The American People, Volume 2

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The American People, Volume 2 Page 73

by Larry Kramer


  I have to say that the longer I stay here, the more I find similarities in the two systems of, how do I say it, processing people. Der Prozess, die Protokolle. It always comes down to people becoming a herd of horses that you must somehow push through your system. In the end all systems are the same. Doctors and scientists are not so polite at the required pushing, not really. That is another skill entirely, and if one does not have it he acts like a monster: “You will do what I tell you to do, you hear me, or I will not pay any attention to you, or worse, I will see that no one else does either. I will enter into your record that you are not cooperating.” I give you an example. Mungel and NITS and Partekla, all are frightening places involved in unspecified and uncoordinated agendas. The patient is not told anything. Give me your arm and pump pump pump, I come back tomorrow and pump pump pump. More and more shots of strange stuff. But tomorrow is often not the same face, not the same person who pump pump pumps. With Debbi Driver and that Leisha woman we supervise many nurses who pump arms of several hundred each week. Many young men cry. They are verwirrt, bewildered. Often they grab hold of Jerry and will not let go of him. So now he has a guard, an armed guard, who “removes” the frightened young men who cling to him. This young man he will no longer see again. I do not know where this young man goes, where they push him.

  All of this gives me too many bad memories. David cried often at both Mungel and Partekla. His body was often pump pump pumped, more than I think he remembers. I do not know who Jerry takes his orders from, who is ordering him to push push push. Who assigned me here to work at NITS? We are herded, the doctors, just like the patients. I did not know who was over me in Mungel. They were never names. They were titles. Everyone seems to understand their place in line. It is not recommended that doctors talk and share. There is that other former Nazi doctor here, Oderstrasse. He will not talk to me. And when first we met he warned me not to talk to anyone. He named names of doctors who are no longer here because of some reason they had been bad. Patients also. “They do not tell you why,” he told me. “One day here, next day not here.” I tell myself, do not be ridiculous. In Germany patients are sent to ovens. But death is death, you know. Here patients are given shots or not given shots and they die too. What is in these shots? ZAP, it is called. Zap is what it does. Zap zap zap. I have seen the face and the eyes of that man from G-D with the peculiar name. Dash Snicker. He is around here all the time, supervising “his” drug. There is no question he is in charge. There is no question he is more important than Jerry. And Jerry allows this position. I do not trust Dash Snicker one minute. And I cannot talk to Jerry. Jerry does not like questions. He does not answer them. So I do not trust Jerry one minute either.

  I did not think medicine in America was meant to be like this. If I had known, I would have said no when Brinestalker, how you say, recruited me in Berlin to come to America.

  MOANIN’ LOW

  HUFF

  Well, I wasn’t a very good nurse, but yes, I was in his affinity group, Wave Seven. He lived downstairs from me in the storefront, and it was hard not to see through the window that he was dying. He wouldn’t go into the hospital. He liked visitors and he left his door open, so a bunch of us who were with him in Wave Seven started taking care of him. How could you not? No one wanted to go into a hospital, because they couldn’t do anything for you except ignore you. We never knew his full name. His last name was Winthrop, so we called him Winn. It wasn’t even his pad; it belonged to his friend who’d died. Winn’s parents were real pills. They didn’t like our doing this but they didn’t want to do it themselves. “So what do you suggest?” Bordo asked the father, who was a particular prick. “I won’t go home!” Winn yelled when we called them. “They would never clean up my vomit. Hey, Ma, I vomit gallons. They don’t vomit in Back Bay.” They disappeared after a while, the parents. And Winn died. And then Jon and Robb and Claudette and Spud and Spencer, they came up with this idea of a public funeral. We built this coffin, all of us together, hammering in nails, each of us. This nail is for Omicidio, this nail is for Ruester, we were really stoned and it was a monumental feeling, making this coffin for him while he was lying propped up dead in his bed waiting for us. We carried him in the coffin to Tompkins Square Park. Word had got around, so lots of FUQU were there and lots of others, and some guy had a violin that he played really well and I started to sing “Moanin’ Low.” I came to the city to be a country-and-western singer and had sort of got off track, like all the rest of us. What the hell good was a track anymore anyway? We carried him around the square a bunch of times. There were maybe a few hundred of us by now. What happened? You guessed it. The cops came. They got wind of what was in that coffin and they took it away from us. Not without a big struggle, I might add, which required a lot of truncheons and nightsticks and sirens, and finally arrests. It’s like we all wanted to get arrested for this one so we all did something obnoxious to a cop. All of us packed into jail was a ball. We sang sad songs and happy songs and went on not only all night but part of the next day, by which time they were sick of us and let us out. We went back to Tompkins Square Park because Smitty had made a memorial tombstone out of tiles. He was a tiler, or whatever they call someone who tiles things decoratively. The tombstone read, “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” As I said, no one knew his whole name.

