by Larry Kramer
Reports at this Berlin conference are indeed, as rumored, uniformly awful. One after another scientist from all corners of the globe reports on research projects that haven’t panned out, producing only more dead bodies. COD and NITS are yet to reveal our latest ZAP figures, no doubt under instructions from higher-ups somewhere. Jerry won’t talk about it.
But it’s their own achievement and new world order ahead that they’re toasting, these TAG boys and girls, in a beer cellar off the Ku’damm. I’m sleeping with one of them, let’s call him Patrick, and let’s call him very sweet and very “into older men like you.” I would never have noticed him if he hadn’t practically jumped me when we were alone in an elevator at this hotel where we’re all staying. It’s been so long since I’ve slept with anyone, felt another body, felt kisses literally rained on me. It’s a wonderful feeling. When I finally came, I ejaculated buckets, and Patrick said, “Wow, dude, when’s the last time you had sex?” And I said, “Not for a very long time.” And he said, “Boy, what a waste. You’re hot!”
Well, isn’t that nice to know.
So now, like Mata Hari, I have decent access to what TAG and Sparks are up to, more or less. It would appear they don’t know what they’re up to themselves. The Kennedy bill dictates there must be a new chief of something to be called the Office of the Underlying Condition (OUC), and we now know this will be Homer Herky, a decent-enough NITS scientist and a spineless drip. Homer has already announced “a total reassessment on where we are,” and to this end has appointed Pip Mussellman of Princeton to chair this review board. I know Pip, too. He’s a friend of my brother, Lucas, and he once invited me to Princeton to talk about UC. He chairs a department there, in bioradiology and associated high-tech medical Star Wars kinds of things, and he’s heavily funded by an exceptionally rich man who’s also from my Yaddah class and has made his fortune screwing America, I think in jet planes or aerodynamic something or other. I have already written to Pip, betting him that whatever his Mussellman Report comes up with, it will not be anything we don’t know already, in either the NITS or FUQU communities—in other words, he’s embarking upon a worthless exercise. Pip wrote back that I’m probably right but that’s what some regulation requires. You, of course, would have immediately demanded of him, “Then why the fuck are you doing it?” I, of course, can’t do such a thing. I overstepped my boundaries by sending him my prediction in the first place. Homer Herky has said that he won’t entertain any suggestions until Pip submits his report and it’s studied and vetted. That will take a year, Homer says. Another year lost! I wonder how Sparks & Co. are going to deal with this. They can’t attack Jerry for this.
Swastikas on kids’ T-shirts are everywhere in Berlin. I try to locate where Hitler’s bunker was, which seems to be in some dispute. I try to locate where Mungel was, and that is a place no longer known. To ask any German a question about the past is a waste of time. I don’t know how they live with the knowledge of what happened, and I guess this is their way of dealing with it: “I don’t speak English” or “I never heard of it.” I think of David all the time as I walk, looking for the places he and even our grandmother Sybil had spoken about. I took the boat to Wannsee to visit the inn where Philip slept with Brinestalker and Amos Standing in their threesome days, joined I now know by David. It’s very weird trying to put together pieces of my own weird past, and in this city, while at the same time attending a conference that’s telling me our professional future as doctors is turning out just as weirdly. I tried to get David to come here with me but he adamantly refused. At least it’s thrilling for me to know he’s back at last. Although I must confess to you that he’s forcing me to confront much sadness.
The full details of the international Concorde study of ZAP are announced. They’re awful and useless beyond emphasizing the danger of taking the stuff. It’s better to wait before starting ZAP than to start on it. But waiting for what? It took them more than three years and several thousand patients to find out what FUQU knew in the beginning, and what Jerry (it turns out) knew in the beginning but seemed unable to say out loud in the face of Dash Snicker, who by the way isn’t here to hear the results of his failure; no one from Greeting is here. Deep Throat warned me that we’re still not allowed to voice our opinions out loud. Trish and Shovell and this Harmish guy passed on to Boy Vertle the necessity of keeping our mouths shut. So now I guess we’ll be at the mercy of Sparks and TAG.
