The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  But real history is not a story. Stories manipulate, and their characters are at the mercy of their cruel creators, who tell it their way. So aren’t good historians permitted to string together a more sophisticated form of narrative, one in which there is more than one kind of thread to follow, to pursue, each of them, of course, suspect by somebody? Isn’t this closer to the truth of actuality?

  All I have so far are bits and pieces. I have no alternative but to press on. I am not dissatisfied. I see a bouncing ball that I can follow. Do you? Can’t you? Why not? It’s all becoming much more clear to me.

  So far I trust my instincts and my nose. If I am as faithful to my beliefs as a Parkman or a Gibbon or a Macauley or a Herodotus, the greatest originator of us all because he was the first (the older the historian, the fewer his attributions for his “facts”—Parkman has almost none), why should I not be as believed as they are?

  Of course, one must always be harder on oneself! But does that mean falling into the same pit any old historian faces when the evidence is not so stone hard as the enormous world of Unbelievers demands? I hope not. I must always ask myself, Am I being too timid? Somehow I don’t think this will be a problem. And God help us if I become just “any old historian.” They are why we are in so much shit.

  Can’t you see and feel the superfluity of Hermia’s evil that has been perking from the get-go?

  So far, isn’t it enough for me to ask you, “Bear with me”?

  PHILADELPHIA

  My name is Hogarth Hooker. I am son to Rev. Ezra Hooker, Jr. I have written these words about my life.

  I studied young and hard and long to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor because I am the son of a famous and hateful father, from a family that hurt so many people.

  But my father’s father had been as hateful to him, and his father and the father before him, old Tom Hooker himself. He had been a fervid monster as well. I wondered if this meant there was no hope for my own happiness, for any future Hooker’s happiness.

  In 1787, when I was twenty-two, I was invited to Philadelphia by a frightened group of doctors, several of whom I had studied with at Yaddah, where I was first in my class. I think I was chosen for two reasons. First, because I can pay my expenses out of my own fortune, their treasury being insufficient to pay for much of anything, certainly not anything to do with health. And I have made a small name for myself because in Massachusetts, where our family business is the collection and removal of human waste, I have been instrumental in attending to its safety. The doctors here are bereft of any other “expert” to talk to. They claim to have consulted many, with no success.

  Philadelphia appears to be a sick place ever since Mr. Penn birthed it in 1682. There are epidemics regularly, and much resultant death. The place is all set on marshy grounds, its weather excessively hot or freezing cold. The great Dr. Benjamin Rush reckons that there have been plagues of the smallpox here in each of these years: 1731, 1736, 1756, 1759, and 1773. And still it is the largest town in America. It is almost impossible to fathom why people still live here when this disease alone has carried so many hundreds away.

  I come to Philadelphia as the Constitution of the United States of America is on the eve of being forged here. There is great hope in the air. Can these men create an America that will please all?

  A number of people are dying from something that looks, to learned eyes, like syphilis. But syphilis, while it has been seen for centuries, has never been seen to be so immediately fatal. And yet it does look like syphilis, and is like it, too, in that the act of sex appears conjoined with these new cases, or so these learned eyes which summoned me have said.

  There is no word for what I am trying to teach myself to do. I call myself a sanitarian. I say that I am interested in the health of the public and in how we infect each other, but secretly I am most interested in what men think of their cocks, which is to say, what they think of themselves as sexual beings. Sexual is a new word for us, an actual word for what our men of God condemn with such contempt.

  A first walk around reveals the town is putrid. The streets are overflowing with filth, as is the river that travels through the town’s backyards. Amputated limbs floating down the De-La-Ware are not uncommon sights. The houses, bigger and bigger the closer to town one comes, are fancy in front and full of shit behind.

