by Larry Kramer
Jeff Schmalz, who’s closeted and getting sick and is Flourtower’s pet reporter, told me that at The Truth board meeting Dearie Fault turned to Jakie and asked, “Fairies are walking time bombs. Can we write about them now?” And Flourtower said flat out, “No.” And Push Dunkelheim, he’s the father, shook his head in agreement, while Pish, the son and heir apparent, who is supposedly being groomed to take over, was about to disagree when Push adjourned the meeting.
I asked Velma Dimley why she hadn’t written anything about infected Factor VIII from Greeting killing gay men. She laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny?” I asked her.
“You guys come up with such ridiculous plots. You sure are paranoid. You think the whole world is against you.”
* * *
DANIEL: I saw my first case of some new “opportunistic” infection today that doesn’t even have a name yet. No one at Mea Montezuma had ever seen anything like it, and they shipped him over. Jerry took one look at him and left the room. It’s really too painful to look at. Skin all stretched and blown up, like a balloon in a science fiction movie. The bulging eyes on this kid were terrified and terrifying, oozing pus that was scarlet red. I tried to hold his hand, but he pulled it back. “Don’t,” he said, “you don’t want to touch me.” By the time I got back to my office, there was a call from Dye that this patient must be sent to Miseraria and no other cases of whatever it is are to be admitted to NITS. Of course, the kid was dead before they could get him out of NITS. Dye ordered his room and the hallways all the way to the emergency entrance fumigated, along with all the folks who had come anywhere near him: nurses, doctors, ambulance personnel, the housekeeping and kitchen staff. Fumigated! Jerry laughed. “We don’t even know what the kid’s got, so how does Dye know which compound to clean up with?”
* * *
FRED: Claude, the blond Jewish model, is in Invincible. Egypt Poo says it won’t be long. Claude was really handsome. I don’t know why it’s sadder when they’re handsome, but it is. Beauty is some kind of truth to weak men like me. Beauty is a horny man’s fantasy. I tricked with him a bunch of times when he first got here from Paris. “I didn’t know Jews could be so handsome and blond like you,” I said to him. I went to see him. I couldn’t believe he’s the same person. Not only is he physically a wreck, but he’s lost his power of speech. A deaf-mute maid on staff wants to teach him sign language. Egypt brought Monserrat in to look at him. She ran out in the hall and started to cry. She looked up at me and Egypt and said, “It’s too horrible. I will send Rebby up to look at him.” Interesting that she has such trust in Rebby as a doctor when she’s so mean to him. She’s told him he can’t be co-chair of “their” organization that he started because “you present such a sloppy and unkempt appearance. I do not wish to expose our rich contributors to you.” What’s Miseraria? I don’t remember any hospital named Miseraria.
* * *
DANIEL: Miseraria, along with Mea Montezuma, is part of Mater Nostra Dolorosa Medical Center, in Northeast D.C. Dr. Sister Grace’s hangout. It was Sibley Hospital when we grew up. The Catholics bought it when the city shut it down because it was so decrepit. The city thought that the Church would remodel. It didn’t and won’t. It’s where they put the worst cases in isolation, the incurables, the lepers, so the nuns can take care of them. Only the nuns won’t take care of them.
Jerry, when cornered, says he’s surprised by all these new OI strains emerging so quickly. Not Rebby. He’s not surprised at all and can’t understand why these what are now officially called “opportunistic infections” weren’t being studied immediately. “Infections can be cured! This is what my boys are dying from!” He stopped by to say goodbye, having packed up here to go back to New York “at last!” Jerry wouldn’t see him. “He’s a nutcase.” “Why? Because he won’t leave you alone?” “You’re getting too big for your britches.” We’re bantering like this more and more.
Gretta Lell will be in charge of one of our trial units for this new Greeting drug they’ve been able to cobble after somehow getting a copy of Jacquie’s virus. There will now be six divisions, at six medical centers across the country, this group Jerry’s putting together. None of them are doctors I’ve heard great things about. I said so to Jerry and he nodded and replied, “I have registered your disappointment.” Wait till you get a load of Gretta Lell. “The twat that stalks South Beach,” the Haitians are calling her.