  FRED TO HERMIA

  I hate this country now. It’s hard to be proud to be an American if you’re gay. I said that in a speech I made at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and it didn’t go down very well. I could see that, and that made me mad, so I yelled at the audience, most of whom were there to learn about FUQU: “And what the fuck are you doing to help!” Oh, I went on a tirade. “We need all the help we can get! This is a plague! Why isn’t everyone here fighting with us to save our brothers and sisters?” People actually tittered when I called them “brothers and sisters.” Which made me scream even louder, “What the fuck do you find so fucking funny in any fucking thing I’m saying!” Grace would have been proud of my language. They wound up giving me a standing ovation. I don’t understand gay men not fighting, every single one of us. And I certainly don’t understand my country.

  Tommy says we should get guns and shoot our enemies dead. He already knows how from being a Navy SEAL, but he says he can teach me. I know I couldn’t do it. I’d put the gun to my own head and fire.

  RON

  We join with other gay groups for a candlelight vigil and rally in response to a recent surge in anti-gay violence—309 assaults in the last six months, including killings in Central Park and a murder by the cops of two gay men on 103rd Street. The rally culminates with 350-plus protesters, led by FUQU members, sitting down in the intersection of 100th and Broadway for a spontaneous CD action: 105 demonstrators are arrested. I get to test out the new chants I’d been practicing for us to protest with.

  TRACY

  I am telling you my phone is being tapped! And that I got a death-threat phone call from some guy who said we were as bad as Jews. And there are people coming to our meetings who are infiltrators. I don’t know them and nobody I know knows them. I keep getting up at meetings every week and saying this, and everybody looks at me as if I’m crazy. I am not making any of this up! Now I am telling you more. This morning there was a swastika painted on my front door!

  ANN

  I agree with Tracy. I believe we are being infiltrated. Diane Sawyer taught me always to expect it when you’re doing something important.

  DUDLEY

  The thing to remember about this organization is that it really isn’t that altruistic. It was an emergency. I mean, it’s a matter of, I wonder if we can stay alive. I wonder if I can keep George from going blind. Right this second, because he’s going blind right now, he’s dying right now, he’s got PCP right now, and I have to get something right now and I’m going to do whatever the fuck it takes right now. It really concentrates the mind—to be in a constant state of real emergency. It is right this second, right now scary.

  INT.
EMMA’S OFFICE. DAY.

  Fred in a hospital robe has been examined by Emma. Tommy holds his hand.

  EMMA: Your liver functions are dangerously low.

  FRED: What else is new?

  EMMA: I’m going to drain out all the ascites that’s accumulated in your gut. Let’s see what happens with that.

  FRED: Why have you been coughing so much?

  EMMA: That’s none of your business. You two make a nice couple. Are you a couple yet?

  FRED: That’s none of your business.

  TOMMY: Thanks, though, for asking.