Audiences at every session fall into increasing despair as one hopeless presentation follows another. The whole “early intervention” program (Parallel Track) that Jerry and FUQU seeded some four years ago—can it have been that long?—still bears no fruit. It’s all Jerry’s fault, Sparks and his minions believe with a fervor that would be touching were he not so arrogant. It’s so obvious what an ungracious winner Sparks is. Sparks is already castigating Jerry publicly, making fun of him to all the scientists he and his TAG troops are cornering here. This is certainly in keeping with the FUQU-type tactics that we’ve also been witnessing. Patrick told me, “There are FUQU members here who aren’t in TAG but you couldn’t tell who.” I asked him what this meant and he said he hadn’t figured it out yet. “It’s hard to tell because everyone’s still tricking with everyone.” Patrick, by the way, is now a total wreck, having heard the Concorde results and he having been a part of it. He bawled in my arms, “What am I supposed to do now! Will you be able to save me?” Tears were shed by both of us.
Gretta Lell presents her arm of the Concorde study, ZAP and ZOK and ZIP in various combos. Deep Throat warned, “Her results could only be a pile of shit because the drugs are shit.” However, she distorts data to show that it’s okay to take this combo. Several of the T+D/FUQU/TAG team confront her in the Q&A after her presentation and criticize her in front of some four thousand attendees for her false data, which sticks out like a sore thumb. They’re right, and no one else apparently noticed it, including me. So Sparks took the mike and said to Gretta Lell that her conclusion wasn’t acceptable. She couldn’t believe he’d said this in front of all these people. Then he asked her to defend her conclusions, and Gregg G. asked her specific questions rat-a-tat-tat one-two-three and she couldn’t open her mouth, and your Barry held up his watch and said we haven’t got time for this, Doctor, and … she broke down in racking heaving sobs. In this huge conference hall. Four thousand people. Then Sparks spoke loudly and very slowly into the microphone, “Dr. Omicidio, do you have any remarks you’d like to add? I believe you were overseeing this trial.” Jerry sits there on the stage like he’s made of stone.
Gretta couldn’t stop crying. She can’t move either, to get herself off the podium. She stands there rigidly, tears streaming down her cheeks, her arms immobile at her sides. It’s an awful and pathetic sight. Finally, Farrell Obernought, her co-author of this study, comes up and puts his arm around her and leads her off, weeping on his shoulder. There’s no shortcut out; they have to walk up the center aisle of this gigantic hall. You’d think someone might shout out, “Good try, Gretta!” followed by a hall erupting in supportive applause. It doesn’t happen. She does not reappear. She flies home to Miami on the next available flight. Jerry asks me if he should send her a note of collegial consolation. But then that would reveal that he had supported her, so I know he won’t do anything.
He’s acting as if nothing’s happened, as if he’s still in charge, as if he’s still the best scientist on the block, as if he’s still the one who will find the cure. I know him well enough to know all this. Even if word’s leaked internationally about this new bill and his demotion, everyone here can see that Jerry’s still the same old Jerry, delivering his opinion on this and that. It’s a gutsy performance, indeed one of his gutsiest. Even I’m impressed. Perhaps with this new anti-Jerry putsch he can acknowledge to himself, finally, that he needs me. They tried to lay me off as well. I can see the hands of Sparks in that, too. But evidently Monserrat defended me and I made the cut.
Everything is becoming more polit
icized in depressing ways. It’s interesting that I’m thinking about this in the middle of Berlin. In D.C. I live in the capital of the politicization of everything. But the presentation of the results from the combo Concorde trials made very clear where we are not and made very unclear yet again how we as physicians are going to deal with this fact, for Concorde has made it a definite fact. Before Concorde it was just years of opinions. Dan Blatz from Israel and Sir Naughton were both at the conference, as were Grutzman from Bruges and Globberg from Milan, Emmanuel Derd from Switzerland, five of the more prominent foreign UC doctors treating patients. None of the foreign docs display the despair that fuels Americans. “We did not believe in much, so we did not expect much” is their protective shield. “And anyway, we are counting on America. Who else is there to count on?”
