The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  It is exceedingly moving to Fred to watch people in danger finally climbing on board. More people are frightened. Fear is the best motivator in the world. Along with anger, of course. Which, for him, means that it must be so for everyone. Whether they want it to be or not!

  * * *

  So, FUQU. A bunch of men and some women who are all terrific, some infected, all angry, many of them unrequitedly in love with someone else, few connecting with each other for very long. “A little love is better than no love,” Carlisle Hopkins says to Norbert Sinclair when they decide their few-months affairlet was better than nothing and even better On Hold for the moment. Why? “Well, maybe we rushed into each other’s arms too fast,” Norbert hazards. He remembers some lyrics from when he was in a singing group at college. “We’ll be together again,” he sings to Carlisle when they bump into each other at meetings. “Oh, yeah, when?” Carlisle ripostes; he had not been so eager to be put on hold.

  But there’s so much else to do besides fall in love. Activism is about togetherness. They draw closer and closer together. FUQU FUQU FUQU. Young men who never felt comfortable displaying signs of emotion and affection in public now do so as a matter of course. Everyone kisses everyone hello and goodbye. Yes, it is all very moving.

  Fred watches it all. He’s still alone, of course. That’s his genealogy. Although he wonders how he got infected. Not that it makes any difference anymore. It is just that Fred, ever more the historian, worries about these things. Where did all this shit come from? And why?

  FROM THE DIARIES OF DR. STUARTGENE DYE

  It has been very tiring living for so long in the white man’s world and denying my Native American heritage. At least I have been able to do good work in honoring my true people. I have been able to insure a bit of retribution against the white man for killing so many of us. Gay corpses will not be allowed to spread disease as they did in life. With incompetents like Geiseric, Grebstyne, Middleditch, and Omicidio I achieved this by just letting them do what they do, which I knew would escalate mortality. So, as with much of my Nobel research for “The Pathology of the Missing Enzymes,” I have been able to keep what they call a “low profile.” You will find little mention of me in any history of this plague, no black marks against my name in any history of NITS. Indeed, a new laboratory at NITS is being contemplated in my honor.

  I look forward to researching the history of my own people, and my particular tribe of them now officially named by the Department of Indian Affairs as the Iwacki Dakotas. I want to locate them, perhaps live with them, certainly talk with them to hear all their agonizing stories of ill treatment at the hands of white men. Perhaps at last they will give me a people to believe in, to teach as Doc Rebbish taught me. Perhaps they have some deity I can at last pray to for an eternal respite from the life I was forced to live for my Nobel-winning discovery. In his last words to me, Doc Rebbish, who certainly had found a great deal, on his deathbed urged me to “seek and you shall continue to find.”

  DAME LADY HERMIA SNEAKS INTO FUQU

  I decided it was time to see for myself. The hall is very crowded. I see Fred and he looks right past me. A woman keeps trying to invite me to Brooklyn to brunch.

  I’d never seen such a stark demonstration of democracy in action that I knew was headed straight to its own destruction. I knew they could not last, certainly not at the pitch they were going, so fueled by an adrenaline that could only deplete them. But also because at that one meeting alone announcements were made of the deaths of at least two dozen of them. I was impressed how this made them even angrier. Anger like this to a Brit is an unknown language. We don’t ever see it, or dine on it, or respond to it. You’d think such suppression would have destroyed us over the centuries, but it hasn’t. In fact, it’s what’s kept us alive.

  I did cry, though. I went back to my hotel, ordered up a bottle of gin, and swilled myself into a horrific state. I bawled and bawled. This hard old nut. My great-uncle Sir Silas Wrench-Fergit taught me about plagues. “They are what they are, my child.”