  Philadelphians do not collect human waste as we do back home in Ontuit, in loads, by horse and dray, for removal elsewhere. They say there is too much here to collect, if they are not too ashamed to talk about it at all. When confronted with the absurdity of their position, the doctors respond instead with questions of their own. “How do you dispose of the waste of twenty residents in one house alone? Or twenty houses side by side? Or twenty streets in this same neighborhood? Or twenty additional neighborhoods? Or the whole of Philadelphia itself? Your Ontuit is but a speck on Philadelphia’s size! Why, we would be buried in piles of shit were it not for the river to dump it in.” Boston and New York both have more capacious river basins that are for the moment performing adequately in this regard. How does England deal with so much shit? I am asked. As you do, I say, but the river Thames moves swiftly. This De-La-Ware is a stagnant swamp. Stagnant water is dangerous water. It alone can kill you.

  Twelve whores calling themselves the Peabody Sisters live in a lovely house on Chestnut Street, “the best street,” as they advertise it. Another dozen live in a hovel outside town in Vanderberg, on the river’s edge. They call themselves the Sisters of Chestnut, and are fond of quipping, “We’re the girls who fuck our founding fathers.” Seven whores and three customers were the first to die, some from each house. Now there have been half a hundred various, and from places other than these two. This is a great number from something so strange and unknown. A number of the dead bodies are found in the river. No one comes forth voluntarily to identify any of the dead, even, I gather, their own families and relatives. The dead bodies, I should state, are often hideous in their disfigurement, in limb and skin especially.

  My great-grandfather and my grandfather and my father all predicted such would happen in a sinning city at such a sinning time. I must prove them wrong, if only for my own salvation. Medicine must overcome the idiocies of the pulpit.

  I am questioned vigorously by the doctors, late at night in a makeshift sequestered ward—the town does not yet have a hospital—filled with moaning men and women. I venture to suggest that the products of the body—disease, blood, feces—are interconnected. “How can they be interconnected?” I am asked. How can they not be? That is not a satisfactory answer. “You are too young,” they tell me. “On what basis do you even make this ridiculous statement?” The older ones are the most dismissive.

  Several younger doctors whisper to me. “Some new kind of pox is rife and no one wants to speak of it or let it be known. For who will come to Philadelphia then?”

  There is much mumbling. “It is not an easy death. It is not an easy death.” Dr. Clement John Norris has seen his own son die but several days ago.

  Three more of the whores and six more men now die. That is the highest count so far for one day’s dead.

  “Thank you, Dr. Hooker, and good night.”

  The assembled doctors have had enough of me.

  I attempt to appeal to them.

  “Our history is coming of age!” I tell them. “The stuff of our lives is accreting, like a snowball. Things are beginning to stick to each other: neighborhoods, lawyers, merchants, tailors, greengrocers, doctors. We all mingle with each other, unavoidably. We must look at these sores as windows on our selves and our future. How can we stay together?”

  I fear I am not expressing myself clearly. I am still trying to work out my philosophy. I cannot answer any of them. I am obsessed with blood and with disease and how it transfers from one to another person. And sex as a part of these. But these cases I am seeing do not tell me how to stop deaths occurring because of them. My hands are tied by ignorance!

  Invasive surgery as a
cure has found a home in Philadelphia. The esteemed Dr. Benjamin Rush is called our first great doctor, the greatest among us all. I call him the King of Bleeders. He believes that every sickness comes from excited blood vessels and that a good bleeding makes the sickness go away. These past weeks he has been proved wrong again and again. But no one remarks upon his useless and dangerous acts. The sum total of the knowledge of these prescribers in Philadelphia is hot mudpacks and leechings and teas steeped from pulverized plants and these idiot bleedings. Dog blood is being given to humans in Europe. They are trying adventurous new things over there! Why are we so timid? I do not want to go to my grave remembered as the shit man from Massachusetts.

  I do not like Mr. Benjamin Franklin. I am suspicious of men whom everyone worships, like Dr. Rush, like all my preaching Hooker kin. Franklin is everyone’s friend and I try to be no one’s, for fear of bondage to false gods. He claims to be a scientist, inventor, diplomat, politician, moralist, wit. That is too many things for one man to be good at. For all that is said and known about him, no one knows with certainty what it is he does. Several of the Peabody girls say that he is a womanizer. He takes opium when he is with them because he is in pain from heaving such a fleshy frame. He does not strike me as a man who is interested in women. He is a very good champion of himself alone.