There’s my phone …
Tristan, a patient, just died. I’ve got to go.
DEEP THROAT CONFRONTS DR. DALE MULCH
“Dr. Dale Mulch,” I said to him, “if what I hear is true, you make me ashamed we work in the same place.”
“Why are you going after me?” he whined. He’s a small man, perfectly formed but small. I was checking out a rumor I’d heard.
“Because you changed women into men.”
The earliest UC cases he saw at Cornell were in women. By the time his report was finally published by the JOD they’d somehow become men.
“I was ordered to by Gobbel. ‘Society must show its disapproval of such behavior,’ he yelled at me.”
“Did Jerry know all this?”
“Of course! He’s my boss! Yours, too. We were interns together. Best buddies. He brought me here!”
I sighed. I had first encountered Linus Gobbel when he worked as education secretary and was trying to fire my daughter, who was fighting to get gay sexuality taught in schools. “If we don’t watch out, these people will demand that the government’s responsibility is to cure them,” he told her. When UC reared its ugly head, from the White House he said it again and to Jerry: “If we don’t watch out these men will demand the government cure them. Therefore, we will go on letting them spread this as fast as they can.” Jerry said to me, “We keep our mouths shut about this.”
“Isn’t it our duty to save people?” I asked him.
“There you go again being a troublemaker. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a bunch of times to keep your mouth shut. We’re not politicians. We’re scientists. This is politics. If I blabbed about this, I’d be fired on the spot.”
“Everything is politics.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
* * *
CONNOR: I am taking care of thirty-five guys as a GMPA crisis counselor. It really sucks, what’s happening to us. It’s Tommy who keeps me and us going. Fred seems to have finked out.
FROM SISTER GRACE’S NOTEBOOK
(IN LUCAS’S SAFE)
Dr. Daniel Elleder of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who has been studying the origins of UC, now believes it can be traced as far back as 60 million years. Shit on a fucking stick.
FADS?
Fredchen, I am not hearing the word FADS from you! Are you aware that Dr. Norbert Nutrobe is too incompetent a person to hold the directorship of such an important stuck-cog in this wheel of murder? Marine biology! He is a marine biologist. He is a specialist in whales! He then went on to obtain a degree in veterinary medicine. Your lives are in the hands of an animal doctor! Where do they find these people!
FRED’S JOURNAL
I’m walking up Seventh Avenue when I’m stopped—actually, it’s Sam who is stopped by a giant schnauzer—by someone I didn’t know. The guy looks straight at me and without even an introduction, launches in. “I want you to know how angry I am with you. I’ve lost my best friends. Because of hearing you speak and reading your articles I counted on you to do something. You haven’t and that makes me furious, you hypocritical Mr. Loudmouth.” I suddenly shouted at him, “Did it ever occur to you to do something about this yourself?” “Go fuck yourself,” he shouted back and walked off dragging his schnauzer, who was hitting it off with Sam, who doesn’t usually take to larger dogs.
EXT. GMPA OFFICE. DAY.
A troupe of protesters are holding an enormous banner that reads: THANK YOU FOR DYING. IT’S THE RIGHT THING FOR YOU TO DO. Tommy and Fred stand there looking at them.
INT. TOMMY’S OFFICE.<
br />
Very makeshift. Tommy is showing Fred a package that he’s opened. It contains several turds of shit.
TOMMY: We get one or two of these a week now. How does it feel, being back here?
FRED’S VOICE: To work on writing this history each day is very painful and haunting. I desire only to live long enough to finish this.
* * *
Poor baby. You have lost. I have won. And I continue to win and win and win some more. There is not a place in this world where I have not left my mark.
