The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  TOMMY: Fred and I go down to D.C. to speak. Ten people show up. Washington is too full of Dumb Doras. Daniel said they can’t be located beyond the bar scenes on weekends. Most of them work for the government and are terrified of losing their jobs, and with good reason, because some are beginning to lose their jobs.

  Fred throws a drink in the face of this guy Terry Dolan at a gay cocktail party in Georgetown we go to. He yells at him in front of the fifty or so other guys there: “How dare you come to a gay party, and take pleasure from our life, when what you do is raise money for all our enemies to kill us.” He runs a Conservative Political Action Committee and has raised millions that are turned into shit patties to hurl at us. There was an article about him in The Truth last week listing all his “accomplishments.” Terry is fucking with Harold Millbank, a friend of Fred’s. The other guys in the room stay away from us as if we’ve got the plague. Once again I hear someone saying, “Lemish is going crazy.”

  Daniel was too busy to get together. He says it wouldn’t serve us well to be seen together. It’s too bad because I’d like to meet him finally. I think Fred and he are having a little tiff. I wonder if he knows about the state of Fred’s health.

  * * *

  DANIEL: Jerry is becoming a media whore. He will go on anything or speak to anyone and his face is becoming identified with UC and America’s doctor for same. He obviously loves it. A car and driver have materialized as part of his job and he uses them daily to make his rounds downtown, going to Capitol Hill now, “checking in,” as he puts it.

  Guys no longer want to enroll in our studies. They’re awaiting better results from any PI study. I point it out to Jerry, of course, after he’s faced Dash’s fury for “not minding your store!” So he says something to me like “Deal with it.” Which brings Dash rushing back yelling at me, “You keep your fucking hands off my trial.”

  * * *

  DANIEL: How did I know that Stuartgene was having “scenes” with Arnold Botts? Arnold came to me with a ripped anus, badly infected. He stripped down immediately without my asking him. I could actually remember what his body looked like. Pale skin. Even the same smell, like milk that’s sour. Mad, crazy eyes that dart all over the place. How he’d risen to hold the jobs he has, both in our government and at Greeting and now at this Presidium, I have no idea.

  He couldn’t stop talking, as if he was on drugs, which his eyes told me he is. If my ass was ripped open like that, I’d be on drugs too.

  “I can’t find any doctor who can take care of this. I mean, I can’t go to any doctor I know. If you know what I mean. You got this reputation as the gay doc. Do I know you from somewhere? Is whatever you’re going to do going to put my asshole back together? I mean, I would be grateful at this point just to be able to crap without pain. Getting that other shit stuck up there, God knows how I got into it. You take enough of something, you can do anything. I was always one to respond to the dare. You know, the challenge of it all. When I was a kid I got pissed on by the other guys. I vowed I’d never let anyone piss on me again. You want to stick a piece of lumber up my ass, you have to pay me good. That’s how you rise to the top in this town, putting out for big bucks from the big boys. The bigger the big boy, the bigger the bucks. You don’t get to the top in this town unless you got hefty amounts of desires and of strangeness in your belly and brain. I got this one guy who’s the biggest scientist at NITS. He’s the one who stuck the tree trunk up my ass. You know, take enough shit and it actually feels good for a while. I got another guy owns a big drug company, he likes to watch us. Then he wants me to lock him in a closet. I hate faggots. I got a girlfriend more beautiful than life itself. She won’t talk to me. But she will … She will…”

  At this point he passes out. I had to get him to Montezuma fast. He was losing blood from his rectum. I got Jack Dorkin to sew him up. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jack said. “And you say he isn’t gay?”

  “I don’t think so. He hates gays. Go figure.”

  “What do we do with him when he wakes up? He’s going to be in excruciating pain and there’s only so much pain shit I can legally dispense.”

  “I have a feeling he’ll be able to locate more. I’m turning him over to you. I can’t see him again. Personal reasons too complicated to go into.”

  Jack threw me a strange look.

  “Don’t worry. My ass is clean as a whistle. We grew up together and he doesn’t remember me. And I don’t want him to.”

