The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  As I suspect, when Omicidio hears Daniel’s identical twin brother is found, he prepares immediately for a bone marrow transplant. It must be done “on the quiet” because in no way could all the permissions from all the divisions and committees and supervisors and peer reviews required by NITS and FADS be granted easily. I talk with Omicidio about his plan. I am not impressed. He is putting a horse before his cart, you say. He assumes if he kills off the circulating lymphocytes and replaces them with fresh from a twin—but who says this virus lives only in lymphocytes? I think more it must also live in blood. Or in shit, as that Dr. Sister Grace Hooker maintained before she was murdered in her convent. Here, too, the murders of the scientists! But this Jerry moves on ahead. I ask for a conference with other doctors and am told to keep out of this. All this takes place in front of Daniel and David, here in our house. Jerry supervises many tests on both of them. He is in and out, often unexpectedly, as if this house is an extension of his wards. I believe that he is moved, that somehow this harsh man on the outside can see what love is transpiring among the three of us in this house. And that he does not have this love. I ask him if he has tried this transplant on other infected twins and what were the results. He does not answer, so I know his answer.

  And so does David. During the night, somehow, once more, he disappears. He leaves us this letter.

  “My dear and special family, I am strong enough to go out now for a while. I thank you for making me this well again with your love. I cannot allow you to have on your conscience that you approved of this Jerry murdering me. Because that is what he will do to me. I have seen and met many murderers. I know the look. You will hear from me. Your David. P.S. to Daniel: I love being back in your arms where we belong. I am sorry we lost so much time. I am sorry for so much that has happened in our lives. It is very sad, don’t you think? P.S. to Grodzo: Please watch out for Daniel, and yourself until I can come home! P.S. I love you both.”

  * * *

  DANIEL: Yes, we slept together, my twin and I. We made love to each other. I understand this is not unusual with twins, although waiting for so long to do it perhaps is.

  What did we talk about? In words that each other could actually hear, precious little. But I know each of us felt the heavy weight of a certain longing at last removed. When I would try to talk about it, he’d cover my mouth with his hand and shake his head and then kiss me.

  In the middle of the night we each woke up to find the other crying.

  “Have you missed me?” he whispered hoarsely.

  I had not but at this moment I realized how much I had, so I could whisper back honestly, “So very very much. Now we are back together again. You must promise me to never leave me again.”

  “But am I not about to die?”

  “Your Grodzo will find a way to save you.”

  “I don’t think so. He has said this virus is so far too complicated to understand. Especially since my blood is different from other UC cases.”

  “Then we must be very strong together. Our love will give us this strength.”

  “I have never seen love to work such miracles.”

  “JERRY IS NOT QUALIFIED TO DO ANY KIND OF TRANSPLANT!”

  DEEP THROAT: You were lucky your David ran away. Jerry would have killed him.

  MERCY KILLING

  This time it’s the doctor who’s dying. His name is Tim. He’s had a hard time of it, struggling now just to breathe. He breathes for Craig, for Craig who loves him and won’t let him stop, the breathing, the living, the loving. Yes, it’s been a good ten years. They’ve had the best of it. That they know. That they’ve told each other every day. Only now he can’t breathe and Craig can’t inspire air into his lungs by pure devotion. The machines by his bedside in this private room in his own hospital, St. Victim’s, aren’t helping anymore. Craig wishes his own breathing would stop. He knows he’ll live and he knows that without Tim he doesn’t want to. Oh, these are just romantic notions, of death and love. Too many movies. Too many bad TV dramas. Too many tears. Why is sentiment so out of fashion when it’s what’s needed most? He has these thoughts while his fingers fool with his tools. He won’t look at his hands. He won’t look at what they’re holding. He looks only at Tim’s heart. His chest is wet with sweat. He lies naked in the hospital bed, all shriveled up, all of him, from the locks of his hair all gunked together to his toenails now peculiarly warped and gray. The only flat smooth place, like some very old stone in a very old stream, is his chest. How Craig loved to kiss him all over that godlike chest, not at all like his own stubbly bumpy thing. Even now his hands want to run themselves across that last outpost of Tim’s beauty, and feel the smoothness, still. But he denies himself that last pleasure. He has work to do and he’d best do it fast or it won’t be done at all, at least not by this fraidycat whimpering uselessly. How dare I call myself a lover. Well, I do. Here, Tim. Here’s how much I love you. I do.

  Potassium, it’s called. Tim named it for him and told him exactly how to do it. Potassium, it’s called, and hypodermic, it’s called, and strength of will and character and muscle, it’s called, but only if it’s called upon and done. Into Tim’s lovely heart, on that Siberian outpost of a tiny island of such smooth beauty, that X-marks-the-spot on his chest, Craig injects the potassium directly into Tim’s heart. Just as he’s been told how to. He kills his beloved. As we have been killed for centuries, he thinks, and so I must do what’s been done to us. Do unto others. I hate God. Tim dies fast and Craig leaves fast, as a murderer must do, before he gets caught.

