by Larry Kramer
What am I saying in all of this so far? I’m not saying I’m not a Monkey First person. I’m saying that I’m a we-did-it-to-each-other-then and we-do-it-to-each-other-now and we-never-stop-doing-it-to-each-other person. This may sound at first blush like Bosco and his “it’s been here forever” theory, but there’s a mighty big difference. Human behavior and poisonous pathogens are two different things. And we didn’t need any fucking monkeys to start anything. They may have been useful. Even very useful. They may even have been the first fuckers to pass Go. But we didn’t need them. It would have happened without them.
Amoebas, piss, and shit. And taking it up the ass.
Mostly shit.
Then add Indians and Catholics and top ’em with Puritans, who were exceptionally intolerant from the get-go. Unbeatable recipe. Unbeatable combo. It’s never just little teeny tiny microbes of poison.
(Be sure you ask Dr. Israel Jerusalem to present his theory of the Resurrection of Glause. He discovered the stuff in 1930. And then he lost it. The fucking lazy bastard crapface suckhole forgot it! I have no idea why.)
And you can’t do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That’s why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are.
Yes, Dr. Sister Grace is going to give you more than you want to get.
I am particularly interested in certain discoveries among the early Indians. This mother hospital, Mater Nostra Dolorosa, is built on the site of not only a Revolutionary battleground bunker but an ancient Indian burial ground and also a remote Catholic fort, established by fathers who managed, God knows how, to get up here from St. Augustine, way—way—before Columbus was even born. These boys, too, had a goodly following, several hundred to be certain, according to membership manifests. Whether they went home or whether the Indians killed them or whether they became Indians, which was very popular in those days, is still unresolved. Once again I’ll wager they ate too much dick than was good for them. After all, they only had each other. And they caused a shitload of death. And starving Indians are forced to eat a lot of shit.
It is the American Indian who first discovers, experiences, and brings anal intercourse into general use in this country.
It is also the Indian who discovers intestinal parasites. Parasites are the great messengers of disease. This is a momentous landmark in the history of every disease.
Any connection between the two? Figure it out for yourself. Those jerk-offs at NITS still can’t. They won’t come anywhere near this. Any of it.
I might interject here (I am such an interferer with my own frigging self) that parasites are not the same as viruses, which for too long stupid fuckers have thought they are. Parasites don’t but viruses do have a sexuality. Viruses can reproduce sexually—that is, by the mating of two nonidentical viruses with enough genetic overlap. The sexual shenanigans of viruses are just like those of us humans. Two different strains of virus can swap parts of themselves to create an entirely new offspring, a new fucker, a new threat.
“Scholarship” has felt uncomfortable looking too closely at the Indians, or as they’re called now, Native Americans, who are already here when Columbus—I hope you understand that he was not an intelligent man—incorrectly assumes he’s discovered the New World. (It takes him three voyages before he realizes he hasn’t landed in Asia. He names the natives he carries back to Spain “Indians” because he thinks he’s been in the East Indies, thus sticking these poor buggers with the wrong name for all time.) Long before 1492 there are somewhere between 4 million and 10 million people in what will become known as the United States, or the Continental United States, and some 10 to 25 million in what will be called South America. That is a lot of Indians. I am going to call them Indians. That is a lot of Indians, and they are not sitting around waiting for some dumb wop to set foot on their land and cry out, “Mira, mama, I discovered fucking Indians!”
What he would have found if he’d looked around a bit—that is, if he’d been a really butch explorer instead of some silly stupid sailor who liked to splash around wanking in his little boats—are all these Indians running around speaking some 250 languages. That is a lot of languages. There is also an awful lot of what we would call human sacrifice, people murdering other people for some sort of horsedung offerings up to the gods. Anytime anybody (read Catholic) premieres a new temple in a new neighborhood, those opportunistic Spanish show up and lop off many thousands of Indian heads. One particularly “high” church down El Paso way appears to have corralled some 80,000 human carcasses—many of the hearts were scooped out with knives. A lot of these knives from 1450 or so are still being found in Florida, up around Disney World, of course. Since early Indians believed they were required to nourish the earth with their own human blood and hearts, the Spanish were good enablers. Murderers usually are.
The Spaniards also chopped off penises and breasts, lest they be too stimulating in heaven. Milton Prance’s “bones” in Ohio will indicate this. I suspect this is too hairy for dear Hermia.
Are there white men here before Columbus? Of course there are white men here before Columbus. Looong before Columbus. Men of all colors are wandering around this country, crisscrossing it for as long as they can stay alive, which isn’t for very long. Why and how does that idiot wop continue to get all the first-timer credit? Are there white men, or many white men, here before the Indians? This is more difficult to answer. Do you know how hard it is to identify skin color after a body’s been buried for a couple hundred years? I wish someday someone would tell me what the fucking hell is so fucking important about the fucking color white.
