The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Diet being what it is, there’s no telling what Hermatros was able to find covertly lying around the village earth on a regular basis. He is not what today would be called “regular.” Nor is anyone else. So Hermatros has to sneak around when no one is looking, usually very early in the morning, when the first shit has been voided and the crapper has gone off to hunt and no one else is around to see our purnoyenne scooping up shit. It must not be known that he’s switched to shit. When he is observed, he claims to be “just cleaning up,” which is not a custom any Seneck is familiar with, since human waste is traditionally left in situ.

  Fortunately, it’s an era when “new things” (nunda dinkele) are happening all over the place. (You are correct: the shit of women is forbidden, just as the entrails of female animals are forbidden, and just as female purnoyennes are forbidden. Hermatros has evidently determined not to fuck around with this one.)

  It’s unknown if a connection between food consumption and bowel movements (hartzz) has been made yet. We’re still uncertain when indigestion per se became a subject to discuss among friends. This uncertainty has been discussed by Sister Beata Fruhlingeis of my staff, in her slim pamphlet “The Digestive Tracts of Early America,” and I would go into more detail but not right now because I know you’re in a hurry to move along to George Washington, our first gay president and another great American who had trouble with his genital-urinary tract (they all did in those days), also not right now.

  The more successful Hermatros’s predictions prove, the more territory his monarch naturally covets. But on any given day there is only so much stool he can collect from his current sources that lies flat, docile, and well formed, i.e., legible. He is forced, yet again, to use his ingenuity.

  I must interject here that Hermatros appears to have had a stunted arm, which is another reason he endears himself to me. His parchments contain many stick figures of the author that show one arm, his left one, as shorter than the other.

  How is Hermatros going to get good shit? I really should use the Seneck word for shit, which is uunth. (A turd is not, correctly, uunth. Uunth is whatever comes out, while a turd is, correctly, compacted uunth, hard, and in one piece.) Where to get good uunth? However will his people have the future his position demands he portend for them? And he knows that if what he soothsays is unproductive, Nuncas will dispatch him straight to Voct (Hell). Nuncas also removes both penis and testicles for major malfeasances, a trick passed down from those Spanish butchers. It’s always been a crapshoot being a priest.

  He teaches himself how to insert a stick of odom (compacted verbonga, a popular herb not unlike marijuana) gently into rectums, first into his own, just to see how it feels. He does it gently, so that narcotic from the glob of slippery sap on the tree twig’s bark begins seeping into the walls of his rectum, then he gently inserts the stick into the tribe’s one and only deaf mute, and plunges his short withered arm into the mute’s innards. Inside he opens his tiny fist so it can scoop its precious cargo and withdraw it slowly, slowly into the open air, then he molds it patty-cake and lays it on his holy platter so he can read whatever fortunes reside within it to be reported to the Satchem. The speechless one loves the whole thing. His smile is blissful. The stick of odom works. Hermatros is overjoyed. A world of unlimited shit lies before him. Halle-fucking-lujah! And Nuncas’s ensuing battles are all victories.

  It is not long before Hermatros has the deaf mute fucking him.

  And thus is history made.

  Fu newsham vrai, alhecta, a la sechel. (The commas are mine.) The entire sentence, which according to my sources in Particle contains a number of idiomatic expressions that have not previously come down to us, has the sense of: “I transferred to him the wisdom of my hard uunth, for he fucked me with his cock, and my shit was on the head of his cock, and I took his cock into my mouth, and now we both have bugs.” (As I have indicated, one word often does the work of many in Seneck.)

  And so we come at last to parasites. Bugs. Amoebas. “Fu.”

  Let me say—and I should have told you this up front—that homosexuality was not forbidden among the Seneck. Far from it: homosexuality was rampant among the early Indians, and all Indians following that. Even purnoyennes, vowed to celibacy for some unknown reasons, were permitted a lapse or two behind the outhouse (which of course was the Great Outdoors). So it is not long before word gets around the tribe of this new exhilarating activity.

