The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Some innate gift for survival must have blessed Horatio mightily. I have heard over the years many unkind myths about him, some rather scandalous, suggestions that he was “kept,” or of white slavery, or childhood torture, or of being the sex “play toy” of the man whose family founded Akron or the man who invented cough drops, or that he was the youngest and most successful bank robber who ever stuck up Ohio. I can hear him laughing as he told all this about himself. He did nothing to correct any of it, nor allowed me to do so. “I like a little mystery” was all he ever said. “Great men are great because we are mysteries.”

  Yes, he knew he was great. He knew he was going to be great long before he was great. And I knew it, too.

  At some early point before we met he took to researching in libraries what cavemen did to keep alive, “what those hairy-chested, lion-skinned big busters of prehistoric times did to get enough energy to rule the world when farming was unknown and enemies were monstrous carnivorous behemoths.” Did diets then comprise only plants and fruits? How could people live on so little? Horatio, at eleven, and having a tough time of it as a traveling salesman trying to peddle cloth ink blotters in an area where many people could not yet write, or had no time to, or no ink to do it with, decided to find out. Horatio, at eleven, returned to the forest “to find myself.”

  Short of stealing, selling things was the only way to forge a path. Manufacturing, or making something, was expensive. One needed materials that had to be purchased. People had little money to pursue imaginative dreams. People had little money to buy the fruits of others’ dreams. People lucky enough to have farms worked the land with their hands, and took care of their animals, and ate what they grew and slaughtered. Or they labored in offices and factories. That was the circle of life. Oh, maybe there was a product like a blotter, or soap, or some elixir in a bottle touted to pep you up and get you going, that needed a representative for the Dakota Territory, where absolutely no one lived. But if you were a go-getter like Horatio Dridge you had to find your own canoe to paddle. Nobody was giving anything away to anyone. There were a lot of children like us, boys and girls seeking and trying and peddling strange notions thrown together mostly with hope. Most of these boys and girls, and most of their dreams, didn’t live long. They certainly did not live long enough to see their names up on banners in great big letters like Horty did.

  At five feet three Horatio Dridge was a short man, but when he opened his mouth to speak he wasn’t short anymore. He was the giant who could sell you a piece of tomorrow. His voice, which was a deeper baritone than anyone so short had a right to house, boomed mellifluously. His hair, and he had much hair all his life, which he attributed to his regularity, which he attributed to his cereal, which he attributed to his “education in the woods,” all of which he attributed to his love for me and mine for him, was fluently wavy, always holding itself up high. He never wore elevator shoes, eschewing anything akin to what he called “the city-slicker.”

  But I digress. In the vast forests and woods outside Petunia, Ohio (recently renamed Dridge, Ohio), Horatio made himself a hut of branches and leaves and started a fire by rubbing “the proverbial two sticks” together. As he quickly discovered, “I am hungry all the time. Leaves and berries are no more than a meal’s beginning salad. No man, now or ever, can run wild across a terrain on such a feeble intake. I try to eat twigs and bark, uncooked or boiled or roasted. Each way is wretched. My insides become mutilated from the strain of digestion and elimination. What kind of stomach can digest a tree?

  “Yes, I did eat trees. It was the same as what we ate in the war. Oftentimes in war and peace there is nothing else to eat, with ice freezing the earth and trees the only thing visible for miles around to warm up in your hands and gnaw at like chewing tobacco, masticating it into a soft-enough pulp to get down the gullet, in hopes that it will churn itself into enough warmth and energy to get you through a night so frigid that animals freeze to death. To this day there’s many a one of us can’t believe we’re still here. Most thank the Lord. I thank Myself.”

  Most times there was only earth to eat. Dirt is cold and tasteless on its own. Warmed up, mixed with water, peppered with whatever berries are in season, often isn’t enough of a help. What, Horatio wondered, might make earth palatable for consumption, in addition to ravenous hunger?

  “Soon it became possible for me to make a flavorful earth. I learned how to make mulch, how to mix leaves and softened twigs and animal droppings with earth and wild berries and fruits and nuts and let it all bake in the sun and be kissed by the rain and churn itself miraculously into sustenance.

  “I found that my body responded favorably. My stomach ceased its bark and howl. My bowels gave forth sturdy turds. Most important, my energy was enormous. I had never felt so strong!