MOTHER ASKS DEEP THROAT SOME GOOD QUESTIONS
It is becoming a perfect counterterrorism case. Much has been proceeding on the part of many parties each evidently in possession of something that each believes is only his.
Let us try to piece together a timeline.
Middleditch and Grebstyne discover in a closet at NITS an old formula from the ’60s that has components that match what dumb Dodo is now calling his.
Middleditch turns this formula over to Von Greeting at Greeting-Dridge to get whatever this is out there fast.
This young woman in France has already discovered the virus of The Underlying Condition.
Dodo disputes the French discovery, claiming that it’s his.
But Von Greeting has been developing ZAP long before he’d seen Dodo’s dirms from NITS. He had microscopy photos of the UC virus presumably discovered by the young woman in Paris.
How did Von Greeting get these photos so early?
And since you tell me ZAP is a piece of shit, why is Greeting now commencing to promote it? Surely Von must know of its deficiencies.
I have now lost a dozen of my best operatives. I am finding this not only sad, but painful. I was very fond of several of them. As I am of you as well.
What do you think might be coming next?
Are we prepared for it?
PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE
Adreena Schneeweiss called me!
“When are you free to start work on my script?”
Oh, Adreena, Adreena, may we make the bestest movie ever made!
We will get this awful and sad and tragic story out there quickly! You will be my conduit to the world. At last our story will be told! If you make it, every one of your zillion fans will see it, which means the whole wide world.
I’ve forgiven her for wasting the years since she bought my play while she made an awful movie about whores.
DODOGATE CONTINUING
DANIEL: Dodo is not shy about accusing Jacquie. “Jacqueline Françoise worked in my lab and she stole my shit and took it back to France and now she calls it hers! I taught her how to do it! I taught her how to make the fuckers fuck!” Gaston Nappe tries to cooperate every stage of the way, or so he tirelessly maintains, “but your Dodo is a big-time cheater.” No journal in America will publish the French studies, or the letter from Gaston claiming “foul play.” Yet all journals are competing to publish Dodo. The longer this unresolved resolution of ownership goes on, the more determined each side is to WIN. Forget the saving of lives. All these delaying tactics—and others about to commence—can only take a long time.
At our next mass meeting Dr. Dye announces, “I am pleased with the progress of this plague,” which is a strange way of describing things. He was called to a special meeting in the White House with Ruester and Manny Moose and Dr. Nutrobe. No one knows what they talked about.
Dye announces that he’s decided to immediately launch drug trials that will revolutionize the treatment of this serious illness, “and may this be the first of many successful trials that NITS and Dr. Omicidio will supervise, beginning with this most promising ZAP from Greeting.” Von, of course, is in attendance; it’s been a while since we’ve seen him here. He’s beaming and gives us that old clasped hand above the head prizefighter pose. Grodzo is not here.
I can see that Jerry doesn’t appear happy. I asked him why he wasn’t brimming over with happiness now that he was officially in charge of NITS. “You’re a Jew. You should understand. It’s tempting fate. Catholics worry about that too.”
Sure enough, the next day The Monument and the wire services have headlines about “NITS forging ahead on UC treatment front,” with a quote from Manny Moose “wishing them well.” I forgot to mention—it’s proving harder for me to get all the step-by-steps in coherent order—that it has now been definitely “proved” that Dodo’s “virus” and Jacquie’s virus are indeed one and the same (thank you, Rebby), and Dodo has denied this vehemently in every outlet that comes to him, which are quite a few. He’s not being hailed as a hero, but he certainly is still a celebrity. And we’re not allowed to talk about this! This from our attorney general, Mr. Moose. Each side blaming the other for why this might or might not be so and to claim that the American lab was contaminated by the French isolates or for the French to maintain the reverse … well, Deep Throat “guarantees this fight is going to prove endless.” “Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits,” as my friend Joe Madison prophesied.
And the testing of ZAP before it’s settled is really not very kosher. Even I know that. The more I’m learning, the less I’m liking.