  Much of our knowledge of homosexuality among the later Indians, such as it is, comes from the early work of my colleague Dr. Israel Jerusalem, now jammed into some Alaskan pokey by Ruester’s fuckwits. You ought to find a way to get to him, Freddie. He’s an orgy of information on early faggotry. The famous studies he made in the 1920s that led to his own Nobel for finding the cure to Utzo are detailed in his notebooks in Iron Vaultum, where he also unfortunately detailed too beautifully certain native customs of his beloved Iwacki, which landed him in prison. In Alaska. In northern Alaska. That’s right across from Siberia. Israel has written to me that he can see Siberia from his cell.

  That’s all for now. If I have only skimmed the surface, I remind you that I am, after all, a nun.

  DR. ISRAEL JERUSALEM TELLS YOU NOW

  The relationships among early American Indian young boys and men form one of the most intricate sexual systems that I, Dr. Israel Jerusalem, have studied in any culture. Adult men were to be found with more than one sexual male relationship, even though other “normal” sexual outlets were there for them. In the Seneck tribe, for instance, adolescent boys sought affection in older unrelated males. They established homosexual relationships with them as their fellators, i.e., the suckers of their pre and pubescent little penises, their cocksuckers, you should excuse this accurate term. The young kiddies themselves initiated these relationships. The adult had nothing to do with the choice but to relax and accept.

  When anal intercourse occurred, with the older man the active partner, the justification was that such insemination would “grow” the boys into men. The same is found among the Kadruma Indians, where, during initiation around the age of nine or ten, the boy received semen through anal intercourse so he could become “big.” But in this tribe it is the man who chooses the lad, who then becomes the object of sexual attention from this one man only and for many years to come. The boy’s ideal inseminator was his future wife’s father or brother, a relationship that ended only when the boy developed a beard. Dame Lady Hermia recounted to me how similar this was to ancient Greece.

  Among the warlike Vertrubas, semen was rubbed on the bodies of young boys. These novices masturbated themselves, and their own semen was smeared on them by their fellow youths because they thought this would render them invisible to their enemies at night.

  The Pasquods believed in both oral and anal conception. That no births could be attributed to these practices did not diminish the belief in possibility, in “someday.”

  When the Seneck integrated with the Sequoias, boys took turns masturbating and having intercourse with each other, and took turns playing the active and passive roles. All this was considered part of the accommodation expected of friendship. Friendship was very important, the most important thing, and existed only for males.

  Does not all of the above challenge historians of sexuality to explain how marriage and sexual relations with women arose in the context of adult males first having sex so exclusively with boys?

  I will come back later to tell you additionally about more modern tribes that continue this custom. In all instances, both long ago and still today, these actions were grounded in love and not in obligation. It is very touching, no? If you allow this so to be.

  DAME LADY HERMIA ADDS A BIT

  When the Tilloid-Seneck tribes faltered in reproducing, those remaining became first Nuhualtapecs, then Irquods. With this gradual absorption into newer and bigger tribes, the old ways of the ancestors faded away, and eventually all sex became novot, or sinful, to such a marked degree that overall tribal pop
ulations gradually decreased toward extinction, the greatest sadness. Hermatros and his people were to be no more. That is how, Israel, our marriage rituals of today swallowed, if you will, the older customs, and, if you will again, eliminated them.

  And of course their genocide. My distant kin neglects to approach this desolating subject. It’s all left to Hermia, the genocides, the plagues …

  DR. SISTER GRACE HOLDS HER GROUND

  I knew she couldn’t keep her piddling twatty two cents out of this. I will tell this story in any way I see fit.

  Anyway, it’s writing about all this boy-man pecker shit that landed Israel in the clinker. He was on a government grant back then and having sex with minors is about the biggest no-no in Washington to this day, and there’s no statute of limitations, and I miss him. We have too much important work yet to do to solve this bullcrap. No one has any idea how long the poor man is going to be kept in jail and at his age how long he can live like this. I know Dodo is trying to pull some strings but his string-pulling days are not what they once were, the poor farter. I hope I never have to go through what he has.

