The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Yes, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker knew all this and was murdered because of it. That UC could be carried in shit, just like polio was—who would not want such information known? Who could not want it known so much that using UC-infected shit for developing a cure would get Grace murdered? Deep Throat’s autopsy of her ashes revealed that she had been poisoned. “But not from any poison that I can recognize,” he reports.

  VINCENT MAKES THIS MOVIE ABOUT HIS FRIEND LEATHER LOUIE AND HIS FUNERAL

  “THE BALLAD OF LEATHER LOUIE”

  INT. LEATHER LOUIE’S VILLAGE BOOT SHOP.

  In the midst of shelves of leather boots, Louie, in top hat and tails, very Fred Astaire, is singing to the screen. Music and words: “Your pleasure requested this evening at seven,” and into the words of the song.

  INT. CONCERT HALL STAGE.

  Louie in formal gear is playing a Steinway magnificently.

  INT. A PITCH BLACK PLACE.

  A spotlight goes on suddenly, revealing a fleet of motorcycles, all shined and with adornments, and lined up side by side.

  Then another spotlight goes on, on an audience sitting on bleachers. Everyone is in total leather, except for Fred and Tommy.

  Finally, after a trumpet voluntary, a spotlight shows us Louie’s face in close-up. He’s gaunt, his sculpted beard makes him look like a devil, and as the camera pulls back we see he is wearing a black leather outfit that is so shined that it makes the light bounce off it. He is lying in a coffin.

  New music: something violently romantic played on a piano, Chopin, Rachmaninoff …

  Projected is a video of Louie at the Steinway playing this music, in his top hat and tails … Superimposed on this is a photo of his Pulitzer Prize for Musical Composition.

  The audience cheers.

  The lights go off, the music continues building …

  We hear the sounds of fountains …

  We see the Fontana di Trevi in Rome…

  We see the statues gushing their fountains into the pool below …

  We see these fountains now are men, a circle of nude men encircling the coffin from on high, all goldened-up …

  And all pissing on Louie in his coffin.

  Quick shot of a cherry being popped on top of a sundae.

  One of the golden men turns his ass to camera and unloads a perfect turd in the coffin.

  The crowd goes nuts.

  You could even see Louie might be smiling.

  At the piano, he gets up and bows to all.

  The audience goes crazy. Except for Fred. Although he does shake his head with a little smile of disbelief.

  EXT. PIERS ALONG THE HUDSON. DAY.

  The fleet of motorcycles, driven by those naked golden men, and bearing Louie’s coffin, comes into place by the water’s edge.

  The men disembark and take Louie’s coffin onto their shoulders.

  We see that their naked bodies are covered with lesions and are thin from illness.

  They take the coffin to the river’s edge and slowly slide it into the water.

  There are tears in everyone’s eyes.

  We see Fred, Tommy, Jean, Bordo, Maria, Blotch, others from FUQU all wearing FUQU T-shirts, watching the coffin disappear.

  HEIL TO THE CHIEF

  On January 20, 1989, Dredd Trish is inaugurated as the forty-first president of The American People.

  HOW DREDD TRISH’S FATHER, PROCTOR TRISH, HELPED ENABLE HITLER’S RISE TO POWER

  DAVID

  I see that British newspapers are writing about this.

  I knew this man, the father, Proctor Trish. He came to see Grodzo when I was living with him in Mungel. The war was on, so I don’t know how he got there. Grodzo was very polite to him. He even made all of us dinner. I was told not to say anything, as if I was German and couldn’t understand. They talked about Mr. Hitler’s gold in some bank in Holland and how Mr. Hitler better get it out fast before the Americans seize it. The gold had come from big German industrialists like I.G. Farben. I remember the son of the head of I.G. Farben. I met him at that big strange party at the UFA studio. They and Mr. Trish and a Mr. Harriman all had shares in this bank with Hitler and Mr. Thyssen, another big industrialist. Mr. Trish gave Grodzo some papers to get to Mr. Hitler.

