The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  “But it’s just two hundred dollars and I’ll impress them so much, I’ll win a full scholarship for my senior year and you won’t have to pay a penny.” I wanted so badly to get out of where we lived.

  “Paulson was great,” Henry said to me as we moved into our dorm, Punic Hall. “We have sixty-two guys from my class here.”

  I asked him why he wasn’t rooming with any of them.

  “I wanted to meet new people,” he said, frowning. Like me, I’ll bet he didn’t have any other choices.

  Our other new roommates arrived. Henry and I had already staked out the twin beds, side by side. Pablo was Puerto Rican, but he’d been to Naughton, Paulson’s rival, on a full scholarship provided by a rich neighbor back home. Tom, from St. Xavier’s Prep, was repeating freshman year. They shared the other bedroom, with the double-decker beds. Tom asked for the bottom because he said he’d be bringing home a lot of girls.

  At the last minute they stuck another guy in with us. Saville was very sophisticated. He wore an expensive tweed jacket, casually, as if he wore one every day, which it turned out he did. He was from Santa Barbara, but he’d gone to some school in Switzerland. He was tall and blond and he spoke with some sort of imprecise accent, maybe a combination of Switzerland and Santa Barbara, I figured. He said he was going to become a drama critic, and that he was a homosexual, although he wouldn’t be in a few years, when he intended to marry. He said he didn’t mind sleeping in the living room of our suite because he’d be spending a lot of time with his sister in New York, “to go to all the theater.”

  Everyone pretended not to notice what had just been said. Tom and Pablo looked at each other and shrugged. I looked at Henry. Henry didn’t look at anyone.

  I guess Chuck wasn’t going to be protected here from that word either.

  I’d been trying. I kissed Vivian Mesiroff and Nancy Winkelman and Rebecca Rudolph on their front doorsteps when I took them home. I’d touched the breasts of Marjorie Epstein and Lillian … I can’t remember Lillian’s last name, but I do remember the uncomfortable experience, Bernie Taubtuscher and Mariamne Teitel’s younger sister in the front seat necking away like crazy, and Lillian and me in back, me trying to do whatever was expected, get that hand up under that cashmere, kiss those lips still tasting of pizza, keep up with Bernie, boy, keep up. No wonder I can’t remember Lillian’s last name.

  Early in December, just before exams, Henry and I went to New York. Saville had got us free tickets to a show. The week before, Henry had decided to become a doctor and we were going to celebrate. We wore our gray flannels and blue blazers and button-down shirts and rep ties, our one good set of clothes because that’s all our parents could afford. I watched Algonqua write out the check when she bought them for me at Garfinkel’s. It hurt me to see that. I felt guilty. I wasn’t worth it. She told me it was two months’ salary but “it’s worth it, darling.” As the train pulled into Grand Central, an old lady sitting across the aisle smiled and said how nice we looked.

  “I just know I’ll be a good doctor,” Henry said as we walked quickly up Manhattan’s streets, braving the cold air of the big city without the camel’s hair overcoats sported by all the Paulson and Naughton guys who weren’t on scholarships.

  “You decided to become a doctor just from reading Not as a Stranger?”

  “I’ve read Arrowsmith, too.”

  Saville’s sister turned out to live in her very own town house in the East Sixties between Madison and Park, which I could tell was a good place to be. Standing outside, I felt a tingling of anticipation all over my skin. What was I expecting? I’d been to plenty of expensive houses in Washington.

  Henry pushed the buzzer and the door clicked open and we went in. Everything was beyond what I’d ever seen in Washington. The foyer was marble squares of black and white, the living room was endless and gilded and glistening with crystal lamps and chandeliers and paintings in ornate frames and real flowers in urns so big you could bathe in them. Long corridors seemed to go off everywhere. Henry and I wandered around like two openmouthed kids left alone overnight in Versailles.

  “Some Paulson kids are really rich, but this takes the cake,” Henry said.

  “You can say that again. I wonder what Saville’s father does?”

  “Oil. He’s president of Royal Dutch Shell. Or else he owns it. One or the other.”

