by Larry Kramer
The exceedingly cordial relationships between the American and the German eugenics movements and organizations are cemented by the publication in America of the two-volume Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene by Bauer-Fischer-Lenz. (It is only in Germany that Professor Fisher uses the “c.”) The contributors are all major eugenicists, all intensely racist, and all filled with admiration and grateful acknowledgment for the inspiration from their dear fellow American friends, particularly Charles Davenport, the horse- and dog- and cattle-breeder founder of the American Eugenics Society, now run by … Jeshua Brinestalker and located only blocks from Yaddah’s main campus in New Godding. Jeshua Brinestalker is aided by two prominent Yaddah faculty members, Irving Fisher, the influential political economist, and Ellsworth Huntington, a geography professor. The AES claims thousands of members from America’s most prestigious universities and its ranks include some of the top thinkers of the era.
“Some people are born to be a burden on the rest” is a motto often used at their gatherings.
At one of their conferences, a speaker says, “There is a great human desire for purity—blue eyes, yellow hair, pink cheeks, tall stature, long head, long narrow face, high narrow nose … The only law worthy of consideration is one defining a white person as one with no ascertainable non-white heritage, and classifying a Negro as one with any ascertainable trace of the Negro.”
Eugen Fischer, this two-volume tract’s co-author, even becomes a member of the Carnegie Institution. It is these volumes that Hitler particularly admires. Someone sends a translation of them to him in prison. It will not be long before he will be writing, in Mein Kampf, “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings.” By the time Hitler gets rolling in a few years’ time, American eugenicists will be “intensely proud to have inspired the purely eugenic state the Nazis were constructing” (Black, p. 277).
By 1934 the Germans are sterilizing more than 5,000 a month, slightly outdoing the American states. (California alone had performed 9,782 sterilizations by 1925, Virginia, Kansas, and Michigan each more than 1,000, and twenty-nine states had eugenics laws permitting same.) “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states,” Hitler will tell a fellow Nazi. Even Mussolini joins this band, hosting an international conference in 1929.
No one appears to protest the exceptionally anti-Semitic statements that the Bauer-Fischer-Lenz volumes contain. Even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., beloved to this day (and according to Frederick having already had sex with Henry James), proclaims: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Nazis at Nuremberg will constantly quote Holmes in their defense.
And Frederick, you particularly should know that AES conducts tests on college students, particularly from Yaddah. Huntington believes that Yaddah students stand for the ideal eugenic society—one where the best students reproduce most successfully and create superior offspring. Yaddah was quite literally a breeding ground for the AES’s master race. Breeder Brinestalker arranges for all Yaddah students—soon to include his own son—to be photographed naked so that “a record can be kept of both the good and the bad now passing muster as acceptable in our nation’s youth.”
Oh, Frederick, the bridges of this hateful philosophy are being stoutly built and the traffic flows both ways. How did we, who cared, not know! Where were we all who could have saved the world to come!
And you are all over the place. You are indeed a rover.
YOUR ROVING HISTORIAN WELCOMES ANOTHER EXPERT
“You continue to raise excellent questions, my dear old friend, Fred. It is not so difficult to look back now, though few do, and see the various handwritings on the walls. I know you are doing your best, which I am proud to tell you is not bad at all, to weave the various threads of your own great disillusionments into an account of the monstrosity that is the present day. I salute you in this attempt. The good dame, Dame Lady Hermia, has shared your work with me. I am here to help. Love, Ianthe Adams Strode.”
Oh, my dear Ianthe, where are you? Where have you been? That you have been with me in this world all these years and I have not had the benefit of your wisdom breaks my heart. These increasingly horrid years are so painful to write about. Forgive the telling if it fails your standards. Some of it has been so awful to capture that I doubt anyone on earth could write it with continuing sanity. I will see to it that you are kept in the loop from this moment on and I await your reactions.