  “One lovely spring night, as I was lying in a field somewhere near Cleveland, I believe, I looked up at the stars and for the first time, at some fourteen years of age, I clamped my hand on to my peter and pumped it into a fountain of gism six or seven times. I had never known how to do that, and I thanked all the dirt I had eaten for making me feel so top-of-the-world.”

  There must be minerals and elements in this earth, he reasoned, that have been in it since time began and can be nothing but good for you.

  “I thought to give my dirt a name. I thought to bottle it or bag it so I could sell it after I fixed it up. I had an inspiration. I would say it was my First Inspiration, but I think pumping my pecker was that. I fashioned some moist mud into little pellets and flattened them out on a huge sheet of tin and let the sun bake them dry.”

  And so came into the world Dridge Flakes.

  “Tasty, Healthful, Nature’s Own!”

  Before leaving the forest, Horatio tried several versions to locate more precisely the perfect taste so he could perpetuate it. One day he added a bit of himself. He’d been masturbating again. He did so a lot, now that he knew how. We did it a lot together from the first day we met.

  “Pumping your pecker is very healthy, I had by now determined.”

  And he tastes his semen and it tastes good.

  “With Nature’s Own Secret Ingredient!”

  “I tried selling my Flakes. I’d stand in front of a crowd at a fair, looking peaked and lackadaisical, and I’d chomp on a great handful of my Flakes and perk up and jump high and lift a heavy rock if there was one around. But no one was buying any.”

  One day I, young Clarence Meekly, walked into Horatio’s life and before long Horatio’s Dridge Flakes were released from anonymity. How I made Dridge Flakes into a daily household necessity is no more than the story of an enterprising, ambitious young salesman with a promising product, seeking out new markets and never ceasing to believe that my beloved’s Dridge Flakes were something Americans in droves must eat. Every successful product I have ever studied has a similar history of a passionate belief in its superiority by its purveyor. Yes, the success of Dridge Flakes is no more than the story of a loved one so consumed for the first and only time by love for a fellow man.

  I went west, playing a hunch, correctly, that Dridge Flakes were something cowboys, increasingly known for their constipation, a fact available to a smart young man with his ears to the ground, would eat in massive amounts, such being their appetites. Cowboys took to me and my Dridge Flakes with abandon.

  Dridge Flakes were soon consumed in huge quantities all over the world.

  It was even estimated that if Dridge Flakes were to be withdrawn from the marketplace the world would no longer be able to shit regularly. The Dridge Flake came to be all about shitting. We had discovered a great American secret. The American People were exceedingly constipated. It was as if, these many years later, all the fare everyone was forced to swallow during the Civil War, just to stay alive, was still impossible to eliminate.

  Other cereals soon came along. They, too, were all about regular bowel movements. The competition became so fierce that we could not rise above it. Aspersions were cast about our
ingredients. We watched as Dridge Flakes were overtaken and superseded by Corn Flakes and Bran Flakes, Post’s and Kellogg’s, Mother Maude’s and Wilber’s, which grew into “brands” more successful than our own. I did not believe they aided regularity more significantly. It was their taste. Our competitors used sugar to make their products sweet. The taste was no longer of the earth.

  It was a good thing the Dridge Ampule came along. It would be the Dridge Ampule that made the real fortune upon which Dridge Meekley was founded.

  How did this come about?

  We owe the ampule to a dog. At the Dayton Spa, I fed our dog, Jasper, his usual Dridge Flakes. I put them in his bowl in the kitchen. Perhaps because he had already eliminated all he needed to for the day, he ignored his food. Late that night a spa patron unloaded the contents of his hip flask of whiskey into Jasper’s bowl so his wife wouldn’t discover he hadn’t been filling it with water to drink when parched. The next morning Jasper was extremely excited. He leaped into the air and rolled around the floor and hurled himself onto Agnes, one of the more attractive of the housekeepers, and tried to hump her with his hugely engorged member. I noted that his bowl was empty and that it smelled of liquor. I suspected a cause-and-effect sequence. I removed the dog’s bowl to our room, where I inhaled deeply.

