The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  It must be another half hour before Security comes in their protective clothing and separates mother and son and wraps up the body. The girls get their mother out of here, dripping blood on the floor as she leaves. Don, the pathologist, realizes he still doesn’t have a name for the kid to put on his file. Since the file now has blood on it too, he throws it into the big garbage can. That’s what they’ve been told to do for all the Nameless ones. “No point saving it. Been a lot of them lately. Amazing how many of them don’t have names. No wonder we can never get an accurate count. I sure hope I won’t have to die this way.”

  I’m supposed to check out the fourteen medical centers where Jerry’s latest ZAP trials are going to be held. Thirteen more to go.

  DANIEL THE SPY

  Our Supreme Ruester told some assemblage of international reporters that “the general population” is not at risk, which prompted some brave man with dark skin to shout back, “I am the general population and I have it!” at which point he was ushered from the hall, as they say. In handcuffs. By four armed policemen. He was booked and jailed for several days before someone from his embassy came to get him. His green card was canceled and he was deported immediately back to Brazil. He had been a reporter here for the AP for sixteen years. He left an American wife and a few kids and he can’t get back here and they don’t want to go there. “What, and starve to death?” the wife said. She also said she hadn’t known her husband was infected, “so good riddance to bad rubbish.” She clutched her crucifix as she said this, with one baby in her arms and two toddlers hanging on her skirt, and she managed somehow, while the TV camera was square on her, to cross herself and cry at the same time.

  A young man walked into Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore sick. He is transfused with twelve units of blood. He dies. He tested okay with Dodo’s test, which is now in increasing if not FADS-approved use. His many organs and his eyes and his skin are transplanted quickly. The transplant recipients start to die. There will be fifty of them, for skin and all. The accurate French test is flown over secretly from Quebec and this is used to determine that the man was positive. All the transplanted people die, every one of them. Not a single one of them lives.

  Ironically, both Jacquie’s test and Dodo’s test are manufactured by Audacia, the former by their French subsidiary. There are enough lawyers for all this running around here, too. To even suggest we use the French test, available in Canada, is tantamount to being an everywhichway kind of traitor.

  PCP is one of those OIs that no one is talking about. Opportunistic Infections. It sounds like something on a job application. Please list your OIs. Well, there are more and more of them. At least three, maybe four dozen. New ones are added all the time by COD. Stuff that guys come down with that no one is researching or knows what to do with. Stuff that makes you go blind. Stuff that makes you die. Stuff with names you can never remember. Rebby constantly screams about them. “Why is there no research into the OIs?” he exclaims every chance he gets. He calls Jerry “a monster,” because “all you are looking for is the cure and the cure is not tomorrow and these young men are dying today.” He said this to his face at some conference. In front of a lot of people. More patients are dying from PCP pneumonia than any other OI. COD has a treatment for it, but it’s still embargoed.

  At that conference Monserrat suddenly gets up and yells at Rebby. “We haven’t time to call each other names. This country must get started on something! Let us disprove later! That is why I give you money, to jump-start something!” I gather that only since coming to America has Monserrat acquired the skill of speaking with exclamation marks.

  Deep Throat says all the research is in chaos, and with Jerry in charge of it bears out his sad prediction that we’re all working for an idiot.

  Gobbel orders Jerry to tell Dye to send word to all the blood organizations and to all hospitals performing surgeries to destroy their records so we can’t be found liable when Dodo’s blood test is revealed to be so unreliable.

  THE WORMS OF TIME

  Dr. Nelson Golly, now at Yaddah for a year or two, brings up the ancient possibility of the ingestion of worms, hookworms, and “let’s have a look-see at the system then. Worms were used for centuries, all over the world, the Chinese, the Arabs, in Iceland, in Celtic Britain. Why, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who was a cousin on my late first wife’s side, won the Nobel in 1927 for his treatment of syphilitic paralysis by inoculating with malaria coupled with worms. High fever produced by the malaria parasites killed the syphilitic bugs and cured the patient! Worms have not been used in America, to my knowledge. But now I submit it is time to try. Pray tell, who will help me to obtain some willing subjects? And of course some worms.”