Patrick started to cry after we had sex for our last time in Berlin. “I wish I hadn’t come here. I’m more scared to death than ever now. And seeing all these international docs, they look so out of it to me. They look like the bad guys in the westerns. I just know they aren’t going to be the ones to save me.” His body was hard and muscled, with the washboard stomach guys work so hard to get. It was covered with his own semen, as mine was with mine, or was it the reverse? I don’t have that kind of stomach, of course, but I had a lot of Patrick and at least that was wonderful.
Oh, by the way, the head of this new Presidium, Dr. James Monroe, appears to be very buddy-buddy with Scotty and Sparks.
I’ve heard you aren’t feeling so hot again. Please hang on for that new liver!
DR. EMMANUEL DERD AT THE BERLIN CONFERENCE
I’ve never been attacked before by patients. They came after me. I was never so frightened in my life. First while I was delivering my paper at the conference they started chanting, “Time, time, time,” and they were holding up their watches and then they started marching around the room holding up their watches and one of them had a tray of Kool-Aid and they were saying, “Emmanuel Derd equals Jim Jones at Jonestown, ZAP equals poison Kool-Aid,” and they were passing out these little cups of colored liquid to the audience, and it went on and on like this, the marching and the holding up the watches and the chanting and the Kool-Aid, and I don’t know how I finished my presentation. The doctors in the hall couldn’t believe it either. Some of them got up to leave, but most of us were just so stunned. We’d never witnessed anything like this. Rodney Bodenheim spoke next, and they called him a Nazi because he insisted on using a placebo in his trial, and he was an Orthodox Jew and this really tore him up. “The blood of nineteen is on your hands,” they are yelling—that was the trial that had placebo controls and also had nineteen placebo patients who died. “Nazi, Nazi,” they are chanting, and this is Berlin, which makes it even creepier, and then later on the radio in my room I’m listening to Fred Lemish being interviewed, and he’s saying, “We asked nice. We picketed. We’ve yelled and screamed. Nobody’s listened to us. What we need is a few assassinations and maybe they’ll start listening.” From that moment I was afraid to go to another UC conference and I couldn’t wait to get out of Berlin and Germany because it was all just combining into the most awful nightmare, and I even questioned whether I should continue to take care of these guys, whether I even wanted to practice medicine anymore, because this represented some new world order. And that young Scotty who led us in joint chants in San Francisco, such a nice-looking young man, I thought then—well, no more—he was leading these chants of hate with the rest of them. And Jerry Omicidio was no help at all. He just stood there. Isn’t he in charge of something?
FRED AT NITS HOSPITAL
I stayed in Jerry’s ward at NITS for a couple of weeks. I slept and slept. I was fussed over by every expert in any and every disease or malfunction that might occur to my body. I feel awful. There is something about the famous doctor taking care of you and trying, it would now appear, to save your life, that I find myself questioning every awful thought and word I’ve had against him. Instead of continuing to blame him for my being here in the first place.
It was in this ward of Jerry’s that I finally become really frightened of death. So many “experts” in all fields are weaving detailed elaborations of what might be going on inside me, from their specialty’s point of view, that it’s hard not to be.
The last day, Jerry comes in and takes my hand and says, “I must tell you I was concerned when I saw you in our last TV appearance and recommended you come here for a look at you. Now, after consultation with the group of doctors who have examined you, we’ve come up with a plan. There is a new drug, an experimental drug, that we now have in a clinical trial. It’s called ADAP. It’s manufactured by your friends at Greeting. You take one twice a day…”
At which point I started to cry, shaking and bawling so much that he took me in his arms and comforted me, saying, “Fred, stop crying and listen to me. You’ve been told by your doctors in New York that your liver is on its last legs. It is. And your transplant hasn’t happened. ADAP may buy you time, but it won’t buy you your life. You were told six months. My guys here agree. But take your medicine, eat right and put on some weight, go to the gym, and let’s see what happens. You’re due for a break. Maybe this will lead to it.”
