The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  His skin, now, is burnished bronze. My theory about this has to do with that hazy, almost imperceptible purple interior luminosity, which I think is caused by pigmentation gone awry that can coalesce the melanin, upon approaching death, into this healthy suntanned glow. His skin was naturally dark anyway, so he looks even more stunning. His lovely Northern Italian genes passed on blond hair and dark skin, and the feel of it, smooth, slightly brushed with fine golden wisps of hair on his chest and his strong legs, which are, were, long and pliant, like a swimmer’s or a dancer’s—oh, stop it!

  He kissed me this morning.

  I was up. I’d had my coffee. I’d glanced at the boring Monument, which reports what’s happening not at all. I was dressed for office hours. The bell rang early. It was Francis.

  “I didn’t sleep so well. I’m feeling awful. I’m burning up. I’m sicker than ever. I just know it. I’m sorry for coming over so early without calling. I didn’t know what else to do or where to go. I don’t want to go to a hospital! Please don’t send me to a hospital!”

  Going to the hospital already means sequestering, which is another word for being quarantined, which is being talked of as a possibility. As if locking up all the cases will make any difference. Even if anyone could identify all the cases.

  I examined him immediately.

  He stood in front of me, naked. I found swollen glands everywhere. Under his arms. In his groin. In his neck. My hands darted softly, exploring for more signs that could only tell me the worst. I was crying inside. Death was raging inside this beautiful young man. And my penis was hard, so I was bending forward awkwardly, trying not to look foolish. At moments like this (the sentence of death, not the sexual arousal, though that too), doctors never know what to do.

  “I’m really sick, aren’t I? I’m such a chatterbox. I can find words for all occasions. I’ve fucked with guys all my life, guys my own age. You’re old enough to be my father. Right now I’d give anything to live the rest of my life with someone like you. But it’s too late, isn’t it?”

  And that’s when he leaned forward to meet my leaning forward, and he kissed me. I held him tightly in my arms. I ached to protect him from all harm. And my erection went down as I could feel his rising up.

  “Well, look at that,” he said, smiling down, completely unselfconscious, as only the young and the beautiful can be about their bodies, which haven’t been their enemies, as they are for the rest of us. “I watched this movie on TV with Cary Grant and a tiger or a lion, and he reminded me of you. You wear the same kind of glasses.”

  I wanted to say, I have longed to kiss you and hold you from the very first moment you walked into this office several years ago, fresh from Michigan, where, yes, you had been on the swim team. I was on a swim team once, at Yaddah, before you were born, but not for very long. I wasn’t good enough.

  “Can you save me for a little longer?” He clapped his hand over my mouth. “I don’t want to hear your answer. Just do your best.”

  I held his hand to my mouth. I kissed it and then I just held it to my face. I think my tears came before his. But his came too. And we stood there, awkwardly, looking into each other’s eyes and crying.

  “You don’t know how handsome you are,” he said.

  “Come, put on your clothes” was all I could say as I tried to help him dress.

  “No, come here. Beside me.” He sat down on the cold floor of my office with its threadbare oriental whose dark browns I once thought bookish, way overdue for changing, along with my desire to be viewed as bookish myself. He pulled me down beside him. I could see that his hand, which I was still holding, was turning the blazing red we would soon enough learn signifies final consumption by sarcomas as they usher the blood on its final journey from heart to brain; and the blotches and spots on his face were now merging into one great splotch. I touched this face. “Oh, my Francis.” I wanted to say … what? Oh, my Francis, I love you? Oh, my Francis, I am so sorry? Oh, my Francis, we have been so foolish in this world to believe we are wanted and loved, and it is in another world that we shall hold each other, never to be so naïve, never to let go, never to waste so much time. I lay down beside him and we held each other. I felt so clumsy. I felt so old, so very old. And most of all, so useless. He was burning hot. He was trying to pull my clothes off, my thick tweed armor. He was kissing me, but his kisses flew to the air. He was thrashing so hard from the fever erupting in him that he had no control over the sudden jolts tossing him this way and that. He was like a criminal being electrocuted.

