The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  The huge failure of Beyond the Mountains, Beyond the Stars will put paid to Rust. Hollywood will send him out to pasture. He will continue to live with his “half brother with whom I was brought up with ever since he was found as a tiny foundling on our doorstep in Tarpoo.” Very little will now be heard about him until his death.

  The movie I wrote for him tanks, bombs, stinks, sinks, and deserves to. I was ashamed I’d written the (non)fucking thing. No, I didn’t want to stay in this grotesque town or make another one.

  The money, however, will prove quite useful when I start fighting for my people, Rust’s and mine. Seth will increase it for me a great great great deal.

  So I had learned that I did not want to write movies. Great writing about Hollywood is scarce for a reason. Great novels are not fashioned from the likes of Rust Legend, or should I be corny and say rusty legends. He was neither Mr. Micawber nor Mrs. Gamp. He wasn’t anywhere near a Mrs. Proudie, and Monroe Stahr was above him by far. Neither he nor his work had redeeming qualities. The ability to like him was lacking in all that work he did.

  No, I would have to look elsewhere for the “basic material” with which I’d try to bear witness to the world, and how it treats my people.

  They say you must write about what you know. And that you must suffer before you do. Well, we’re coming to that.

  THE DECADES OF HOPE

  That’s what these postwar years will be called by historians. Steele, Comminger, Ginn, MacNeill, Morris, Jackson … All diseases will be eliminated. Polio will be gone. Enough food will be available for all. If a disease isn’t eliminated, it’s about to be …

  In 1931, Dr. Israel Jerusalem had discovered a new disease that ate the flesh of people after they’d eaten the brains of each other. He won a Nobel Prize for it. He believed something inherent in his discovery could be effective against cancer. He never got the chance to find out because such research as would be required—the consumption of human bodily parts by other humans—would never be allowed in this country. Dr. Sister Grace tried again with Israel’s samples, this time at Partekla. There is something about Israel’s and Grace’s work that interests Dr. Stuartgene Dye. From Partekla he checked with NITS to see if it knows anything about their work. He discovers that NITS owns it. Israel first discovered it while working on a government grant. He’d named it glause. He’d called it “a bodily poison.” And he’d won that Nobel Prize.

  Who’s president? Americans rarely remember in what order their public servants serve them. They certainly give them names, like men naming their dicks. Fucker, Putz, and more often than not, Asshole. American presidents come and go and are rarely remembered. Each new president of course always promises that new day dawning tomorrow. Play it again, Sam. There will be no more disease. Hunger will be eliminated. Poverty will disappear. Everyone will have health insurance. Progress is our most important product. Yaddahyaddahyaddah.

  * * *

  Do you remember Miss Trudy McNab? She got some of me in her eyes when she fell in one of those bloodmobile things. Young Daniel was blamed for it. She has just died from me although you don’t know me yet. It did take her a long time. Some people take longer than others.

  VENUS RISING

  Begin now the more fully blossoming Sexopolis years, the years of its wider-spread hold on the heterosexual world’s erotic imagination. Increasingly men everywhere feel they have permission to perform as well as imagine. Whatever dark thoughts they’ve been harboring can now come into a brighter light. Mordy is hailed as a great man, the king of a mighty revolution. And so he is. It’s hard to underestimate the importance of what’s going on now with the penises of the American heterosexual male, the significance and relevance of what they’re doing, these penises, these men, because of this magazine, because of Mordecai Masturbov, son of Abraham and Doris Hardware Masturbov, grandson of Herman and Yvonne Masturbov and of Horace Turvey, Jr., and whatever her name was, and cousin to Daniel and Lucas and Stephen and David Jerusalem. Anthony Comstock would turn over in his grave. But who the fuck remembers Anthony Comstock?

  Mordy anthropomorphizes his subscribers. They are all living, breathing beings to him. He even talks to his own penis. Nothing new about this. But Mordy’s penis talks back. Sexopolis has a column by Mordy’s penis. “My Friend,” he calls it. My Friend talks to his fellow travelers in direct, instructive ways. “It is more pleasurable to both your partner and yourself if you can locate those specific spots of her vaginal canal that bring on the fullest excitement for you both. Don’t be selfish. Remember there are two of you. Write to this Box Number for our illustrated instructions.” Sometimes the baton is passed to Witty Ora, My Friend’s fellow columnist, a specialist on the intricacies of oral sex: “Honeys, listen to me. You got a mouth. You got a tongue. You even got teeth but you got to be careful with them. But God gave you all these things. So learn how to use them to their fullest, you hear! Write to this Box Number for our illustrated instructions.” The sort of thing that had never legally found its way into print before is now being purveyed to a “mass market.” Some subscribers have even been known to break legs rushing to their newsstands on publication day, or to sprain wrists reaching too quickly into RFD mailboxes. “Be careful how you use your hands,” My Friend writes often. “Your hands are your conductors, for your own symphony orchestra. Cream them just like you cream me.” It’s no wonder each issue finds so many hundreds of thousands from across the globe joining “Our Box Numbers Master List. Welcome!” So it’s no wonder Jerusalem & Sport, Mordy’s law firm, as young and eager to grow as he, is hiring many a smart-ass horny associate to defend Sexopolis in courts of law.

