The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Her children, one and all, keep their distance. She has ruined Junior’s life. I wish he had inherited her balls, or at least one of them. The girls are crazy in their own ways. The other son is a joke. It’s the most dysfunctional of families; the amazing thing is how off-limits this is in the press. She has managed to create just the images she wants, and off with the head of whoever veers from her course of action. Even I am impressed. Hell, your Ianthe owns to never having seen the likes of it. In all this she has her henchman; now that Garrie’s mysteriously gone, her handpicked axe wielder is Linus Gobbel, the house Nazi. It is he who conveys to the press that unless they behave there will be no access to the crowing Ruester. Strangely enough, they behave. It’s distressing how well they behave. They’re learning it’s a mistake not to take her seriously.

  Isn’t it interesting that in summing up his first term, their first term, I’ve spoken only of her? Peter has been receding more and more each day. Purpura and her Bohunk and her Gobbel and her Slyme are keeping him busy so he appears to be doing all sorts of governmenty things and can constantly be photographed signing something or other with his huge, contagious grin. I doubt any historian will ever write the true history of his era, because if it is to be honest—and what is these days?—it will all have to be about her.

  In this town the filthier the life, the safer.

  Patti tells me Purpura’s busyings are increasingly about missile shields and things Soviet, matters she had never found riveting. But as we are seeing, she’s a quick study.

  I save the saddest for last. Patti also tells me that Junior comes often to cry on her shoulder, literally. He says he has somehow miraculously escaped UC and he is “torn in a thousand pieces between gratitude and guilt and indecision and shame and fear and trembling and duty, but to what and whom?” I could not put it more succinctly or movingly, so I won’t try.

  He now knows, as very few know, that the UC policy, or nonpolicy, starts right there in the White House at his own mommy’s desk. “No son of mine is going to be a fucking fairy ballet dancer,” she gritted through her teeth when I asked what she thought of his burgeoning career. And we all thought it was Peter who would put paid to that. “Tough love,” she said, “and that’s all I am going to say about that!”

  PISS ON THE PRESIDENT

  IN WHICH DARCUS CHARLES GRAVES DOES JUST THAT

  Darcus Charles Graves watched as workmen constructed the enormous viewing stand for the president’s second inauguration. Sam Sport is in New York, so Darcus has a day off and has decided to walk around Capitol Hill. Darcus remembers this area from his boyhood as a place of shitty slums, and while he’s watched it change into something cleaner, with escalating property values, it’s not his people who are benefiting. “Our slums just moved farther out. We still live in shit,” he said to his wife. He nods to some black construction workers hammering nails to keep the planking up long enough to hold this president with his heavy crowd, and they nod back. He likes to watch workers doing tough stuff, but he’s glad he doesn’t have to do shit like that. No one seems to care much as Darcus goes to stand under the spot where he imagines Peter will swear his oath on the old Ruester family Bible. His own papa, Felindus Max Graves, swore in a president once. Darcus couldn’t tell you which one, and Felindus Max is hidden away in some home somewhere, nutty as a loon, so never able to be trotted out to testify that he once did something so grand and patriotic.