  He has asked to meet me. We walk around his town.

  “Look, over there,” he says to me, rambling as we walk, “two men slipping into the house of Laurinder Tresh. They will say they are attending a reading club, and each will show some book he has brought to share with other men also arriving to read. The hushmarked. If Hamilton could diddle the cock of our commander in chief, why not these men who say they read books?”

  It is as if he is conducting a tour. “Even in France I never knew of such a lot of single and lonely ladies as are here. They all come to find a husband. There is no patience. Should a woman see a man of interest, she does not think it rude to inquire immediately, often to his face, of his availability. ‘Time is precious’ are words of explanation given for almost all behaviors. Girls come to town from everywhere. Philadelphia is like a magnet whose force of attraction is money. A man in a suit with his hair slicked shiny and his boots not caked in mud is money. You cannot deny the atmosphere here, the whisper, the belief in the destiny of tomorrow. It is believed this town will be the capital of the world, the richest place ever to be. A piece of land that costs ten dollars today is one hundred by a week. And next month upon it will be built a house that will be joined in another month by two, then ten. And then all will be sold for a dozen times their cost and the recipient of this bounty is on his way to more. It all happens like lightning. And I am a man who knows his lightning.

  “So many have come to this country with every conceivable baggage save common sense. That is why they revere me. ‘You are Mr. Common Sense,’ they say to me. And so I am. I am. Where are the intelligent? Right here in front of you. I am the sum total of all knowledge in this town. William Penn himself warned that reading books is not so good as praying. We will become a dumb country. Mark my words.

  “Oh, it is a terrible burden to be right,” he concludes, or seems to be doing so, but he goes on. He goes on. And on. I have captured as much from my memory as is necessary to paint him.

  Finally he demands, “What have you discovered since your arrival?”

  “Pus, pustules, sores, scabs, dementia, fits of raving and wild thrashings preceding seizure and death, rarely seen here before. Convulsions most florid, fevers most elevated, chokings more apoplectic than any recollected.”

  I see him wince with each mention of these unpleasant matters. I continue.

  “Uncontrollable voidings of the bladder, intestines, and stomach. Tempestuous bowel movements continuing uninterruptedly even when no intake occurs. What of remedies? Salves? Bloodlettings? Plugs up the rectum? There are in your town champions for each. As well as the cutting out or sewing up of vaginas, the severing of penises, the stitching up of rectums with gut. Each, I gather, has been quietly performed, or as quietly as such pain allows. In one case a woman exploded. And … and … should it indeed be syphilis, there are not sufficient sheepskin sacks or makers of them as are routinely found abroad.”

  To which Ben Franklin responds, “This is a country of differences which everyone demands be made the same. I fear this is only a magical idea. Still, I remain an old man of pride and curiosity, a constant observer of one and all, a roamer of the universal realm. But you are young.”

  To which I more fervently reply, “Sir! I add to the foregoing more alarming symptoms: bodies entirely scabbed, fierce howling not unlike a wolf’s, the urination of blood, shit containing bits of intestine, ghastly suffocations, ghastly fevers that burn men up. And still your doctors do nothing but leech and bleed.”

  To which Ben Franklin responds with amazing speed, “Young man, my town is filled with men come here to compose this new land’s legal foundation. George Clymer, John Dickinson, Elbridge Gerry, William Johnson, Rufus King, John Langdon, Thomas McKean, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Abner Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Pernnilius Abraham Pinckney, Edmund Randolph, Ebenezer Punic, George Read, James Wilson, Matthew Thornton, William Whipple, Francis Lewis, Israel Clark, William Ellery, George Wythe, John Morton, William Pacah, Caesar Rodney, William Blount, William Few, Jared Ingersoll. I know their names as those of honored family. Whipple and Blount seen walking together provoke small girls to rush to them and curtsey. Our Constitution proceeds. We shall be free and independent. There is much to do. God give us the strength to do it all.”

