cream. Pumped full of hot air.”
“So what?”
“So I’m not ready to be crucified for creating a media tornado. You keep your mouth shut too.”
Maggie Fuldy has the first major fuckup on a PI trial. Several of her guys had taken their ZAP immediately to a chemist and stopped taking them if they were the placebo. Dash blames her noisily for “not maintaining sufficient personal contact” with her enrollees. “Am I supposed to be in their bathrooms when they take their meds!” she asked him testily. She’s taken off the trial, which is then combined with one of Debbi’s. This is not kosher, but who’s to know. The guys taking the placebo were told to get lost. Actually, they were told more than that. Dash reamed them out for being selfish and inconsiderate and irresponsible, “and how do you expect us to get data that will help everyone when you pull shit like this.” One of them spoke up. “Sargent Pepper died on this dose.” Sargent was a guy named Sparks Puffington’s lover. Sparks is not happy about this loss and comes up to Dash and says to his face, “You’re a murderer. Fifteen hundred milligrams is poison and you know it.” Sparks is small in size and Dash isn’t. Dash picks Sparks up and carries him to the door and puts him out in the hallway. Debbi doesn’t like the way Dash was rude to Maggie and tells him so. He takes her off the trial too, combining her already combined trial with that of old Leisha’s. After twenty years of doing trials for NITS, Debbi is furious. Jerry transfers her to another PI, forcing her to move to San Francisco to work with Farrell Obernought. Leisha’s section is then unblinded. Her guys got varying doses with no placebo. Here it’s apparent, more or less, that while everyone in her trial will eventually die, the lower the dose, the longer before they do so.
But G-D absolutely will not lower the “recommended dose.” No money in that. “The patient population has to be broken in to the higher dosage, more slowly perhaps, but our testing indicates that the system can tolerate it eventually.” Dash says this to Thelma Adroit of Time. Word’s leaking out about the ZAP trials. No trial is producing results good enough for what everyone’s been hoping. In all the PI-supervised trials all over America, those enrolled start taking matters into their own hands, dosing themselves up as they see fit—more for the days they feel good and less or none for those days they don’t. “We’ve been had once again!” Orvid trumpets in The Prick. “The Prick told you so!” Fewer people are willing to enroll in 1500 mg trials. Dash, who has oversold his product’s benefits and oversupervised everything, reluctantly adjusts the “recommended dosage” to 1000 mg daily. Even this is hard for many people to handle. From one dosage or another everyone has a stomach pockmarked by indigestion and diarrhea. The more fastidious now wear Pampers or always stay home.
But then Gretta’s and Farrell’s trials are unblinded. It would appear that 1500 mg wins the day. Even though they may die on 1000 mg they die having felt better getting there, but on 1500 mg you will feel as awful as you’ve ever felt but you live a little while longer. But since Gretta’s and Farrell’s patients look so good (remember they were healthy going in and they were on the drug for only six months), even Pansy Merridew in Palo Alto, the most negative PI, proclaims, “the results look pretty good to me and it would be unethical not to start our trials in all centers,” as he testifies at a secret FADS meeting recommending same. So another announcement is made by another secretary of Health and Disease, or I guess it’s Health and Happiness now, and Jerry and yes, even Dodo are put out for show, and of course Von and Dash, praising “the progress of American research, and medicine, and science in delivering us this excellent new drug.” G-D is even given a Presidential Citation for Excellence in Industry.
And that “free” ZAP Dash promised all trial entrants when their studies were unblinded? Forget it. “You cheated on your dosages, so why should I reward you?” is his rationale. Von Greeting actually says he’s sad his company couldn’t keep its promise. Hermia says he must want more gays to die. And I hear Von’s gay himself. Go figure.
And so ZAP goes out to all the PIs and their centers. “The benefits in very sick patients outweigh the serious toxic side effects” is heard like some mantra of permission and recommendation.