  We pressed onward, into the interior. Would we find a mass murderer’s pile of bodies that would stun the tabloids? An orgy of dancing girls veiled in opium clouds? How did I know to worry about either of these things? Where was Saville, our roommate, our host?

  There he was, in a big wicker laundry basket turned on its side, spilling out sheets and Saville, naked except for his white athletic socks and his Shetland sweater over his button-down shirt, his penis dangling down the side of one thigh, white drops of semen congealing on his cock. He must have passed out reaching for the buzzer above him and fallen out of the basket, or into it. We were in a kitchen straight from a Dutch painting, Delft blue and white, hutch cabinets with lined-up plates, pitchers erupting sprays of dried weeds and willows. And Saville on the floor. Who would notice both décor and Saville? I would. Saville, certainly from the waist down, was very handsome. His skin was smooth and tan, and he had no fat on his belly, like a statue of a Greek athlete. His penis was beautiful, and so was the blond hair gently surrounding it. I didn’t know I knew what a perfect penis with perfect pubic hair looked like, but I knew I was looking at it. I’d have to pay more attention in Punic Hall when Saville went to take a shower, so I could join him.

  And then we looked beyond him to what must have been a maid’s room, where a naked young man lay spread-eagled on the bed, his bottom glistening with semen.

  I could tell that Henry was nervous. In fact, he was having a hard time trying to turn his attention to checking out the interior decoration when the young man in the maid’s room, just a few steps away, groaned and rolled over, displaying his own dripping cock. It, too, was perfect and lovely. I was about to step closer to get a better look—after all, maybe there was something wrong with him and he needed help—when Henry grabbed my hand and started running to the front door, yanking it open to the cold December air that blew sharply in our faces. It would blow what we’d seen all away. That’s what I thought Henry wanted as he smiled at me almost as if in relief. I noticed I had an erection. It had all been very exciting and I realized I was reluctant to leave. But the cold air calmed all of me down.

  We went to a Broadway musical pretending to laugh and enjoy it, and then we returned to Yaddah and exams and books. When we saw Saville on Monday morning, we ate breakfast with him in Commons as if nothing had happened.

  I couldn’t get the image of Saville in that basket out of my mind. I’d seen naked guys before in gym, I’d played my share of forbidden games, but the look on Saville’s face and the sound of the other kid’s groan told me they’d been in heaven. I didn’t know where heaven was, but I wanted to get there. Saville reminded me that whatever I thought I’d left for good in Masturbov Gardens (Pop always urging me to keep my eyes out for a rich girl: “it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich one as a poor one”) was still waiting for me, like that appointment in Samarra (I was reading books of portentous influence).

  A mysterious cough came next to hector me, a tickle in the far reaches of my throat that got worse and worse until it kept me up most of the night, hacking and barking so loudly that our freshman counselor sent me to the infirmary. Swabs and tests administered by doctors and nurses produced no cause and the cough endured. I must have whooping cough, they said, but they weren’t sure. They didn’t know what to prescribe beyond continued bed rest and that red cherry syrupy stuff they give to kids. But how was I to rest, missing so much of my coursework in which I wasn’t that up to speed to begin with?

  The cough dwindled and disappeared as mysteriously as it began. I was allowed to return to Punic and an even higher stack of books I had to crack fast, or else.r />
  Henry and Tom were buddies now. Tom was on the verge of failing again, and Henry was helping Tom with his work. Saville and Tom were suddenly close too. One of the local girls Tom brought back had touched Saville’s heart, and he was now involved in a romance with her that Henry and I observed with interest. Pablo was preparing for final exams “in the way we do back home,” by steadily downing gallon jugs of “the cheapest sherry I can find.”

  No one took much interest in me. Only Henry had come to visit me in the infirmary, and he only once. I’d asked him if he and Saville had exchanged any words about New York.

  “No, of course not!” he snapped.

