The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  One of the several reasons Mother originally sent me to NITS was because of my expertise on infection from diseases, which of course includes condoms. The SG is being ordered to retract his position on condoms, which he’s refused to do. Now he is forced to listen to the president’s domestic policy adviser, Gree Bohunk, who knows as much about medicine as Al Capone. The SG said this was the second time he’d been in the White House; the first, when he was sworn in, was the only time he’d been within earshot of the president. Gree started right in yelling at him that he had no authority to issue such reports. I was pissed enough to tell Gree that Dr. G. was the nation’s doctor and ethically bound to give all of us his best advice.

  The White House has also sent along Penny. Penny is tall. Penny is a little long on the vine, but a younger Penny must have been devastating. Penny is blond, groomed, and has long beautiful fingers and large hands that are impeccably cared for. I am sitting beside her. She is smart, mean, and I would like to go to bed with her. She has small breasts and walks with an assertiveness that makes you think she always gets her way. Pushy. I can almost feel the force and juice of her as she sits beside me. She is really hot.

  Penny leans forward toward the SG, her frock sliding along my right side in a silken whisper. I nearly shiver. “But Doctor, this pamphlet you wrote and already sent out without our permission is not an educational lesson that we want to represent the administration,” she says with all the passion of Catherine De Medici offering someone a delicious garnish of arsenic. He smiles benignly, and finally explains quietly and once again that the surgeon general’s report is what the surgeon general felt was obligatory to report. “But, Doctor, you can’t send this out as an educational message!” I couldn’t take it. “Penny, the surgeon general of the United States is not sending out an educational message. The surgeon general is a doctor, the doctor to The American People! He is giving them medical advice! Medical advice is different from educational advice.” I guess I spoke a bit more strongly than these fools are used to. The surgeon general sort of winced but bore up pretty well. Penny doesn’t stop. “Congressmen are also sending out this report to their constituents!” she yelps. “So what,” I say, “what if they decide to send Harrison’s Textbook of Medicine to their constituents? The message will be exactly the same.” Big Gree looks as though his dyspepsia and hemorrhoids have just collided. Penny keeps boring in. “Well, change the part about condoms. Condoms fail and people should know it,” she says with a smile of ingenious triumph, as though this is both true and profound and God has sanctioned it. “We know that scientists at FADS have proved that condoms fail fifty percent of the time and if people use them they will have a false sense of security.” The “scientists” she referred to is a third-rate statistician employed by the Catholic Church, the Right to Lifers, and for all I know, the American Fascist Party, and who is both evil and stupid. His name is Dr. Ronald Bletsch, and his supposed calculations are based on ancient anecdotes from traveling salesmen in colonial days, and a complete misunderstanding of new condom technology and the data supporting it. I told her this. She was pissed. I loved it. The more pissed she got, the more inflamed my fantasy of her became. What kinds of orgasms did she have, I wondered. The SG was back to smiling like a benevolent Buddha. The babe made one last stab, rather peremptorily, at “demanding in the name of the president of the United States that you as his representative send out to every household in this country additional information edited ‘clean’ of all references to condoms and intercourse and anal intercourse and gay anything.” She practically choked, poor dear, on that word, anal. Buddha just sat there with his lovely bearded smile.

  I knew the meeting was over and that we had won a victory that was too decisive and too outspoken. I was meant to effect a compromise. Gree stalked his five-foot-three-plus elevators out the door. Penny, to her credit, did shake hands with a strong grasp that made me look at my hand later to see if she had left a permanent mark to go with her other impressions on me. Nostrill, whom I’d not noticed had taken a seat at the back, was looking at me as if I were a representative of Satan on earth. I keep forgetting this place is swimming in Lovejoys. I wonder how much Mother knows about that.