  Darcus pulls out his enormously long penis and urinates on the ground and on the wooden supports and metal piping, and, holding it like a hose, he washes down a little of this part of the Capitol building’s base. Then he squirts upward directly under the president’s podium, smiling as a bit of his urine rains back on him. He laughs softly. “Here’s piss in your eye, Mr. President. Mine, too. It’s for good luck. A big black nigger cock is good luck, man.” With his cock still hanging out, he’s spotted by a group of tourists from Georgia wearing large pins that say, “We are the Georgia Klan.” He wishes he had more urine inside him to hose them down too, but he waves his penis at them anyway. They scream and run, falling in line behind a leader carrying a big placard lettered in silver and gold: THE KKK CELEBRATES THE REELECTION OF PRESIDENT PETER RUESTER AND THE CONTINUING BIRTH OF THE NEW ERA. Again Darcus laughs, louder this time. It’s not a mean laugh; it’s the laugh of a man with little to laugh about. He’s taken it upon himself—in his new program of self-realization, education, and betterment—to understand all he can about “Black Suffering!” as spelled out by the big letters on the wall of the small room in the basement of his father’s church. He wonders if the president will discuss in his speech from this podium any of the subheadings listed under “Black Suffering!” on that basement wall: “Black Invisibility!” “Black Sadness!” “Black Misery!” “Black Death!” He pulls out the extra-large handkerchief he’s taken to carrying since he started sweating so much and he wipes his face and under his arms and sticks it down in his crotch. He wonders why he’s dripping so much as to seep through the tailored shirts and suits Sam buys for him. He doesn’t have much to do until he picks Sam up tomorrow and brings him right back here. Sam has front-row seats. Sam is buddies with the First Lady. Darcus has no place to sleep since he and his wife are having another fight. He’ll sleep in the backseat of Sam’s very big Mercedes that’s parked in Sam’s garage. Sam says he can stay in his guest room full-time if he wants to. He has a key. But he doesn’t want to stay inside Sam’s. Sam pays him to keep himself free. Darcus would prefer if he had something to keep him occupied. He thinks of too many things he would like to do, like this pissing on the president and strangling white kids. Sam is going to all the inaugural balls and parties, so Darcus will be busy. He wonders if he could actually get inside the White House grounds and what he could do if he did. Sam has been saying more and more that he wants more of his big black nigger cock to fuck him. Darcus does not know how to process shit like this.

  He is tired of what white men are doing to his people. He is tired of what white men are not doing for his people. He is tired of Sam Sport fucking him so much. It disgusts him more and more to have that white man’s cock inside him.

  * * *

  I would be less than honest if I did not confess to my growing realization that of all the weapons this country and this plague are providing me to work with and to move forward with, nothing is so effective as its hatred of homosexuals.

  IT IS NOT SO PEACEFUL AT ISIDORE PEACE

  The board of directors of the Isidore Peace Medical Center meets to listen to a report from Dr. Israel Jerusalem, a staff specialist. In the Great Hall, overlooking the Mathilde Eiker Schmuck Memorial Gardens, one dozen Important People wish they were somewhere else. Dr. Jerusalem, who is seventy-three and has been on staff since Schmuck’s opening day, in 1933, is and has always been an unpopular doctor, rarely listened to or believed. (“Staff specialist” is an uncomplimentary title reserved for those who have not achieved as expected at a Jewish hospital.) Dr. Jersualem reports on his resighting of a troublesome organism that he once called glause. He first named it glause in 1935. Now glause is evidently fatal. When will it stop? Does he not think that the brains in our heads have a statute of limitations? Those several members of the board who are as old as Israel, and were in this very room when he reported many other meshugas to them over fifty years, exchange covert glances. The crazy is at it again. As is his way in time of stressful confrontation, when not supported by his fellow doctors, he stomps out. Where has Grace gone? She would have understood.

  With the unpopular doctor gone, the board now listens to the Committee for Decisions. Should they or should they not be the first hospital in the city to officially put a quota on the UC patients it admits?

  “Why is NITS not advising us on what to do?” asks the chairman, Dr. Meyerwitz.

  “I believe that they don’t know themselves,” Dr. Schwartz responds.

  “Quotas are embarrassing,” says Dr. Morganthau.

  “We’ve got to g
ive them something.” This from Dr. Fester. “We can’t just turn them away.”

  “Why not?” says Dr. Dressy.

  “This illness is pure poison,” says Dr. Schwartz, “at the rate it’s going.”

  “Good. Maybe it’ll kill them off faster.” This from Dr. Moses.

  “It could bankrupt us. They’re already taking up so many beds!” This from Dr. Sonnenschein.

  “I couldn’t get my own mother in last week.” This from Dr. Mommser.

  The entire board votes unanimously to turn off the UC tap.

  “After all, we don’t want to be known as the local UC hospital like Table in New York,” says Dr. Fink.

  Israel sends word he will not comply with “such inhumane treatment to fellow human beings. Need I remind the board of their own heritage of tsuris their mischbocha suffered and most likely did not survive?”

  MORTON DIES

  FRED

  I’m with Morton in Mount Ostroff when he dies. He’s the guy from GMPA who rewrote all my stuff for our newsletter behind my back. And wrote that letter Bruce read, kicking me out. We went roller-skating once, Morton and I, in nineteen seventy-something, and later in his apartment I tried to kiss him. “You have too much need,” he said. “I can feel it.” He’d been handsome, with intellectual glasses, and I always felt warm toward him, which I guess is why it’s me he came back to.