  I swallowed three hundred aspirin on a day in late February after I’d returned from a visit home to Masturbov Gardens. What was I doing there again, I wondered, in a place I didn’t want to be? But there I was. I’d looked forward to midterm, going home with hope, until the instant of my arrival, when Algonqua opened the door and I entered the apartment of my youth, and I was swept into that treacherous current where I felt so helpless and unloved. Why in the world did I come back? To this scene of such a lonely and unhappy childhood. How could I think anything might have changed? And that miraculously I might be happier here with them than I was at Yaddah, where I was increasingly lonely and miserable and flunking out? I looked at my mother looking at me. She didn’t want me here at all. I could hear her thinking, We just took you up there, what are you doing back already? Three weeks of this? How would I live through them? She closed the door behind me. I was home.

  Neither one of my parents wanted me here. I suddenly realized that I was familiar with this feeling. What a dumb kid I must have been not to have known it then. Oh, I knew it all right.

  Lester surfaced from listening to a ball game. A fat, heavy, lethargic man, he sweated a lot, no matter what the season. Algonqua said, “Say hello to him, Lester,” and he grunted his greeting so as not to disturb Milton Berle, now coming on the new TV. I was back in prison. Even Yaddah suddenly looked good.

  I looked in the mirror over my bureau. I resemble Lester. I have the big head, the big ears that jut out, the protruding jaw, and the same unhappy, dissatisfied eyes. I had fought so long not to be like him, to outrun the genes of failure passed along like this old bureau and this peeling mirror. Now here I was, just like him, doing poorly. What was there to return to Yaddah for? More of the same. What was there here in Masturbov Gardens? More of the same.

  I began to have nights of sleeplessness. At 3 a.m. I’d go out and walk in the black cold night through the empty streets, through this bleak warren of my childhood. I felt like a fugitive looking for a safe place to hide, what with Mom and Pop still yelling all the time, my departure not having removed their favorite target, each other. At dawn I returned home exhausted, my head still vibrating with fears, some more identifiable than others. I fell asleep only to be shortly awakened by the noises of their own unhappinesses, doors closed sharply, voices raised in disharmony. Sleeping late in this household had never been an option.

  Almost to the finish line. If I could only last two more days, then one more, I’d be able to go back to Yaddah, now the clear winner as the lesser evil. Algonqua finally noticed my sorry state. She came into my room in her nightgown and sat down on my bed, none too carefully protecting her body from a son’s eyes. She took my hand and clasped it tightly as she asked if anything was troubling me. I knew this confidential pose of hers: she’d struck it many times. Once again she was going to make me feel guilty for something I didn’t do in the first place, whatever it was. Her favorite was trying to get me “to apologize, for always yelling back at your father who works so hard to [take your pick:] feed you, clothe you, send you to Yaddah,” a place I never wanted to go to. I always found it uncomfortable, this implication that some special bond between us should procreate confession when she desired it. I saw in her expression, in the rejected sag of her body, her message that if I didn’t tell her something, anything, some private bit of evidence that she could call her own, then it meant I didn’t love her. But could that really have been news to her? I didn’t want to be here, I don’t want to go back there. What was I going to do? Physical torture couldn’t have extracted words from my mouth right now, even if I could have found words for any of my current feelings.

  Then once again she tried to ask me: “Are you sad because of a girlfriend who isn’t working out?”

  And when I didn’t answer and her body had sagged, she’d sighed: “Would you like some aspirin, dear? They often make me feel much better.”

  I remained silent and she let go my hand, which was sore because she’d been clutching it so hard, and she left me there.

  Of course Lester never noticed a thing.

  I got myself back to Yaddah. I hadn’t written the term papers I’d planned to over my vacation. They were way overdue now, one of them hanging over from my hospital stay. I hadn’t prepared for the exams coming up next week. There was no euphoria of return. I was right back where I started, no matter where I was.

  The notification from the Dean’s Office was on my desk. Henry had put it there. It had been slipped under the door. I was flunking out officially. Unless I improved my grades I’d be joining Tom, whose baggage was already gone. I looked at his bare mattress. At least he’d fucked. At least he’d had some intimacy. I wondered what he’d do with his life now that he’d flunked out of Yaddah twice.

  As Henry and I tossed in our beds that night he asked me if I’d had a good vacation.

  “It was awful.”

  “So was mine. What did the dean say?”

  “I’m … I have to do better.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know how I lived there so many years.”