  The fallout took a little time. I was called by Jerry to tell me I had been involuntarily retired from the Public Health Service for dereliction of duty. I went to Building 1 and was told that my performance ratings from Jerry and others did not merit my promotion to the next step. The “brilliant” performance ratings that dated from before I had moved over to Jerry, I was now told, were unjustified and conflicted with my new ratings. Jerry, who had just been informed of my lymphoid reservoir work, offered me a temporary contract at much less pay and no benefits. I had just lost my pension and retirement somewhere between his office and Building 1.

  Mother had told me this would happen and that I should take the temp position. There was still stuff he wanted to know more about. He would supplement my income from one of his budgets. He also said he might be assigning me to the White House, details to follow later. I should “stay tuned.”

  I wanted to stick around until I was certain of this lymphoid reservoir work. I had done what I set out to do, report with Don Kotler that the location of the UC virus was in the gut, which explained the awful GI difficulties UC carriers experience. Jerry was in no way involved in my discovery. It was, of course, work that he should have done a long time ago. I had practically begged him to do it. My degrees from Hopkins, Yaddah, Cambridge, and Uppsala counted for naught with Dr. Jerrold Omicidio.

  I have a personal note from the surgeon general of the United States of America framed over my desk, thanking me for my support.

  There was a big book burning. Nobody knows about that. Most of the copies of the Surgeon General’s Report to The American People never left the government printing office. They were trucked into the country and burned to ashes.

  DR. DONALD KOTLER

  I had blood and tissue samples preserved in various ways, from deep-freezing to electron microscopy fixatives. Deep Throat didn’t like any of them, and insisted I look at the paraffin blocks that he had done. His work was beautiful. I had given him biopsies from as many activists as I could, including ones from Sparks Huffington and Fred Lemish.

  DEEP THROAT

  Don has underplayed how this evolved and his significant role. I became interested in the GI complications of UC and looked in the current literature, where I found some of Don’s publications of work he did at St. Luke’s in New York. Since I could get no help at NITS, I called Don out of the blue and told him what tools I had. We started to work together on biopsies from the gut, totally unknown to Jerry. I had started working on UC in the parotid in a patient with what was then called the Nector (by now we knew that nimroid was early Nector, which is now named UC), and my findings were published without Jerry. There followed a whole series of papers, some with Don, some with other collaborators, on UC in the lamina propria, on UC in esophageal ulcers, on the lymphoid reservoir of UC, on UC in the human gut, on the pathobiology of UC infection, on hidden lymphoid germinal centers as reservoirs of UC infection accounting for the apparent latency of infection. No Jerry on any of these.

  After I left, Jerry, with Pantaleone, published essentially what I’d found. In all of these major discoveries, Jerry played no part. Mine were all published in peer-reviewed journals. I don’t need to make claims or argue over who knew what when. Don knows a bit of the depression and paranoia that anybody who has to work around Jerry goes through. Jerry still takes awards and prizes for what others did. It is my and Don’s work that will change the course of this plague, not his. We discovered the mother lode.

  Had Jerry been willing to listen, the plague’s progression would have been otherwise. There existed a place to start from. I gave him that and he could have proceeded with his work from that. He ignored it and another three years were lost. This is of no interest to a number of people in high places.

  This is the man you’
re trying to understand?

  DR. DONALD KOTLER

  Our GI work indicated that the virus is in the gut in almost everyone. I speculated as much and found some evidence. DT proved it beyond a doubt. Now people know that the gut is the earliest and often the most affected organ. In practical terms this means that looking at cells from a blood sample does not give the full picture of what is going on. And for years, then and now, it is the blood sample that is the basis of all interest and study, in almost everything. Think about what I’m saying. Even in patients without detectable viral loads, there may be residual viral activity in the gut, and elsewhere.

  Jerry tried to get the journals not to publish our work.

  DEEP THROAT

  I have never known Jerry Omicidio to have an unselfish thought. You were recently speculating about his sexual orientation. He can’t be gay, or even in the closet. His problem is somewhere in the Marquis de Sade. Something to go along with being short. Great deceivers are often short, like Napoleon and Hitler.