“What’s it like,” I ask him, “for a straight man to handle so many gay men’s naked bodies?” He doesn’t answer me. “I just wondered,” I said.
David doesn’t know I’m in here. I told him I was going to Berlin. He refused to go there with me.
“Over my dead body! I will never set foot in that country again!” he said to me.
THE LOVEJOYS ARE COMING. AGAIN!
HERMIA
The Disciples of Lovejoy had been seen as “the quintessential American faith” by that intellectual blowhard, Yaddah’s feared and fearful Ben Ezra Plonk. He pointed out in one of his more than one hundred scholarly tomes that “this new American religion was dreamed and launched and fervently successfully established on U.S. soil. In its sacred text, the Book of Lovejoy, Jesus whispered to Billy Lovejoy that Missouri was home to the Garden of Eden in the past and the New Jerusalem of his future. Jesus will meet him and his Disciples there and together they will build a brave new world. Even though it was in Missouri where Billy met his maker, the Brothers of Lovejoy moved on and have flourished and prospered mightily.”
Plonk neglects to inform his readers that the first Furstwassers hated homosexuals, even though Billy Lovejoy had totally accepted them. This hate has never wavered for an instant over all these years. But as you boys start becoming more visible, more politically powerful, even demanding, and moving closer to achieving not only equality with other white people but also seeking to marry like them, it becomes too much for all Lovejoys. They are collecting millions of dollars to locate ways to expunge your growing menace. Ben Ezra now claims to be beside himself in frustration. “I can do nothing,” he moaned to me in his slobbering way. “I am only an academic who was listened to when I had something positive to say.” He is such a phony, Plonk. Several women I know studied with him and were sexually assaulted. He denies it, of course, and Yaddah refuses to pursue the issue.
If you’ll recall—and there’s no reason you should and every reason Plonk should—one of Billy Lovejoy’s original decrees was that it was perfectly acceptable for brother to love brother, and to cohabit with brother, and to even marry brother. This got quickly discarded along the way from Missouri to Utah, and you’d be hard-pressed to locate any who recall these doctrinal planks from the original Book of Lovejoy. Yes, Jesus is complicated. He always was.
Who says that religion is not based on an unhealthy dose of vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord (and anyone else who wants to join in)?
But vengeance because of what?
Your increasing visibility is proving to be one of UC’s great gifts to the Lovejoys. In showing you off it brought many more into the fight to eliminate you. Chief among these haters are the ever-populating Lovejoys.
What I am discovering will turn yo
ur hair. I hope you and your troops are up to it. I fear otherwise.
Hadriana has informed me that what I am writing is too controversial even for her! You were correct: she is a cunt, in any language!
* * *
I learn many of your songs. They make me happy. The Health of the World organization reports that my presence is now so firmly established in your world that I can never be completely eliminated. I wonder if there is a happy song for this. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”? I wonder, what are bubbles?
PHARMA, PHARMA, WHO’S GOT THE PHARMA?
FRED AND PERRY
Von Greeting was never unaware of the many deaths his company’s products are causing. There are always lawsuits pending, which never bother him. “In today’s markets, the number of threats against you is actually a decent yardstick of the historical changes we’re trying to bring about,” he said in an interview with Pharma Plus. G-D refuses, as indeed do all the pharmaceuticals, to cave in to the increasing accusations of “when-are-you-going-to-get-your-ass-in-gear.” They all vigorously subscribe to the mantra of the ever-negative Tolly McGuire, head of Big Pharma, their Washington lobbying group, that “there’s no money in this shit so please stop pestering us.” Tolly’s peddled this line to Congress, to Jerry, to Homer Herky. The subtext of Tolly’s “official” attitude, of course, is that if you want action, ante up, Uncle Sam. Congress has anted up timidly. Ironically, the amount was so little that it was left under Jerry’s control. Once again Jerry can still be faulted for his cautious—or as Sparks calls it, “mingy”—response.
