The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Fifteen-year-old Abraham Masturbov marries twenty-year-old Doris Hardware outside Baltimore in a town called Jepsom, where almost anyone can get married quickly and legally. On the same day they sleep with each other for the first time, in a modest inn where almost anyone can get a room. Something is happening between them that they both realize is exceptional and probably won’t ever happen with anyone else. It can’t. First times are first times, and good first times are as rare as inheriting rubies and emeralds at birth.

  “It wasn’t just sex,” Abe will later tell Dr. Shmuel Derektor. “We felt solid and united together. We said if we felt this way from the start, then it was a worthwhile gamble we’d do better together than apart. You know what she told me? She said she felt Jewish even though she wasn’t Jewish. And I said what she felt was the part of Jewish that wasn’t the bullshit part. The emotional. She felt stable. I wasn’t so stable. Then or now. Not in business: there I’m a rock. She felt whole. Most women in my life never seem whole to me. I feel they’ve only got part of them to give. Most women I’ve known make me feel like a freak, like men are some sort of peculiar species. She made me feel equal.”

  Abe has to lie about his age. He has a forged birth certificate, not so difficult to get in those days. He’s caught. Not by the justice of the peace or the clerk in the license bureau or any police or civic authority. By his mother. Who does not approve of the unseen and unmet and gentile Doris. Goldowsky tells her. Yvonne Masturbov sees to it that the marriage is annulled and that Goldowsky threatens to fire Abe if he continues with “such heathen fleisch.” Having experiencd a slightly more dramatic version of the same story, Goldowsky plays his part well.

  “What?” Abe sputters. “I just found you land that made you a profit of forty thousand dollars in three months. Where’s my commission! Give me what you owe me.”

  “Honor your mother.”

  Abe can’t bear it. There had been not one single thing standing between him and lifelong happiness. Now he holds a piece of paper from some lawyer that says he and Doris are not married. A piece of paper! Goldowsky has worked fast.

  “We are flesh and blood!” Abe screams.

  “That was then and this is now,” Goldowsky says, although he cannot bear to meet the young woman’s eyes. She looks lovely and she looks sad. So what if she’s a shiksa. What is he saying! Abe is crying. Goldowsky walks past them both.

  “I will see you in my office in the morning,” he says to the air behind him as he leaves them.

  Doris says little. Abe assumes, automatically, that he will find a way to make happiness return.

  “You must not be discouraged at this, our first test,” he says.

  Again, she is surprised at her reactions. Never a quitter, always strong—why is she different now? She feels in the grip of some controlling force. She waves her arms around, lifts her elbows up, as if to free herself from cobwebs, or perhaps chains.

  The operator in Abe takes over. “What you and I do is between us. No one else needs to know. We’ll live together until I’m legal. I can make money without Goldowsky. You’ll move to Washington. I know Washington block by block. It’s time for me to strike out on my own.” He goes on describing a future that sounds entirely plausible to him, and probably is.

  She doesn’t seem to be listening. Her mind is somewhere else. He recognizes the look. Yvonne. For a second he’s frightened, but he shakes it off. He can outsmart early misfortunes and confound past evils. He can dream.

  Doris leaves a note for him at her rooming house. “I love you and I’m sorry. Stay with Goldowsky.” She has gone away, the landlady says.

  Why did she walk out? Why did she walk out without talking? He can’t understand or accept the why, whatever it might be. He only knows to negotiate, to hondel, to make deals that will please both sides. Goldowsky can see his heart is broken. Goldowsky tells him all gentile women behave like this. They don’t know how to talk. They disappear in the middle of the night. “Jew dames do nothing but talk. Forever. You wish they shut up.” He feels bad enough for the kid that he gives him part of the commission due him. “I give you the rest when your momma says okay.” Since when has Yvonne got so much strength? Abe wonders. “You are all she has,” Goldowsky answers for him.

  Through all the streets of their hand-holding the rejected suitor trudges, imploring buildings, begging bricks, beseeching the empty night. Where are you? Why, when perfection arrives, is it wrenched away? Love is holy and precious and forever. How could she leave me if she loves me?

