The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  David finds it difficult to understand why men demand approval in the form of tacit uncritical acceptance for these activities. “We’ll never get anywhere defending these activities. We just won’t. We can never be taken seriously if we continue to act like this.”

  Fred smiles. “You’re beginning to sound just like me.”

  Then David out of nowhere says: “Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi propaganda minister. He said this: ‘Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it again and again, and eventually they will believe it.’”

  “Oh, honey,” Tommy says. “It’s getting harder and harder for a boy from Alabama to make sense of anything. What does Goebbels have to do with this?”

  “I’m thinking about it. I’ll let you know.”

  Fred’s come to Miami with David and Tommy to make another speech. The men cheer him. “Thanks for telling it like it is, Fred. We’ll see you at midnight at our Fontainebleau Fuckfest!”

  Which indeed is more of the same, but under the stars and full moon the three friends do manage to dance and kiss and hug.

  Great and obvious truths are still elusive. “People will be people” doesn’t do the trick. Not for his gay people, who he desperately wants to believe are better than this.

  He and David talk about this a lot. David’s experiences of exposure to naked men in groups confuse rather than clarify anything for him.

  DAVID’S VOICE

  IN FRED’S ARMS IN BED

  I have not known what to do with all the history that our bodies have witnessed and endured. But I think I am zeroing in on something.

  PRESIDIUM!

  The following press release appears from Presidium (formerly Greptz Greeting-Dridge Presidium) Pharmaceuticals:

  We pledge to adhere to the highest ethical standards. We have a commitment to supporting patients’ access to our medicines. It is not true that rising prices have little to do with increased production costs. For many years the world has been waiting for an effective treatment against the ravages of UC. Presidium is proud to shortly be providing the first truly effective treatment to you. We have named it Peturba. We are not apologetic for the high price of $15,000 per month and quite frankly we expect gratitude for our patience, our ingenuity, and the highest quality of what our great scientists have brought forth. There will be more drugs forthcoming from us shortly, each one a little better than its predecessor. But let us take this one drug at a time. God bless Peturba and God bless America.

  Linus Gobbel

  President and CEO

  Bart Shovels

  Vice President

  James Monroe M.D., Ph.D.

  Founder

  Presidium Pharmaceuticals

  INT. HOSPITAL. DAY.

  Fred is hallucinating, with David holding his hand. Dr. Brown is now his doctor.

  FRED: Testing testing phase one countdown countdown Central Heating? Steve was murdered. Send in the clowns. Phase Two. Phase Three. Where’s David? I want my David.

  DAVID: I’m here, honey bunny. (To Dr. Brown:) Why is he hallucinating?

  DR. BROWN: He has some kind of infection. That’s what I’m treating him for.

  FRED: First they say we don’t exist. Now they want us on their list.

  DAVID: What’s happening to him? I’ve taken him to every one of his doctors.

  DR. BROWN: An infection can be a good sign too. It can protect the brain while it recovers.

  DAVID: Recovers from what?

  DR. BROWN: From whatever it is that’s infecting him. Tests will tell. I think there are some residual reactions to that ADAP drug Omicidio gave him that Greeting was testing without approval.

  FRED: Himmler said over one million gays were exterminated.

  DR. BROWN: We’re going to get you through this.

  DAVID: Hear that, honey? You can do it.

  CUT TO (night):

  DAVID (lying with Fred, who is sleeping, in hospital bed): Our lives have been so messy. But not like this. This is the dark night of our souls. I love you even more.

  CUT TO (morning): Dr. Brown looking through open door and seeing Fred and David still asleep.

  FRED (waking up): Good morning.

  DR.BROWN (smiling): Your fever has broken. I was right. I told you I’d pull you through this. A few days and you can go home.

  David and Fred hug each other.

  DANIEL’S LIFE

  How do you dispose of so many dead bodies all at once? All over America, death counts mount. It’s a problem not discussed. NITS alone produces three hundred dead patients a day.

  Three hundred sounds like a lot for one institution, doesn’t it? Well, they don’t all die on the premises. Many die at home, and their deaths aren’t included in this figure. I’m in charge of Jerry’s unit now. I don’t have much time to spare. I barely sleep enough, or eat properly, or even have time to cry. I’ve finally, somehow, learned how to let loose with tears and cry. If you think about having to deal with three hundred patient files a week …

  TWO MORE

  Arnold Botts Greeting was sent to Omicidio via emergency ambulance by James Monroe from Presidium’s headquarters in Arlington. He passed out in the middle of a meeting. As his face was bursting out in purple patches, Monroe had a notion of what might be happening. Omicidio wouldn’t go near him and it fell to Daniel Jerusalem to deal with him. As Deep Throat was visiting, he called him in to help. Arnold’s clothes were cut from him and his naked body revealed that Arnold was pretty far along in UC deterioration. Deep Throat was gently pricking his skin for scrapings when Arnold opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was Daniel Jerusalem. “I know you!” he said, spitting and screaming out the words and jumping up. “You pissed on me in Masturbov Gardens and ruined my life.” He grabbed Deep Throat’s scalpel and slashed it across Daniel’s face and rammed it into his heart before convulsing himself and choking to death. Daniel was dead on the floor. There was nothing Deep Throat could do to save either of them.

