by Larry Kramer
No, I mean how do you end it in your head? That what you’ve done hasn’t been decent. I am not feeling sorry for myself. I loved the immorality and danger of it. It was no small thrill going into the studio every day knowing Adolf Hitler’s your boss and you’ll talk to him a number of times each day about making his movies. Partekla is germ warfare contrived by Edna Hoover to beat the Japs and Germans at whatever James Jesus and Kim Philby and others said that they were up to. Partekla was, and still is, about beating all “thems” at manufacturing epidemics first. It is successful, as the world will shortly discover. Yes, how do you leave this world with all this upstairs in the back rooms of your mind? I’ve ignored it all for years. Why not now? I have no guilt and I don’t want to have any. Guilt doesn’t exist for Standings, or for spies. It just doesn’t.
What I do care about right now is that I have remained unloved. No one has loved me. But knowing it doesn’t make getting old alone a posting an aging spy wants to say yes to.
I left that office, and I left the agency, and I got in my car and started driving north. I realized I was headed for New Godding and I knew that I wanted to see where Philip and I met and fell in love. I have not seen him for many years. Men need something to believe in and hold on to when nearing death. That is my current state. I resort to the only person I ever loved. Once a gambler, always a gambler. You either survive or you don’t. You either use your gun or you don’t. Spies don’t think like other people.
I loved them all, unlikely as that sounds, Philip and Rivka and young David and even Brinestalker doing whatever stupid things he was doing. Brinestalker was a big spoiled child with a peculiar charm when he got all excited about whatever was exciting him. He bubbled over like champagne and it was fun to watch him. He believed so much in IBM and that Hollerith machine that he sold a million of them. My father’s brother, Owen Standing III, was like that, always finding some modus operandi he was going to change the world with. My father always called him a fool.
Hell, when I got out of Cincinnati and got to Yaddah it was fun to watch anyone get excited about anything, but especially cocks. There wasn’t much excitement in my life until I met Brinestalker and Philip. Very rich Wasps whose family built the ships that sailed down the Ohio, and the Mississippi, and built the canals that made the city become America’s first inland boomtown, and then built the railroads, and then built the streetcars, the Standings were very big on transplanting people on our way to making so much money that we became straitlaced and humorless and determined to not only stay that way but not let anyone from any outside get anywhere near us. Every great fortune’s like this. You think it’s worth it.
Philip took my mind off everything. He was the first Jew I knew. He was like some rare poison I had to take. I had to beat the shit out of him. The way he looked at me, the way he looked at everybody, the way he lived in the world, just made me want to slap him silly. When I did that it gave me a hard-on and gave him one too, as if he was saying—shit, he was saying—More! More! More! I’d never done anything like that. And he hadn’t either. I was the first wealthy Wasp that he was friends with. I wonder if each of us was punishing the other. We certainly weren’t the lover we could take home to mother. Or in my case, Aunt Margot Charlotte, the doyenne of the Standing dynasty. Longfellow called Cincinnati “the Queen of the West.” That was really Aunt Margot Charlotte. She wanted me to go to England and marry someone royal. They did things like that in those days. Lady Astor was just a rich American gal from Virginny.
Yes, I hired Philip. NITS must still have his reports—going back to the ’40s, when he started to work for me, at first in Berlin and eventually in Washington tallying case histories on how many people died at NITS and Partekla (which become the same entity), and, as much as possible, getting them to sign over their estates to us. That’s how Partekla continued to be financed off the government’s official books. It was all Hoover’s idea. He took a cut of all that Philip’s work extracted. At some point I stopped seeing Philip. I became concerned I would go too far. He understood intellectually that I was right, but he was too weak to accept it and he would come begging, phoning in the middle of the night or pounding on my door. It was a mistake for me to move back here after the war. But James Jesus Angleton dangled fascinating assignments in front of me, “that only someone who worked with Hitler would appreciate.” That of course was getting Partekla up and running, and that was preceded with another bit of juicy government back-room concern, who was JFK fucking and what did she know because of it. Right at the end of the war I’d been offered a posting to England to live at Farm Hall with all the German atomic scientists whom we and the Brits had rounded up and put under house arrest, recording every word in their completely wire-tapped existence. “Hitler’s Uranium Club,” it was called. James Jesus’s boys are said to have made personal fortunes out of that one. But I’d had enough of Germans. Besides, I wanted to work more closely with Hoover. He fascinated me. I suspected in advance that from Hitler to Hoover wasn’t much of a stretch and I wanted to see this borne out. So I went to Partekla, where I learned once again how powerful forces, this time our very own homegrown ones, could alter a world totally ignorant of what was going on.