  But back to fu.

  Hermatros not only discovers fu, he determines there are 189 different families of fu. Within these families he identifies 1,023 separate and distinct members. On one long scroll of parchment there are 1,023 tiny drawings, an amazing sight.

  I am not going to list the 189 families or 1,023 species, although I was able to do so in my younger days. (My interest in all this had to be an ex-ex-cathedra extracurricular activity, let me tell you.) Amazingly, 98 percent of these parasites still exist, and are still swimming around the innards of the world’s populations. Hermatros’s work is so beautiful, and that it should still be so valid so many centuries later is so beautiful, that—crappy, annoying little buggers who help cause worldwide plagues or not—to be witness to his supreme achievement is so beautiful.

  People since time began have been carriers of bugs. Fart endlessly though we may, most of us never know what’s throwing the switch. Poisons, usually arsenic-based medicines, can rid our systems of the most obnoxious fu. Our insides adjust. Dinosaurs had intestinal parasites. Because certain fu are indeed killers, these tiniest of creatures may have been the death of those biggest. My colleague and former student Professor Tartrekka Khan of the University of Utter Polsky, Subsidiary Campus, Ganges, India, has written about this. Parasites are a terrible problem in unclean countries. And you tell me: Where’s the fucking shitty goddamn asshole country that can be called clean?

  I believe—and this is another one of those statements that gets me into a great deal of trouble—that any living thing that ever ate another living thing, which of course is all of us, has intestinal parasites of one sort or another. Intestinal parasites are endemic to life. Masses of the world’s populations are infected with bugs, most of them uncomfortably, some of them as carriers of poison. It has not been possible to treat most people successfully—that is, to rid their systems completely of fu. Fu outsmart many poisons that have been unleashed against them.

  Hermatros actually tells us that some fu are less benign than others. How did he know this? We are unable to see them without the aid of extreme magnification. Were ancient bugs larger, more visible? Have the exceptionally harsh medicines of modern times made them smaller? Perhaps the Indians did have some primitive form of microscopy, though we don’t credit such a discovery until the early seventeenth century brought Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch draper and lens grinder who scraped the skuzz off his teeth and placed it under his apparatus and saw little swimming creatures.

  By the end of what we know of his life, Hermatros writes: “I see them growing bigger and bigger and I wonder if they are eating my own flesh. I note that if a drop of my hartzz is mixed with a few drops of water so that it can be spread thinly on a piece of white pig’s skin, I can observe actual movement. Is what is moving eating the hartzz, and if so, was it, only hours earlier, eating me?”

  Since Hermatros is now using only hartzz and not dodenemelpa (“innards of a flying thing”), I wonder if Nuncas finally cottoned on to the fact that his now huge empire was built on shit. There is a very touching tablet Hermatros inscribed to “My ‘He,’” in which he thanks his devosta devosta (this word, repeated, is considered romantic) for the great pleasure of his penis up his rectum and for the shit on the end of his penis and for this gebafu (“gift of bugs”).

  By the end of the First Great Indian Migrations, which transpired between the death of Hermatros and the expansion of the Seneck from tribe to nation-state, say, from A.D. 900 until A.D. 1200—although that’s probably way too early, I always prefer to be too early than too late—there are so many fucking Indians, and Indians fucking, that anal intercourse is a definitely confirmed carrythrough to the heterosexual population. Anal intercourse can’t produce kids, of course, but it can produce something as much a part of that food train. Pleasure. Ecstasy. I am told there is something about sticking a dick up an asshole that feels so good that many are the heterosexual men who’ve been known to pull out of the vagina before orgasm and pump the rest into the woman’s rear. It really shouldn’t be so troubling to so many: even with all this up-the-ass stuff, the population of this land has multiplied mightily.

  History is a story. A story that can only remain a story until some historian comes along and tries to change it, to fuck it all up and over, which I know will happen to the story of this plague. Then it just becomes the next man’s story. One his-story begets another. Yes, it’s usually always men.