  FUQU STORMS FADS

  DANIEL THE SPY

  My first action. Fred would have loved it. Jerry was looking out some office window with another Dr. Schmuck, who’s acting head of FADS, staring down at us as if we’re some strange animals in the jungle. There were hundreds and hundreds of us screaming and yelling and chanting, waving banners, carrying posters with Jerry’s face and a Nazi swastika. There were armed policemen on horses stomping through our hordes, trying to herd us off the range, and dropping piles of shit all over. A kid went around shoveling it up and depositing it in the building’s entrance so no one inside could get out without walking in it. A guy named Scotty managed to climb up on the roof of the entrance overhang and tape FUQU and Ruestergate posters on the building. The crowd went wild. Evidently there were some 1,500 protesters there from all over the country. Someone said 180 were already arrested. Isn’t it interesting that Jerry came all the way over from NITS to watch us? It’s a good thing I was wearing civvies, black boots, and a mask of Ruester.

  After the activism comes the feeling of fraud when I take off the mask. Am I a hypocrite, one way or another, wearing the mask or not? After the excitement of marching, sometimes even running after a target appearing from out of an office building, packs of us, like the frightened humans we really are, dashing to frighten them, which indeed we do. What comes next? I’m aware that I find the fear in the eyes of my fellow bureaucrats strangely amusing. We’re not out for their actual blood, but they don’t know that. When I go home I wonder about the person, me, who became this Masked Activist screaming at those I work with. Amusing? Fraud? Why am I using words like this? I haven’t felt so … vital since Philip was my enemy through that never-ending childhood I couldn’t wait to escape. But Philip’s eyes contained not a drop of terror. Once I heard him say to Rivka, “I don’t know what to do with him,” and his voice did sound sad, just that once, but certainly not enough to warrant the apology Rivka pressured me to perform. “Never!” I screamed at her, my mother. Funny, I can see his sad eyes now and hear that sad voice now. Gay Philip. Homosexual Philip. Jerry’s eyes today on the other side of that window reminded me of Philip’s sad eyes. Trapped. Jerry is a homosexual too. I know it. My instincts for this are, after so many years of dealing with so many patients, usually not far off. Is he as unhappy about it as Philip was? He must be. How could he not be affected, having to take care of dying gay men when he’s a dead gay man himself? Will our demo right under his nose loosen him up? I never felt like a fraud fighting Philip in Masturbov Gardens the way I feel a fraud right now. Why do I use that word even after a day of running around FADS and then over to the NITS campus running after Omicidio, joining in screaming “Murderer!” at the top of our lungs when he got out of his limo, and then coming home to reread Fred’s attacks on us, as if it will help me regain the euphoric righteousness I felt all afternoon? Jerry’s eyes this afternoon were the eyes of the endangered small animal scurrying away from his awful pursuers. Who put Elliott Garbantz up to slashing the number of New York UC cases in half? Who slashed the total number of gays in America all of a sudden? I asked Jerry about this juggling and he wouldn’t answer. “Who is after us?” I demanded, surprised by my tone. “Does he or she have a name of his or her very own?” He pulled away from me. “Why are you yelling at me? I am not your real enemy.” He looked small and terribly rattled, as am I in a way. I can see that activism is not for the faint of heart. When I asked him, “Well, then, who is?” he shook his head as if to say the question is too beneath him to answer.

  Ann, to whom I revealed myself because I knew Fred and she were close, tells me that activism is not about feeling guilty. Maxine, ditto, tells me that FUQU is something to be proud to belong to. I had an instructive and moving time today. I don’t think I want to go on any more of these demos, though. They make me feel too rotten. You shouldn’t have to do shit like this to be treated equally here. What is wrong with me! Of course you must. I miss Fred. I miss David. I miss a life. I miss a personal connection to a real life.

  WHERE WAS FRED?

  I was in Table recovering from a “procedure.” I’d collapsed after a FUQU meeting and Tommy rushed me to Emma. I am sad not to be in Franeeda with my kids, but I am, one, now momentarily drained of some new kind of poison that is endangering my liver, and two, filled with the increasingly morbid feeling: I am wasting time. Four quarts of something has been drained from my stomach and is already starting to replenish itself. I am told again that the days of my liver are numbered. Which means that I am too. FUQU is wasting time too. We aren’t getting anywhere. We joke how good our “shows” are. And they are. But as with touring companies of Oklahoma!, how many times can you perform them if you aren’t getting rave reviews in The Truth? And gay people can’t tell the truth in The Truth. So much for The Truth. So much for the truth.