Philip and I hadn’t had sex in many years, and he didn’t want to see me. Through my work with blood I came to see Rivka again. I hadn’t seen her since their wedding. She was surprised to see me and not very friendly, which meant that she knew.
As I was driving I remembered the first time I saw her. She was very pretty, not much over twenty, always smiling and trying to please and be interested and attentive. Philip brought her up from Washington for a winter-weekend carnival at Yaddah, an annual event with lots of parties and dances. I gave him the money to do so. He said he’d dated her in Washington and their families both owned grocery stores. I was very drawn to her and danced with her a lot, which of course annoyed Philip, which of course was the reason I was doing it. But I found I genuinely was attracted to her. This pleased me, that there was another quiver in my arsenal of arrows. Nothing much came of it, of course, but back in Washington after all these years of our living our lives I could see that Philip had ruined hers. And that I had been a big part of that. For a while that just made me want to beat the shit out of him even harder when we finally had sex again, especially when he told me that David had come home and run away. “How could you have allowed that!” I actually raised my voice in anger as I kicked him silly. “You don’t know how much trouble had to be gone through to get him back to you who had left him!” It was then that I finally asked myself what the fuck was I doing, and then my cock wouldn’t go up for him anymore. End of story. Or so you would think. Or so I certainly thought.
The OSS had seemed romantic (yes, running Hitler’s film studio was romantic, at least in OSS terms—think Orson Welles and Graham Greene and The Third Man), but when the CIA was born out of its cocoon, I could tell right off it was going to be nasty and stink to high heaven, and that James Jesus, whose OSS cock I’d diddled with on many a long winter’s night, was, now that it was a CIA one, out to screw everyone the whole world over. He needed a ripsnorter of a supportive president to allow this to happen, and we had a string of them. Subversive was the CIA’s middle name from the get-go. The OSS had been gentlemen. Now a bunch of would-be Nazis were plopped into place in the CIA organizational chart to somehow keep that ball rolling. Real Nazis I’d reported on to FDR as of great danger to world peace. I didn’t want to work alongside these born-agains, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I could complain about out loud. After all, I’d been Hitler’s PR man. And I’d loaned my name to a very peculiar camp in Idaho after Brinestalker and Hoover talked me into it, a camp that was supposed to make homosexuals more masculine but wound up, so far as I could discover, killing most of them just like Grodzo and Mengele did at Mungel. So after dealing with the mess of the murder of Mary Meyer, who was indeed JFK’s mistress for quite some time and did indeed stuff him full of LSD and a number of others wi
th them on their trips, and then finishing up my last case, which was routing out a mole named Drinnell Torpor who was working on chimpanzee shit and piss—a most peculiar and expensive endeavor he was covertly sharing with Russia—at our new germ warfare operation at Fort Detrick, a new part of Partekla, all of which was now a part of NITS, where I knew Philip was still working at its St. Purdah’s, I decided it was time to retire. Whew! In that one paragraph alone resides the whole Cold War.
Except I had some years left of my life to live and I didn’t know what to do with them. I can’t say that my conscience was clean at this point. But I’d never thought in terms of conscience. I’d been too much the rich Wasp playboy during most of my life to think like that. But here I am, going on seventy years old. Something was at last frightening me. Concerning me, I should say.