  To this we’ve come.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  I wander through the Village. New Year’s Eve has always made me sad. Washington Square is this pukey color from some sort of not quite fog that exudes a yellow tinge, as if the Christmas tree under the arch and all its creepy yellow bulbs bleed this color out like pus from a wound. It makes me think of UC-infected skin. I’m working with an overactive imagination in many areas now. Overactive? Get real, Fred. The night air is eerie and you don’t want to be home alone. You always feel awful on New Year’s Eve. This year is just worse. You walk by building after building where someone you knew had lived and died.

  The streets of the Village are empty. There are no crowds of guys rushing off to the discos, which I will be told tomorrow were “sort of packed but not like the old days.” More and more talk about the old days.

  And Adreena has gone off to make a movie about … oh, who the fuck knows. “It was a pay-for-play for my co-star Jeff What’s-his-name so of course it has to be made now.” Of course. I’d had a new draft screenplay to show her.

  We just can’t get our story out, no way.

  UC MAY DWARF THE PLAGUE

  is the SMALL headline that appears on Page A-24 (the real estate page) of The Truth.

  BETTER LATE THAN NEVER?

  Martin Richtig, the new editor in chief of The New York Truth, sends the following “authorizing memo” to his staff:

  “Starting immediately, we will accept the word gay, as an adjective meaning ‘homosexual,’ in references to social or cultural patterns and political issues.”

  Note that the use of the word gay as a noun is not authorized.

  Jacob Flourtower is retired as The Truth’s executive editor. He has reached the mandatory age. The relief that sweeps through the newsroom is “palpable, almost giddy.” He is heralded far and wide for “seventeen years of record growth, modernization, and major journalistic change.” Tell that to Gertie, still drinking vodka stingers in the old Colony gay bar on the Upper East Side.

  NY UC PLAGUE—150,000 PERVERTS DOOMED!

  screams the headline of The Sphere, the supermarket tabloid. “A worldwide death toll in the tens of millions a decade from now” is what a former secretary of Health and Happiness, Dr. Otid Bowbender, is predicting in The Monument. “One hundred million could be infected within five years” is the prediction of Dr. Halfdan Mahler, the new head of HOW, also in The Monument. The current issue of The Atlanti
c, a publication whose pages had not previously been sullied with our plague, says that for every reported case there are sixty unreported. Nice of someone to let us know.

  FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  Gordon Wellschaft, Monica Druse, Pablo Esco, Nedrick Castleford, Miles Forster, Drew Hampton, Allan Nokes, Michael Dribble, Harry Brimm, Ray Malfuzzi, Trevor Alan Balding, Allen Barnett, Trudy Menscher, Victor Vaga, Thomas Fiorentino, Myron Shenker, Alden White, Nonny Paul, Sam Shoe, Astride Oguno, Moe Alhambra, Norman Browne, Alex Alesandro Aguilla, Zack Daniels, Grosman Paul Schwartz, Jr., Drew Malone, Peter Eshman, Chick Soldheim, Marshall Bruckner, Harry Applebaum, Norman Gresham, Sam Smith, Ronald Starke, Teddy Neust, William Wolhheim, Hiram Vaughan, Pieter Samsung, Glo Wurttenberg, Miles Allenson, Tom Tom Fury, Fergus Marshallseigh, Martin O’Dempster, Sasha Feigenbaum, Natalie Strong, Eleanora Fawcett, Alana Reese-Enders, Galvan Deuter, Martin Federmann, Rojan Mahar, Basinger Ryce, Craig Nottel, Engin Vazar, Eugene Monckton, Giorgio LaSera, Bill Kelly, Jim Duranto, Philip Clive, Michael Edgerton, Toff Graham, Caldwell Rothman, Norman Lignor, Alberto Gonzalez, Alvin Guttman, Allen Marsh, Forrest Altman, Andy Rosco, Bob Bakemeier, Carroll Banner, Jon Barton, Carl Weede, Paul Cohen, Roger Bernstein, Alexander Rosenthal, David Andre Billingsworth, Ross Lord, St. John Bradbury, Marty, Brimmer, Scott Brock, Hugh Butler, Daniel Campbell, Chris Chan, George Chase II, Doug Shapiro, Carl Bornstein, Duane Drucker, Richard Engelstein, Sawyer Eskridge, Brooks Feingold, Charlie Fox, Gareth Gardener, George Goldberg, Gould Sherwin, John Hammer, Spencer Horowitz, Morgan Greenend, Jerry Coleman, Erich Estava, Kenneth Kim, Corety Concellos, John David Katz, Frank Steinman, Bruce Kaufman, Jamie Klein, Mark Lake, Jules Lethbridge, Matt Stull, Federico Rondino, Laurence Marstan, Vincent McGrath, Jacob Meadow, Danny Meyerwitz, Charles Karpel, Jeffrey Moss, Seeley Smith, Philip Nichols, Antonino Sursone, Roscoe O’Brien, Burt Fogelstine, O’Mara Calvert, Gene Rendell, Hermann Benze …

  * * *

  I am learning yet again that I work much faster in many of your people than in others. And the part of me your scientists are now trying to destroy, which I must confess frightened me, is still working. I continue to multiply myself undisturbed by any experiments. I continue to lurk in the guts of your people’s reservoir of me. Thank you for your continuing hospitality.

