by Larry Kramer
Within several weeks, after several more arriving boats, I am certain we have three thousand poxed. I will be told this number is inconceivable when the very population of Long Island itself was still so small. Yet, though I vouch not for these figures, these numbers will tally with ledgers and records found later for this period at some national institute. The guards, with no shame or compunction, stuff the newcomers into cells already filled. When I complain to Maurice of these severe conditions, he says, “The fear of pox is loose in all the land. From state to state and territory to territory and sea to sea. There is great fear out there, of this, and of us all. There is little sympathy for what you and I would call their ‘human needs.’ The government now controls us. I have no choice. I was compelled to sign a contract to get this home for us. I have been ordered to lock all up and feed them through holes in the wall and make them slop their waste through holes in the floor. If they die, they die. That unfortunately is the unwritten directive communicated to me in so many words by my superior in our new capital, Washington, at a place called the Department of Health and Disease. If I am to continue, if we are to continue our experiments, with the hope that God will bless our endeavors and increase our knowledge, if we are to continue using our patients for our testings, then we shall now have to do so under these constraints. Let us recommence our work and see just how far our work will take us.”
“Tell me what it is you hope to find.”
“You know it is a cure for pox.”
“How goes your progress toward success? Tell me in honesty.”
“Some days I think it right over there. Other days I think ’twill never be.”
At this moment he looks so human and so sad that I reach out and take his hand. He steps forward and puts his arms around me in embrace. “I would kiss you were I not afraid, no matter what I say, that I carry death.”
I understand.
The screams begin, the agony of the newly incarcerated going crazy. And still we pack them in. Each week brings yet another boat with more. Bodies are spirited along by the guards in dark of night and housed I know not where.
Maurice now shows me the contract with this Department of Health and Disease conjoined with the Sailors’ Institute, “a contract with Dr. Maurice Punic to look after the health of certain American people.” I was not aware of the government’s financial involvement in his work. I read on quietly about the “fee structure” for our work. Then I walk in the darkness among the huge trees with their heavy branches that populate these islands instead of people. I have learned that we are paid one dollar for every patient admitted, and then two dollars for each one that dies. The scant five cents per patient per day allotted to feed and clean and clothe them is absurd. Indeed, it is all too obvious that it profits us to see our patients quickly dead. Is Maurice supervising a charnel house?
On come the boats and the poxed. The only thing as sure is the stench of human waste and rotting flesh. And piss. The smell of urine grows more awful by the minute.
And the hideous never-ending screams, barely muffled within the stone cells by thick walls that cannot contain the horror.
And I am richer for it. Hundreds of dollars come wordlessly to my hand each month from Dr. Maurice Punic, Jr. There is a look of terror in his eyes that I will abandon him and leave him here alone if he’s not given me enough, and so each week he gives me more.
More than money now comes into my grasp.
He gives me each day my pick of women and men to fuck. I fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck and if I were to write the word as many times as I did the act there would be no more paper for I don’t know what. I had never fucked before.
My cock is always hard.
There is a reason.
Tincture of salving oxide is mixed with ore beads and melted and mixed with propholoxis fercurochrome, falidia trice, sassafras, and salt, all of which is stewed with green medicinal herbs such as mint and frankincense, chamomile, rebid, and lyre of Jew. Some of these I recognize from Uncle Hogarth’s notebooks. Then it is reduced to a pulp and kneaded to a salve with whale blubber so that it can be spread upon a cock or rubbed into a cunt or up an asshole.
Yes, I come to use all these words as freely as my ever-aching cock. I come to know these constituents of our unguent and to gather them and mix them and knead them, and to write it all down.
I cannot describe the feelings excited by this salve. It is as if explosions burst and burst again, so warm and vital and taking me to the top of life. Last week we—for Maurice now partakes of all of this with me—discovered that when the salve is inserted up a nostril the pleasure increases even more, although I had not thought more pleasure possible until it was reached. Each day and night and in every conscious moment do we, Maurice and I, grease our cocks with this and stuff our assholes and our noses, and we go and choose our women and men, for in these passions’ heights it matters not which sex, and we salve them up too, and then none of us can stop. Whence comes such strength, and for so long, and without sleep or proper food, though some of this has arrived, for us? It seems sometimes as if we fuck for days.
Yes, I partook, and partook, and partook, and partook, and partook. I deny it not.
Once we do it all alone, Maurice and I, just the two of us. I have never known such pleasure. Yes, it is that ecstasy he promised I would one day know. It takes us two days and two nights until we finally climax. We sleep in each other’s arms for two days more.
Maurice Punic is refining the world’s most perfect aphrodisiac, he tells me. It seems that in the course of purchasing the Hooker Home, Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., either found or was given Uncle Hogarth’s notes, and added these recipes to his own growing knowledge from experimenting in his travels. From this invention we will become rich, Maurice says, rich beyond any king or kingdom or crown. I am to be his partner in all we make. I believe him. I have no time not to believe him, because there is something in this stuff that stays inside me, so that my cock demands repeat only hours after climaxing. If I do not fuck over and over again, my muscles and bones ache most horribly, and my brow grows fevered with heat and sweat, until my cock must touch and enter another’s flesh or I think I shall lose my mind. Oh, this is the most insidious of masters! After entry these fevers vanish, to be replaced by lust so fierce as make the fevers seem calm. For time beyond reckoning my cock pumps and pumps, even when the rest of me cries out for sleep, for respite, for surcease.