I can find no scholarship in that NITS Library of all Libraries, or at either of the Greetings, or even at that hallowed knee-trembler, the Kinsey Institute, devoted to the sexual lives, habits, practices, or erotic interests of the North American Indians in the pre-Columbian era. The sparsely extant examples of their numerous written languages and their surviving artifacts tell us little about this aspect of their lives, which is surprising given how much is written about Indians in Mexico and South America, much of it sexual and grotesque. Why no records north of the border and nonstop chitchat south? In view of centuries’ worth of hypothetical suppositions dealing with the hanky-panky of no less than Jesus Himself, dealing with the passions of everyone from wandering Jews to mad monks, must one not question why it is that information about the feelings of America’s earliest people is so ass-wiping scarce?
But they do participate in and perform many rites that are frowned upon by fellow Indians, of their own tribes and, especially, others. The Zuni Indians become drunk from downing gallons of their own piss and then performing ritual dervish-like dances pissing it out all over each other until, dehydrated as well as drenched, they collapse in their puddles of pee, only to wash it down with whatever diarrhea they were shitting out. They shat into their leather pouches and quenched their returning thirsts. The consumption of shit is more widespread than academics will face up to to this day.
Well, it is not for this one-armed foul-mouthed nun to spend too much time condemning other scholars for failing to locate all that is most necessary. We have all been there. But let us cast our minds back to long ago.
Let me tell you about Hermatros, my hero.
I must first interject here some necessary thoughts and facts. Attending a Catholic medical school when I did was a different choice and experience than it is today. You expected to be taught by Catholics who had achieved and who nevertheless elected to commit themselves to such an institution rather than one in what I would call the Real World. We went there to be protected from any interference with our learning, with a commitment to making our brains as capacious and reactive and spontaneous as we could. Sure the Church got in our way, especially Jesus, who demanded much too much attention. But the time we devoted to him was a small down payment on access to the extraordinary minds I was able to sit at the feet of (we did that literally, after class, after chapel, after prayers, afte
r endless study hours, brainstorming and bullshitting to beat the band, hot toddies in hand and our habits fanned out to gather up warmth from various dormitory fireplaces). It was not really as time-consuming as most of the extracurricular time gobblers everyone out there at “regular” rah-rah schools dotes on. We had the greatest minds in classical medicine, Father Hobert Estimius, for instance, in biological intrusiveness, Sister Gabriella Forchu from Cape Breton Island, on the internecine properties of blood vessels, and quite possibly the most unacknowledged true geniuses in Infectious Disease, the trio of Sister Dierdre Evangeline Morpasso, Sister Olive Matrimonia, and Bishop Raymond Odetts, who went on to teach Omicidio (unfortunately not to the good bishop’s credit). There were the Nus, mother and daughter. There was my great love, Annunciata Rose. And there was Monsignor Albertus Magnus Ogunquit, who was the best teacher I ever had and who taught me about Hermatros. Students today simply don’t have access to such biggies.
I was to find that many don’t take you particularly seriously when you claim a Catholic medical education. It’s assumed you’ve compromised the facts somewhere along the path. That has been one more motivation for my vocabulary. The hypocrisy of such thinking is fuck-faced. I will match my abilities against any layperson anywhere. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!
Hermatros was a purnoyenne, a Seneck word best translated as “inner soothsayer” or “gizzard doctor” or, better, “important person because he specializes in guts,” as well as, I am told, “gossip”: purnoyennes are also important carriers of the news. With his death, it will come to mean “bug doctor.” It is a word that appears to be feminine, as Greek Vestal Virgins, which purnoyennes most closely resemble, were always women, but gender in Seneck is mostly a grammatical conceit. That the same word can have so many meanings is interesting, albeit less noteworthy when one knows that the Seneck language, like many another language in those days, just didn’t have enough words to go around.
There are many drawings of stomach bugs at Lady Jane’s Etc. from the New Mexico of pre-white-man Indian days, the days of Hermatros (which are the days I am talking about, A.D. 1000 or so; dating is not my game; that territory belongs to Cousin Hermia and her factual logorrhea). Hermatros’s specialty would eventually become the identification of intestinal parasites—stomach bugs (“fu”) in shit—in which he believed that answers from the gods were received. Minds that can work like this! Shit talking via master’s movements! It just required an ability to be able to “read” (agglopp) it, which Hermatros found he had. Parasitology is another one of the many subjects “historians” avoid like the plague even though, God knows, pockets of civilization are constantly falling apart because everyone is shitting their brains out, which is one thing parasites can do for you.
The reading of entrails was always regarded as a holy calling. Entrail predictions were sought and made for centuries, in ancient Greece, Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, even early Palestine; America in its earliest formative years must be added to this list. Hermatros writes that “in all the days of birdflying” he did not believe there was ever a time when some evisceration of animals, the removal of innards to allow for their proper interpretation by a holy person trained in reading portents in their patterns, did not play an important role in how rulers “reached for the Beyond.” How did the fucker know that? I don’t believe there is any way in hell that any Indian tribe in the New World had an iota of information, via the Jungian collective unconscious or any other seedy grapevine, of who the Greeks et al. were or where Greece et al. was or that there was a civilization a thousand years earlier rather more advanced than the one parading around the campfires of America in feathers and loincloths somewhere around A.D. 1000 and performing the same rituals, i.e., reading the same shitty glop.