  Dr. Warrem Trubeshott in South Dakota thinks it’s an idea worth pursuing. He is a Native American. He has seen Native Americans eat worms and their ailments disappear. “Worms make the body fight the intrusion. They can be flushed out if they don’t work. The trick is to find the right amount of the buggers to swallow. Too few and they’re not effective, too many give you a really bad stomachache, and more than too many, well, they kill you. I got a few Indian docs out at a nearby reservation that I’ve consulted with before. I’ll check it out. Tell Nelson Golly I’ll collaborate with him. He’s a big deal.”

  So seven Pronto-Iwacki Indians from a decrepit reservation in the Black Hills are located and enrolled by Warrem. They have UC, but since they are Native Americans on a Native American reservation, they haven’t been tallied anywhere. “I coulda had two dozen, maybe three,” Warrem says when Paulus Pewkin calls to inquire, “What the hell is this all about? Nobody told me about any fucking Indians. Did you run this worm idea shit by Marie Clayture at FADS? I can tell you now, she’s not going to like it.”

  “I’ve already started on it,” Warrem says. “I got seven Prontos with anywhere from ten to one hundred Pacific Coast hooked longworms inside of them.”

  Paulus hangs up.

  Warrem then tries to talk to Jerry but only gets through to Daniel. “I sort of feel I’m operating on this without much support from home office. Is that you guys?”

  “Yes, Jerry approved Dr. Golly’s grant. Keep us up to date.”

  “Well, you should know that two Pronto-Iwackis died.”

  “Already?”

  “I don’t think it was from the worms. These two were on the lowest amount. I got something else to report. The other five want their stomachs cleaned. They want off the study.”

  “Then I guess you better clean their stomachs,” Daniel answers.

  “I’m not sure how, and Golly won’t tell me. He yells at me: ‘Keep those frigging worms in those frigging Indians’ guts!’ And then he hangs up. What’s frigging?”

  “He’s very distinguished in Great Britain and I think he feels unappreciated over here,” Daniel says. “Anyway, I’ll have someone get back to you right away with the recipe for a stomach lavage. And I’ll deal with Golly.”

  The other five Pronto-Iwackis are cleaned out. Golly has hysterics for other reasons and goes back to England. And that’s the end of the worms episode. Only it’s not the end. The families of those dead Pronto-Iwacki Indians get a lawyer and try to sue NITS but the case gets thrown out of court because the judge didn’t believe them and Golly wouldn’t come back to testify.

  None of this stops Dr. Warrem Trubeshott from trying the experiment on himself when he comes down with UC. Maybe he had it all along. This time he uses Atlantic Coast hooked longworms. He gets very sick. He shits all the time. When he hears that Nelson Golly is now back at Yaddah, Warrem journeys to New Godding, finds Nelson’s office with him sitting behind a brand-new desk, drops his pants, and shits all over it. “Don’t you ever hang up on an American doctor again, you hear!” He then collapses in spasms on Golly’s rug, in his own shit, and dies. Right there. Nelson has him biopsied from head to toe. He had everything, Warrem did, from dementia to no toenails. Nelson of course writes the case up for NEJS. A protest is r
egistered against NITS and FADS and the government by the Pronto-Iwacki Reservation, claiming that before this study commenced no one on the reservation had UC and now some three hundred of those living there are infected. Some 110 of these committ suicide upon receiving notice of their infection after having been tested with Dodo’s AudaciaUSA test.

  Paul Bellhoppe, Ph.D., of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, sent to investigate matters, discovers that there is no Pronto-Iwacki Reservation and that there is no such thing as a Pronto-Iwacki American Indian. “The Iwacky lived in the Andes and Africa. I can’t find out squat about any USA Pronto-Iwackis.”