  He was a rich Texan Protestant, and, at thirty-five, still had never told his ma and pa he was to the penis attracted. He was particularly fond of exceptionally large dildoes. He went home when he got sick without saying what he was sick from but assuming it was more or less obvious—I mean everyone watches the evening news (and his pa owned all the TV stations as well as the bank and newspaper)—and that they’d take care of him. They knew and they did not like what they knew and so Morton’s dad told Morton to leave. Just threw him out. Just like that.

  Morton came back practically dead from what I’m about to describe. Somehow he’d found his way to my apartment, and the doorman called me from the lobby and said I’d better come right down “because this one ain’t going to get himself up to you.” I had to take him to Mount Ostroff because Table and Invincible and a few others I also lugged him to wouldn’t take him. The only way I could get him into Mount Ostroff was by threatening them: “He was your patient and you let him out before you should have! And that’s grounds for a lawsuit.” Something like that.

  After being thrown out by his folks Morton had then gone to stay at a pigeon farm run by an old geometry teacher he’d had in prep school who’d made a pass at him when he was in eighth grade. He felt so weak he knew he was going to collapse. He was afraid of another hospital. Ostroff had been awful. He discovered fast enough that Texas doesn’t have any hospital health care for the indigent. He had no car and he had no money and he was walking down the highway and where he collapsed was by Homer Thrall’s pigeon farm and Homer remembered him as a kid and cared for him until an ambulance came and took him to Dr. Prespice in Houston, more than four hundred miles away and a place that some new experimental treatment for UC called Adnover was available. Adnover was some crud from Israel made from margarine and soy and it smelled and tasted awful. He got a little better and made it back here to New York and I got him as I said back into Ostroff, which by chance is the only hospital in town licensed by Mortimer Pharms to administer Adnover (of course you need a license to administer a treatment, even when the patient’s dying: NITS regulation 107984b6c,1934). Morton, who isn’t circumcised, was almost denied admission, or readmission, because some Hasidic emergency room worker admitting that day said to him, “I’m sick and tired of all you faggot goyim being sick in our hospital.” Morton fainted, vomited, and shat all at the same time, which is what got him the private room, only it was one with bars on the windows, and he woke up facing a psychiatrist with a yarmulke on, Dr. Korp, standing in front of him, staring at him, waiting for him to wake up. He’d been asleep or out of it or away from consciousness for about a week, and more than anything Ostroff wanted their private room back. I’d already warned them that if they threw him out, well, I was getting where I could threaten with great authority.

  “So!” this Dr. Korp starts, rather emphatically.

  “So what?” Morton said back, hating him on sight and trying to be just as emphatic and not doing such a bad job of it, all things considered.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what? Suck cock?” Then he thought of an even better one. “Take giant black dildoes up my ass?”

  His mother had a hard time with this one. I should mention that his mother, Carisse, was now here. At this point she excused herself to go to a restroom. She dropped his hand, which she’d been holding. Interesting she knew what a dildo was.

  It’s really hard being with anyone dying when a mother is around. Not that it’s so easy when she’s not. Some guys want them around. Some don’t. It was just so awfully hard for this son to acknowledge that, really, his mother wanted out. Morton’s ma is scared shitless of his illness. She knows he’s sick with something awful and she hadn’t wanted to come and she particularly hadn’t wanted to come when she heard the hospital was Jewish. “Everyone here is tough as nails,” she offered in a rare moment of chatter. To her credit, she cried a lot. And my goodness, she was well dressed and all turned out.

  Dr. Korp continued: “Why did you leave your beloved parents, who brought you into this world and cared for you and spared no expense to educate you and give you the very best and still you become something they deplore, but that is now beside the point, my question to you here and now is: Why did you run away from them when they so wished to offer you succor and comfort in their Texas home? You cannot expect charity from this hospital when such an alternative for you exists.”

  Well, this is the first Morton hears this version of his departure from Prairie Gulch. He also wonders how come this Dr. Korp knows so much. Morton had a way of snorting when something outrageous landed in front of him to deal with. It was one of his endearing qualities. I haven’t strewn in here facts from our own relationship, all our fights at GMPA mainly. I caused Morton many a snort. But we somehow stayed friends.

