The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Answers and objections seem so obvious to Fred and me. Why weren’t they obvious then? Or now?

  Why was Grodzo purchased to come to America? In Mungel he’d been tasked with trying to discover the cause of homosexuality. Were we a crime against humanity? Or a target for genocide? Was that why someone here knew about him and wanted him here? Is this what he was doing at Partekla? He told me that it was there where I got all the scars on my back. Why don’t I remember any of that?

  INT. BATHROOM AND SHOWER. PITTSBURGH APARTMENT. DAY.

  Fred is standing in the bathtub as David sponges him down, being careful of all the stitches. David is naked too.

  DAVID: Now we both have scars.

  Fred is tearing up again.

  FRED: I cry when you take care of me.

  DAVID: But I want to take care of you.

  FRED: I should be taking care of you.

  David stands up and kisses his eyes. They hug each other.

  DANIEL WATCHES MORE OF HIS LIFE BURN UP

  Miseraria’s been set on fire.

  The place is so awful now that no one much cares who might have done it and if he or she should even be thanked. Miseraria, part of Nostra Mater Dolorosa, was originally built for the rich Catholics. Now it’s where they put the worst cases of everything, even worse than Nostra Mater, which now means all the last-stage UC patients, which means Nearer Thy God to Be. It’s also where I spent part of my internship. The staff used to all be nuns. But the Church ran out of M.D. nuns about a decade ago. The nuns working in Miseraria now probably aren’t even nurses. For all I know, they aren’t even nuns. But women in black outfits run the place and when we have to go over there, which I still do, too many times, to certify deaths or observe a particularly new and wretched symptom, we try to deal with them whatever they are. They aren’t friendly and who could blame them. The smell was so awful that you talked as little as possible, tried not to inhale deeply, and to get out fast. Most patients couldn’t speak English. There is not a day I was in that place that I didn’t come home and scrub myself hard with antiseptic soap. Finally UC got so bad there that these nuns now complain loudly and bitterly and in the press. No one at HAH or COD or PHS or NITS pays any attention.

  Someone set it on fire, patients and all. You’d think such an ancient pile would burst into instant flames. But it didn’t. It just smoldered and smoked and refused to truly ignite. Everyone is evacuated, though I guarantee no one knows how many patients were in there. Hard to locate the truly decrepit in big city hospitals. I hear that all the time from around the country.

  With the first hint of fire, the Church Albigensian Commission, which hasn’t been summoned officially in Washington for 127 years, calls itself into meeting and decides a sacrifice to Christ must be made immediately. Since this was announced publicly, crowds of the devout start coming to take a look. The Catholic Archdiocese also summons all the parishioners that it can. Evidently you want a crowd for this sort of thing.

  Cardinal Buggaro, just back from the Vatican looking really hot stuff in his crimson outfit, is intoning an outdoor Mass in his obviously stumbling Latin, one that’s evidently very black. Medieval. Patsy Dura, with whom I went to junior high and run into here, tells me this. She still lives in the neighborhood and goes to the local church. A large contingent of priests stands watching while seven more burn the seven covenants of the deed of transfer from the Vatican to the Washington archdiocese. Then a bishop asks all the Catholics to pitch into the pyre a few splinters shaved from the actual Cross itself (where and how do they still say they get these things?), which are passed out to the large audience hungry to touch and accept them. For the not-so-true believers there are big piles of old planking and cartons of old clothing and whatever stacked for everyone to have something to hurl into the flames. A black coffin appears that contains the remains of the most recent death in the hospital who’d been waiting for the undertaker. Since everyone knows that every patient in this place had UC, everyone stands back as if the devil is in that casket and it’s not the symbolic offering it’s meant to be.

  City officials, summoned earlier to be johnnies on the spot, are handed tiny pails of ashes of the burned deed. The hospital is thereby symbolically returned to the city’s books, causing the mayor, whatever his name is (Washington mayors come and go quickly; no one ever knows their names), to throw a fit.