  He never doubts for a moment that she loves him.

  Wondering if he’s come upon an unyielding characteristic of the gentile mind, he vows he’ll do business from now on only with Jews. And marry only Jews. But he will fuck gentile women over and over and over. Gentile fucks will continue to haunt him until his death. He convinces himself they are better fucks. As Claudia will later plant her own seeds of perversity under Stephen’s skin, and under Buster Punic’s, Abe has been infected by his own first shiksa.

  He thinks he can put her out of his mind. He thinks he can keep his mind on vacant lots. He thinks lots of things that aren’t possible. This infuriates him—that he is not master of himself, worker of his will—and so he rushes out into the streets of every city where he goes on business for Goldowsky, New York, Philly, Wilmington, Boston, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah (he is afraid if he goes back to Washington he will murder his mother and he will not go back to Baltimore either), and he grabs any shiksa he can find, and he fucks until his cock is sore and then he fucks some more until he thinks it must fall off and it should fall off if there is any justice in the world, if there was a God it would fall off, for he is hurting himself and he is hurting others. This is not even lust, it is escape, and there is no escape. He fucks three, four, five times a night, in doorways, in strange smelly beds, in putrid toilets, in back rooms of offices, on or under desks while bosses are out and even sometimes when they are in but occupied elsewhere. He learns to do it fast. He learns to do it endlessly. He fucks so many women he can’t remember if he might be doing it a second time with some of them, which is something he never wants to do, lest he give them, and himself, some hope. Only one per customer, ladies. As if he is working his way through all the gentile women in America until he either finds Doris or punishes himself enough for having failed her. Finds her? Every cunt he enters is Doris’s cunt. A few of the women enjoy the brutality, but it frightens most of them. Some of them fight him, clawing his back until it’s covered with welts and sores and scabs, some of which never leave him. He is one battle-scarred cocksman.

  Finally, when he thinks he has no semen left inside him, or that he cannot be disappointed that yet another cunt isn’t Doris’s, he commits himself to a plan. A simple plan. He’s heard about some land in Northwest Washington, bits and pieces that everyone else thinks are not contiguous, and he makes himself go back to that city and he uses the few thousand Goldowsky has paid him to buy this land on instinct and hunch, convincing the seller to give him a month’s option. Then he turns right around and sells it to the schmuck Isidore Schmuck, for a hospital yet, a medical center “bearing my name.”

  Abe makes for himself an unbelievable sum, $100,000, and for a kid barely sixteen, and he buys the biggest, most beautiful house he can find, a mansion overlooking all of Washington from DesVrese Circle, a mansion built by two lovers, Horatio Dridge and Clarence Meekly (the widow Meekly is old and the house is too much for him). Abe signs the papers and makes the payment and he goes back to Baltimore. He stays in the Y and once again walks the streets all day and all night, looking on mailboxes, in stores, offices, bars, restaurants, asking, looking, seeking. He realizes how little he knows about her life. All she told him was that she was from Denver and that she went to Goucher College, which won’t even give him a clue on how to find her.

  Denver! He is such a schmuck.

  He rushes to a library, finds the Denver telephone directory, looks up Hardware, and is amazed to find s
eventeen of them. He runs to the railroad station, where there is a phone operator to help travelers with long distance. He calls the first Hardware, who tells him to call a second, who has no information but passes him on to a third, and finally there is a Hardware who is closer kin to Doris. The man tells Abe that Doris is living in Washington.

  “Washington!”

  “Who is this?”

  Abe hears his own voice yell into the phone, going clear across this great wide country, all the way to a Denver that he is certain is a town fresh like honeysuckle blossoms and smelling sweet like Doris, now so close herself: “The man who loves her!”

  “That so,” the voice in Denver says. “Well, she’s a very nice young woman.”

  “Yes. Yes, she is. She’s wonderful.”

  “What’s your name, young fellow?”