  * * *

  Your boys and girls are certainly a mess of a mass. Or is it mass of a mess? They join with your Mr. President and your Dr. NITS for guaranteeing my eternal life. Thank you very much. Love from Mr. UC.

  DEEP THROAT GETS THE AXE

  This is how it happened.

  Dr. Alphonse Garibaldi was a distinguished pediatric surgeon. He was famous for a number of breakthroughs, including separating conjoined twins. He was tall, handsome, with an impressively neatly trimmed beard and a persona that you knew had no patience for fools. Ruester appointed him to be surgeon general. Dr. Garibaldi wrote the official U.S. policy on The Underlying Condition and took the unprecedented action of mailing detailed information to every U.S. household. Many people are unhappy with the way in which he dealt with gay sex and the high risk of infection through anal intercourse. The White House goes ballistic. Garibaldi is unapologetic and explains his position: such activities entail risks several orders of magnitude greater than other means of transmission; hence The American People must be warned. Additionally, Dr. Garibaldi infuriates conservatives by insisting on sex education in schools, ideally as early as the third grade, including instruction regarding the proper use of condoms to combat the spread of UC. While straightforwardly and officially telling the public that this disease even exists is controversial in itself, Garibaldi is further criticized for causing a subtle shift in public consciousness. Previously, government health agencies were expected to develop cures and vaccines for diseases (although they rarely did). Under Garibaldi, this mandate was expanded to include a “duty to warn.”

  “This is not the government’s responsibility” had been Purpura’s commandment, now delivered via Vice President Dredd Trish to Garibaldi.

  Garibaldi had been first put forward by Chevvy Slyme, who then put his name forward to Moose, who thought it a splendid idea as Garibaldi was on record as against abortion, which would be useful for the anti–Roe v. Wade crowd. Ruester agreed and Garibaldi was already appointed and in residence when it turned out that yes, he was against abortion as a personal moral decision but not against it as a medical one. He was ordered to amend this opinion, made in one of his earliest reports. He did not do so. Although he still had not met the president or the First Lady, that did in no way curtail his determination to constantly advise The American People about their health.

  Garibaldi is again called on the carpet for having published a second Surgeon General’s Report to The American People on UC without clearing it with the White House. Once again he had simply sent the document to the Government Printing Off
ice with instructions to print it and send it to every mailbox in America. The good doctor now strongly urged all of The American People to please use condoms. The fact that the surgeon general even mentioned that obscene device a second time is further anathema to every right-thinking conservative. The White House blew up, of course. The SG is asked to retract his position on recommending condoms or at least to state the high failure rates of condoms. The problem is that condoms don’t fail very often. Conservatives want to believe that condoms fail all the time. The SG won’t budge an inch. He sits there, like a benign Buddha, being hauled over the coals by Bohunk, never in fact opening his mouth.

  I don’t know why I’ve been told all this. Purpura’s taken a fancy to me. Mother told her about me. Manny Moose orders that Garibaldi is given the axe.

  The surgeon general, a rank from another era, had been a political plum reserved for doctors adept at raising money for presidential campaigns. The idea originally was that there would be a Commissioned Corps and staff for the surgeon general of the Public Health Service just as there would be an Army for the Defense Department. The PHS had been a haven for draft dodgers in the Korean and Vietnamese wars and was a means today for lazy physicians to make a better salary while keeping banker’s hours working for the federal government. The Army’s job was to make noise and kill people in case of war. The job of the PHS was to constantly make war on disease with the Commissioned Corps as troops. The surgeon general was to command the PHS. However, the surgeon general was never given the actual authority to use any troops, or to command them to do anything. In sending out his Reports to The American People, Garibaldi was really performing a heroic act above and beyond any actual prose in his job description.

 

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