  “Another fucking Catholic fuckup,” the mayor screams at the bishop. “What makes you think I want this fucking sewer back! This pile of shit is yours!” And he takes his bucket of ashes and thrusts it into this bishop’s hand, who then hands it to the cardinal, who’s just finishing rushing around igniting various spots with a long taper, and he hurls these ashes in as well.

  At last a mighty whoosh deafens the air. The crowd falls back in fear. But no one turns their back. Because this is part of the Mass, remember. When it looks safe enough, people fall on their knees and recite along with Buggaro.

  It’s all an amazing sight. Soon enough there’s a pitch-black pile of heavy ashes. These ashes for some reason don’t blow away. They just sit there. They’re very heavy. Soon firemen start shoveling them to neaten things up and you can sense how heavy they are. Patsy tells me that really serious Catholics who have lived in this neighborhood all their lives believe this is a sign that Jesus doesn’t want this place to leave this earth. “So our wish must be coming true.” How would I know that Patsy had become so devout? Eventually the ashes start hardening into a sort of huge big malformed rock. The mayor demands that the Archdiocese remove “that whole shitty shebang.” All of Nostra Mater Dolorosa Medical Center is built on top of a holy grotto of something, and Catholics from all over the world have over the years made this a place of pilgrimage. I remember being taken on a school tour when I was a kid, down into that grotto, how scary it was.

  People now start to help out by taking chunks of the rock for themselves. Yes, they believe it has holy healing powers. They start arriving with their own hammers and chisels and wheelbarrows.

  Every week of my young life I passed by this place on my bus trip downtown to either work at the Jew Tank or to go to Washington Jewish, where Rivka taught Sunday school. The increasing darkness of tonight reminds me of that awful trip home when Rivka and I left Philip presumably almost dying in the hospital having told us we weren’t Jerusalems, and we went back to our flooded apartment in Masturbov Gardens waiting for the phone to ring to tell us he was dead. It reminds me that I don’t even know if my father finally revealed what we’re to be called. I asked David when I was taking care of him if he ever wanted to see Philip again. For once, he answered quickly, “Not on your life.” Washington Jewish isn’t there anymore either. It didn’t burn down, it just converted to another faith as their Jews moved to the suburbs and sold it to some Muslim sect. I’ve noted various obits for the Jew Tank girls, but I’ve never seen any of them and I wonder why. All those lost Jews. Did we find any of them? Feef Nordlinger. All these years I wanted to call her. She made me laugh. I heard she committed suicide. My life has been so bereft of friends.

  In my determination to be a fine doctor, to disempower a past as I created a future, I sure had lost myself. And I think that’s exactly what I wanted to do. How else do you face up to a history like ours? With that I’m in harmony with all these bereft Catholics. Their Miseraria’s gone for good. I guess misery is supposed to do that. It’s just that the city’s now lost a couple hundred beds. Not so coincidentally, today I booked my five hundredth case, four hundred at NITS and one hundred in my private practice. As if in honor of this, this four hundredth case at NITS was completely covered with scabs from various layers of nimroid, hard as a rock, like he was wearing a suit of armor, as if he’d been infected and then reinfected on top of the original infections. Haven’t seen one like this before, the layered look. Are guys now reinfecting themselves but with slightly different and escalating strains? This guy had been a Catholic wearing a huge crucifix.

  Fred once said to me t
hat he heard the voices of the dead always talking to him.

  Dr. Sister Grace Hooker lived next door in Mater Nostra. Is anyone hearing her voice? Is she watching her neighbor going up in flames?

  Mater Nostra itself still stands, though, like a fortress, on its plain, huge hunks of ancient masonry that from a distance—and no road comes too close—looks intact and sort of majestic, as old heaps from past eras can do when they’re over there and you’re over here, like the handsome old woman whose makeup gives her a burnished luster from fifty paces but only a wrinkled endurance when confronted close up.

  Shit, she’s still there, isn’t she? Fighting, surviving, doing her damnedest to stay alive. Men fall apart, collapse, fart themselves into unpleasantness. No one calls an old man anything besides smelly old man, old fart, old geezer … There are no Brownie points for fellas who survive. But there’s always a soft spot for an old dame still in the race on legs that hardly support her. She hasn’t sunk from the weight of agonies endured in all of its buildings’ bodies.