  * * *

  IANTHE: “It has to do with the silent, invisible mob in men’s minds and hearts that is waiting to burst out into spiritual violence and sometimes physical violence.”

  Letter from your great lesbian southern writer, Lillian Smith, to our great lesbian First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, telling her about her new book. I just came across this and I thought it must fit into your “history” somewhere, no?

  INT. NEW YORK CITY BALLET. NIGHT.

  Emma in her wheelchair sitting on the aisle, her feet moving in time with the music and dancers as best she can. Fred and Tommy are with her.

  FRED’S VOICE: You really love ballet.

  EMMA’S VOICE: More than anything. I’m a season subscriber.

  EXT. LINCOLN CENTER PLAZA. NIGHT.

  Audience going home. Avram is holding a sign with gay pink triangle inverted that says SILENCE = DEATH. Fred, with Tommy and Emma, is talking to him.

  AVRAM: A bunch of us take turns meeting in each other’s apartments to make activist art. Good to see you, Fred. We miss you.

  VINCENT (joining with another poster): We sure do. You’ve got to make another speech.

  FRED: No one will come. Everybody hates me.

  ERIC (joining with another poster): They’ll come. Guys are getting more desperate now. We’ll spread the word. They’re ready.

  TOMMY: I keep telling him that but he doesn’t believe me. More and more people are more and more frightened and keep asking me where you are.

  FRED (to Eric): Eric, how’s Marcus?

  ERIC: Dead.

  EMMA: Marcus Noble?

  ERIC: Yes, ma’am. He committed suicide. I loved him a lot.

  Eric’s poster: RUESTER IS KILLING US.

  EXT. BUS STOP. NIGHT.

  Emma, Fred, and Tommy are waiting for a kneeling bus to arrive. The weather turns bad. Emma pulls out an umbrella, which Tommy takes and opens and holds over her. A bus appears but doesn’t stop for Emma. She jots its number down.

  EMMA: Our wonderful public service. Don’t give a shit for the people they’re meant to serve.

  FRED: I want an army! A wonderful army. I want to start a new organization devoted to political action, to fighting back. It’s time for us to really shake things up!

  FRED’S APARTMENT.

  FELIX AND TOMMY: YES. YES. YES.

  “SEX ÜBER ALLES”

  Cocker Rutt teaches and writes what he does with pride. He’s a proud teacher at the New Jersey Institute of Organic Philosophy. “Unless philosophy’s left unbridled, what field be left to graze?” is the school’s motto, more or less, in Latin. It used to be a school of animal husbandry until New Jersey became so populated with humans that the animal population couldn’t support that curriculum. That not too many of today’s students enroll in his course The Pertinambulae of Queerdom from the Third Reich to Steve Reich doesn’t prevent Dr. Rutt, as he’s known at NJIOP, from proudly writing the many instructive treatises that can challenge young minds. There are a number of self-published academic and pseudo-academic (the dividing line is elusive) journals willing to publish such as Cocker. “The Arrival of the Homosexual Penis as the Logarithm of Male Dominance” was a recent Rutt that elicited several letters to the editor of Achilles and Madonna: The Journal of Queer Iconography. A recent issue of QUEER PUBE features Cocker’s “The Thrill of Pursuing the Destruction of Anti-Anal Rectitude.” This paper, a particularly challenging and dense one, has yet to elicit either student or reader response, but the new issu
e of PUBERTY PLUS! has yet another of his essays, “To Be or Not to Be,” which, with its pointed reference to Hamlet as “a major Queer icon,” will surely garner attention.

  Cocker and The Village Vice’s Pubie Grotty have come to the lovely town of New Priss, New Jersey, to meet with the great gay author Jervis Pail, who has recently returned to America to be a full professor of English at New Priss University, with tenure. For the past number of years Jervis has lived in Manila, where he was guest editor for Philippine Vogue.