  MEANWHILE, BACK ON OUR RANCH

  SPARKS

  It was scary when we finally got inside and saw what we saw. It was a meeting where Jerry and his staff presented some more of their lousy ZAP data. It is hard to believe they are even still studying ZAP. Everyone all over the world knows what shit ZAP is. We weren’t invited of course, their meetings are listed on the NITS calendar, which theoretically means anyone can go. We thought we’d give it a shot. What did we have to lose?

  The first thing I realize is how dumb and rude everyone is. Jerry sits there stone-faced, not even saying so much as Hello and Welcome. The meeting is conducted by his chief nurse practitioner, Debbi Driver, along with Jerry’s assistant, dumb-ass-looking Dr. Daniel Something-or-Other, who looks real uncomfortable but says nary a word. Since this is the first meeting on trials in a while, this conference room at NITS is half-full, which I’m told is “a pretty good crowd,” by some doctor, who looks at me as if I’m from Mars when I ask this question.

  Debbi Driver is a big woman, a large woman, tall, dark-haired, too large for a Debbi. She is now in full charge of Jerry’s trials. A Leisha McGonigle had been in charge of them. She seems to have disappeared. Just as a Margaret Something-or-Other disappeared. Just as well. She was dumber. They were both dumber. We saw their reports and literally gasped. Eigo says there are enough holes in them to shoot deer. And it is very evident Debbi’s no prize.

  Not enough people are signing up for any trial. And of those who actually apply, some 98 percent of them are turned down, for one of two reasons, because they’re too sick or because they’re not healthy enough. If that makes any sense. Which it shouldn’t. But that is Snicker talk. A Dash Snicker rule. One way to guarantee good outcomes is to have healthy patients from the get-go. Dash Snicker makes a statement to defend this nonsense. Dash Snicker is a snot. No getting away from it.

  Fred warned us about all of this but Fred can overdramatize. Obviously not about this. He confided in me that he has a mole inside here, who might come and introduce himself. I said, Mole like in a spy movie? And he said, Correct. I’m flattered Fred confides in me. I’m impressed his information tentacles can reach into covert corners. No one’s shown up to talk to me yet. Including Fred, who once again is somewhere else.

  Debbi is stern. Debbi is unyielding. Debbi is completely unreasonable. Debbi rudely turns down sick people as if they are scum, thus pleasing Dash Snicker and G-D no end. “Entry criteria must be relaxed, not tightened,” Eigo tries to explain to her, to which she doesn’t respond. She doesn’t know who Eigo of T+D is and she doesn’t want to know. So he makes a point of introducing himself to her every time he stands up to question one of her “statements as fact,” as he calls them.

  Almost ten years now. Makes you want to throw up. Fred would say, Makes you want to kill. That’s one of the differences between our styles.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, buster,” Debbi says, jamming her forefinger fiercely into the chests of first Jim Eigo and then yours truly, Sparks Puffington, and repeating her action, Jim’s chest, Sparks’s chest, Debbi’s forefinger, as if the very bravura of it all provides her with the energy to repeat herself: she’s famous for this same digitalization of dialogue and muscular action as she’s coasted through one inconclusive trial after another. You’d think she’d break that finger. “She likes to be in touch with her audience,” some doctor tells me. She is not popular.

  Dr. Levi Narkey, a gay doc who’s come with us, actually begs for two drugs to be tested at once. “What is there to lose?” You would have thought he’d spit upon the Cross, which of course he has, the Holy Grail of the Clinical Trial as devised in the year 1800 B.C. The pharms sit back and watch and snort. Pharms are beginning to show up at conferences. They won’t talk to us either. Or rather they talk to us like we really are from Mars. We are wearing our FUQU T-shirts. “And what are you doing here, pray tell?” sort of thing. You can tell they’re pharms because they look like traveling salesmen. Debbi Girl is protecting them, they know, protecting them from us heathen activists and who knows how much else. Eigo stands up, introduces himself to her again, and asks if she might respond to Dr. Narkey’s request. “And just what two drugs do you have in mind, mister?” she spits out at Eigo. “I got one drug. You want another drug, you go scream some more at FADS.”