  MOTHER’S NOTEBOOK

  There were slaves at Mungel, and several managed to survive and sue Proctor, who they claimed made a lot of money selling them to German businesses during the war. This money is the basis of the Trish family fortune. The American firm Proctor worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman, then the world’s largest investment bank, was the U.S. representative of Fritz Thyssen, who owned all the steel plants in Germany and who helped finance Hitler. The files of I.G. Farben and Thyssen verify all this. So did my reports back from Amos Standing. Proctor Trish worked with several German companies the whole time of the war, including I.G. Farben. Harriman and Proctor Trish secretly set up the Union Banking Corporation in Rotterdam for the Thyssens. Harriman was the son of the railroad tycoon whose wife and daughter were so obsessed with American racial purity and gave all those lunches Mrs. Strode described. Everyone was especially interested in ridding the world of homosexuals, as of course was Hitler.

  The “owners” of UBC had provided the slaves laboring at Mungel and elsewhere. Our government seized its assets after the war. It could never be proven that Harriman and Proctor Trish were actual stockholders. It proved impossible to be certain that all records were located. It has now been reported by my British moles that Proctor Trish sold UBC shares for several million dollars. This was all a violation of America’s Trading with the Enemy Act. Edgar had requested me to bury this information for the moment. It still remains in my archives at our headquarters here in Virginia.

  The two Holocaust survivors on behalf of all remaining camp survivors sued Proctor Trish et al. for a total of $40 billion in compensation, claiming they materially benefited from Auschwitz and Mungel slave labor. Harriman and Trish were represented by the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, where the partners included Allen and John Foster Dulles, both of whom would work for American presidents. Allen was a predecessor of mine at the CIA. And John Foster was Eisenhower’s secretary of state.

  Edgar Hoover traced millions of dollars’ worth of gold, fuel, steel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds shipped to Germany and financing Hitler’s buildup to and running of the war. But he kept this information private, to use just in case he had to threaten a Trish.

  If the U.S. Air Force had destroyed the camps at Mungel, Auschwitz, and others, some four hundred thousand deaths could have been prevented. Pressure from Hitler by way of Thyssen via Harriman and Sullivan and Cromwell saw to it that this bombing would not happen.

  John Foster denied “all those slaves claims.” In his defense of his clients he said: “Many of these so-called slave laborers were homosexuals and would present their own unwanted sociopathic problems to society were they allowed to live.”

  How did they all get away with it? My boys have yet to provide me with answers. I would come to know all of these men. But I was to be posted to South America to help in the search for Mengele.

  Proctor Trish, once considered a potential presidential candidate himself, is on record as being virulently anti-Semitic and homophobic. He had requested that Hitler specifically speed up the murders of all gay people.

  Proctor got his money out just in time, before he could be discovered helping the Germans. He’d bet on Hitler winning the war. Now his family’s fortune was secure forever.

  And his son Dredd Trish will now be the president of The American People.

  I shall be kept very busy.

  DAVID

  I had sex with Dredd Trish, Jr. I know him from my days at Mr. Hoover’s whorehouse.

  Grodzo told me Mr. Brinestalker made a fortune in Germany, illegally selling IBM machines to the Nazis. And he and my father were friends from Yaddah with Amos Standing, who Gertrude told me had been a spy. All the Trishes went to Yaddah. So did my brother.
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br />   I know too much.

  No wonder I am frightened someone is always following me.

  I wonder if Daniel is being followed too.

  FRED

  How could such a cover-up have gone on so successfully for half a century? This was the way Hitler was funded to come to power. This was the way the Third Reich’s defense industry was armed. This was the way Nazi profits were secretly paid to American owners. This was the way investigations into the financial money laundering of the Third Reich were covered up.

  I’ll bet this is not dissimilar to the UC mess going on today. Someone is making his fortune by secretly murdering lots of my people.