But here comes the whopper. Monserrat Krank got her Binky to negotiate with the presidents of both France and the United States to sign an agreement that the UC virus was a joint discovery, just so that at last work could be started testing people to see if they’re infected. Gree Bohunk convinced Purpura to get Junior tested, just in case, to make sure … (Ianthe found this out.) She used Jacquie’s test. Three years this all took. More than three. Three-plus years wasted from when Jacquie first made her discovery. It turns out she’d prepared her test then as well, waiting and ready to go! But nothing’s been signed yet. Dodo won’t sign over any of “his” royalties for “his” test.
Those two words, blood test, will still take at least another year to be more than words. Both Dodo and Jacquie demand that, signed international agreement or not, only their test be recognized and used. There will be a fortune to be made in royalties from this test, and everyone on both sides knows this. Enter more armies of lawyers. Well, they’ve never actually been away. But at least we have a drug to test on sick people. No one knows much about this ZAP.
WARD F
DANIEL: Jerry took me, or rather he marched ahead and sort of allowed me to follow him, into the NITS UC ward, Ward F. It requires going through several locked doors and guarded passageways. I wonder why there are guards now, particularly since this remote place appears to be so empty of activity. It’s in a wing most people here don’t even know exists. This doesn’t mean anything. NITS is very big and winding and full of corridors with nothing but letters and numbers to identify them. When you consider how many hundreds of doctors there are here, maybe thousands, and how many illnesses are meant to be of interest, ignorance of so much of what’s going on isn’t surprising. It’s not like a university where at least at your indoctrination you’re given a tour and map. I’ve talked to nurses who have never seen any part of NITS but the stations they work at.
Jerry unlocked the last door. Ward F has thirty private rooms. Every one is empty. In a Monument story this morning, and on the Sunday morning TV talk shows, Jerry is saying, “I have been studying UC in patients since before 1981.” That’s an outright lie.
Jerry takes me to a large double-door refrigerator and opens it. Its shelves are stacked with bottles of ZAP. “These are for the trials Dr. Dye referred to. Just so you know, this stuff is shit. And we have to give it to guys to prove statistically how it works. We need a baseline entry-level drug to build on, to work from when a new one comes along to combine it with. I need someone honest like you around. We’re going to have to make a lot up as we go along. I hope you’re up to it.
“But in the meantime we can’t start our trials until we know if all the applicants are not only UC-positive but healthy as well. G-D won’t allow any sick people to be on any ZAP trial.”
“We’re really going to learn a lot from that. How do you know ZAP is shit?”
&n
bsp; “First drugs always are.”
“Don’t you not like the smell of all this? You won’t be able to say ‘it’s not my department.’”
“That’s what I’ve got you for.”
“What’s that mean? To lie for you or to cover up for you, or what?”
“A day at a time.”
WHITE HOUSE MEETING
(THE RUESTER LIBRARY: TOP-SECRET/CLASSIFIED/EMBARGOED DIVISION)
In attendance:
President Ruester
Mrs. Ruester
Mr. Manny Moose
Mr. Linus Gobbel
Dr. Stuartgene Dye
Redacted by:
Patti Montgomery
Sec. to Mrs. Ruester
Mr. Moose asked Dr. Dye, “I ask you once again. What is taking so long?”
Dr. Dye: “What?”
Mr. Moose: “For more people to come down with this shit.”
Mr. Gobbel: “When I was in Africa twenty-odd years ago they were falling dead all over the place. I was told it was only a question of time before it spread all over the world.”
Dr. Dye: “Told by whom?”
Mr. Gobbel: “That’s none of your business.”
Mr. Moose: “I ask again. Why is it taking so long?”
Dr. Dye: “I ask again. Why is what taking so long?”
Mrs. Ruester: “For all the sick fairies to die from this … shit!”
Dr. Dye: “I would say they are doing a pretty good job of it. On a day-to-day and month-to-month basis. (To Mr. Gobbel:) Why wasn’t America told about what was happening in Africa?”