  There was such a long silence I thought Henry might have fallen asleep.

  “Chuck…?” He started to ask me something. I know he did.

  When he didn’t finish, something lay in the air. I waited a bit more before asking him, “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said softly.

  “What were you going to ask me?”

  “Nothing. Really. I wasn’t going to ask you anything.”

  There was another long pause.

  “Henry…?” My voice was barely a whisper. “Would you come into bed with me?”

  He didn’t answer for the longest time. Finally he said decisively, “It’s against God’s way.”

  I saw him turn over to face the wall. I heard him fall asleep. I heard the birds announce the beginning of the new day.

  My brother got married a month before I took the aspirin. Her name was Jean and she lived on East Seventy-first Street, between Madison and Fifth. She was a Smith graduate and she worked for the Institute of High Art, as assistant to the curator of the entire collection. When Seth asked what I thought of her, I told him how much I liked her. I didn’t know why he bothered to ask. I’d never disapproved of anything he’d done in his entire life. I stayed with her in New York one weekend, I came back early when I thought they’d be out and they were making love half-naked on the living room floor. We were all very embarrassed as they scrambled for their clothing.

  The wedding was at the country club across the street from the old colonial house where she grew up in West Charity. Her father was a federal judge covering all of New England. Everyone made a fuss over him, but I thought he was unkind and demanding. Her mother was quiet and sad and waited on him hand and foot. I danced the Charleston like crazy with Jean’s sister, who was my age, and stuffed myself with food from the buffet and drank too much champagne. Lots of people pinched my cheek and said, “I’ll bet you can’t wait until it’s your turn to get married!” I walked around the golf course and finally puked my brains out.

  I sat on the manicured turf or whatever it’s called and yanked my new tie up over my head as if I were hanging myself. The salesman at J. Squeeze had assured me it was the latest, as was the rest of the clothing he sold me. I’d charged it all. A couple of thousand bucks by n
ow. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it. Lester only gave me fifty bucks a month for an allowance. But I had to look nice for Seth’s wedding, didn’t I? I wanted him and Jean’s world to be admiring and accepting of me.

  “Where did you get all those new clothes?” Lester asked me when he saw me all dressed up for the wedding.

  “I won them in a contest.” That’s what came into my head. “They had this contest. You had to write an essay, ‘What Freshman Year Means to Me.’ I won and this was the prize.”

  “As long as I don’t have to pay for ’em,” he said. He didn’t congratulate me for winning or tell me how handsome I looked.

  I was the best man, which was nice of Seth, because I wasn’t his best friend. I didn’t lose the ring. I managed to offer it at the proper moment. I got tears in my eyes when the vows were exchanged. They seemed so courageous and hopeful and final, all mixed together. “Please, God, let life be good for them,” I said to myself. I wished them well. I really did.

  After the wedding they went to Europe for a three-week honeymoon.

  I was scheduled to take four make-up exams that would wipe out all my accumulated failures, if I passed them. I’d wipe the slate clean all in one blow. It would be like taking a new name all over again. I’d tried to study. I sat there in our room with the striped chintz edging on the curtains Algonqua had made and the matching bedspreads Henry’s mother had made, trying to store up information for the tests, but my brain had no ability to absorb. I’d stare at the printed page and think of Australia, another place like Canada where I thought that I’d be safe. No one would miss me.

  My cough came back. I was serving food in the dining hall as part of my scholarship, and the lady in charge of the steam table told me not to cough on the vegetables. The next day the dietitian told me I’d have to stay away until I stopped coughing and I’d have to make up my lost hours before she’d credit my scholarship. I went back to my room and tried to study some more. Henry tried to help me, but I didn’t know how to tell him what I needed. How do you explain that you can’t make your eyes read? Pablo was having one of his heavy Mission Bell sherry nights and playing mournful Spanish music on his phonograph. I knew Seth and Jean were back. Had they had any fights? Were they still together? Was it going to work? What was sex like for them? I went to sleep with tears in my eyes. I was flunking four courses. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I couldn’t pay for my clothes. I couldn’t stop coughing. And I certainly didn’t want to go back home to Masturbov Gardens.