  GET OFF YOUR ARSE!

  HERMIA: When will you face up to the fact that all these histories you are relating are the result of evil, which is the word Hannah Arendt used in identifying how the world responded to the poisonous deeds of Hitler (and Stalin)! Well, can’t you see that you have a Ruester, an Omicidio, a Geiseric, a Gobbel, a Greeting, a Goins … the list of your murderers is increasing with every passing day. As beloved Grace would say, “Get off your fucking ass!” In Great Britain we say “arse”!

  READY, SET, GO

  Okay, Lemish! Bear fucking witness!

  PART II

  THE BEGINNING OF FUQU

  GAY AND LESBIAN CENTER, NEW YORK CITY

  MARCH 10, 1987

  EXT. GAY COMMUNITY CENTER. NIGHT.

  Crowd building as more and more enter.

  INT. GAY COMMUNITY CENTER. NIGHT.

  Place is packed, settling in. Fred at front is pacing back and forth nervously checking the crowd. Tommy is in the front row.

  ERIC (to Fred): I told you you’d get a full house.

  PHOTIS (young, rough, opinionated; he is talking into a tape recorder): It was a Monday night. And more people by now really are kind of scared. And here’s this crazy would-be messiah come down from the mount to deliver his tablet … and you’re like—I’m like—scared and excited at the same time. There was talk about quarantine. We could wind up in camps again. With numbers tattooed on our arms. Here he goes!

  FRED

  Thank you all for coming. On March 14, 1983, almost four years ago to this day, I wrote an article in The New York Prick. There were at that time 1,112 cases of UC nationwide. My article was entitled “1,112 and Counting,” and it was reprinted in seventeen additional gay newspapers across our country. Here are a few of its opening sentences:

  “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence on this earth depends on just how angry you can get. Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die. In all the history of homosexuality we have never before been so close to death and extinction.”

  My God, how many people have shown up. It’s standing room only. They remember me and what I did and said! They want to hear me again!

  Predictions are now rising astronomically. We have not yet even begun to live through the true horror. The average incubation period is now thought to be five and a half years. The real tidal wave is yet to come. People who got infected starting in 1981. You had sex in 1981. I did too. And after.

  Last week I had ten friends diagnosed. In one week. That’s the most in the shortest period so far for me.

  Look at them looking at me. There’re so many of them and they’re frightened and they don’t know what to do. God, they’re so young and so touching.

  I would like everyone from this right-hand side aisle—would you all please stand up for a minute? Thank you. At the rate we’re going, two-thirds of you could be dead in less than five years. You can sit down now.

  I have never heard such silence.

  Let me repeat my Prick article of 1983. If my speech tonight doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If what you’re hearing doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on earth. How long will it take before you get angry and fight back?

  I have never been able to understand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves be knocked off man by man—without fighting back.

  I don’t want to die. I cannot believe that you want to die.

  But what are we doing, really, to save our own lives?

  Two-thirds of you—I should say of us, because I’m in this too—could be dead within five years. Two-thirds of this room could be dead within five years.

  What does it take for us to take responsibility for our own lives? Because we are not—we are not taking responsibility for our own lives.

  You know, each step of this horror story we’re living through we come up against an even bigger brick wall. First it was the city, then the state, then COD, then NITS. Now it’s FADS, the Food and Drug Supervision bureaucracy. Ann Fettner wrote in The Prick about FADS: “It’s a godawful mess, documents are likely to get lost in the mailroom, they aren’t even computerized, which means that pharmaceutical talent diddles doing nothing while it waits for FADS’s judgment and permission.” A new drug can easily take ten years to get FADS’s approval. Ten years! Two-thirds of us could be dead in less than five years.

  Who the flying fuck is in charge?

  Certainly not our president, who has yet to say the words Underlying Condition out loud.

  The one drug that NITS is testing is already proving less effective than what we need to stay alive. Why do they insist on testing it over and over again? Why do they refuse to test any other new drugs and treatments that are brought to their attention? We’re willing to be guinea pigs. But give us something real!

  Find us those fucking drugs that work to keep us alive!

  An unwilling and unsympathetic Congress is at last throwing a few million dollars at UC. But it’s not buying anything that will save two-thirds of the people in this room. A college on Long Island has been awarded a $600,000 grant from the Center of Disease—another organization I have come to loathe because it refuses to pay attention to us—to study UC stress on college students. I can tell them right now and save the government $600,000. I know what it’s like to be stressed. So do you. What downright bureaucratic stupidity is operating here?