To clear my head, I went to a small town in rural Maine, on a lake. It was calm and picturesque. I was contemplating buying the pleasant cottage by the water’s edge that I’d rented for two weeks, when a homosexual man was thrown off a bridge in nearby Camden to his death. He was a professor of literature in Washington and it was he who’d suggested I might enjoy living here near his own place. “Nothing much happens, the people are decent, and we can make fires and cook dinner for each other.” The murderers were found soon enough. They were young men, out of work, angry, powerless, with a need for some visible proof of their manhood. I’d encountered enough like these over the years. One of the guilty lads said to the press, “Does this mean I’m going to the chair? I hope so. I don’t want to live anymore.” It touched me, these words and the picture of him in the local paper. A very handsome young man. Would that I had been able to teach him—and David as well wherever he was—how to appreciate his beauty and live more fully because of it. How do you teach that to handsome young men without being murdered yourself or sent to jail? Maybe that’s why Brinestalker changed, having failed so miserably in his own attempt at something like this. His Greek Warriors either escaped or were eliminated somehow. Well, I don’t know how to change, at least not that. I may not be “getting any,” as they say, but you live with that fact, as most of the world does.
I began to notice the local people staring at me in an odd way. Were they warning me to leave before something happened to another homosexual man? Evidently they were. My rental cottage overlooking the lake was torched in broad daylight while I was out stocking up on groceries for my intended retreat. I had brought little of value with me beyond the few dreams I was nurturing for what I was finally courageous enough to call my declining years. Just some books and a portable typewriter. It’s time to write that book! Isn’t that what so many people of a certain intelligence and achievement finally retreat to?
I had gone to Maine to consider this subject: Who is Amos Standing? Has his usefulness expired? I returned to this journey. I had a suitcase that had escaped the torch only because it was still in my trunk along with my typewriter. I left the pressing of any charges to the owner of the cottage. The police were reluctant to allow me to leave, but I told them that two attacks on single men in such a short time did not encourage anything but a hasty exit. I gave them the name of my lawyer in Cincinnati if they needed to locate me. Gottschalk is accustomed to getting me out of awkward situations. When I asked the police chief if he didn’t think these acts were despicable, he shrugged and said, “Maine has never been friendly to homos.” How had I not known that, who knew so much else about the location of our world’s hatreds?
It was while driving south through Massachusetts that I began thinking of Philip. I thought of him more and more the closer I got to Connecticut. I arrived in New Godding and checked into a hotel and went to bed thinking of him. An erection appeared, an occurrence I could no longer count on. I quickly attempted to take advantage of it but it didn’t last. Still, my sleep was sound for the first time in many nights. Walking around the glorious campus the next morning cheered me even more. Perhaps I should think of living here. This is where Philip and I fell in love. I could teach here. Old spies were teaching all over the place. Several Yaddah presidents had even been OSS/CIA operatives during the Cold War years.
Yaddah was still gorgeous. Much donor money had made it even more resplendent. I lived for four years in this town and I have not been back since we graduated. The Three Comrades. Philip and Amos and Brinestalker. Did I move back to Washington to be near Philip? I once tried to marry Rivka, thinking I could love her to be near him. I wonder how many lives I have hurt because of Philip. Rivka, the twins? Philip? Myself? There must be others. He had two older sons as well.
Brinestalker and I of course no longer talked. He is still involved in turncoat activities of the most perverse kind. How does a mind turn on itself so completely? Quite frankly, I was worried about something like this happening in myself. Philip does not respond to my letters, even my reply to the passionate one I received from him out of the blue, but a phone call to Miami Beach resulted in his hanging up when he heard my voice.
My ancestors built ships and fleets and died doing so with their boots on. What else have I got to do with my boots on? I want one more thing to be proud of before I die, assuming that serving my country has been noble. Gottschalk had already been instructed to locate David and give him a healthy amount. The rest of my inheritance will go to Rivka and her old friend Gertrude.