  “I can’t stand up!” These were his last words on earth. He was in fact trying to stand up. In the seconds since I’d last seen his face, his skin had gone from red to purple, as if in some horror movie with special effects scaring the bejesus out of you.

  Then it happened, of course. Impious me begged a god I never knew to save this boy, to give him just a little more time—to get him cooled down, to get him to a bed, to get him a shot of Faranx (which doesn’t really help, though we give it anyway because we have nothing else to give; you buy it at a camera store; it’s used to develop X-rays, another of Golly’s follies), to grant me just a second extra to say I love you, I think of you all the time, I worry about you, what are you doing for dinner, I apologize for this awful rug, I’ve wished as long as I can remember for someone to share this house … oh, all these silly thoughts of a lonely man who could and should have had love but for whatever reasons—mine, the world’s—has not. I was holding his hands so tightly and he was looking up at me with eyes so filled with questions: Why? Why me? Why now? Perhaps: Isn’t there even time for another hug?

  And then he lay dead in my arms.

  Francis is dead in my arms.

  So now I sit and wait for the men from the morgue. They are already wearing protective clothing so thick they could survive Hiroshima. Francis. Diagnosed with the nimroid and dead from The Underlying Condition and incinerated into ashes in a little over an hour. The law will shortly say that all UC deaths must be incinerated swiftly. Burial is forbidden. When I phone his parents and when they hear the diagnosis and recall the article from The New York Truth, they refuse to claim him. Send them the bill. There are no siblings who wish to come forward, or so the parents say. Is there a lover? A what? they ask. They hang up before I can answer. Diagnosed and dead and incinerated and disowned in a little over an hour. My God.

  I hear the mail come through the slot. I fetch it by force of habit.

  There is a letter from Francis:

  Dear Dr. Jerusalem, I love you. I want you to hold me and kiss me and make love to me. All this time we’ve wasted. I haven’t had the courage to tell you my feelings. All this time neither have you. I can tell the way you touch me and look at me, wanting to kiss me and hold me and let me kiss and hold you back. But afraid. Like we’re all afraid. Why are people always afraid?

  Francis is dead on my floor and there are stains in my trousers from love unshared. How much time is left? To do what?

  My eyes fill with tears. My tears turn to sobs.

  I believe my country is allowing this to continue.

  I cry. And then I cry some more.

  If I silently witness something evil, am I then an evil man?

  EXT. LENOX HILL HOSPITAL. DAY.

  Pouring rain. TV camera covering a few pickets, Fred and about ten others. We see the signs: OUR BACHELOR MAYOR LETS GAY MEN DIE! COME OUT OF THE CLOSET, MAYOR, AND SAVE YOUR DYING BROTHERS! Fred is photographed holding this last sign.

  INT. NEW GMPA OFFICE. DAY.

  A raw space, empty. The board is all here, trying not to look at Fred, who stands apart.

  BRUCE (entering): This is perfect for our new offices.

  DICK (to Fred): You organized that picketing of the mayor?

  (Fred nods.)

  And those signs?

  FRED (nodding): He is a heartless, selfish son of a bitch.

  DICK: Your next play is about a First Lady who gave the best blow jobs in Hollywood?

&nb
sp; FRED (nodding): And her gay ballet dancer son.

  BRUCE: You got into the White House and they had to throw you out?

  (Fred nods.)

  BRUCE: You tried to organize our over six hundred volunteers to go down to Washington to storm NITS?

  (Fred nods, grinning.)

  BRUCE: You scared them all to death. You’re circulating a flyer calling Dr. Omicidio a murderer?

  (Fred nods with a bigger grin.)

  (Sounds from outside, down on the street.)

  EXT. STREET. DAY.

  People of all ages, carrying signs: KEEP YOUR DISEASE OUT OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD. COCKSUCKERS DESERVE TO DIE. I THANK THE LORD EVERY TIME HE KILLS ONE OF YOU. I HOPE THEY NEVER FIND A CURE. GOD LOVES YOU.

  Tommy comes hurrying toward the building. One of the picketers tries to prevent him entering. Tommy hauls off and decks him.

