The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  What would ever make people believe that shit and sex and religion are inter-mix’d? This question haunts me.

  * * *

  Such is the book of philosophy I try, and try again, to write. Now that I have writ this small portion, what can I say?

  These thoughts are most peculiar. And yet I have them.

  The world is a peculiar place in more ways than are considered.

  Is that not what I learned in Philadelphia?

  Causes, and the effects of them, are not what we want to see, or know.

  What, then, do we want to see, and know?

  Whatever the answer, I fear it is a great secret I am striving to see face to face.

  Who will want to know that the penis is the secret to the world and the key to all its actions? For that is what I think I shall find.

  How do you tell such a secret to the world?

  Do others have such unvoiced thoughts? How am I ever to know?

  The maid who cleans my room asked me to read her what I was writing. I did so. I was asked by the proprietor to leave Toobeloo forthwith. In fact, he escorted me to the stagecoach depot with a rifle and sat there with me for some hours waiting for it to arrive. He did not take his eyes off me. I tried to engage him in conversation, to no avail.

  CONCORDIA, EASTERN SHORE, MARYLAND, MARCH 12, 1790

  I wonder if semen and shit share anything in common. I must research this matter when I return to Ontuit.

  I am not gifted sufficient in science to locate the answers to all the questions that plague my mind. There is no one with whom I can share my thoughts. When I talk I frighten people. Well, I come by it honestly. I am a Hooker, after all.

  My nanny used to tell me, “If your semen can birth a baby and your shit can help grow corn, then a man is not a useless thing.”

  Wandering this country I must perforce live with myself. I have never been alone with myself for such a long time. I find it is a struggle.

  Here in Concordia, I have fucked with my first woman. She has been a long time in arriving! At last I shed my shyness and timidness. She was wife to the local collector of clams. Her hands were rough from shucking them, but her face and eyes sparkled. We did our coupling in a shack on the shore and we lay on a bed of clamshells! It was most pleasant, if a bit peculiar and filled with humps and bumps. I was happy, and yes, proud.

  I fell asleep and when I awoke she was gone. But a man of great height and wide shoulders and strong arms stood over me, his penis out of his pants and erect. He was waving it in my face to indicate I should take it in my mouth. He was not threatening me. Indeed, his face was most kind, and welcoming. So I did what he desired. His penis was noticeable for its saltwater taste. He did not take long to deliver his semen into my mouth. It too tasted of salt-water. When he was finished I invited him to sit down so we could talk.

  “Tell me about yourself,” I started.

  “What more do you need to know? You have fucked the wife and sucked the husband.” He roared with laughter.

  “Does this happen here often with passing strangers?”

  “We do not see many passing strangers, but if we did it would not go amiss. Is such behavior strange to you? Then you must live in a place of many people, not like here, where it is so lonely it hurts.”

  Before I could respond, he took my cock and made it hard and then put it into his mouth so that my pleasure returned once more.

  I was urged by both of them to stay for dinner and I tried again to discuss our unusual couplings. Men talk only when they are hard and ready for pleasuring, and not always then. And a woman is quiet in front of her man. So they were not much interested in a discussion. They had done what they had done and thought it not much to talk about. We all drank wine and went to sleep separately and in the morning I sensed that it was time to say goodbye. They had much work to do with clams.

  I recall as I went on my way how he had made me laugh when he wanted a second act of sex and his cock was slow to harden. I was to see this often, men talking to their penises, as if to another being. “Come on, George!” “Let us go, Peter!” “Come to Father, John.” If their members do not respond they hit them.

  NORTHERN TERRITORY, TERRA HOTE, NOVEMBER 3, 1790

  This place is flat and small. There are people who speak French and recall the Indian war.

  Traveling the roads into the heart of this country shows me that there is not much people do but for work. Joy and sparkling eyes are fleeting. When I try to discover their thoughts, I am told, “We have work to do. Our lives are hard. Goodbye.”

  In small towns or outposts like this one men get drunk a lot. Women do not come to these places to live. There is naught but the hard work of clearing the land, which is overgrown with nature, high and thick. I asked one man if he stayed here to forget. He looked at me with nary a glimmer of understanding. Fearing I had insulted him, I moved on.

  At night the men repair to a tavern set up in a log cabin. Here, after a while of drinking, they perform on each other without shame or concern. They need relief from their needs, I hear them say, and, since they do the same most every night, their needs must be most strong. Their faces are blank, as if they are watching wind or rain. There is no joy apparent in the performance. But then there are few smiles during the daytime either.

  I spent the past many months working in a camp for logging men. The work was especially hard and I was always very tired. I am not certain why I did it for so long. I expect I thought being in the midst of so many men would give me information, but they were all as tired as I at the end of the day and not interested in talk.

  There was much coupling among them, always swift and necessary, like removing mud from boots before entering a new room. I saw no affection exchanged. Always eyes were tightly closed and britches swiftly hoisted when the act was over. Insofar as I could avoid it, I did not partake. The harshness of sex with these men was not appealing. Few want to do anything but have their cocks inside an asshole. Not everyone is comfortable with this. There is much fighting for surpremacy, like roosters, I guess, or dogs. Few are interested in using their mouths.