Why do I enjoy this man so? Because he is the first to discover the secrets that lie within my own chosen fields, the lives and deaths secreted within us, the inestimable value of our own insides. Fuck me, I’m gushing. Neither scholars nor scientists should gush, but I am talking about the Big Things. I could never have discovered them without Hermatros and his fu. At Lady Jane’s there are pages of drawings of the little buggers. How in hell could he see them? I wager they were bigger then.
Hermatros is the first to discover that human stool freshly laid at an early hour under the morning’s not-yet-too-hot sun produces more accurate predictions than anything he’s scooped out of an animal’s guts. Hariff Ben Yodoff, of the Bengali Institute and Library of Free Trade in San Pedro, California (the only other person I’ve come across who writes about purnoyennes and purnoying), makes a convincing argument that this carrythrough from animal to human was not all that difficult. A hot day. A fowl with rotten intestines. Another bird with innards that are too congealed to “read.” A lamb with offal that “says” the most awful things, so awful that even to hint of them to Nuncas Our Leader could mean “off with your head.” Decapitation of earlier soothsayers is recalled. There … there on the ground is a pile of human shit. It matters little whose. That it is there in the first place is in itself an Omen. That it is there is also not unusual. Indians shit shamelessly and on the spot. But look. The turds point this way and that way. How interesting. My goodness. That is actually very exciting. Let us see if the portent in this shape and this position indicates something that will come true. I must tell Nuncas immediately. I cannot tell Nuncas. He will not appreciate that the source of such good news is this. Well, he doesn’t have to know. You get Professor Yodoff’s drift. You have no idea how much of history is pieced together in this shit-rearranging way. The Omen brings more land. Nuncas is thrilled. He is hungry for more land. That he and his tribe must now murder other Indians to get it is beside the point. They will get it.
Hermatros’s predictions using human shit come true more often than not. Nuncas, now ascended to the throne as Seneck Satchem, is over the moon. Hermatros becomes his favorite and only purnoyenne, an acknowledgment, as my cousin could tell you, not dissimilar to those warrants issued by Britain’s Royal Family that allow Thomas Crapper and Son to advertise “By Appointment, Supplier of Toilets to Her Shitting Majesty the Queen.”
This first record of the occurrence of anal intercourse in our country that I am going to reveal to you is of enormous historic importance. I’m not saying that the parchments at Greeting describe the very first occurrence of anal intercourse in North America. I’m not that naïve; only a dumb asshole could and would say that. I’m saying they constitute the first record that contains some concrete evidence that it is happening, whether it happened before or not. Ours is a country with museums that record every ancient bug in amber for posterity, but try to locate in any history book or encyclopedia the first time somebody gets fucked—forget it.
Of course, it could have been the first time, although my own sense of things is that it wasn’t. Any good scientist admits begrudgingly that there’s never anything really new under the sun. It’s only a question of goddamn time before some eager beaver will bonk us with a multivolume history of anal activities since the Garden of Eden. God, I hope so. It’s waaaaaay overdue. Anyway, I have studied those parchments at Greeting and I’ve studied Seneck with, and consulted with, not a few Seneck scholars on their main reservation in Particle, South Dakota. There are, as in all tongues, some words that can be translated with different meanings. But there are some words that can mean only one thing. Farhoot, for instance, can only be “up the ass,” and tutsdonngg, with the double-consonant ending, can only be “shit on the cock.” These are both pretty site-specific. “Shit on the cock” is not, for instance, “shit on the ground” or an early version of the idiomatic “shit on a stick.” I realize that this verges on the farcical, if not the absurd. Be tolerant. Most of history is like this. You just didn’t know it.
It is obvious, because of his use of the imperfect future subjunctive (“would that it will continue to be so”—Seneck is a quagmire for the grammatically fussy), that Hermatros was thrilled by the experience, a
s well as frightened by it. He says, “oh lord how long oh lord”—visda-danay-tuvonk, an unmistakable word meaning not only the Great Father but a Heavenly Experience. His life up to this time, remember, has been a quiet one, devoted to the study of foul gizzards and the contemplation of his ancestors and how his predictions could bring everything all peacefully together on that great grazing field on the plains. But a new fuljum (“contemplation” or “concern” or “consternation”—something along these lines that begins with “con”) now takes over his life. It is what today we would call “sexual.”
The very use of this word—sexual—is a cuntfucking, cocksucking scholarly land mine. You simply cannot make a simple declarative sentence like the following without being crucified, academically speaking, on all sides:
“Since human nature has changed, or evolved, very little over the centuries, it is quite reasonable to believe that people did then all the things which people do now, to and from and upon and over and under each other.”
I made the above statement originally at the First Annual Conference on Sexual Identity: Whither Nunhood? (It was not only the first one but also the last.) Prides of scholars pounced, demanding I relinquish my habit. It is useless declaring to the poor misguided intelligentsia of my church, “Thou doth protest too fucking much”; that does not change their minds. Religion has less elasticity than science. Religion has less elasticity than just about anything, including fucking steel rods.