  Several bodily changes immediately transpired. First, my heart beat wildly and my head felt giddy and my whole being was as if transported to someplace transcendently elsewhere. I am not certain where, but I very much enjoyed being there. Second, I had an erection, not a regular occurrence anymore by any means, a very firm and large erection. Third, I desired sex immediately. Horty walked in at this propitious moment and I rammed the bowl under his nose. Instantaneously and simultaneously we grabbed each other, stripped each other bare, and fell upon our bed, where we commenced wild sexual experiences of a nature heretofore unknown to either of us. We even kissed each other, many times and in many places. Horty had never been a kisser, despite my deep desires in that area. These timid aging bachelors were behaving like youngsters! When our passions flagged, when our erections sagged, they could be reignited by a further deep inhalation of Jasper’s bowl.

  Horatio made me, Clarence Meekly, his partner not only in fact but in legal deed.

  Numerous orgasms later, we napped, sleeping tenderly in each other’s arms. “My Clare, my Clare, my beloved Clare,” Horty mumbled in his sleep.

  Upon awakening we fell to the floor, this time propelled not by libido but by extreme curiosity. What was in that bowl?

  Whiskey and Dridge Flakes was the not-unexpected discovery.

  Horatio, the great inventor, pondered.

  His flakes were composed of various earthy ingredients, composted together in a secret recipe he continued to toy with. He never stopped thinking about it, or adding a little of this and that into different batches. I had even seen him add some of his own shit. He ate a perfect diet and reasoned, Didn’t cow dung cause the crops to grow? Mr. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were said to contain saltpeter to keep little boys from masturbating. Horatio had noticed that when he added a little bit more of his “Nature’s Own” to his flakes, the spa guests who were particularly bound up rushed up to him on their way to or from a toilet, in exceptional gratitude. He came to produce various versions of his flakes, and to recognize which of his guests needed what and when and how much, and he gave appropriate names to his inspirations: Dridge Number One (a poor seller), Dridge Number Two, Dridge Number Two Plus, Dridge Number Two Supreme.

  We wondered what this new discovery should be named, and exactly how it could be recommended tastefully.

  Horatio got up and went to his laboratory, where he did his best thinking.

  “Something happens when mud, shit, a bit of piss, and a touch of semen are permeated with alcohol. Something that makes man and beast go wild.”

  He discovered it was the aroma, inhaled, that caused the fury, and that it was this aroma that must somehow be contained.

  He experimented with a number of containers before alighting on a small glass tube encased in a silk sack, which when crushed in the fingers would emit its odor for quick inhalation, quickened heartbeats, speedy passion. It was all quite a miracle and Horty and I, still naked and after sex of course, thanked each other.

  The resultant product—the Dridge Ampule—was marketed as “Recommended for those suffering from heart palpitations, physical restlessness, constitutional malaise, feeble desires, hunger and yearnings, and the vapors.”

  In no time at all the Dridge Ampule was used by everyone from young gallivanters to enfeebled old gents. There was hardly a spinster’s clutch purse or a vest watch pocket that was without an ampule. When exhaustion overtook, when those imprecisely named “vapors” overcameth, out with the tiny glass ampule in its little silk mesh stocking, to be snapped in two and deeply inhaled for renewed invigoration.

  When Horatio died, he was worth $25 million.

  He died, Horty did, in his Clare’s arms. We had just made the most passionate love either of us had ever known, and Horty’s heart could not take it. His cock was still up his Clare’s asshole, and still hard as a rock, when he screamed out his last passionate “I love you!”

  N.B.

  YRH reminds his readers that this version of the history of the Dridge Ampule might not be … all there is. The aphrodisiac that Lucid III carried with him from Fruit Island, and that Pushnow, that mysterious Jew, had pledged that he would capture, and did, and that Messie Too was also traveling with—what has happened to all of these? Was the stuff of Dridge really the stuff of any of these?

  DR. SISTER GRACE GOES BALLISTIC

  HORSESHIT HORSESHIT HORSESHIT! If you believe Clarence Meekly’s dog-fucking version of the “discovery” of the Dridge Ampule you’ll believe in the mingy man in the moon! Who is ass-feeding you all this manure? This is not history! Did you not learn from or listen to anything that I said? I told you that I am the one who invented this ampule, which I then sold to Greeting-Dridge Pharmaceuticals. It makes me go crazy to hear that fistfucking fuckpotty name of Dridge. And I am the one who got rich from it. I hold the major patents! There is no Clarence Meekly or Horatio Dridge in the line of patent holders. Clarence Meekly and Horatio Dridge were copulating crap turd charlatans of the highest order. You have pissed me off royally by even giving voice, much less credence, to such arrant lying about this ampule that bears the Dridge name only because a pharmaceutical company was founded to acquire his laxative cereals! And I’ve been cooperating with you! Go to hell, young man! You are not worth the paper we are piddling on.