  FRED’S LIFE

  The murder of Daniel is a huge burden on the overburdened shoulders of David, and of Lucas. Fred feels like a witness from the sidelines. His own wretched family’s past had offered him scant solace to share. He’d tried over the years to think of it as little as possible. But this is different. His husband’s twin murdered is as if they all have been struck down. The plague’s coming too close for comfort, not that it wasn’t before.

  David is not as inconsolable as Fred thought he might be. “It’s all just part of our same story,” David had said. “It’s no better or worse than what we’ve lived through. I know you’ve longed for some happy ending. Well, this is not there. Except for you and me.”

  Fred has been sensing that some people think the plague’s over, that the tide is stealthily ebbing back to pre-plague shorelines. Even though there are growing rumors that various ZAP and bootleg combo trials are only providing a certain diminution, what appears to be happening is a lessening of the virus’s virility, provided that the drugs will be rigidly adhered to. For some, this works. For most, it doesn’t.

  Levi Narkey said: “We ain’t out of the woods yet by any means and I worry about Sparks going crazy. It’s amazing how much bootleg crap is out there, and he’s determined for TAG to take credit for this new Presidium drug Peturba now that our bootleg trials of it have been promising and it’s officially being released to the UCCTG for trials. It’s almost some point of pride for Sparks that TAG’s right and FUQU wasn’t. It’s like some sort of vengeance.”

  Perry says Sparks is drinking too much. And that he and Scotty are no longer talking.

  And for most of the rest of the world, which is pretty much all of it, life goes dangerously on. Until everyone in the world is tested, which of course will never happen, there is no way either to know how large is the population of infecteds or how to curtail the present danger. “Present danger”? Already this sounds so … yesterday. And yesterday he had Daniel the Spy to help him fill in the State of the Plague. Now he has no one on the i
nside full-time.

  How could anyone in his right mind think this plague is over? Peturba or no Peturba.

  A “cure” cannot really be claimed to be on its way, as Sparks is now announcing publicly. “Well, nothing is ever going to be one hundred percent.” That’s heard a lot, as if an acceptance of some status quo is already setting in. Even though San Francisco has already figured out that their bootleg protease inhibitor didn’t work on 35 percent of people there.

  “People are tired,” Tommy says. “I sure am.”

  Toward the end of her life, Hannah Arendt said that what she admires in Socrates is his capacity to provoke thinking by infecting others with the perplexities that she felt herself.

  Dearest Hannah, it isn’t working. What am I still doing wrong?

  David is now reading his way through all of Hannah. That’s one major task! “I didn’t know anyone could be so smart!” he said. “To think we were both in Berlin at the same time. And come to think of it, fighting to save my life, too. And come to think of it again, I live now with another one trying to do the same.”

  Needless to say, this cheers me up. Come to think of it.

  VIRUSES HAVE SEX TOO

  A book by the important Dutch scientist Jaap Goudsmit comes out in which he discusses the danger of viral mutations. “Viruses can reproduce sexually—that is, by the mating of two nonidentical viruses with enough genetic overlap to allow cross-information. The UC viruses are past masters at such exchanges, meaning that within a matter of thirty minutes, two different strains of virus can swap parts of their physical makeup. It is a little like sexual partners swapping personalities so as to create an entirely novel offspring: a new virus, carrying the potential of a new threat.”

  * * *

  You make me sound like boys’ night out at your bathhouses, exchanging me all over the place. I love it. Now you know how I can keep my hard-on for so many millions of years without losing my power.

  HIGHWAY ROBBERY

  BARRY

  In law school they did not give us case studies like this one.

  Fifty million dollars is missing from the UC balance sheet at NITS. It is Spud from TAG, with his Navajo haircut now purple after a siege of chartreuse, who discovers this. It’s $50 million that was given by Congress to NITS c/o Dr. Sheldon Grebstyne to devote solely to UC research. But Shelley isn’t here anymore. It probably should have been earmarked just to NITS, but because Congress was worried about the excommunication of Dodo and Jerry, it came to NITS via Shelley, and so be it, who knows why or where or when and never look a gift horse, etc. Shelley’s now a bitter man not prone to talking to anyone from NITS, filled as he is with the “go fuck yourself” attitude so characteristic of ex-employees. The thing is Spud can’t find any vouchers or clues affixed to this grant file since its receipt and he can’t locate the $50 million either. In Walla Walla, Dodo is still pursued by seventeen different courts and a hundred different lawyers, so his memory’s been shut down too. So who else is there to query? Jerry certainly refuses to discuss anything pertaining to money as our TAG-inspired legislation now dictates he mustn’t. Anyway, he would now have this 50 million bucks, not that he necessarily knows that it’s missing.