Maurice says we must have patience, that each day and week his experiments bring him closer to perfection of “our” recipe; that it will soon be possible with a smaller amount to achieve a lesser passion, but a grand and fulfilling one nevertheless. Then he goes into his laboratory, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, while I wait outside, yearning for more, like the most depraved eater of opium. I hammer on his door until finally he must let me in to join him. And we start again. He confesses he is just as much enslaved. So much so that he barely concentrates on his work as a scientist. A cure for pox? This is what has come of the cure for pox. We cannot stop! I cannot stop. God help me! I think myself better dead. Until we start again. And then I am in heaven.
And yet it does appear that there is perhaps something in this salve that prevents disease. Naturally, Maurice says that is part of his plan. Neither he nor I have become remotely poxed, however much we fuck with the poxed. If indeed there be some sort of protection in our salve, then it will be a gift to the world far greater than any aphrodisiac! If we can discover how it works, then sure we will be saints. Saints made of gold.
All that is why, highest upon my list for my defense, I join him in all of this. That is what I tell myself. That is what I tell myself.
May God have mercy on my soul.
Maurice summons no more bodies to be bath’d. We confine the poxed we’d fucked with to their cells. Let loose they are likely to kill each other, they are that hungry for the salve. There are now numbers of patients so demented that they can summon up huge energies to become unpredictabl
y violent, as if they know it is not worth staying alive and madness is a gift given them to dwell in. They scream all day and they scream all night and they rattle their cell doors and hurl themselves against them with inhuman energy. Bedlam swirls around us. We do not notice that slowly, bit by bit, in certain corridors of the hospital, the screaming subsides, then ceases.
Now I see Maurice himself going mad, his cock hanging out all the time from his trousers or undergarments, if he troubles to wear any. It juts out permanently erect, like a branch from a tree. When he cannot stick it in me he rushes around looking for someone else to stick it in, but he is unable to find anyone since Mrs. Horvath has assumed complete control over all the keys, Maurice being in such a state and I not much better. She keeps her distance and has her own guards now.
Maurice desperately wants his cock to go down. He looks upon it and begs it to soften. It will not. He cries out that he has succeeded with his invention only too well and the punishment for his success is not fair.
His lab when I enter it with him is a shambles of broken bottles and vats leaking on the floor, where we fall down and roll in this mess, so that we might feel ecstatic again.
I think of the women and men we fucked and how grotesque they came to look, with twisted bones, and noses eaten away by constant inhalations, and eye sockets running streams of pus, now with altered bodies like one buttock swollen ten times larger, or toes fallen off. I fear to catch sight of myself and pass by any mirror or glass as if it is not there.
And then I think of the babies, the hardest to view, scabrous, infected, screaming malformed bundles of flesh which bite and scream and kick and spit like tiny sharks. How did they come to be this way? Surely no one fucked them! The matron in charge of their “nursery” wing of cells had died, sprawled out on the corridor floor, and they got out somehow and were crawling around trying to eat what remained of her pitted flesh. I had fallen upon them when I lost my way and was nearly eaten alive.
I barely remember sunshine. I realize that when Dr. Punic Sr. came to call, God cursed me with the perfect punishment for all past Hooker sins. Hogarth Hooker is responsible for all the syphilis in America, and I for perpetuating his legacy. And Thomas Hooker, the progenitor, the father of us all, for making Sex the Sin. Had he not trumpeted so against it, who would have wanted it so much?
I grab Maurice on the floor. I ask him where the latest formula is written down. Maurice shakes his head. “No, I am not going to give it to anyone. It is still too strong.” He shakes his head again. “You are going crazy,” he blubbers. “I must not follow you into madness. I must finish my work. Without you. Away from you. There is no one to be trusted except myself. Maurice, Maurice, Maurice.”
He puts his hand to my face. “You are passing into another world. You were once so handsome and filled with promise. Now you look like an ancient cow.” His eyes are staring into nothingness. He screams that he sees me crawling on the ground like a snake and spitting venom. I am crawling on the floor, and I see myself doing the very same. He is also affixing his mouth to any part of my flesh that is exposed, which is all of it, trying to suck it as a baby does a mother for food. Even for air to touch his cock, which still sticks out hard like a rock, makes him scream. He jumps up and rushes from one side of the laboratory to the other, from the ice chest to the kettle on the stove. First he applies cold compresses of ice to his penis, then, screaming in pain, he runs to pour boiling water on it and screams appallingly louder. Then he tries to push me against a wall and sit on my hard cock. But this only makes both of us scream out in pain. We simply cannot be touched now.
With the key on the chain around his neck Maurice bends forward to unlock his safe. He withdraws his salve, uncorks his vial of inhalant, and tries to stuff it up our noses again. He finds a knife and tries to rip his throat open. I think he is trying to kill himself to ease his agony and I see that I must not let him.