  One night the owner of the camp—a man of seventy or more, I would say, tall but still most muscled in his arms—pulled off his shirt and grabbed me in a rough embrace, kissing me and using his tongue to taste me. He had protruding tits that sagged like an old woman’s and he was trying to get one of them into my mouth.

  “Suck! Suck! You bastard man, suck my tits! Suck, goddamn you! I own this place and I order you to suck my tits!”

  Around us were gathered the men I felled trees with by day. They were drunk now, and they took up his words. “Suck, suck, suck!” they chanted, stomping their heavy work boots on the floor of this cabin where we also ate and slept.

  I had little choice but to take his tit in my mouth. Well, I had tried other peculiar things before, and I reminded myself that that was a principal reason for my journey. He smelled terrible, like the dying men in Philadelphia, and there was liquid oozing from the tit that I surmised to be a bodily poison of some sort. With a mighty surge of strength he threw me up into the air, and I would have fallen hard but for the men closest around us catching me. I would have been relieved of my distress had they not immediately relieved me of my clothes. Six or seven of them pinned me to the floor facedown and proceeded one by one to fuck me. There were some thirty of them in all, and each took his time coming to his climax, or not. I wanted to lose consciousness but I could not. One or two of them passed out in drunkenness while still inside me. When all was silent at last, the old man picked up his rifle, shot them all dead one by one, and motioned me to go, his eyes filled with tears. “I am sorry,” he said to me as he turned the rifle on himself.

  I recovered my clothes. I located a small glass jar and squeezed into it some of the juice from his tits, tucking the jar in my pack with the vials containing the flesh of Borstal and his wife.

  I knew I had to leave before all the dead bodies were come upon, but I could
barely walk. I stumbled to a small shack where we left the tools, the saws and axes, and collapsed on a pile of seed bags. I passed out for I do not know how long, but I know I had a great fever that kept me tossing in sweat and nightmares. When at last I had the energy to get outside and feel the cold air in my face, the cabin was gone, burned to the ground. There was nothing but the smell of charred flesh in the air.

  It was a long and painful walk to the next township. The roads were coated with snow. The wind whipped me forward. When I arrived I was greeted with suspicion as the new face in town. I was accustomed to that look. I found a poor accommodation to sleep in and eat some food.

  It took me some time to mend. I was afraid a serious injury had been done me, either of the flesh or through some infection transferred to me, but after several weeks I felt almost myself again. I worked for meal money and a cot in back of a schoolhouse, ignoring the teacher when she inquired why I did not sit down “to take a load off your feet, sir.”

  * * *

  I then begin a course of longer wanderings wherein I know not the dates nor make entry of them. I am lost and I know I am lost. I feel a failure in everything I’ve done. I have not loved or been loved. I have not succeeded in any fashion, and Hookers, if anything in this world, are meant to excel at something, if not godly at least measurable for decency and respect. I just walked and slept and ate and shat and found labor to make some coins and walked some more. People who talked to me received no response. I begged sometimes, I even stole when I was able. My bearded face I know was sinister and so I was more left alone. I knew I stank from lack of bathing or any hygiene. My God, what had become of me, I was able to ask myself again and again. Looking back I note that, not by design, I had stayed away from any beaten path, large and growing places, prosperity, and even merriment. All I saw were people working hard and bent over from exhaustion and, yes, lack of joy. Most surprisingly there were few churches and no Great Awakenings here. I had thought Puritans were everywhere and had taken over everything. The few churches I went into, to keep warm, were sparsely attended and the preachers often had not shown up. I remember pledging to locate a smile on a lovely young woman’s face, and I looked and looked but I could not find her. No, I saw no joy. Not in faces or smiles or in gratitude to anyone or anything, certainly to no deity. I visited places of healing, tiny … hospitals is too grand a word. Clinics some called themselves. There are never any doctors. We must be too far in the wilderness for doctors. “We get sick and we just die,” a nurse of sorts told me. “Isn’t it the same everywhere else?” When I told her about Yaddah Medical School she said it sounded like heaven and where could this town get “one of them who learned there.” I turned and ran away. How long this lasted, and how I beat it out so that I came out of it, I have no idea. But I did. One day I knew that once again I could see clearly. I was ravenous but not for food. The one thing I was most hungry for was to fuck a woman. I start talking again to men and this time I am hearing answers. Men are most angry when their penises do not do what they are told. “If you are a doctor like you say, then give me something guaranteed to make me hard!” I hear this over and over, so many times it hammers itself into my brain. If there is one thing that most men want it’s this.

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, JANUARY 2, 1792

  From a doctor here I learn there is a term for this thing so dearly sought.

  Aphrodisiac.

  “The man who discovers one will become the richest man in the world and bring much joy and happiness to all mankind as well.”

  The doctor says he believes it possible to find such a thing in nature and ingest it.