  “Sir, there is no time!” I finally intrude upon his performance. “This town grows filthier by the day. The riches you describe lure multitudes more to augment this filth I beg to bring to your attention. I cling to the notion that could we all but talk aloud about it, matters would not be so dire!”

  To which he replies in most unexpected fashion, “Have you heard that jest is made about my yard? ‘Old Ben Franklin has a dripping cock,’ they say, ‘but better his cock run off than his mouth.’ Yes, I hear all this. I hear everything. I hear that many find me intolerable, unbearably pompous, with a pretentious unasked-for opinion about everything. To have worked so hard and given so much and to be laughed at for reward.”

  Mr. Franklin sighs wearily. As he turns to walk off, he says again, “It is a terrible burden to be right.”

  A fair is under way here. It is being held on a field far removed from the center, in a pasture once used for visiting preachers and their Puritan awakenings, no longer popular in a town of Quakers, but now adjoining a graveyard for the indigent. I have heard about the fair from the Peabody whores in Vanderberg. A number of foreign lands have dispatched representatives to bring best wishes to the new Americans who have abandoned those lands to come here. It has not been well received and those attending are few. Walking through the fairgrounds I am approached by a sailor, a mammoth black and bearded man.

  “I can sell you something that can destroy all mankind,” the sailor says to me, holding forth a small package wrapped in paper.

  I am startled. “Is it Mr. Borstal, now?”

  “Yes, Dr. Hog! I had heard that you were here. It’s good to see you.”

  Mr. Darcus Borstal is a shit shoveler I had met in Boston, a jolly young man with a smile for everyone. He had shoveled shit in London originally, where he was born and raised by a nobleman from whom, as I recall, he ran away. It is one of the few lines of work in which a Negro can travel without being arrested or indentured. How did he get from London to Boston to Philadelphia?

  “Ah, there is a dramatic story in that. The heart travels across the ocean with the body.”

  “And what are you attempting to sell me, my good man?” I have taken his package and unwrapped it. It contains two small vials.

  “As I have said, something that can destroy all mankind.”

  I clap him on the shoulder. “I very much doubt that, for since my birth I have heard
men promise the end of the world, yet here we are. But I shall buy it anyway. What is it?” I am holding one of the vials up to the sun. Inside is what looks to be a chunk of rotting flesh.

  Mr. Borstal looks around to make certain we are alone. “That is my cock,” he says, and lowers his trousers. He is indeed without a penis.

  The suturing has been most well done. There is a metal straw, which appears to drain fluids into a leather pouch ingeniously strung around his waist.

  “That is a fine job,” I say, my medical curiosity having overcome my shock. “Where and by whom was it accomplished?”

  I am holding up the other bottle, which appears to hold a piece of spotted skin floating in what he says is gin.

  “Is that pox? These are not spots I recognize.”

  “It is the pox of the wife I left in Paris. She it was I gave it to. She is dead. What do you think? You get the moon when you buy the stardust.”

  I give Mr. Borstal several coins and rewrap the vials clumsily and prepare to say goodbye. “I wish you well with your injury. Might I inquire how it came about?”

  “As I say, the heart travels across the ocean with the body.” He hands me a letter. And he is gone.

  My grandfather Abstruse Mather believed in the supernatural. He looked at cabbage roots and deemed them capable of miracles. He would eat them. He dug up red earth and mixed it with wine and offered it to God, before consuming it himself. He preached about the terror of swords in the sky, and his parishioners saw swords in the sky. “Those swords are the unloosed passions concealed beneath your trousers,” he would warn them; “and these passions are the most terrifying part of human flesh; they can spear you to death.” The weak in heart would kill themselves when he frightened them so much. After hearing him, they often determined it was safer to be dead. Abstruse, of all the Mathers and Cottons, claimed the record for these.

  Is there no man alive who is at ease with his cock? Why do preachers never preach on this?