  JUST YOUR AVERAGE FEW DAYS IN MARCH

  Steve Z. was a videographer of the UC movement and was trying to set up a nationwide network of people doing similar work. I knew him from working out at the West Side Y. He’s found murdered in his apartment. He was wearing a FUQU T-shirt and he’d been stabbed to death through its lettering. The police were useless and couldn’t have cared less, according to Steve’s father, who rushed up here from Florida. A week later five thousand from FUQU demonstrate at City Hall to protest Kermit Goins and his continuing negligence and manhandling of our lives and daring Dredd Trish to be better than Ruester. We shut down traffic in lower Manhattan in the morning rush hour. Two hundred of us are arrested. In jail the women are illegally strip-searched, which leads to a widely publicized police scandal and an out-of-court settlement. It’s our anniversary and this is one of our largest demos yet. Many of us carry posters of Kermit on the front page of the New York Post with its headline proclaiming, “I’M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL!” together with our additions superimposed over his mouth, “AND I’M MARILYN MONROE” being a favorite. A reporter from Brazil comes up to me and says, “You call this a big demonstration? In my country when they raise the bus fares a hundred thousand people show up to be angry. And they blow up the buses.” Ron leads us in a chant he whips up: “UC care is ineffectual, thanks to Goins the heterosexual.” Too bad Steve, who was UC-positive, wasn’t here to film it.

  EIGO TO THE FLOOR OF FUQU

  FADS, in the person of Dr. Marie Clayture, has told yours truly that personnel in their antiviral division are unsure what an efficacy trial is, unsure what constitutes efficacy data, so they’re talking it over with their lawyers. If they don’t know what such a trial is, how have they been judging trials all these years and what are we to make of the so-called Trish Initiative, which can allow for marketing approval after two rather than three phases of trials when no one knows what an efficacy trial is? Our initial charge against the Trish Initiative (it’s a sham, it’s murder) seems more frighteningly accurate by the day. For those of you who need more info, President Trish, as a thank-you to his rich supporters in the pharmaceutical industry and on Wall Street, gets a bill passed that provides for much faster FADS approval. It is historic, but that’s not why we got it. It was passed because it’s good for business to get expensive drugs, for anything, out there quicker. Mixed messages? You bet. Like Ruester, who named us as kin to “welfare queens,” Dredd Trish has not said the words of UC out loud. He’s appointed another bad joke to be head of NITS, Dr. Stanley Wishbone, if you can believe it.

  IANTHE KNOWS HER FIRST LADIES

  Trish has a mistress, you know. Jennifer Fitzgerald. She’s no secret, not in this town. He is no more faithful to his wife than most of his predecessors. Well, if you were married to that large woman with her silly name, Taddy—no, it isn’t silly, it’s stupid—you’d want someone else for comfort too. By the way, Taddy is distantly related to Franklin Pierce, one of the gay presidents you mentioned, an alcoholic. I believe you also pointed out that he was Hawthorne’s roommate at Bowdoin and they were in love with each other. Taddy didn’t know any of this when I told her. Her response to me: “Dredd is going to ignore anything having to do with homosexuals. Just like President Ruester. Just like every right-thinking American.” Dredd Trish is a consummate snob, but then so is Taddy. But his Bart Shovels is exceptionally adept at protecting them. He is an expert manipulator of everyone and everything, including, of course, the truth. He reminds me of those weasels who protected Hitler that Strode used to tell me about. Hell, I would see them all too. Weasels all look alike in every country.

  Jennifer, by the way, is older, not pretty, and has been with Dredd wherever he was, from job to job. She almost gives Taddy a nervous breakdown. While Dredd has had plenty of women over the years, Taddy allowed him that. Until Jennifer came along and had some sort of staying power. That’s when depressed Taddy took her life in her hands, becoming the butch image that made her appealing, if not to her husband, then to every middle-aged white woman in our country. She really isn’t a very nice person, but one can understand why. Does she have the power of Purpura? No other First Lady has ever had the power of Purpura.

  REMEMBER PERKY FEINSTEIN?

  Junior danced again tonight on Saturday Night Live. There he was, in his underpants, showing off his long, gorgeous legs, which he wrapped around my waist once or twice as I had my cock inside him. I think he’s trying to show the world that he’s okay, because there are rumors all over the place that he’s got UC. I keep waiting to be summoned again, to another trip for another strange treatment, but he doesn’t call. I see pictures in the papers of him and his wife too often, as if I’m being punished. She looks much older. He looks so dumb on this program. Why is he doing it? He is better than this! He is better than the life he’s leading! Why is he leading it! Why do I continue to love him? He never writes. He never calls. I sound just like my mother. But my mother doesn’t still owe me $25,000 for a blood changeover from a quack doctor, and Junior does.