MERCY HOOKER
Another fucking Hooker we have to deal with. For fuck’s sake, it never fucking ends. She fucked up her fucking life. I am getting fucking fed up with fucking Hookers. Doesn’t anyone in this fucking family ever do anything fucking right? I can see I’m back to only using “fuck” again. I’ll work on it. Variety is the spice. I just get so … pissed off how much waste my family represents.
Mercy Hooker is an heiress. Her particular pot of gold, which also dates back to Puritan Massachusetts, is from glass, and is still intact, and is larger than ever because nine out of ten Americans drink from a fucking Hooker glass, whether they know it or not. I have no idea why Mercy doesn’t share in Massachusetts Waste. She is from another part of our fucking forest and to this day I can’t find any family historian who can tell me precisely where. It’s a knee-trembler.
Good old fucking Cousin fucking Mercy. No wonder she never wanted to play fucking dolls with little me. I leave it to Israel himself to tell us more.
In 1925, when just seventeen, and having finished medical school in Palestine, I arrive in Washington and save the life of Mercy Hooker. It becomes a very famous fucking case of its day.
Mercy Hooker is a beautiful middle-aged woman who is brought into the emergency room of Mater Nostra Dolorosa, the Northeast hospital where Israel is an intern. (Northeast Washington is Washington’s Catholic stronghold and will be mine, too.) Cousin Mercy is hemorrhaging dangerously.
Everyone at Mater Nostra makes fun of Israel because he is so young and so smart. And, of course, a fucking Jew. “Oh, how a Catholic hospital makes fun of yids and kikes and hebes from Palestine. From anywhere. The goyim doctors make jokes about me not even being a doctor, for who is there who can vouch for some Misch Fehl University in such a faraway land. Jews must be pretty desperate over there to make a doctor so young.”
It is mid-Saturday when Mercy is brought in by her chauffeur. He drives up in a show-off pissy Quadrata limousine and carefully lifts her body, and gives her like a precious package to the only person in sight wearing a white coat, who is here only because the gentile supervisors made him do weekend duty, on the Sabbath no less, because he’s a Jew.
“Please save my mistress,” the chauffeur says. He is a handsome fellow with a shaved head and sexy leather riding boots. “Please,” he says again, and this time his voice cracks and his eyes fill with tears. His skin is a soft brown color, telling me either mixed blood or a recent vacation. Perhaps the latter, because his mistress is tanned as well, though fading fast.
“I pull on some rubber gloves and take the armful and lay her on the long wooden examining table with the white enamel top. The room is filled with crucifixes. There is one in every patient’s room, but here, no doubt because God must bless the occupants more in order to ward off the evil emergency, there is one on every wall and in every nook and corner. There is even a crucifixion mural painted on the ceiling. I counted fourteen Jesuses. I remove item after item of the woman’s expensive clothing, handing each to the chauffeur—there is no nursing assistance this afternoon—who folds everything neatly, trying not to look at his mistress’s naked body. I commence man
y jabbings and liftings with my hands. There is no apparent reason for the bleeding. She does not appear to have been hit or to have fallen. I can find nothing broken. The chauffeur says she hasn’t eaten anything poisonous. (How does he know?) She is suffering from no evident malfunction, and yet blood oozes from her lips and nostrils and issues from her vagina and rectum.
“The woman is alive; there is plenty of breath inside her. For a brief moment, when I find a crucifix around her neck, there crosses me the thought that something might be transpiring, a stigmata of some sort. You never can tell with Catholics. I turn the body over on its stomach. I ask the chauffeur to leave. Her anus is oozing blood. It runs in dark and heavy trickles down the inside of her leg and onto the white enamel.
“I stick my finger into the blood and rub it against my thumb, testing the texture, the viscosity. It seems more thick than blood should be. Inserting my finger inside her, I find her anal wall is very … pitted. The flesh is torn and ragged, like rose thorns can rip smooth fleisch. Has something brutish been introduced into her anus forcibly? And then into her rectum?