  Spud has been poring over all the books of the various divisions of NITS, looking for just such shit as this. The kid is a wiz, a marvel at spotting chicanery, legerdemain, the cooking up of the books. Wasn’t his grandfather a top accountant in Germany, hauled off to the ovens when the war started “for being a rich Jew”? “He taught my pop, who taught me everything about how to hide stuff in the ledgers,” Spud bragged to me. “Before he was hauled off to the ovens as well.”

  “Your father was also burned up in the Holocaust?” I said, sad and impressed. I’ve never known anyone who had experienced that horror so closely, even though I’m a Jew.

  “I just told you,” Spud says. “And my grandfather and grandmother. And my mother was killed in a Russian camp.”

  “Your father and your mother!” I said, even more startled by the news out of this kid’s mouth. How could he even have been born by then, and old enough to learn all the stuff from his father about cooking books?

  Spud seemed ready for this unvoiced question. “My father taught his brother, my uncle. He wasn’t as good at it himself. He’s in Leavenworth for not getting away with it somewhere. I thought you and I were going to have a date and you were going to teach me how to have anal sex.”

  “I did say that, didn’t I?” I dimly recalled some such thing, although I can’t recall why I offered. Spud’s not really my type, and anal sex these days, well …

  “Anal sex isn’t so kosher these days,” I said. “I assume your family kept an Orthodox home.”

  “I just told you I don’t have any family left. They all got murdered by the Nazis during the war and the Russians after it. That was my mother’s side of the family. She escaped to Russia, where she met the man who became my father, before they were both sent to a gulag by Dmitri Norbtrekno. Did you ever hear of him?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Who was he?”

  “He was trained by Stalin to be a monster murderer. His gulag was the worst gulag.”

  “That’s pretty bad, from what I know.”

  “You said it. Will you teach me how to kiss, at least?”

  “You don’t know how to kiss? What do you know?”

  Spud began to cry. When I tried to take him in my arms, Spud broke away and ran off.

  He wrote his report about the missing $50 million from the NITS coffers a week later. He put it out on the back tables at FUQU and TAG meetings, and what with one thing or another it must have made its way somehow into the wider world, because Dr. Sheldon Grebstyne’s suicide at his new position in Arizona, “under unexplained circumstances,” according to Velmy Dimley, happens maybe two weeks later.

  I send Spud congratulatory flowers “for your really great and heroic work, and also because I really would like to go out with you and teach you whatever I can that you want to know.” I do wonder how this really smart kid can also be so dumb. Sex is so perplexing now. Guess he knows that.

  A few weeks later Spud sends me a thank-you note, also saying, “It was just as well you didn’t fuck me and we didn’t kiss. I am positive for UC, which I didn’t tell you. I have become a much better Jew because of it. I go to temple all the time now and I’m learning Hebrew. Do you go to temple? Which one? Perhaps we could go together and hold hands.”

  A few weeks later, Claudette, who’s changed from being a lesbian to not being a lesbian, runs into Spud at a coffee bar. He tells her that everything he had told me, and that he knows I told Gregg and Scotty and Sparks in our support group, and that hence made its way to Claudette, was untrue.

  “About the Jews and about the Holocaust and about my accountant father, and, well … everything.”

  “You’re not even Jewish?” Claudette asks.

  “No.”

  “Why did you say all that? You’re not even positive for UC?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you say all that!”

  “It all seemed to fit right in with the drama we’re living.”

  Maxine’s response to Spud’s lies was very Maxine. “Some gentiles often feel so white-bread that they need to be Jewified.”

  I allowed that I’d never heard of that one.

  The $50 million? Spud located it in Grebstyne’s bank account in Switzerland. Jerry had to deal with it.

  Sparks immediately called Jerry and demanded he now pay for more trials. Or he’d sic FUQU on him. As if FUQU would do anything for Sparks and TAG.

  When I looked for Spud at one of our meetings I was told he’d moved out of town somewhere.

  HOME ON THE RANGE

  A Midwestern radio personality known as Smacker reads out on his show the names of all the sex offenders rounded up in his part of the woods. Another radio commentator, Pooh-Bah, this one gay, warns his audience to stay away from those parts of the country where Smacker is
known to be operating, traveling a lot as he does, the better to pop in and surprise men in toilets, making an entrance with his camera already rolling and pointed toward a urinal. Laws against such sexual behavior in public places are widespread, and Pooh-Bah, who is the gay commentator, likes to warn his audience “to keep safe and out of harm’s way, and if you have to do this, try and listen in to Pooh-Bah first to see if your area is high and dry. You may think what you’re doing is normal, but others don’t. You do know that, don’t you? By now? After all this time?” He wonders why he goes to all this trouble to protect these laggards, except that when he drops the “Pooh-Bah’s No-No Road Map” section of his program his ratings plummet. And he knows he is losing the ratings race with another gay commentator, Dangerous Dan, who “will be constantly interviewing lawyers from the ACLU about our legal rights to be in parks and other such public facilities. Remember, the next time you want to give money to any gay organization ask them their stand on sexual issues. If they refuse to support cocksuckers (don’t mince words!), save your money.”

  A map of the United States is captioned ACTIVE HATE GROUPS. It is covered with a blinding number of indicators of where these groups are located.