  DANIEL TO FRED

  I’M SICK OF YOU CARRYING ON SO. YOU’D THINK YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS DEAD FRIENDS.

  I see patients twice over, at NITS and in my Georgetown office, and I hardly know who I am anymore. I can’t name their names out loud like you can. I certainly love them just as much as you do. I can’t take them into my arms either or call them my children. Doctors are meant to be dispassionate about everything it’s hard to be dispassionate about. Everyone’s looking for help and relief … including me. I told Jerry we, the doctors, should have some kind of therapy group with a shrink. He said, Do what you want to. Would you come? I asked him. What do you think, he asked me. I realize I don’t know, I said. “You, mister, who thinks he knows so much about me?” he threw at me. “You, mister, look at me every minute.” Then he actually sat down in a chair and hung his head down between his legs. Before I could get to him to offer some comfort physically, he jumped up like he’d been electrocuted. “No, don’t touch me!” Then, and it was as if he were making some superhuman effort to say it, he said, “I’m sorry.” And he ran out of his own office to get away from me. We both know I can’t leave here now. We’re chained together. I have more patients here than he does. In fact, he’s stopped seeing patients at all. And we’ve got this big bunch of second-raters on staff now; that’s all we can seem to get; no one wants to work here. Jerry takes it out on me and all of us. Grodzo wants to go back to Germany. They offered him a full professorship and to restore his pension and benefits, with interest for all his years away from home. David will be sad to hear this, that is, if David ever shows up again. I am angry now with David. Here today and gone tomorrow. I want him here! I don’t want to see or hear you yell at me again. I need you now but you’re always off on a snit of one kind or another that you take out on me. I can’t believe we ever fucked so much.

  LASAGNA, PIZZA, AND G-D

  FRED

  Eigo delivers two speeches before two congressional committees, the Lasagna Committee—that’s his name, Rep. Lasagna—and one before a committee that we call the Pizza Committee because it’s so without funds that it’s forced to meet in a basement room under some pizza parlor.

  Yes, we are somehow getting nearer and nearer inside. Today we’re even in an auditorium on the NITS campus.

 
Eigo is nervous, and brilliant, an intense young man with black hair and eyes (“black Irish,” he claims as his heritage). In real life (that’s how I began to deal with so many kids: “What did you do in real life?” as if this life we are now living is no longer real, which in many ways it isn’t) it turns out that he writes pornography for money. Straight porn. “I take care of my dying father. No one would pay anyone to write gay porn.” He is impressive, not only in looks but in prose and speech. His words just march out of his mouth, almost Gibbon-like, as he lists for the Lasagna Committee an assortment of congresspersons who do not inspire hope, and dozens of stupid mistakes being made by people who just can’t be that dumb but obviously are. Debbi, Jerry, placebos, PCP prophylaxis, ZAP, winding up with, “And we are learning everything faster than you are.” When he finishes, he is cheered by his fellow members of T+D (including me), who have traveled down to Washington to hear his debut. Sparks and Rebecca and Claudette and Spud and Perry and David G. and Kersh and Scotty and Spencer and Barry and Kenny. Kenny is very thin now, and Spencer’s face is covered in strange bumps. Rebby, who has come as well, and who takes care of both Kenny and Spencer, is perplexed unto fury, as always. “Why do you persist in your stinginess?” he cries out to the committees after Eigo’s finished. “We are dying from a hundred different infections. It is much less expensive to treat an infection than to locate the cause for an entire plague!” Yes, he’s using the plague word, along with me. Rebby’s voice is always so filled with the pain and agony of his every living minute that it takes the committee by surprise. This is an open meeting, and they have to listen to people who’ve signed up in advance, usually an endless number of crazies. They’ve not experienced the likes of us before.