  There are many in the gay world who said out loud and even in print that Jervis left America when and because UC arrived, so Jervis is nervous about his reentry, lest he have lost his unchallenged position as gay lit’s brightest star. He’s defended himself against those charges in many interviews in The Avocado and The Prick. “I had to keep the slate of my unconscious clean so I could write what I read on it” was one of his more memorable defenses of his move to Manila. Another was “The politics of The Underlying Condition were and are simply too exhausting. Who can deal with the likes of Fred Lemish? I wish someone would come along and put him out of our misery.” Jervis smiles when he makes a verbal joke. He is clever with words.

  Fred Lemish had written in The Avocado, “He ran away from the most important subject he could write about.” Pail’s last novel had been “out of touch,” according to The Walt Whitman Review of Books. What’s he going to write about now? He doesn’t know anything about UC. Manila is certainly not a hotbed of medical information. Since his return he’s been both impressed and depressed by how an obsession with knowledge about this disease is consuming everyone he knew. It must be said that everyone he knew is also sick with it or of it, or knows someone who has died, or is dead himself. Not a few times has he considered returning to the Philippines. The boys are certainly very sweet there, and already sending him letters about how much they miss him. It’s a good thing he held on to his ourie, which is a little country cottage, a shack really, made of mud and ferns and palm leaves, in Verteetoo, the small village an hour east of Manila where sweet boys can be bought for only ten doo.

  Cocker and Pubie are humble in Jervis’s presence. Most gay writers are. Jervis had been there first with a good review in The Truth and a classy publisher, Alonso Knockwurst. Gay writers tend to tie themselves together, as if the protection of their fellows can help them overlook the fact that even as a group they don’t have many readers, and aren’t written about in the mainstream press, or don’t have as much talent as they think they have. Of all the gay writers, though, Jervis is still written about the most. He’s long made it a point to stay in touch with everyone famous he’s ever met, and his contacts with Vogue have certainly helped, even though he can no longer remember whose dick he sucked or which people he invited to one of his soigné dinners with other important people he’d gathered along one roadway or another. Not in Manila, of course. No one came to Manila. Which was why, in the end, he really had no choice but to come home. He’d made a wrong turn when he upped and left and he’d best face up to it and rewrite his route back into the center-stage spotlight.

  Fred has always thought Jervis was a phony. “He writes beautifully but he doesn’t say anything useful,” Fred said in his Avocado response to Jervis’s unkind words about him. “All he writes about is sex, as if gay men have nothing else in their lives, as if all we have to think with and about are our dicks.” This, written before UC when Jervis was still around, was of course not dissimilar to spitting on Jesus, and many gay writers not only don’t talk to Fred, they won’t even consider him a writer. The Avocado piece was one of Fred’s earlier forays into the world of gay art and culture, and it was in response to an attack by Jervis, in the opening salvo of what would become a continuing bitchfest: “Where did this Fred Lemish come from that he considers himself a writer, worthy of inclusion among our immortals, Proust and Gide and Genet? He is talentless. Utterly talentless.” This was after Fred’s first play had opened and closed on opening night and he was feeling exceptionally fragile. He considered the attack by Jervis unkind. If he represented the world of gay writers, Fred would happily steer clear of it.

  Jervis was a founder of the Purple Peculiars, the most exclusive group of a few gay male writers, “our very own Académie Française,” Jervis called them. Once there had been a dozen Peculiars. Now there are only three. Persh died, and Drean, and Paul-Marshall, and Murkt and Tilley and Jason Robert (JR, as he didn’t like to be called). How many is that? It’s hard to recall all their names because—well, it’s hard enough to remember the names of many gay writers. No one will admit that when you consider the long noble line of sublime gay writers including Melville and Proust, none of the Peculiars, including Jervis, was anywhere near to being comparable. Jervis’s last book, which he wrote with Mussy, another Peculiar, was One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Ways to Have Rectal Intercourse. Somehow, he’d been elected to the Academy of American Artists and Writers, no doubt via another sucked dick or two, or a few of those soigné Jervis feeds before he went into Philippine exile.