  INT. NEW OFFICE. DAY.

  As Tommy enters.

  FRED: The mayor has four more hours before we carry out our threat of civil disobedience if he doesn’t meet with us. Don’t worry, a bunch of us are doing this on our own.

  BRUCE: Tommy got the call.

  FRED: Why didn’t you tell me? You see, it works! What time?

  BRUCE: We can only bring two people.

  FRED: What time!

  BRUCE: Tommy is the executive director.

  FRED: I’m going.

  BRUCE: I polled the board.

  FRED: I’m on the board. You didn’t poll me. I wrote that letter to the mayor. I got sixty gay organizations to sign it. I organized the picketing when the prick didn’t respond. That meeting is mine! It took me twenty-one months to get it and goddammit I am going to go to it representing this organization that I have spent every minute of my life fighting for and that was started in my living room or I quit.

  (No response. Dawns on him.)

  You’d let me quit? Just when you need me most? The mayor is the one person most responsible for ignoring this epidemic in our city and allowing it to grow into a plague, and now you’re going to kiss his ass?

  BRUCE (takes out a letter and reads it to Fred): The board wanted me to read you this. “We are circulating this letter widely. We take this action to try to combat your damage, wrought, so far as we can see, by your having no scruples whatever. You are on a colossal ego trip we must curtail. To manipulate fear, as you have done repeatedly in your ‘merchandising’ of this epidemic, is to us the gesture of barbarism. To exploit the deaths of gay men, as you have done on television and in publications all over America, is to us an act of inexcusable vandalism. And, after years of liberation, you have helped make sex dirty again for us—terrible and forbidden. We think you want to lead us all. Well, we do not want you to. In accordance with our bylaws as drawn up by Lemish, Frankel, Levinstein, Mr. Fred Lemish is hereby removed as a board member of Gay Men Pay Attention. We beg that you leave us quietly and not destroy us and what good work we manage despite your disapproval.”

  (During the above we notice that Morton’s and Dick’s lips are moving as Bruce reads. They are the writers of this letter.)

  INT. GMPA OLD OFFICE. DAY.

  Fred is clearing out stuff from his cubbyhole corner. Some volunteers watch nervously. Fred is pushing Tommy away. More volunteers will come in as the scene builds, until by the end the room is filled with people staring at Fred.

  TOMMY: The executive director isn’t on the board. I didn’t have a vote! What could I have done?

  FRED (screaming with fury and rage): You didn’t support me! You’re all nothing but undertakers! This organization is a funeral parlor! All you do is take care of the dying! Who’s fighting so the living can go on living? History is worth shit. We’re becoming our own murderers. Is this how so many people just walked into the gas chambers?

  (He comes across an almanac of famous gay people. Everyone watches him going crazy. Bruce enters.)

  FRED (contd): I belong to a culture that includes Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Herman Melville, Thornton Wilder, Brahms, Cary Grant, Tchaikovsky, Auden, Forster, Byron, Plato, Socrates, Henry James, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, so many popes and cardinals you wouldn’t believe, King James and his Bible …

  (Grabs Bruce.)

  Hey, Mr. Green Beret, did you know it was an openly gay Englishman who was responsible for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code. After the war was over he committed suicide, he was so hounded for being gay. When are they going to start teaching any of this in the schools? A GAY MAN WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR WINNING WORLD WAR TWO! If they did, maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself and you wouldn’t be so terrified of who you are. That’s how I want to be remembered—as one of the men who won the war. Being defined only by our cocks is literally killing us … Bruce, I know I’m an asshole. But, please, don’t shut me out.

  (Bruce walks out followed by everyone else. Everybody’s walked out, although Tommy has tried to catch his eye until Bruce pulls him with him. Fred’s all alone.)

  * * *

  HERMIA: Fredchen, my dearest one, I am so sad for you. Everything that I am discovering is immensely sad.