  “We would,” Eigo replies in his unshakable calm tone. “But Dr. Marie Clayture doesn’t return calls, or answer letters either.”

  “What are you guys doing here anyway? This meeting isn’t open to the public.”

  “Yes, it must be, by law,” David G. answers her.

  Debbi walks out. Everyone just sits there, including Jerry, who doesn’t bat an eye.

  A few minutes later six cops come and escort our gang out. David G. refuses to go. “It is the law of this country that these meetings, which are financed by taxpayer money, must be open to all!” he screams at the top of his lungs. He is handcuffed and lifted up and out, yelling even louder: “We are going to get into one of these meetings! You are breaking the law!” All the NITS people remaining look at David G. as if he’s crazy. They have never seen activism or activists so up close before.

  MORE SHIT

  The Table Family and the Hooker Trust are among the most secretive fortunes in the world. If you recall, Table and Hooker money originated in shit. Years ago, Fate pointed a finger at an earlier Table and said “Shit.” There is lots of money in shit. Yes, it smells. All of a sudden your nose is so fussy? No Table, down deep, is thrilled that their money started out as shit. This is not bandied about at family get-togethers or in the society columns where Joan Table cavorts with the likes of Perdita Pugh. The early Hookers also weren’t going around bragging about Massachusetts Waste, their own fortune from shit. But then there aren’t many of that old family of Hookers left, which has made Dr. Sister Grace even richer.

  In Great Britain, the Purveyor of Toilets to the Royal Family is Thomas Crapper and Sons. They have big showrooms emblazoned with replicas of the Royal Crest and Warrant—the Queen herself shits in a Crapper. Who in America would lend such a name to such a daily convenience? Do you know the name of the maker of your toilet? Who is Mr. American Standard? The Tables named a New York hospital. Their company is called Table Holdings. Even Wall Street doesn’t know what that means, nor does anyone else. Or the Hooker Trust either. (To this day we still don’t know what’s in the Masturbov Trust.)

  Do you know what is done with what goes down a toilet? You think shit just goes down there and disappears somewhere forever? You are wrong. Shit is useful. It can be made into lots of other things. It’s used in food. It’s used in fertilizers. It’s used in building materials. It’s used in hospitals. It’s used in medicine. It’s also a conveyer of diseases like polio and UC and is hence a surrogate marker for UC, which Dr. Sister Grace tried to tell you about. Didn’t you know all this? You weren’t listening.

  Then what? What comes between being flushed down the toilet and the pill that
you are ordered to swallow?

  Just as there are different kinds of people, there are different kinds of shit. There is a difference between French shit and American shit, between the shit of someone who eats a certain kind of diet and someone who eats another, between southern shit and northern shit, between shit culled from inhabitants of the desert and of the mountains, the colder climates and the torrid, and, yes between black and white, or, to be more ethnically precise, between Caucasian and African American.

  America is queasy about its shit. Other countries don’t mind as much. There are countries where people squat and shit in front of each other in open public toilets and little men come around and scoop it up while others are still doing it. Many such places are in tribal regions, usually temperate, swarming with flies and overrun with disease. This shit is filled with fruits, vines, raw meats, and is extremely vitamin-rich.

  American shit is problematic. For one thing, the American diet is now so processed that much of its nutritional value is lost by the time it exits from the body, by which time it’s all turned to bulk, fibrous roughage. While some American nutritional “experts” advise that fiber is imperative, remember that the paper you write on, the paper you read each day, the paper you wipe your ass with, is fiber. Your intestines are filled with the equivalent of your daily paper, or at least part of it. You are shitting out The New York Truth.

  Let it be noted, as it will be by Rose George in her several articles in The New York Truth, that “… human excrement is a weapon of mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million viruses. At least 50 communicable diseases … travel from host to host in human excrement … in numbers equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every hour … Uncomposted human feces can carry diseases and extremely resilient worm eggs.”