  Jervis, as the only Peculiar to get reviewed in The Truth (it helps when you’ve been to orgies with top editors from all over town, particularly when they’re masters who like to piss on slaves—and what top editor does not like to do that?—unless they like to get pissed on themselves, and there are certainly major editors who like that, too), had written to each of the dying Peculiars on their deathbeds, “History will remember you. I promise.” Sadly, History hasn’t. Another reason Jervis came home. He could tell how many times his name was not appearing now in … well, anything, really. How had he ever talked himself into thinking that he could stay in touch from so far away? Well, he had been frightened. Nothing wrong in that. If only he had just admitted it. Well, now he has. More or less. He will not admit anything out loud, of course. And now, since almost everyone is frightened, no one will notice whether Jervis was, or isn’t.

  It should be noted that Jervis, at Fred’s request, had joined him in starting GMPA. Fred was looking for a “famous gay name” to join him in launching it, and Kipper Gross and Randy Dildough and Sammy Sircus had declined the honor. Jervis is still listed as one of the six founders although he left for Manila shortly after the meeting in Fred’s loft that brought this historic organization into being. Fred, whose own ego has its weak spots, gets annoyed when he sees Jervis described as “a founder of GMPA.” So to the list of Jervis’s failings, to his lack (for Fred) of talent, to his preoccupation with sex, and shortly, to his unending espousal of his joyful masochism, Fred has appended Jervis’s cowardice in running away just when he might be truly useful.

  Now that he’s back, writers start begging Jervis to jump-start the Peculiars, to locate suitable replacements for the departed PPs. Cocker and Pubie would both die to be Peculiars, but one is an academic and the other is a journalist, so they don’t really qualify. But that’s not why they’ve come to Beer & Burger in New Priss to meet with Jervis Pail. They’ve come to brainstorm the future, a future now increasingly overwhelmed by the past and those who have passed. Jervis had this recognition quotient before he left, and they all feel—well, “who else is there to speak for us?” They all know the gay world is all but bereft of willing gay spokespersons.

  “Hey, how are you, Jervis? You look great!” Pubie, short, squat, balding, bushy-bearded, and smiley-faced as ever, hugs Jervis, who is in fact looking quite fat, fatter even than on his last trip home when the interview he gave to Town and Village showed him joking about it by lounging on a chaise, belly up and protruding like Buddha’s, but who is just as jolly as on that visit, when he was still diagramming on graph paper versions 195 and 196 and 197 of how to fuck and get fucked for his book with Milo Mussy, which turned out to sell very well indeed. “Put on a little more weight, did you?” Pubie, who is sensitive to issues of weight, wants desperately to ask Jervis how, in his condition, he lands as many boyfriends as he claims in all his novels.

  “What’s the difference? Fat or thin, no one
wants to fuck me without being paid. Can I still call One Touch of Penis?”

  “Be careful,” Pubie warns. “R. Allen died and so did most of his boys and those kids left are all infected.”

  “So am I,” Jervis tells them.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Pubie says, genuinely. He’s never sure how to respond to this news. Of course he’s sorry to hear it. But he is aware that he looks upon this admission as some sort of disloyalty on the confessor’s part, a desertion of the team, so to speak, a traitor to the cause. With which opinion Cocker most certainly agrees. “How will the gay world continue on our mighty mission to teach the rest of the world how wonderful the utter abandonment to the pleasures of promiscuous sex can be if so many practitioners are dropping by the wayside or calling it quits?” There, Cocker has said it out loud and straight as an arrow.

  “Is everyone infected?” Jervis apprehensively asks, after a suitable pause for reflection.

  “Nobody knows,” Cocker answers. “And there’s no way of finding out except by getting sick.”

  “Surely there must be some source of … safety?”

  “There is no question that some people get sick and some people don’t,” Pubie says in his best journalistic tone of summing up.

  Cocker continues: “But some people can evidently do anything and not get sick and some people can’t do anything without getting sick.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t heard about the ones who can do anything and never get sick,” Jervis says, wondering how you met them. “How do you meet them?”

  “I told you, nobody knows.” Cocker and Pubie exchange looks; they are wondering if Jervis, having been away for so long, is in a state of denial. So many guys are who haven’t even left the country.