Some thirty thousand people are entered in these trials. Almost immediately four out of five 1500 mg patients die. The 1000 mg fellows seem to be hanging on. But it’s just the beginning. This “controlled clinical trial” is scheduled to last at least a year. The gay population is going nuts waiting for ZAP’s official approval. It’s already rumored to be going to cost $10,000 a year, which is more than any company has ever charged for a drug before. Dash is very eager to join the Billion Dollar Sales club. Dash et al. had finally rounded up ten thousand acceptable entrants. There is of course not one single woman enrolled. Women don’t get UC, you know. Maybe the ladies were lucky. Let’s wait and see. It’s going to take a while. It’s a double-blind placebo-controlled study (don’t ask) and, well, it takes a while. Or should. If it’s being conducted correctly. According to the law. Which Deep Throat says is full of shit. And isn’t being adhered to anyway.
REBBY
“To rely solely on official institutions for our information and help is a form of suicide,” Rebby writes in some unread newsletter or other.
PEARLY SNOW KILLED HIS DOG FIRST
There are twelve guys waiting for him at Pedro’s apartment on the Lower East Side. It’s a sixth-floor walk-up. It’s a tough climb and all of them are really sick. The plan is that once they get up there they
’ll stay up there and take some poisoned Kool-Aid like those Jim Jones people and hold on to each other and, well, die. Word got out and a couple more guys want to join and are coming. Pedro says it’s going to be a little crowded. It’s a tiny apartment. Pedro is an expert on Jim Jones and Jonestown. His mother was one of the ones who drank the stuff, so he’s excited about doing it too, and joining her. He got a doctor to get the poison and mix it all up right. She’s an expert on poisons for the city, Pedro says.
Pearly Snow thought it all sounded very creepy when Pedro and then Xavier, his boyfriend, started talking about it, but he doesn’t find it so creepy now. He finds the way he has to live creepy. Anyway, he has to go through with it now because he’s already poisoned Ferdinand, his black lab, who’s lying dead in his kitchenette, so there’s nothing to go back home for. He used some rat poison and mixed it in his Alpo. Besides, he is really tired of living in Jersey. It’s just too tough a commute to get his ZAP at the hospital and the doctors, just to stay alive. Anyway, Pearly is ready to go. Most guys say they’re ready to go. They’re all on ZAP in Dr. Poo’s trial. The Kool-Aid exit sounds great. “How many ways do you spell relief?” they joke with each other. He’s come to realize that what he’s doing is kind of gutsy. He was always a nervy kid, thank goodness. He figures that’s where he’s getting the courage to head into heaven this way.
Pearly Snow is also a patient of Dr. Ginny’s, a really nice therapist affiliated with GMPA and Table Medical. These kids break her heart, and she sees them for free. There are so many of them that she’s taken to seeing them in groups of half a dozen or so at a time, but she usually winds up speaking quietly to each one alone in a corner or in the hallway or even in the toilet. She can give each of them maybe five or six good minutes before the kid is usually heaving sobs and tears. She wonders if she’s doing more harm than good. The business with the poisoned Kool-Aid has her freaked. She doesn’t know how to deal with it. What her patients tell her is meant to be confidential. She’s been in similar circumstances maybe a dozen times already, where she’s been informed in advance of awful things that have come to pass. She wonders when one of them is going to boomerang back in her face, and the city, which is paying for part of her contract for so many hours each month, will have her on the carpet and up on charges and it will be in The Truth where all their awful “human interest” stories appear. Now a bunch of six or seven or eight Hispanic guys are going to drink Kool-Aid this afternoon at five o’clock. She looks at her watch. It’s six o’clock. She wonders if they did it. It’s better if she doesn’t know. It’s also better if they did it, she finds herself thinking. It’s a very inventive way to die. Just like Pearly Snow was a pretty inventive name. “I made it up myself,” he’d told her. “It doesn’t mean anything. Just like life.” She wonders how long she can stand taking care of cases like this.