“Why am I suddenly supposing another person is involved? Maybe she deliberately sat on something? Perhaps it was an accident of some sort. What kind of accident? I am only seventeen years old. My parents are dead, themselves from a freakish act performed by freaks.
“Then I think I am being too much the detective, too much the psychologist, and not enough the doctor. Why am I concentrating on her rectum when she is bleeding also from her mouth and nose?
“I turn her on her back. The chauffeur comes back and asks if his mistress has been made well yet and when they can leave. I recognize his voice is peculiar, like someone who learned English too … precise. I speak sharply at him, ‘Don’t touch her.’ He’s reached out to touch his mistress. His hands are strong and hairless. They look Nordic. Does this chauffeur have anything to do with the woman’s condition?
“The chauffeur steps back, as if threatened, and moves into the shadows, away from the hard medical lights hanging over the table. I change my gloves and now stick my fingers into the woman’s mouth, prying it open. The flesh inside is the same as in her rectum: like ripped … meat. Are her nasal passages the same? They are. Is the fact that the blood is only trickling out an indication that the lacerations are surface, and not deep? Her blood pressure is relatively normal. How can that be? She is losing blood. Something medically crazy is happening. What have I read about loss of blood and OK blood pressure?
“I step back to look at her. There is what appears to be a small smile on her lovely face. No, it is lovely but also hard, perhaps mean. This is a woman who gets her own way. Her hair is long and like silk. It falls on the enamel nice and even.
“I turn to the chauffeur. ‘Do you know what happened?’ I am hoping to take him off guard, and get a truthful answer. The chauffeur shakes his head no. I remove my gloves and scrub my hands. Then I study all her garments, all her pockets. I open her large leather purse. The chauffeur leaves the room again.
“Had I not opened the purse—and most doctors probably would not have opened the purse, or inspected the garments so thoroughly—much less stuck a finger up an anus—I would not have solved the case and thus would not have become so renowned and had my first moment in the limelight. I hate this. The story begins to unwrap by itself, at first through whisperings from staff and then from the mouth of the chauffeur—his name is Aalvaar Heidrich—to whom The Washington Monument has paid sufficient money.
“In the large leather purse are numerous penises made of ivory. Each is wrapped in its own linen handkerchief. The penises are spiked with many tiny barbs. On their sharp points are bits of dried blood. There is a small penis that might fit up a nostril. There is a large penis that might fit a vagina. There is a larger and longer one that might reach a rectum. There is a wide one that might stuff a mouth.
“Reporters don’t know how to write about penises, to put two and two together. Until Aalvaar Heidrich steps forward and tells the world that his mistress is addicted to pain. ‘I am hired to pain her.’ It is not easy for him, he says, because he is a gentle soul. Often he has to restrain her from holding her fingers over dinner candles. He claims to have found her many times on the floor of her bedroom, weak from having flagellated herself with a whip. In his estimation, it is not a penance or anything of a religious nature. He says he never saw her indicate any interest in God, though he understands her to come from a religious family. He says she says it’s something pleasurable. He believes her because he’s heard her scream her orgasms out. ‘The chauffeur heard her passion explode,’ one newspaper writes. How does he know it was an orgasm, a reporter from one of the even more dirty-minded tabloids perseveres. ‘Because I was paid to clean her off. With my tongue.’
“Mercy is dead within a year. Heroin. Her nose was like a rock, almost crystallized. I thought it was the drugs, but perhaps it wasn’t. Her body had turned all purple. No one figures that one out.
“Heidrich is her heir. He lives in her mansion, deep in the Rock Creek Park, alone.”
EVVILLEENA STADTDOTTER
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF DR. ISRAEL JERUSALEM, ADMIRAL MASON IRON VAULTUM LIBRARY OF NITS*
What is there in Mercy’s story that causes a middle-aged lady like Evvilleena Stadtdotter to seek Israel out and beg him to be her doctor? The newspaper photographs of Israel make him look unwelcoming.