With all my strength I tie Maurice against the post that holds the ceiling up. “I have not endured for so little recompense.” I look all over and can find no records. Maurice must be working in some secret room, perhaps in a basement or an attic or in another part of the building, or even in some other place on these grounds I do not know about. I continue my search. I fear I am indeed going crazy and must not allow it. I find the enemas he uses for his concoction. Are these enemas his secret to life? I had watched while he siphoned bits of this and that into the liquid he pumped messily up his ass. When he was flying he would scream, “I have found It!” Every salve and mineral and element and salt I find on Maurice’s shelves, surely the world’s bowels cannot absorb these ingredients. But I will steal the formula by putting them all together! In this tiny laboratory, I give myself a dozen enemas a day, flushing myself out over and over again, not caring that blood pours from me, my hair falling out, my eyes becoming, if not sightless, useless, as I see only blazing suns. Sleep is lost to me. Time is meaningless. The room is nauseating. I am too crazy to notice that my cock has finally shrunk nigh unto invisibility. That my passion for sex has been rendered nil.
Maurice, still tied to the post, has long since been hanging there limply. Is he even alive?
That it is about to become even more awful almost stops my telling it.
I swear to all that this is true remembered, and I write this at a time in my life when calmness has returned.
I had untied him free and returned to my search, which took me out of this cabin. When I return, Dr. Maurice Punic, Jr., still naked, has gouged out his pelvic area. His male organs have been replaced by a woman’s vagina (it belonged to Mrs. Horvath) that is stitched to a rope tied around his waist. With his hands holding his penis, impaled on a long stick, up in front of him like some banner of freedom or cross of Christ, he runs crazed from the hospital. There he puts down his bloody penis so his hands are free to remove from the leather pouch around his neck a spoonlike implement that he inserts into his exposed guts. He scoops more of them out, to place beside the severed penis what feces remain inside him.
Behind some trees not far from him, I, Lucid Hooker, also naked, am thrashing myself with branches, flagellating myself in punishment for my never-ending sins. “I condemn myself, I condemn myself, I condemn myself for my failures and my acquiescence.”
“I am the teller of all futures and all fate,” Maurice intones in counterpoint.
Maurice is shaking and finding it difficult to stand. He falls to earth. As I come closer to him I can see him looking up at me. He is dying. His hand reaches for mine. In it is his bloody severed penis.
“It has gone down at last,” he says.
He presses this gob of flesh and shit into my hand. Then his head falls from him and I see his eyes rolling on the ground, staring into me.
I am crying, sobbing, violent sobs that soon become racking spasms of abandonment and fear.
“Goodbye,” I finally manage to spit out.
Then I believe I hear voices from each side of me. From Maurice’s clutches I seize the leather pouch that contains the record of all Punic experiments and many small vials of potions and salves and the lump of blubber that is the aphrodisiac itself and clutch all to my heart as I head into the night. Like my progenitor Hogarth I carry with me another man’s severed member out into a hostile world.
DAME LADY HERMIA STARTS DIGGING IN
Frederick, what my research is uncovering about this man Furstwasser is important for both our history and my history and will get us both murdered. We can have a double funeral. That said, here, as nonjudgmentally as possible, is what I have learned:
Considering he makes such an indelible mark on your country (I guess it is my country now as well but I shirk from such possessiveness when it turns up such as what is turning up), it’s peculiar that his name, Furstwasser, an Ezra or any other, isn’t found in any earlier record located thus far. He has come to America to join his brother, Gideon, also Swiss, who has claimed to his employers that he is an American by virtue of his wife, Nephtalia, wh
om the two brothers (?) had already quietly murdered? disposed of? unloaded? before they arrived here. (Ezra, so far, is single.) Gideon is sent on an official visit to Fruit Island as a representative of the Department of Health and Disease in Washington to its contractee, the Great Hospital for the Wretched and the Destitute on Plum Island. Any government contract requiring the paying out of so much money must be adjudged for its worth and value, and of course its truth. Gideon was already employed by HAD when he hired his brother Ezra to work with him. I do not know yet how Gideon got the job in the first place.
Fruit Island is situated in an area described by the U.S. Department of Land and Sea, Division of Storms and Weather, as “laden with weak alluvial banks,” i.e., what are known as swamps, particularly on the south shores, which, because of “Tidal Disturbances and Concomitant Sediment Irregularities,” are dangerous.
A Mr. Bernhardt Krebs, who is director of the Office of Disease Disbursement of HAD, brought this unruly situation to official attention. HAD contracted the hospital to Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr. Providing care to 2,700 patients “with disease” has come to $26,543.76 thus far, which amount is considered excessive by Washington and requires an on-site investigation by Gideon Furstwasser, its director of Receipts and Disbursements. According to the admission records sent to Washington, the Great Hospital actually houses “two thousand, nine hundred adult syphilitics, plus additional seven hundred twelve children under age twelve years; oldest syphilitics eighty years and youngest infant babes,” and Punic is claiming additional monies due him.