  How do they feel about Jews in Denver?

  “Please, could you give me her address?”

  “If you love her, how come you can’t find her?”

  “We had a terrible mix-up! It’s all right. It’s going to be all right! Please! Please could you give me her address?”

  He could only have sounded convincing in his youthful ardor.

  The voice comes back across this great wide country. “It’s 708 P Street, Northwest. Now, what’s your name, young fellow?” The voice is a touch impatient.

  “Thank you, sir. Oh, thank you! My name? My name is Abraham Masturbov.”

  Denver hangs up.

  Abe rushes back to Washington, to the address in downtown, not far from where he himself grew up. It’s funny, he thinks, that she instinctively found such a neighborhood. There is even a synagogue next door, one of those small ones in a tiny house, where a few families who don’t get along with other families, or can’t afford to, find their own place to pray. Hers is also a tiny house, fairly neat. There is no answer from the bell. He sits on the stoop. It is midafternoon. She comes home close to midnight. It is so dark outside he can’t see her well. But he can smell her, and he can see her shadow walking like Doris. Oh, she is beautiful and desirable still, more than ever, dark or no dark.

  So is he to her. She cries and cries, both outside, in the darkness of the night, and inside, in the darkness of her small rooms, a bedroom like a cell with a bed and a window overlooking the backyard of the synagogue, strewn with garbage, and an only slightly larger living room and kitchen where she makes him tea without saying anything as he just looks at her, speechless too, and turns off the lamp so the ugliness of the situation is not so harsh as to defeat them. He tries to gather her into his arms, but she pulls away.

  “I’m sick,” she says.

  Abe finds Doris but he’s not listening to her. She says she’s sick but she looks even more desirable than his imagination allowed. She senses his hunger and she wants to say, Please don’t be hungry, I said I’m sick. She tries. She plows ahead: “It’s called a breakdown. Have you ever heard of a breakdown?” He just stares at her as her words come more swiftly. “I’m not quite certain what breaks down. I stare into space a lot and for a long time I couldn’t leave this room. This is an awful room not to leave, but I didn’t notice that. I was afraid to go out. I wouldn’t eat and the landlady brought in a doctor, Dr. Israel Jerusalem, isn’t that a lovely name, who got me to Dr. Shmuel Derektor. You Jewish men have all been so kind to me. Do you all try so hard to take care of your women? Dr. Derektor said … he said…” She is having difficulty with the lingo, which is like a foreign language. “He said I have trouble in my subconscious, underneath my ego … Have you heard of Dr. Sigmund Freud?” Abe shakes his head. If he is listening he is not liking, certainly not understanding: Does she want him back or not? Three doctors in one sentence (outdoing even his mother) and he is still only sixteen years old. Almost seventeen. “Well, he has revolutionary theories and he has a representative right here in Washington, Dr. Derektor, and Dr. Jerusalem says I am very lucky to be in on the ground floor.”

  “Dr. Jerusalem is my uncle,” he says.

  Now she isn’t listening to him. She is on the couch at Shmuel’s. “I lie down on a sofa and say whatever comes into my mind and memories keep coming, I’m flooded, I can’t keep up with them, they pour out so fast, just from lying down and … it’s called free-associating.” She almost sounds like a little girl, except the words are very grown-up.

  “Free?”

  “I’m remembering terrible things. Awful things. Abe, awful things I haven’t let myself think about ever.” Now she is sounding like she’s fifteen. “And I’m afraid.” She comes to a dead stop.

  “Like what?” He’s shivering, a little afraid of what she might say.

  She notices. “You’re afraid of me now.”

  “Me? No. Never.”

  “Yes, you are. If I had a sore on my arm instead of in my head it would be different.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  Whatever is keeping her from accepting his answers as truthful upsets him. He doesn’t like to have to beg people. They should just believe him.

  Now he doesn’t want to know what she found out. Why doesn’t he inquire or at least sympathize? she wonders. All he really wants to say is, I have bought us a fine home. But he doesn’t say anything. He wants some comfort too.