  Morton summons every ounce of the strength that Adnover was giving him (it turned out that this shit had a high amount of caffeine) and pulled himself up and spat out the words, “Get the fuck out of my room before I vomit on you!”

  When Dr. Korp just smiles at him benignly, Morton pulls himself up and jumps off the bed with his various IVs and Dr. Korp sees that the threat is about to be father to the deed so he runs from the room, heavily, because he’s a corpulent man. (“Although this in no way interferes with my making love to my wife, which we do most enjoyably and often,” he said out of nowhere one day to me when I was visiting another friend and Korp and I were washing our hands in a men’s room.) Today he is screaming out as he runs, “You will never leave this hospital, where I am chief of psychiatry and you are in a locked room, until you talk honestly to me, and kindly.” The episode was very macabre, particularly with Ostroff wanting Morton out and all that.

  I was still in the room with Morton when his mother, Carisse came back from the john. She looked even more beautiful, the expensive clothes and jewelry that wasn’t showy but wasn’t fake. She was very quiet, as a type, as is Morton, so they just looked at each other for a long while. I started to go, but Morton wouldn’t let me.

  “I don’t want you to go. You’re my friend. She’s not my friend. She wasn’t there when I needed her. Now I know the truth for gay people and that is that our friends are our family.”

  The word gay made her wince. But she said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  Morton snorted loudly. Then he went “Hee-Haw!” like he was back in Texas.

  “I’m glad Morton has had one friend through all of this.”

  “Why were you so cruel to him back in Texas?” I am never one to waste time in getting to what I want to know, really.

  Her pride
and gentility didn’t allow her to respond to me. She looked at her son, who waited for an answer too. No longer any Texas boy, he. He always said Jewish boys were too pushy, and I smiled at him, to welcome him to this side of the fence. He smiled back. She started to cry, feeling, I guess, shut out.

  “Oh, Momma, don’t cry,” he said.

  “Oh, son, what’s happened to us all?”

  I’m happy to say she wanted to be hugged and went to him, her son, and he hugged her and she allowed it and her unblemished clothing got a mite wrinkled. I cried, too.

  “Why did you have to be homosexual, and why must you die for it?”

  He let go of her on this and pulled himself back. His breathing was very labored all of a sudden, the racking sobs caused by their reunion escalating into gasps as less and less air came into his lungs to cry with. In a moment he collapsed back into her arms and she held on, hard, because she knew before I did that he was now dead.

  MY BEST FRIEND TOMMY

  We had had a tough time of it for a while. But it was very moving he was there for me so when Felix died. We started hanging out all the time, even though that annoyed Bruce too much, that Tommy might be telling me secrets. He lost his lease so I let him move in with me. We tried sex a few times. I could see how much he was in love with me so I tried. But it didn’t work out, the sex, nor of course the timing. I just wanted to say now that little by little Tommy (that is his given name, Tommy, not Tom or Thomas) Boatwright and I have somehow remained the best of friends.

  Neither of us had any other real friends and we had gone through sad times together and even our own little affairlet, that stupid word, during the production of my play—mercy fucks, they’re called, those gropings for other bodies in the dark, if only to keep warm, to be less afraid—well, I could see there was nothing I could do that would put him off me. He liked me too much. And God knows, no one else did. He even admired me. He just thought I was the best. He was GMPA’s first official full-time executive director to whom we paid actual money, and what the organization became, a group of UC nurses’ aides I insulted for being “candy stripers” and not warriors out there on the barricades, was largely his doing. He had worked in hospitals, a lot of them, and had his emergency medicine down pat. That’s what he figured we needed most, and besides, as he pointed out, “Honey, these guys who are turning up to volunteer are not activist material. Just look at them. They are sweet little momma’s boys and we have to make use of them for that.” To this day, that’s what they still are, if they’re still alive, that is. Good little boys and girls grown up into decent good little men and women. If this sounds condescending, I’m afraid that’s what I mean. And my best friend, because that’s what Tommy is now, took them all in and gave them succor and substance to operate this way, and so GMPA, my beloved first child, is a bastard I want to disown half the time. But they’ll help you draw up a will and get your dog walked and feed you if you’re hungry and of course assign you a trained caregiver to visit you in the hospital. But effect public policy? Forget it. Bruce and the board won’t even allow Tommy to go on TV.