  A Mrs. Wendy Trubeshott shows up to bring suit against the government, claiming to be Warrem’s wife, although no record can be found of his ever having been married. She is UC-positive and also brings suit against his estate, which turns out to be worth several million dollars. She wins the suit, but before the estate can be transferred to her, a woman claiming to be Warrem’s mother appears to demand the money, insisting that her son had never been married. She, too, claims to be UC-positive and to have been infected by her son. The Albuquerque judge throws out her suit, reverses Wendy’s ruling, and orders that the money be donated to a federation of Pronto-Iwacki Native American charities, of which he is the chair. By the time it’s discovered that there are no Pronto-Iwacki Native American charities both Wendy and Mom will be dead from UC and the judge has moved to Brazil with the several million bucks and Dr. Nelson Golly, now back home as a don at Oxford, is still hoping to try the worms business again.

  (You think I’m making this up? Just wait until July 1, 2008, when you can read about it in “The Worms Crawl In,” in the Science section of The New York Truth. YRH)

  SOME SEMI-FINAL THOUGHTS TOWARD FRED’S CONTEMPLATION OF THAT OTHER ORGANIZATION HE WANTS TO START

  He keeps putting off his speech. He’s made enough notes to write a book. He now accepts that Tommy’s right, that the time is right, that people are ready to show up to hear him. He doesn’t want to fuck this chance up. He’s coming back from exile, like some formerly elected official who lost the last election and doesn’t want to lose the next one. Why is he making such a big deal out of this, dragging it out so? He knows who he is and what he wants to say and that he only knows one way to say things now.

  He wants to be one of the guys but he can’t. He’s too critical, so adept at calling attention to all that he knows is wrong. They’re frightened of him. He intimidates them. He tries to point the way when they don’t want to hear it. He has seen this happening, over the years, from his self-imposed permanent placement on the outside of things. All the noise he made was just another nail in his ostracization. Most of the time he hadn’t minded it. Some of the time he does. Right now is one of the latter. This time it’s the life or death not only of his people but of himself. He had not worried about his own death before. He may live on Washington Square in the heart of Greenwich Village but he feels like he’s living on some remote island in the north of Norway. He damn well better shape up and come back to the mainland.

  He sighs. He sighs a lot too. Little groans as he’s sitting somewhere, like on a bus, emitted automatically, so that the person sitting next to him looks at him questioningly, only rarely asking, “Are you all right?” He wants to say something dramatic like, I have been reviled and misunderstood by many including myself and what is to be done about it? But he knows the other person, in New York City anyway, is likely to reply, “Welcome to the club.”

  When he was parted from GMPA, rumors circulated that he was writing a novel about his unrequited love for Bruce, or Christopher, or Kenny, or … or Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong; that he’d left because he couldn’t stand Tel or Friff or Griff or Stiff; that he’d started the whole organization just to write about it, and them. Many thought he’d fucked with half of GMPA when he hadn’t, not a one of them. He felt a certain pride and righteousness that this was not what leaders should do. Interesting that rumors once started never let up. There must be a lot of Pubies and Jervises and Cockers out there to keep them alive. What a boring life some gays must lead if their topic of conversation is dishing him.

  Well, he can live with all this, as he’s learned to live with everything else his existence provokes on days when his skin is thicker than others. He can live with all of this. Sure.

  But it is often difficult, on late spring afternoons when the dipping light cries out for handholding or “Come and see what a beautiful sunset” might be called over to him by a friend, and there is no friend. No Felix. Or when groups gather together, always together, to go places, make visits, invite others to dinner, or just to make phone calls of “hello, how are you, just checking in…” These are harder tests of stamina, of doing without. Saturday nights, and Friday nights, alone at home are hard. Oh, and Sunday all day long as well.

  Tomorrow he has another blood test. Dodo’s test is finally working although Emma’s long since told him the bad news. Today was Ken Wein’s funeral. Yesterday he had brunch with Craig Rowland, who’s a skeleton and doesn’t expect to live much longer. He talks about the sadness of the death of desire, the death of hope that love will ever come to him. Oh, God! That was happening to him, too.