  I made it back to Washington and my empty flat. Thank God his Lordship is out there somewhere doing something for the Queen. That evening I hit the gin once again and bawled and bawled some more because I had seen last night that Fred could not be the leader he wants to be, and that is desperately needed, and that he didn’t know this. Oh, he talked a good game. He surveyed the room filled with dying young men, but he did not enter it. He accepted their kisses and greetings and hugs and he returned them. That is not what I’m talking about. He is off in another world, thinking, all the time thinking, what to do with all this. But where he’s living is a writer’s location and not a leader’s one. He lives in his head. And while he loves his brothers and sisters very much, I could see he only has his anger.

  I pray it will keep him, at the very least, alive.

  I realized I’d never recognized how very dear he’s become to me.

  “I came to one of your meetings,” I finally write to him. “You were far too passive. You’re sitting on an army waiting to be led. But they are leading you! Even after all these years I cannot fathom aspects of American ‘democracy.’ You must take charge! I do not want to see one more man in a dress facilitating a meeting unless he’s concealing a secret weapon. Dredd Trish’s shot-caller Bart Shovels will make Moose look like a morning glory. He is another nasty evil man. Your few hundreds must more fully comprehend that there is an inexhaustible supply of them and you are not ready.”

  My husband constantly berates me. “Americans are too incomprehensible for we poor Brits to ever understand.”

  MY CHILDREN

  As with GMPA, guys say I started FUQU to get laid with the beauties. I didn’t want people to say that was why I was doing all this. I didn’t want that to be the case, that the founder fucked his children.

  Of course, it’s just the reverse with most of the FUQU guys. They are fucking like bunnies, “to spite the evil eye,” as Goober said.

  Yes, from our very beginning, everyone all around me is fucking with each other like crazy. I get a kick out of watching them at meetings, walking around, surveying the room even when they’re sitting, looking for and often finding the spark to ignite and pair off with someone and, usually, soon enough falling apart and brooding and then finding another. I make it sound like the biggest gay bar in New York. Well, in some ways it is. Broken hearts repair themselves with facility and speed when you know you don’t have all the time in the world. Except for me. I have been writing this book for what now seems a hundred years and I ignore the fact that time will not be so kind and generous indefinitely.

  That’s not true. I worry. I worry. I try not to think of dying.

  More and more we are one huge family.

  I feel increasingly protective of them. Yes, I think of them as my children. I am so fucking proud of this FUQU thing. It is far too territorial for me to think this way. FUQU is much too democratic to allow a father.

  DAVID

  Reading a book review in The Monument, I learn that new Holocaust camps are still being discovered. Old camp sites, that is. There were some 2,900 of them.

  When I was with Grodzo at Mungel, I learned that camps were all over the place. What’s new is what I’m reading now: “The camps were filled with gays as well as Jews.” So they wanted to get rid of all the gays, too. Just like what’s happening now. Why haven’t I been murdered? I have lived in many camps.

  THE ANIMAL MODEL

  MAJOR GENERAL HORACE WIDDUMS, M.D., FRANEEDA NAVAL MEDICAL CENTER

  It is important that there be good monkey doctors. If a monkey isn’t used in an experiment then a person has to be used, which is against the law. And if living people aren’t available to be administered an “experimental” anything, then be grateful to the little monkey who’s willing to stand in for you. If you think all this talk about monkeys and monkey doctors is beside the point, please pause to consider that not a day goes by wherein an important scientif
ic experiment, the outcome of which might bear on whether you or your loved ones live or die, is not conducted somewhere in our country by an idiot. Be grateful for the monkey. (S)he is your friend. (S)he is willing to die for you and your sins. Jesus may want you for a sunbeam but a monkey only wants you for your nuts.

  None of this levity is to imply that an “animal model” for a disease is something to treat lightly. But science, which despite its desire to breach frontiers, must also be facile at covering its ass. The Animal Model is one of the great Ass Coverings in Modern Medicine.