  Science is not a story. Science knows. That is why I am proud to be a scientist. But science comes after the story. There must always be the story first.

  As with the cause of anything, one is required to read between the lines. Reading between the lines, as you have pointed out, is not a sufficiently satisfactory surety for the sticklers. Sticklers are the party poops of everything: science, medicine, life. Certainly history. And I must admit, certainly the Catholic Church. My various Mothers Superior naturally frowned upon my interest in Hermatros. Like you, I have always been a troublemaker. They would have tossed me out for good if I did not win my Nobel Prize for my discovery of Vel. Vel is extracted from shit. Fresh shit. Newly shat shit. Newly shat human shit. I could tell you more about how we do this but not right now. But I learned it all from Hermatros.

  * * *

  You have now heard four world-famous experts. It is humbling to confront such wisdom. With such wisdom and urgency underlying the search for the cure for me and the destruction of me, I will live forever.

  The nun thinks I was there from the beginning. Guilty as charged. Of course I was in there, you dumb dodos. I was inside the dodo bird too, come to think of it, but it didn’t work out. There weren’t enough of them, and they were so big and clumsy and dumb that they had real trouble fucking each other. American Indians were a treat, as long as there were so many of them. Their braves did love fucking each other! Since they were all burning each other up when they died, I didn’t get as far into the New World as I wanted to. There are still a lot of American Indians, but they drink too much and smoke weeds, so they can’t get erections.

  Does anyone really believe that parasites or anal intercourse or fucking in groups, all of which you have lived with for thousands of years, would be enough to trigger an end-of-the-world-type plague?

  At the rate you are figuring things out, I’ll be blamed for causing everything.

  And I will have.

  Yup, listening to these windbags, I know I’ll live forever. At the rate you are figuring things out, I’ll live forever.

  I keep saying that. I mustn’t! It’s tempting what you call Fate, and what I call the way of the world.

  DAME LADY HERMIA RESUMES

  Researching plagues is a grotesque and tedious affair. There are only so many horrid statistics about dead bodies one can absorb. It is said by somebody or other that 42,836,486 died in that Black Death in the Europe of 1348 and following. Ten
thousand people died on a single day in Rome. What on earth does one do with ten thousand dead bodies in one day? How does one even count them? Did some official walk around with a handy pocket abacus and go click-click? Forty-two million dead? What happened to them? How does one dispose of 42 million bodies?

  Predictions are now seriously being made that one billion people could become infected with what is happening to you. How will the world deal with the loss of one billion people?

  In the old plagues rats always appear the instant there is something for them to eat. Like viruses, rats are first-rate travelers, and they’re not picky eaters. Teeny teeny fossilized rat skeletons are prevalent along certain seacoasts, including your own. Thousands, millions, trillions of them: could these tiny carriers of poison have been implicated in the removal of all the mountainous piles of dead bodies each and every earlier plague produced? That is a lot of rat excreta. Underneath or on top of or beside Bosco’s dead monkeys.

  I would like to utilize the word shit but that is my cousin’s way of the word. I do not wish to enter it. And yet there were so many, many rats all over the world, what other word is as expressive of this all-embracing … state of affairs? Excreta is simply too polite. Feces is too diminutive for the amount’s utter profundity, and turd is too neat. Evacuation? Much too redolent of wartime. Excrement? Perhaps. Anyway, there was an awful lot of it, and simply everywhere, so just tuck that image, and its malodors, into the forefront of your consciousness. Because if you were lucky enough to stay alive, there was no way out of it. Extensive excrement layered the world.

  For ages everyone believed rats were the big eaters, the lorry drivers who trucked away all those bodies.

  Only now it’s turning out that perhaps they weren’t. In many places of plague there weren’t any rats. Too cold. Too far north. Whatever. But no rats. Hawks, perhaps. And starving people. But no one has dared consider this last possibility. And as yet, fossilized or buried human remains do not reveal guts chockablock with masticated people. But then no one has been looking for it.