Edgar’s funeral was not what it seemed to the world and the press. Oh, the emissaries of the world’s leaders and countries attended him with tribute, but the real man is not in that coffin. Who were these many young “agents,” lined up in black, their faces hard with that cold impassivity drilled into them? What did they know? What did anyone there know? Except Clyde. What will anyone else ever know? This man who controlled the free world more than any other ruler has ever done died knowing more about America and the world than anyone before or since, or ever will. For another thing, it was the love story. Johnny and Clyde were lovers in the truest sense of that misused word. In Sickness and Health. These were strong, tough, disciplined G-men. Look at the photos of the handsome young square-jawed Clyde. He was the model for Dick Tracy. He worshipped Johnny and Johnny worshipped him back. When Johnny up and suddenly died, Clyde was devastated. Johnny had always been there. Clyde had only a couple of weeks as acting director to burn all the evidence and protect his beloved. That accomplished, he never left Johnny’s house except to visit his grave. In visiting him, I had never before seen such a face of grief as when this strong man cried because he’d lost his beloved. Such was the roaring voice of their silent love. Edgar left Clyde forty large sterling silver napkin rings. Clyde collected napkin rings. J. Edgar Hoover left Clyde Tolson everything, but it was these extra-large napkin rings that Clyde cherished the most. They had called each other Edna and Tilly as they played house.
I wanted one of those true love stories. I’d always had everything I wanted but I’d never had one of those. Yes, I felt sorry for myself and was now shedding tears to prove it. I had never shed a tear before.
I thought of that as I stood in front of Hooker Hall and Standing College, the two dormitory buildings we lived in and loved in. Yes, Standing is named after my family. I was surrounded by a sea of youth rushing by me as if I weren’t here. That I had lived here once and rushed around as they were doing now was of no interest to them, and why should it be? Still and all, they made me feel old, and I did not like the feeling one bit. These handsome young men were longingly attractive to me. It made me feel young just to look at them, until I pictured what they would see if they looked back, which of course they did not. I hated the thought I might be considered a dirty old man.
Philip had never been good-looking. What was his attraction for me? He was short and stubby and pale, with a hairy chest and a hairless body. His face was soft, with fleshy cheeks and a bit of an Adam’s apple under his chin. The hair on his head was almost gone. He had big ears and a largish nose. What comparison did he bear to any of the attractive young men around us when we lived here?
None. Still I cannot picture myself fucking any of these youngsters, even if I were their age, but fucking Philip was always exciting to me. Tying him up was exciting to me. Making him wear leather was exciting to me. Making him obey my orders was exciting to me. Making him crawl naked across a room to suck my erect cock was exciting to me. I can’t even fantasize making one of these lads do anything like this. They’re too wholesome, too clean-cut. I can picture watching them have sex with each other. I certainly had my fill of this at Partekla, whatever that place was really about, something I now refuse to allow myself to remember in much detail, but of which I do recall there was a great amount to forget. That’s spy talk for you.
Our entryway to Standing College had been conveniently vacated for repairs, so I was able to locate our rooms on the third floor. I went in and closed the door behind me. The view from the windows, looking out at the towers and turrets of this handsome and stalwart university, was still thrilling, the elms and maples and oaks even more grandly healthy and beautiful now. The suite still had two bedrooms and a living room. One bedroom still had a double bed in it. It was inconceivable that it would be the same bed, although it looked like it. Could two men be sleeping in it still? The walls were scruffy and colorless as ever. We used to call the shade vomit green; now it was more like pale piss. I lay down on the bed and fell asleep in Philip’s arms.
I don’t know if he enjoyed any aspect of his servitude but did it because I told him to. I never discerned any true displeasure on his part. I thought he enjoyed everything we did together. If he hadn’t, would I have felt the reciprocity that motivated me? I was thinking all this now as I lay on this bed from our past.