  The Dridge Diagnostic Directory of Doctors lists the most respected monkey doctors today as Nobu Chin Chen at Stanford, Renata Heil and Vorschluss Heimatt (yes, two now very old Nazis granted immunity by our government at the close of World War II because of “previous superiority in the burgeoning field of animal husbandry”) at Idaho Iroquois Medical Center, Yours Truly, and Bosco Dripper, of Yaddah’s Deacon & Caplan D&C/NITS Primate Center at El Modesto Estancia, Florida, whom we now know to be dead. Along with all his monkeys.

  And now all monkeys have been embargoed for use by NITS and COD and HAH. Not so long since an assassination attempt was made on our president. He was given an untested experimental treatment.

  No Animal Model (NAM) in a practical sense means No Government Funding (NGF). And No Pharmaceutical Interest (NPI). Hence, No Cure.

  Why has HAH suddenly announced that monkeys are no longer available? The monkeys have been disappeared not only at El Modesto but at every other government-funded primate center in the country. I cannot get my hands on a one of them. What do I do if another president gets shot?

  A judge advocate on my staff confided in me that Dr. Geiseric rarely changes his underpants and that filthy shit-encrusted same are often found in his trash, which is still being “sifted” by legal authorities, i.e., searching for “suspect” matériel. When confronted, Geiseric replied, “Thomas Edison didn’t wash either. He believed that changing his underwear changed his body chemistry for the worse. I confirmed this myself with an animal model.”

  AN ARMY OF LOVERS

  What about turning FUQU into a national army? There are chapters sprouting up across the country. Put them all together, Fred, they spell army! Hannah Arendt said that Jews should have had their own army!

  Gustavus Entshul, Morris Dawes, Perry Allen Miller, Drew Overlander, Magnus Hill, Gretchen Vorwarts, Teddy Stendenhall, Laurent Fest, Norman Stumph, George Hartford, Isaac Garfield …

  I thought you were stopping this list making!

  Teddy was in my bunk at Camp Adventure, my first sleepaway camp. Morris was in my astronomy class at Yaddah (we both almost flunked), Isaac was the son of …

  Oh, stop it!

  TOUGH LUCK

  Congress approves yet another Vurd Amendment, which extends the prohibition on funding any and all UC education efforts that use the word homosexual. Only two senators vote against it. From this date forth and through all succeeding presidents, and indeed into the next century, further implementation of various government regulations will continue to prohibit use of the word homosexual to such an extent that any grant application for UC research that contains this word is automatically denied. Coincidentally (if there is ever anything coincidental about this plague that is plowing right ahead), this bill is passed two days after the historic March on Washington by one million gays and lesbians. That event must have scared the shit out of all these legislators. “There can be no more brutal index of the depths of anti-gay prejudice than the direct governmental interference and censorship of effective research concerning gay men and women at the height of an epidemic,” writes Simon Watney in Taking Liberties.

  Furthermore, little by little, Republican administrations will fill all civil service positions as they become vacant with “friends of the family,” so to speak. It will take decades for any administration to put this right. Civil servants can’t be fired.

  BART SHOVELS

  My name is Shovels, not Shove or Shovel. Please tell your secretary to learn how to spell it properly. Quarantine and mandatory UC testing are viable policy options. Bill Buckley has said publicly that gay men should be tattooed on their ass. They are scared we’re going to put them in internment camps. Good! The more we can scare them, the better. Civil rights ninnies can protest all they want to, the more of it, the better. No one wants these fairies in our country. Armed resistance to them would be a justifiable response in a time of quarantine.

  I remember sending you a confidential memo that these are all justifiable means, plenty to think about, talk about, and put into the hopper. I await your instructions and approval.

  WHAT WILL ARNOLD BOTTS DO NOW?

  Arnold Botts is packing up his office at G-D. Von’s not been seen or heard from in longer than usual. Arnold, suspecting the worst, considers this a bad omen.