  Suddenly she is screaming. “Stop looking at me as if I’m a freak! Why don’t you take me in your arms? You should be longing for me as I have not for one second stopped thinking of you.”

  He can’t speak. She stares at him staring. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants her. He does the wrong thing. He takes off his clothes. Nakedness, he has discovered, is his best armor. Her eyes fill with tears. He feels cold and shrunken. He imagines his penis is the size of a baby’s. He comes to her and starts to take off her clothes. Why do men think fucking is the answer to everything?

  Abe fucks her, at first with great force and fury, trying to beg her with his insistent actions: Don’t go crazy, don’t do this to me, don’t! Please let me have you the way I had you. But of course she doesn’t understand, women don’t understand reasoning like this, which can serve to make the otherworldly so mundane. She just lies there, not responding, trying not to let her memories completely destroy her. She must get herself to Dr. Derektor tomorrow.

  Then his fucking turns to gentleness. He kisses her everywhere, softly, his cock turning from stone to a magic wand that wants desperately to bring her pleasure. She holds him close. She wants to say, Why do you think I am here, in your city? I came to look for you after I ran away.

  They are both crying, blubbering, sucking in and out huge racking foul heaves of yesterday’s uncollected shit.

  “Every day is too precious to lose,” he says to her. “I won’t let you have a breakdown, again or ever. I’m angry you ran away. Promise me you’ll never run away.” He is simultaneously shaking and holding her, and hoping she will look at him. “I’m sorry,” he suddenly hears himself say.

  “For you or for me?” she asks him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, for you, for me, for both of us, for this world which could embrace two such wonderful people as you and me and instead does nothing but make us unhappy.”

  “I have never heard you talk so much.”

  His eyes are filled with tears. He is naked and he looks down at his cock, which has shriveled and now seems unimportant. “It even looks funny,” he says out loud. “A redheaded Jew. We’re very rare. Did you know that?” This for some reason makes them both laugh.

  “So then why are you crying?” she asks.

  “Because I think when we both know everything about each other, we’ll scare each other to death. There’s no virtue, so far as I can see, in honesty. The biggest crooks are the richest men. That much I can tell you for certain.”

  “How do you know so much so young?”

  “You may think just because I’m so young that I don’t know much about awful things. I do. And I’m going to tell you before you tell me. Not because I’m impolite, because I am not,
but because I know your story must be awful. My story is awful, too. I want you to know that. Up front I want you to know that whatever you tell me I will still love you. That’s why I want to talk first, not because of any selfishness but because more than anything I want you to still love me no matter what I tell you. Okay? May I put my story into the kitty first?”

  He talks for several hours.

  Abraham tells her the history of his family, the story of Herman the mohel and Yvonne the bleeder and Emmanuel the brother never seen who hanged himself. He gets lost in the telling: he is back in time witnessing many events he’s only heard about, from Herman, from Nate Bulb, from Yvonne, on her better days, who now can’t shut up about every symptom of her strange illness, and who regales her son each time she sees him with detailed descriptions of each bloody manifestation since his last stay at home, whenever that was, and from talkative old synagogue Jews he’s met on Goldowsky quests, bearded ancients with little plots of land to sell, so that Abe puts the pieces of his past together as he assembles huge parcels for the likes of Isidore Schmuck. Sometimes he can’t believe it’s true, his patrimony.

  When he finally finishes, when Herman is put into the earth and Yvonne returns to her tower, Doris, her back to him lest he see that she is ashen, takes her turn. It is the bleak quiet blackness now of just before the dawn, just before the question is answered: Will the sun come out? There is no light in the room, so perhaps they cannot see each other’s face anyway, only hear each other’s words.

  “Now I think I understand why I respond to you so violently,” she whispers. “We are the same. And perhaps there is some fateful force that brought us together. I believe it is this same force that will say we can never marry. Please…” She holds her hands over her ears lest he begin to protest. “Please hear me out.”

  And then she tells him her history. She tells him the story of Turvey, all of it. And then some more.