  I wonder if I would have given this much thought had I not encountered these past years of wandering with the problem myself. Many a lonely night I wanted to comfort myself, only to find the more I wanted to use my cock the less it wanted to be used. More and more I am not always its master.

  Charleston is a lovely place. I walk its streets day and night and find women willing to take me into their beds. These are poor women, often Negro, all of them unclean and not put off by my being the same. They take me into hovels or into their master’s homes when they are not there. I realize that it is only diseased women I want to fuck. I become consumed with fucking and fucking and fucking. This is my research, I say to myself. Why have I wasted so long avoiding it? What better way to investigate disease than to become diseased?

  I wonder if I am passing on to them any disease I surely must have by now myself.

  But I am not diseased, at least not so I can see or feel.

  I go out of my way to locate women who are in some way infected, with pox, with clap, with any ailment of the cunt or blood. It is not so difficult to find them when you know what you are looking for. This lovely town is diseased more than it can know. Like Philadelphia, towns with prosperity most often are. This very challenge excites me. I see in it a way to find myself and bring me back to life as it is lived, and most of all, to do good for my fellow man. It excites me sufficient as to make my cock hard all the time I am fucking a woman of ill health. The more I remain free of pox, the harder I must work. I am determined to make myself poxed!

  The more I fail, the more I begin to suspect that I have become invincible and that within me must reside something of great import.

  I traveled through the southern regions, where it seemed to me there was more pox. I fucked white women and black women and mulatto women. I fucked American women and Indian women and Chinese women and Jewish women. I fucked them front and back and in their mouths. I am so obsessed with my challenge that sometimes I become quite brutal. I did not see that I was becoming a man I no longer knew. Anyway, that man is gone.

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA TERRITORY, AUGUST 1792

  I had heard of a hospital here for venereal diseases, which are rampant in this place. I arrive only to discover that it has been closed for some forty years. It was started by royal physicians from France because matters were so bad here, and there too. Apparently it did not improve them. The soldiers were so licentious that the epidemic could not be stemmed. I could find no one able to tell me much about it. The building had been burned down to destroy any possible contagion.

  But here it was that I met the woman who would become my wife, Margatula Abagale. On the still partially charred grounds of this once-hospital she maintained gardens for the city. She grew flowers and she was allowed to sell them. She was a Creole woman, tall as me, and strong. Her skin was like highly polished burnished wood. French was her first language, but she spoke English, too. I was admiring her herb garden particularly, there were so many kinds I had never seen.

  “Don’t touch them. Come with me.”

  I followed her into a large shed of everything needed for her work. She filled a great tub with water. She took off all my clothes. And with her strong arms and shoulders she threw me into it.

  “Now I can see what you really look like,” she roared with laughter.

  She made me remain in the tub while she washed my clothes and I shaved myself and she set my clothing out in the sun.

  And here it was that after I fucked her seventeen times and fell in love with her my penis would not erect again, no matter what I said to it or how hard I tried to slap it into sense.

  I had learned enough, or too much, or more than I wanted, or not enough, so I married Margatula Abagale and determined to take her home to Ontuit.

  The week before we were to depart, I met Hiram Punic, in one of those taverns where men fuck each other when they are drunk enough. I had gone to see if my cock would still work here. I struck up a conversation with this Hiram Punic, an ordinary-looking man about fifty, and to my surprise he was eager to be interviewed about his penis, and invited me home so that we could talk privately. He was a person who never stopped talking and he said he had many interesting things to confide. He took me to Mon Petit, outside New Orleans, to a small farmhouse that was filthy and stank. I could see that he was lazy with his hands and barely getting a
long, but his brain was busy enough.

  Hiram Punic was an evil man. He wanted everybody to fall sick and die, and he told me so. For some while now he had been going to this or that town a few days away by horseback, and then a few weeks away, and finding a church social to attend so that he could pour a poison powder into the punch. With great pride he spread a local newspaper before me, with a headline that read, “Mysterious illness results in deaths of 34 ladies and gentlemen.” He brought forth more newspapers with similar headlines, from all over Louisiana, and from Alabama and Mississippi.

  I think Hiram Punic might have killed off all of America had he not met me.

  Hiram told me that he always had a few animals on his farm that were sick from something strange, something Hiram didn’t recognize. He took the oozing pus that came out of a duck’s ass or a chicken’s or a pig’s and he put it in the food he gave his healthy animals. Soon they were sick too. The larger ones, the horses and cows, discharged much more pus before they died. Hiram collected all this in a bucket and poured it on a big flat rock and baked it in the sun until it turned to powder. He gave the powder to his cat and she died fine, so he knew he had what he wanted. He saddled up and galloped off to his first town, Veronica, Louisiana. There isn’t any Veronica anymore. He laughed loudly as he told me, and when I looked skeptical, he barked, “Come with me!”

  We rode to a town close by. It appeared to be a holiday of some sort. There was a big outdoor picnic, with what looked to be everyone in town in attendance, including many children. The people were laughing and singing in Spanish and French and not much English.