She does not tell him the truth, which will turn out to be complicated. What she says is, “It iss the youngsters who know what iss new in medshin and schience and reshearch. The old fartss, they are too tired to learn. They cannot understand new wayss. They never learn passht a shertin point. But the old never believe the unbelievable until it iss too late. And it iss the unbelievable that musht be inveshtigated. When shomting new kommst, the old fartss pooh-pooh. Every time. Are these good reashons, Dr. Ishrale?”
Yes, she speaks like this, with much slurping and sshushing. It sounds like her mouth is at the dentist’s. She sounds more MGM movie-German than the real Germans he knew in Germany. He could understand them and he can hardly understand her, but she says she is German so maybe she is. It’s not fashionable to be a German in Washington.
He is not certain what there is in the Mercy Hooker case that’s brought him so many single woman patients so quickly. He is the new doctor of the moment. People are reading about him on the bus, if you can believe.
Five, six, seven times in the next months Evvilleena Stadtdotter comes to the private office he’s set up in the basement of a neighborhood residence. He is stern with her, which is not his nature, but she provokes it in him with her phony-sounding accent and her batting eyelashes and her invitations. Kommst. Kommst. Kommst! To mein haus. Fur dinner. Fur luncheon. We make spazieren in park. He hates it when her appointments come around. It isn’t long before she begins to offer him money. Whatever he wants. Do du not wisch to reshearch? Ssoooo? He becomes gruff and harsh with her, which had not been his nature at all, but she provokes this nastiness in him.
Once she attacks him. He has paid all her offers no attention! He accepts not even a lunch in some safe outdoor café when the weather is nice!
While he is sticking his fingers under her breasts, she throws herself from the table to the floor. Quickly he kneels to help her up. Just as quickly, she pulls him off balance to lie beside her. To her surprise, he stays there, saying nothing, just staring at the ceiling, confused with being confused.
She begins to undress him. He is on his back, his eyes now closed, and she peels away his heavy tweeds like a maitre d’ in the fancy restaurant dealing with loose skin on a poached fish. Under all the layers of clothing—it is the summer and yet he wears a jacket and vest and shirt and undervest—he is all bones. He is pale and thin. She runs her jeweled fingers all over his chest, as if he’s rare and precious. As her hands descend, he begins to whimper, like an unhappy puppy. Tears come from under his tight-closed eyelids. He is as lonely as she. He’s never been touched by a
woman. He’s never been in a position of intimacy, of any kind. He shivers. She’s moved by his shivering. She bends over to kiss him, little pecks all over his bony chest, like a mother hen scavenging the bare earth for something to eat. He pecks back, incompetently. These useless kisses thrill her.
He is becoming aroused. “My skinny pecker that is like a turkey leg is getting hard.” He tries to will it down. He knows what will happen almost immediately. Aagh. It has happened. It is always this way when he is masturbating. The very thought of the act causes the finale. His tears come more plentifully. “I will never be able to satisfy. Not even myself.”
She has watched as his skinny pecker progresses from flaccid to erection to eruption. It is pathetic, and she knows it, but so what. How many things at her age thrill? She has caused him to become excited. With speed she bends and sticks out her tongue and licks up his semen. She savors it, rolling it around in her mouth, and then she swallows it. She sucks on him, hoping to extract a further drop. This tickles him, and he giggles, and jumps up, and quickly puts on his heavy wardrobe again, his underwear, his tweeds. She shrinks, unattended to, ignored, overlooked on the floor, an old pile of flesh, as he clothes his nakedness. Finally he offers her his hand and yanks her up.
“Israel, will you marry me!”
He runs from the office. Outside, in a garden of macabre statuary, elves and gnomes and fairies and angels, he smokes a cigarette and calms himself down. She is gone when he goes back inside.