  He writes to himself: “We all loved each other very much. Why we fucked with each other so much is because we loved each other so much. That is hard for Them to understand. We had this superabundance of love to share. Too much, it turned out. We still do, only it seems we can’t use it so generously anymore. There shouldn’t be such a thing as too much love. Anyway, we all loved each other and we all killed and are killing each other. And there shouldn’t be such a thing as killing each other by loving each other too much.” He read this to Tommy, who started to cry.

  More than ever Fred Lemish wants there to be some sort of record that he’d tried, he’d really tried. For history, of course. So that when some “historian” writes something mean and nasty, inapt, inept, incorrect, and and and … But he still hasn’t yet stormed the barricades of “historical truth” as needed to be successfully assaulted. Not yet.

  There can’t be any other plan. Isn’t it your responsibility when one knows too much and even if it can kill you as it did dear Sister Grace? How many pages of homo-hating history must vomit out before everyone listens? And fights back? Hasn’t he been left alive to effect just this?

  He’s got to give it another go. Is he really ready?

  “I want to give myself something to be proud of. Before I die too.”

  JOE KIDNEY

  FROM HIS BOOK PETER RUESTER: A VERY BAD DREAM

  No, I don’t think he hated homosexuals. His Hollywood experiences had certainly thrown him in among them. But like Purpura’s determination that “I will not allow the women of my country to be besmirched,” this is an oddly apt defensive stance from someone who certainly was also a great besmircher. I can only assume his anti-gay public statements served the same psychic protection for self-defense.

  He made decisions quickly and didn’t second-guess them. But his hold on the reins was flaccid, at best. His biggest problem, and unknown to him, was that he didn’t know how much he didn’t know.

  In the void that he created, his staff rushed in to compete for influence to advance their own agendas. They are all expert manipulators. And of course they are in league with Purpura. If she didn’t like you or you wouldn’t do her bidding, you weren’t there for long. They all treat Peter as if he were a child monarch. Since he thought it his due to be so treated, he loved it. Did he know about Brinestalker and the Tricia Institute? Much too complicated. Did he know about Gobbel’s National Guard? He thought they were the Marine Band come to salute him.

  “You get the people that you believe in and that can do the things that I sincerely believe need doing,” he explained more than once to The American People. The big decisions, he added, “are mine, and I make them.” Since all his policies were framed and trumpeted “to advance the cause of freedom”—a principle that could mean almost anything
—he could be counted on to support whatever Moose or Gobbel put in front of him to sign.

  Did he realize what UC was up to? She would have seen that no information about it would reach his eyes.

  Thus Manny Moose and Linus Gobbel and Gree Bohunk functioned as de facto presidents—with greater (Gobbel) and lesser (Bohunk) degrees of success. Other “advisers” simply asserted that their actions were consistent with the president’s goals when he said to them, “We’re here to do whatever it takes.” One is reminded of how Hitler’s government worked. He never issued actual orders on pieces of paper. But everyone knew what he stood for and desired and they didn’t have to be told how to work toward that goal.

  Don’t forget President Peter Ruester’s optimistic belief that the progress he was delivering was an American birthright, an inevitability that he was personally singled out to deliver. And his radiant constant smile as he waved to us all was enormously, seductively winning.

  WHAT ARE THESE FELLOWS UP TO?

  Gree Bohunk prepares his list of health recommendations in the name of Dr. Dye on behalf of the president, to be decreed by that new secretary of HAH, Dr. J. Purnold Drydeck, recently having arrived from Utah per his large contribution via Manny Moose:

  1. Fellatio does not give you The Underlying Condition.

  2. Kissing or exchanging saliva will not infect you either.

  3. The only way you can catch this is by getting a transfusion or by participating in anal intercourse.

  He sits back to think for a minute. Is there any way he can recommend anal intercourse? That would include so many more of them. It’s a pity to discourage them when they want to do it so much.

  Gree had read this fortnight’s New York Prick. Orvid Guptl doesn’t like him. “Numerous incidents of sabotage by an unknown person or persons of UC research have been discovered at a COD lab in Chattanooga.” Gree wonders: How the fuck does Guptl know about that?