  It’s dark outside. There’s Sister Mattie, with whom I’ve worked on many a case, who of course is not as old as her cloister here, but just as tired. I know, because she told me, how she wants very much to die. She is that tired of it all. I can see her looking out her window, in this wing she shares with twelve other women, each as old as she, each as tired as she, each as anxious as she to join their much missed dearly beloved Dr. Sister Grace to pass over to the other side they know is waiting (because they are people for whom religion and God are living presences, like brokers for bankers and bookies for bettors), and she wonders if the light that is just dim over the horizon, just coming up over Bunker Hill, will be the day that will free her from this earthly hell, God forgive her, God be praised.

  Sister Mattie realizes that the light she is looking at is Miseraria, still on fire. “Look, Sisters. Miseraria is still alive and kicking,” I’ll bet she’s saying.

  “Thank the Lord,” I can hear them all say in unison, no one I’ll bet quite knowing why.

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  HAROLD

  I live in Baltimore. I live in Columbus, I live in Little Rock, and Houston, I guess you could say I travel a lot and I don’t call any one of these places a home. Not since Myron died. I still do all this shit, stuff I think should be done. Really for him. Myron would have been approving and supportive. And of course for FUQU. Except for Fred and Tommy, most members don’t know about me. We had more chapters for a while. I think we had way more than a hundred, all over the world. We’re really petering out. I used to go to the new places in the U.S. and help them get started. Each chapter is then on its own. We don’t have a network where we’re all plugged into each other. We should, but “we should be a lot of things,” as Fred says. He’s been out of commission for a while, so I’ve been acting on my own. But he checked back in with me a few days ago. He says he feels great.

  We’re not very complicated, how we operate, so it’s not rocket science, as they say. I guess the work I do, which is the most noble and exciting to me, and I’ll admit I’m … no, I won’t admit it, but you’ll think it, you’ll think I’m wacko, a nutcase. But what I’m doing is something wonderful and noble, and I spend a lot of time crying about it. That’s how I know what I’m doing is decent. Thank God, Myron left me well off. I go around and help bury guys. I help facilitate the public funerals, the political funerals, some chapters like New York call them. We want the world to see what’s happening, don’t we? Fred or Tommy would call me when something might happen, I mean inquiries about a new chapter, or who wanted to bury their dead. I then go to Akron or Austin or Milwaukee, Dubuque, and try to get things going. I offer my help in subdued ways, being more experienced and all that and from the big city where they think FUQU/NY is the cutting edge. They all had sick people and so I’d intimate there are many ways to die and go to heaven and I’d try to find out if there was a way to—I use the word integrate—to integrate the funeral shit into whatever local shit they had to deal with, inside their group or out of it. Dead UC bodies are not exactly welcome in the burbs and sticks. Undertakers don’t want them for sure. Well, there are a lot more “public” funerals than anyone knows. Maria and Jean and Maxine, they didn’t know about them. They only focused on New York. Maxine, she is a trip. I would watch her when she got up to speak, and man, she is a take-charge kind of dame. No nonsense. Easy to admire. Very on the nose. A lot of women like her out in the Midwest, where I mostly am. Maxine is sure a role model to more than she knows. I guess Fred told her about me because I just took care of an old friend of hers in Portland, Maine. First woman I did this with. Maxine said leave her outside City Hall. The men out of New York are such wimps. Out in the sticks the juice all comes from the women. There are more guys, sure, but they still cruise too much.