  Lucas is the only one who worries their success won’t last indefinitely. His law firm with Stephen and Sam Sport is not only making them rich but making him uncomfortable. This ascension is not without a lot of fights. There are many in this country that don’t want a Sexopolis, in any way, shape, or form. Stephen is in one court or another on a regular basis, as is Sam Sport in the higher courts, fighting against being classified as “pornography,” such an ugly and derogatory word.

  Lucas wonders if he knows his own brother anymore. Stephen is annoyed that he has to keep reassuring Lucas. “Listen, it’ll take a long time to get judgments from local courts appealed up to the Supreme Court. Sexopolis already has more money to fight for its rights than most states have to fight us back, and each day we only get richer. You and me both, bro. We’re getting fucking rich representing this magazine that’s giving our country what it wants: fucking! How to do it! Why to do it! Permission to do it! America has been waiting almost two hundred years for this. America, our America, is not going to let it slip away. Can’t you see that?” “You sound just like Mordy,” Lucas says quietly. “What’s wrong with that? What’s fucking wrong with that?” Stephen replies. “The penis is mightier than any law,” Stephen and Mordy yell at Lucas over and over. “You’re not getting laid enough” usually ends all discussions.

  And then there are the moments when Stephen takes Lucas aside and says softly to him, “Lucas, we’re young. We’re rich. We’re getting richer. Enjoy it, will you, my brother I love?” And moments when Mordy has to be reassured himself, by, of all people, Jinx Seeley, who’s become a buddy of sorts, hanging around the Sexopolis mansion, which is what Mordy’s house is now called, with a growing group of girls with gorgeous everythings while waiting to be photographed or fucked. “There’s not a man, woman, or child in these United States, perhaps the world, who hasn’t been affected by you in one way or another,” Jinx scolds him. “How many people can make that statement? Why is it that Jewish boys have such difficulty in enjoying a job well done?” She reminds him of this regularly.

  Yes, by now everyone knows Sexopolis. Every full-blooded American Man knows Sexopolis. Your Friend is mine. Get with the program! Climb on broad, er, board.

  It is his readers who are Mordecai Masturbov’s family. They are all living, breathing people. He takes them all to bed with him. They
do not leave him in the middle of the night. They wake up with him in the morning. He does not have to show them out the door. They do not leave him at the close of day. They love him as he loves them. Faithfully. As he’s never loved or been loved before.

  He will have everything but his Claudia.

  By 1960, Sexopolis will be selling one million copies a month.

  The population of the world had now reached three billion people.

  THE ABOUT-TO-BECOME FIRST LADY (OF CALIFORNIA) HAS TO GET LAID

  Purpura Ruester has to get laid. Why should she not have desires? Does not a First Lady (of California) have needs?

  All those years Peter schlepped across America speaking out for Greeting, back and forth, back and forth, she never saw so many men in dark suits. Black and navy suits are the safest. They are usually worn by lawyers, and lawyers don’t talk. She rarely sucked off a lawyer who couldn’t get a big one up for her. She’d had to get laid quite a bit over the years in their travels. Why waste a dark blue suit?

  Now that she and Peter are elected, she’s forced to settle down in one of the ugliest state capitols in America. Foppy Schwartz, her mentor in matters of style and taste, advises her to relax. “I predict that you won’t have to stay too long in that dull, dreary, bleak, unpleasant pit.” The state mansion is actually falling down. They expect her to live in this? She knows she’ll just have to get laid more than usual. A body’s needs can get aggravated by geography and real estate. Carlotta Punic is also giving her lessons on how to dress. “We’ll hide those piano legs, honey.” She’s always been self-conscious about her legs. Legs are so important to men. And skirts are shorter now. Between Foppy and Carlotta, Purpura will emerge stylistically triumphant. And dressed to kill.

  Stay tuned. To be continued. Sacramento is simply too boring to spend too much time on or in, at this moment.