  Arnold had seen the ominous signs. Not every gay is becoming infected. This is unexpected. UC is also spreading around the globe, infecting more and more people who are not gay, including women, for whom not one of the original instigators had spared a thought. It was meant to be a homegrown all-American anti-gay-male crusade for the elimination of all-American queers. Something has obviously gone wrong with the master plan, wherever that stands. Where is that fucking Tricia Institute and the Sons of the Pocahanti? If anything should blow up, he wonders if he should get out of town while the getting’s good. He wonders if “they” will come after him. An insecure psychopath like Arnold always fears that somebody will miss him. In partaking of the poisonous libations of so much heinous trickery, he’s learned there’s always a somebody who will come after you. Someone always knows when someone knows too much. Each of his mentors along his journey has taught him this. Von Greeting, Brinestalker, Stuartgene, Vurd, Slyme, Moose, Buster Punic, all the president’s men, he’s been tossed from pillar to post, working for all of them, learning from all of them, and he can tell you where on each body a blemish resides. What can he do with everything he knows? How would he even locate the right person to tell it to if and when the time comes? None of these mentors ever teaches you how to paddle after you’ve been pissed on. A penis can take you only so far. He doesn’t know how to plan ahead. He only knows how to hate. He learned that early and he learned it well. But what will he do when all his best customers will be leaving town? Dredd Trish is gathering up his own Kaffeeklatschers.

  Dredd Trish’s son, another Junior, is also a faggot and has been ever since he was a kid. Shit, Arnold let Trish Jr. suck his dick once in the balcony of Loew’s Capitol. Dredd Trish, Jr., keeps his childhood boyfriend around so they can still play side by side. Dredd Trish, Sr., who is an upper-class snot, no doubt will be the next president, and Dredd Trish, Jr., is no doubt waiting in the wings. The Trish family is particularly popular in places that are big on hate. Arab places where they throw you off of rooftops if you’re a fairy, after chopping off your head. Unless you’re a president’s son. Arnold would certainly have a problem if Junior wanted more and more of Arnold’s cock. In the end, that’s what usually happens. The stupid farts want more. Arnold still gets calls in the middle of the night from a drunk Junior Trish. “Come on over, babe. I’ll send a limo.” How does he know even now that Junior will one day be president? No one takes Junior seriously. The Arabs are very rich and want Trish the Father, and Trish the Father wants Trish the Son. That’s the deal. Von explained it to him. It’s a pretty nice cock, Junior Trish’s cock. Those rich Wasps are all circumcised. So many cocks in Washington aren’t. As if things aren’t smelly enough in the games they’re playing. Junior Trish always tried to get Arnold to suck his after he’d sucked Arnold’s. Arnold wouldn’t. He doesn’t do things like that. He’s not a fairy. He pauses a minute to remark to himself about the unusual coincidence of having the Juniors of two presidents running around with gay-hungry dicks.

  He knows that Jerry and Dodo have royally fucked things up. Before he was murdered, Nasturtium had told him that Purpura knew this from the beginni
ng and it was just what Ruester wanted. Jerry Omicidio coming up with nothing pleases the White House, according to Buster, who revealed all this to Arnold as Arnold was whipping the shit out of him way out in the countryside in Fille de Maison. Buster always wants to be “done to” somewhere far away. It’s a long drive, back and forth. It was enjoyably painful for Buster, driving back to the District. Since Claudia, he’s had trouble finding a good whipper.

  No matter, any of this, so far. No one is writing about it anyway, anywhere, certainly not with anything resembling the truth about what’s really happening. No one is asking, “Is UC an intentional attempt to rid the world of homosexuals?” Now, if that would only appear in, say, Foreign Affairs, would it be taken seriously? The fact that it isn’t proves no one wants to know, and so Arnold knows he’s still safe and his coast is clear. For a while.

  That drug that Von gave him? A new company called Presidium is running with it and Arnold will be a chief operating officer, and tough Linus Gobbel its head honcho, which pleased Wall Street and Arnold to no end. They don’t come any nastier than Gobbel. Although he’s been hearing even nastier stuff about this Bart Shovels.