  I usually just get a call. Somebody whispering, almost. We got a body … So I take a couple of my friends—by now I have a list of contacts for willing helpers everywhere, mostly guys I’d helped get their own lovers out there expeditiously—and we would pick up the body or the ashes or the coffin in my hearse. I have an old jalopy hearse that I actually live in, sleep in, when I’m on the road. And in the wee small hours we’d drive around Akron or Columbus or New Harmony or Buffalo or El Paso or Charlotte or Des Moines and look around for an interesting place to leave the body. I had this official-type letter that was Scotch-taped to the urn or coffin that said something like, The guy who was once living and is now inside this coffin is dead because of UC and because you who are finding him here didn’t give a flying fuck to help save his life. Different versions of that. Sometimes, if the weather’s nice, you know, a balmy night with stars and stuff, I’ll open the casket and leave it open and put the letter in the corpse’s hands. That was actually my preferred way of doing it. We’d drive around to look for an open place that made sense and no cops were around and we just left him there. Then I’d drive somewhere farther out and park and then walk back to watch what happened. Sometimes it was boring, like the cops would just get the coffin hauled away. But sometimes homeless people would discover it or drunk kids would open it up and toss the body on the ground and leave it there while they slept in the coffin or had sex in it. Sometimes animals would come and start to eat the body. Starting at first light people would see it and just be horrified. I forgot to mention that the coffin was always painted with DEAD FROM UC on it. This meant that removal teams had to dress up in all their stupid gear before they’d touch it, so it could be a while before it was taken away. In Oberlin, Ohio—I mean, you’d think with a famous college there they’d be smarter—the open casket stayed open with the body in full view for maybe two days. I kept waiting for TV to come and shoot it or the newspapers to write about it, or the radio, but, you know, that rarely happens. These were events that no one ever covered, which if you think about it is more weird than what I was doing.

  Now Fred said to stop it. He actually called me from where he said he was recovering from his transplant and he said he’d been thinking about all this body stuff and he was beginning to think it was sort of disrespectful of the dead. “I having come so close to it, I don’t want to be treated like this if I die. They die in this place every minute. I hear the helicopter land on the roof above my head and drop them off and take them away.” And then there was a long pause on the other end before he said, “I want to get some nobility back for us. I don’t know how yet. We got our dead bodies onto the White House lawn a couple of times, so we’ve done that. I’m home soon. I may call you. I got to go, Harold. Too tired. Thank you for everything. I love you.” And he hung up.

  I did a couple more myself after that, where I called the local papers and TV and tipped them off, “Dead body from UC in front of City Hall demands that you pay attention,” stuff like that, or that line from Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid,” trying to get something noble into it like Fred wanted. That didn’t seem to do the trick either. Fred said all along how hard it is to get
this shit publicized right, and it’s true.

  I will kind of miss doing this. It makes me feel I was really doing something for the cause. Creepy as you might think it is, I didn’t think it was creepy. But I’ve come to agree with Fred. I feel less noble because there’s still no public acknowledgment for this dead body or this disease or this coffin in their midst, which means we’ve failed. Funny, also, that gay newspapers, not a one of them, in any of these places, wrote about this. Go figure. These were not places where guys partied real hard after an action. Maria would not feel at home here.

  Wichita and Tulsa, they were the last ones I did after Fred said to stop. The firemen in Tulsa took the body out of the coffin and set fire to it and stood around and watched it burn to ashes. They drank beers while they watched, and tossed the empties into the fire. In Wichita the cops got their big dogs to rip the body to shreds. Then the chief came and told his cops they had to shoot the dogs just in case they got infected too. So they shot their dogs. And they made the firemen put on all their protective clothing to cart the dead dogs away. God bless America.

  CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

  Can it be possible? No one can believe it. Dodo is asked to leave NITS. Who asked him? Has he been judged guilty or innocent? What’s he done with Poopsie? The final Dingus Report has been released. Our greatest scientist? Our great discoverer? The man acclaimed by that lady of the wigs as “our great savior”? What’s in that Dingus Report? It’s marked “Top-Secret.” You never see the names Moose or Bohunk or even O’Trackney Vurd anymore. What happened to Vurd? (He committed suicide by drinking himself to death, according to The Life and Times of the Scoundrel Vurd by Glypha Jones-Morton, Ph.D., State University of Wisconsin Press.) Where will Dodo go? Who would want him now? Soiled beyond repair? Scorned and ridiculed for being scorned and ridiculed? Dingus did that! Dingus, who dingled Dodo and Garth Buffalo, too. How fleeting is fame. How fleeting is infamy. What are we left with?