  GOING FORWARD TO LOOK BACK

  Terartunian Mdeske is a Haitian accountant working in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a tax collector in a country where it’s hard to collect taxes. Belgian Congo is one of several central African countries where UC was unknowingly living around 1930, when it is thought to have jumped from chimp to man. As a public servant he’s entitled to all sorts of perks, including especially his pick of any women and men from any tribe that catches his fancy. He is very handsome so there are many willing picks. He is a long way from home. Yes, he gets infected with what will be The Underlying Condition, for this is where it presumably came from, from all these poor starving people hunting monkeys for barter or eating them. Terartunian Mdeske travels often to neighboring Uganda, carrying letters of credit to that country, which he will deliver around 1965 to Maj. Gen. Idi Amin, right-hand man to another master-murderer Milton Obote, whom Amin shortly gets rid of. Here, too, Terartunian Mdeske is a hungry fucker of both sexes. He knows he’s going home to Haiti, where it will never be as good as this.

  So Terartunian Mdeske returns to Haiti carrying the deadly virus, just after Idi Amin begins his own ethnic cleansing, his army also mass raping and massacring women in Uganda and in Tanzania as well as in Congo itself, which had just been the setting for Lumumba (who was assassinated and his body completely dissolved in acid) and the monster Mobutu and the mad-dash exodus for freedom by hundreds of thousands of their civil servants, many of them Haitians. In fear, the entire non-African population—which for many decades served as civil servants in these countries—fled to the four corners of the globe, particularly Brazil, Asia, India, Haiti, and the United States, carrying you know what with them. And leaving behind hundreds of thousands of women who survived only by selling their bodies to various conquering armies. There was not one single medical doctor in the Congo in 1960.

  And yes, Terartunian Mdeske, on his next assignment from Haiti to the United Nations in New York, brings the UC virus with him here too.

  One thing about Canadians. We did keep good records of everything.

  * * *

  Yes, yes, that is a part of what happened! I am brought to your shores again, this time in 1969, more than a full decade before your public health “experts” realize they have an awful lot of me on their hands!

  DAME LADY HERMIA: Grace confides in me that she is frightened. “Why do I fear for my own fucking life, dear cousin? What secret am I treading so close to? Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to make me look guilty. Of what! Shitty-ass rat fuck!”

  THEY DIDN’T TEACH ME ANYTHING LIKE THIS IN MED SCHOOL

  DANIEL

  My older brother Stephen is now also obsessed with sex. He credits Mordy for luring him in, slowly but surely, not only as his legal adviser and stockholder, but as participant in all that Sexopolis and “My Friend” define as “new and different.” He is handsome. He is horny. He had learned how to tell when a girl was horny too. Sometimes in the nice weather they’d sleep out all night in Rock Creek Park. He found ways for them to sneak into all sorts of places. One night he and a cheerleader actually slept in the locker room at Griffith Stadium after the Redskins football team won the championship. He had more good-looking girls mothering him than he knew what to do with.

  It’s interesting how some kids can become adept at providing for their needs in spite of parental abuse, or lack of interest, or whatever you want to call Philip and Rivka not paying attention to us. Stephen had clap a few times and crabs a lot of times but he really sincerely genuinely loved fucking. It was magic to him. Magic he couldn’t get enough of. He told me some of this. Claudia would tell me the rest. His grades weren’t the greatest but he was smart enough to figure out how to get through college and law school. Through it all, the grip of sex grows stronger and stronger on this man who only a few years ago was straitlaced and easily shocked. It’s surprising, though it shouldn’t be, how many people have few memories of a past they don’t desire to live with. He, like Mordy’s growing army of readers, is both amazed and pleased that there are many a new “sexopolized” tool to make his old tool yesterday’s model T. I could see all this happening as well with my gay patients. It was also a brave (not for me!) new world of physical adventure.

  At Doris’s, Stephen’s discovered Claudia. In no time at all he becomes convinced that Claudia is the answer to all his needs. She treats him like she treated his young brother, me, like she treats all men, which makes him want her more. For the moment it’s not a story ready for its telling. She hasn’t changed much, except she’s getting paid for it, and he’s got plenty of money to pay. He’s read a book on the subject of sexual satyriasis; to be so inclined, it appears, has less to do with appetite than with some dysfunction in the goals department. He no longer wants anything else badly enough. From poor boy to rich man to boredom! And still so young.

  Yes, he’s rich, and Lucas is, too, thanks to Mordy and Sexopolis and Sam. This has been said before but rich with what Sexopolis is providing them is really rich and deserves to be emphasized in a family history in which there doesn’t seem much else but money to motivate. This source of wealth is different from owning land or real estate. My older two brothers’ riches are from protecting physical passion. And from Sam Sport’s finding illegal ways to challenge prohibitions via secret contacts that no tax or moral code has plugged up yet. There’s a reason for the expression “living high off the hog.”

  This magazine and this owner are the clients any law firm longs for. While Sexopolis is always in trouble, Sexopolis is always profitable. Stephen is excellent at dealing with trouble. Sam is excellent at scaring people. All three partners are excellent at either defending against or threatening sexual improprieties, which Stephen now understands firsthand; and the very litigation he’s usually involved in on behalf of Sexopolis serves the additional plus of turning him on.