  I must collect my fucking thoughts and myself.

  Oh, what’s the use? It’s fruitless to fight back. All that does is make everyone think I have something to hide. I do not. I know what I did. History will bear me out. Although I am sick of that useless bugfucking expression. History knows dipshit about ratshit.

  For the moment I’ll leave it at that.

  Fred Lemish, I have known you since you were a child. I held you in my arms and gave you baths. I cleaned up your shitty Fruit of the Looms when you ran all the way home from Franeeda Elementary because you didn’t want to use their toilets. I do not deserve this from you.

  And which years are you even talking about? The errant timelessness of your roving renderings cascades your telling into fart-bearing fantasy!

  HAVE WE ALL FORGOTTEN ALREADY?

  Although I find it difficult to say this to her, Grace has a point. As we know, or should remember, or should suspect, Clare’s version of the history of the Dridge Ampule may not be completely kosher. (What was in those days?) I defend myself, dearest Dr. Sister Grace, you who tried to clean me up when I was at my messiest, by saying that by including Clarence Meekly’s story I am not taking his side, only advancing a chronology. We simply must not fly off the handle so easily with each other. (I know that I myself will come to rue these words of advice.)

  Was the stuff of Dridge really the stuff of Lucid? I say not only to Grace and
myself, but to my readers: “Clear title” is a term I remember from working in the movies. These are very difficult to prove! That Grace is today’s recipient of all royalties on the Dridge Ampule is certainly an indication the law is on her side right now. But even just saying it this way, I see I only step in more potential shit!

  Let us continue, as best we can.

  HOVES MORE INTO VIEW

  OK, back to the proverbial grindstone in attempting to sort out who’s who and what’s what and who did what and when and why are we here today, if we are here today, if we are anywhere today. I must be of firmer faith that eventually we shall get ourselves somewhere! Although I feel myself toughening up day by day. I must confess to mounting apprehension as I approach the twentieth century. Knowing what I know now and learning more every minute about what we have seen, and not seen, the walls may all still come tumbling down at any minute. It is the Lemish curse to increasingly feel this way.

  Now that they have their very own name, will it remain so thorny to follow undecipherable trails through long agos, and not so long agos, to reveal and convey what homosexuals do to protect themselves, to define themselves, what they participate in, allow themselves to do? So few have yet been identified who follow Peter and Virgil, who themselves remain unknown, even to this day. Why, just the other day I realized I could not find out, from anyone, scholar or otherwise, how the word lesbian came into general use. Lesbians themselves, still, still, are unable to answer with certainty when their own name came into being! How did anyone in the mid-to-late nineteenth century know about the island of Lesbos, and about Sappho and her sisters? Is a life not diminished when we are ignorant of where we come from? This is a loaded question, to be sure. There are millions of adopted people, unenlightened about their origins, who seem to have lived and live fine lives. But my little tussle with Grace, above, who is most dear to me, only increases my apprehension and the certain knowledge that, from here on in, the ice gets thinner, and being more equipped with a certainty that we can stand up and say, know, and be proud of who we are remains an elusive task. My appeal to my lesbian friends that “it is time to put your house in order” was met with more shrugs than concern, as will be all my similar pleas to men. Coincidentally, a distinguished gay historian has excitedly revealed to the world that he has uncovered a “transvestite” diary from this turn of the century. It is no different from what a similar drag queen might write today. They had different names for themselves then, androdyne or intermediate or third sex, all of which disappear when homosexual comes to rule the linguistic roost. The inclusion by the writer of this diary of a verbal attack on him by his employer who, discovering his employee’s escapades, fires him on the spot, is included: “My disgust is innermost and deep seated! To begin now to show any mercy to the invert, after having for two thousand years confined him in dungeons, burned him at the stake, and buried him alive, would be a backward step in the evolution of the race! The invert is not fit to live with the rest of mankind! He should be shunned as the lepers of biblical times! If generously allowed outside prison walls, the law should at least ordain that the word UNCLEAN be branded in his forehead, and should compel him to cry: ‘UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!’ as he walks the streets, lest his very brushing against decent people contaminate them!” Condemnations like these appear a dime a dozen to this day.