  You are trying to do too much! You are trying to tell us too much all at once. Your beloved organization, your first child, disinherits you. Your beloved new lover is dying. The history of this wretched plague that grows more complicated whether you go back or go forward. Your hateful country hates you. You need as much help as you can get! Did you know that lovely Ann Fettner has died? Middleditch couldn’t get all the cancer out of her lungs. She was preparing for you her thoughts and feelings about this Omicidio, which I sense will prove most uncomplimentary. She has turned these over to me and I shall continue this investigation to help move you along. I smell much more evil coming. With such ancestry, how could it not be so.

  Just know that I adore you more and more each day. Your own, your one and only, Hermia.

  INT. HOSPITAL CORRIDOR. DAY.

  Fred, dressed in a suit and tie, hurries down the hall.

  INT. FELIX’S HOSPITAL ROOM. DAY.

  Curtains drawn so light is dim. Felix is almost dead. Fred comes in.

  FELIX: I should be wearing something white.

  FRED: You are.

  FELIX: It should be something Calvin Klein ran up for me personally.

  FRED: What am I ever going to do without you?

  FELIX: Don’t stop writing. Okay?

  FRED: Okay.

  FELIX: Promise?

  FRED: I promise.

  FELIX: It better be good. Fred, don’t stop fighting. Don’t lose your anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness, for yourself as well.

  Emma comes in with Tommy.

  FELIX (contd): Emma, could we start, please?

  EMMA (taking Felix’s hand): We are gathered here in the sight of God to join together these two men. They love each other very much and want to be married before Felix dies. I can see no objection. This hospital is my church. Do you, Felix Turner, take Fred Lemish … to be your…?

  FELIX: My husband. I do.

  FRED: I do.

  Felix is dead. Emma leaves. Orderlies come in and put a screen around him. Fred tries to go to him, but one of the orderlies gently prevents him.

  FRED: Why didn’t I fight harder! Or go on a hunger strike? Or picket the White House all by myself if nobody would come?

  TOMMY: We will, sugar. We will.

  A SAFE HOUSE?

  GARRIE NASTURTIUM

  I live in what’s called a safe house. Purpura insisted on it. She had it found for me and then came and checked it out. I’m too valuable to her, she said. What are you afraid of, I asked. You never know, she said. She had Patti help me furnish it. Even Mr. Schwartz came to say hello.

  She trusts me. She doesn’t trust anyone else. I try to present her to the world as she wants to be seen. It isn’t easy. She knows that. She’s grateful to me. She is always thanking
me profusely when anything complimentary about her appears. She can smell trouble coming faster than anyone I ever worked for. When UC was secretly described to us by Slyme, long before The Truth, she knew right away what was going to happen, way before that Lemish guy. Her main concern is keeping it as quiet as we can. “We must at all costs prevent the world from knowing that this is happening in Peter’s and my country.”

  She’s always saying she loves me a lot, that she couldn’t do without me. “We are on a secret mission together,” she tells me more than once. More and more she’s running the country. She’s a busy girl, no doubt about it. When I compliment her telling her this, she answers, “Let’s keep that our secret, shall we.”

  INT. CREMATORIUM OFFICE. DAY.

  A clerk approaches a counter with two cardboard boxes. Fred is there, as is another gay man, Edward.

  CLERK: Let’s see. Fred Lemish, for Felix Turner?

  FRED: That’s me.

  He takes the box. He is crying. Edward, who’s taken the other box, sees this.

  EDWARD: I’m so sorry. (He gives Fred a hug.) My name is Edward Alsop. I know who you are. I’ve got a car outside. I’ll drive you home.

  FRED: Thank you. I’m so sorry for your loss too.

  INT: CHAPEL. DAY.

  The urn with Felix’s ashes. A small crowd for a memorial to Felix. Emma, NYT staff, Felix’s wife and son with a minister. Tommy is holding the huge blown-up photo of Felix while Fred talks. Other photos hanging. Felix stands to the side, looking on. We see that Edward is also here.

  FRED: Felix Turner and I loved each other very very much. Thank you for coming to remember him.

  MINISTER (wearing collar, southern accent; stands up): Felix Turner was a sinner, and his wife and son, Felix Jr., and I have come from Tulsa to join with you in praying for the salvation of his soul. Let us all rise and pray for the soul of Felix Turner, who sinned himself to death.