The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  We had a member of FUQU who worked as a trader on the Exchange and told us how lax the security actually was. There was this door right under the columns that you see in the famous picture of the Stock Exchange. It faces Broad Street, and right behind those columns is that big floor you see on the news. You go through that door and then there’s three steps to your left, a little landing, and another three steps up and you’re on the floor. It’s that close to the street. There was just one security guard there, with no metal detectors, and when our guy told us about that door I started quietly putting a crew together, much of the same crew I had in North Carolina at G-D’s home office.

  First we needed to get these white trading badges, so a couple of us went down with video cameras and we stood outside the Stock Exchange acting like tourists during lunch, when many of the traders were standing outside smoking and what have you, and we zoomed in on one of these badges and then drew one up based on that design and took it to this kind of pawnshop in Greenwich Village that makes badges and things. We gave the guy a whole story that we were doing a skit for a holiday party and we needed these badges for the skit. And they’re just these white plastic tags that had those big traders’ numbers on them with the name of the firm underneath and a black line through the middle. They also had photo IDs, but our contact on the floor told us that everybody kept those in their wallets. Nobody had to show them to get in. If you had the white badge, that’s all you needed. They looked great but we did a test run to make sure. The Tuesday before the action, which was on a Thursday, a few of us went in with the opening bell in trader drag, ties and shirts and badges, pretending to be traders—shit, I had been one and I knew what to do—and the security guard didn’t bat an eye and all of a sudden we were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  I wanted to figure out where to do the demonstration, so we’re walking around, the bell is ringing, trading is starting, everybody is busy, we actually pulled out little pads of paper because that’s what traders do, and we discovered this old VIP balcony that wasn’t used anymore. It had a steep little staircase, and it was perfect because it had a big NYSE banner hanging over it, which would be a great backdrop for the photo. Since it was unused we wouldn’t have to push anybody aside to get up there.

  But then I got stopped on the trading floor. This old guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re new!” And I’m like, “Ah, yeah!” I started to sweat. And he said, “Bear Stearns.” I said, “Yeah, yeah.” All our badges said “Bear Stearns”—we just picked a firm out of a hat. And he said, “That’s weird, 3865”—my badge number. He said, “The highest number on the floor is sixteen hundred; there are only sixteen hundred traders here.” And I said, “I don’t know. This is the one they gave me.” And I was starting to sweat more and he went, “I guess they’re trying a new system. Well, welcome.” And he shook my hand and that was it, he walked away, and I was like, Holy shit!

  So we went back to the pawnshop and got them to make all new badges. We had like forty-eight hours before the demo would be happening.

  We met at a McDonald’s beforehand that morning on Nassau Street, nervous as all hell. There were seven of us, five who would go up to the balcony and two photographers, and the photographers were supposed to take our picture and get out right away, and hand the cameras over to runners who would take them up to the Associated Press. Each of us had stuff under our shirts. One person had a huge banner that was all folded up. He looked a little fat. I had a chain wrapped in a fanny belt for chaining ourselves to the banister so it would take them a while to pull us off the balcony. We all had handcuffs in our pockets. We all had little marine foghorns that were ear-piercing, and that’s how we would announce our presence. And then, in honor of Abbie Hoffman, who was the first and only person to ever organize an action on the Stock Exchange in what was then the visitor’s gallery, which is now walled off with glass because of him—in honor of Abbie, who threw down real dollar bills onto the floor of the Stock Exchange as a rant against how capitalism was funding the war, we had fake hundred-dollar bills made up that said on the back of them, “Fuck Your Profiteering, We Die While You Make Money. FUQU!”

  So we all piled in at 9:25, walking right past security, and the five of us went up the stairs of the balcony and knelt down and pulled everything out from under our shirts and put the chain around the banister and handcuffed ourselves to a railing. We unrolled the whole banner, which said SELL GREETING. At 9:29 and 50 seconds we jumped up and put the banner over the rail and let off the foghorns, and you couldn’t hear the opening bell—it was extraordinary. The place went dead quiet just for a second, except for the foghorns, as everybody tried to figure out what was going on. Then we showered them with our fake dollar bills and they started going into a rage as they realized what was happening. Our photographers took their pictures quietly and got out, handed the cameras off, but they saw that the crowd was beginning to throw wads of paper at us and getting very angry and they were concerned, so they foolishly went back in and quickly got nabbed. The traders were looking around for conspirators and our guys got real roughed up, shirt collars were ripped and stuff like that. But one of our photographers did get out.

  And these traders were just raging at us, and I used to work with that testosterone, and it was—ah, it was really one of the most gratifying moments of my life. It was done. We had succeeded. The picture was taken, this was a gigantic news story. And they could scream all they wanted but we were going to be on the front page of The Wall Street Journal the next day.

  It was while walking home that I conceived of what had to be done next. Actually, I’d been thinking of it for a while.

  HAZEL

  I am sick of Scotty. He thinks he runs us and we are his own private army to perform for him. He thinks he can do anything he wants to do. Yes, he raises lots of money for us. The T-shirt sales were his idea. We have this whole wardrobe of T-shirts, SILENCE = DEATH, RUESTERGATE, READ MY LIPS, they’re all very cute. And they do make us tons of bread, but that doesn’t give him the right to be so lordy-lordy.

  EIGO CONFRONTS JERRY

  In Montreal Jerry had agreed to come to a FUQU meeting at the Lesbian and Gay Center. Eigo confronts him there before a packed audience that includes Daniel.

  * * *

  Why don’t all your committees, considering the gravity of the crisis, meet more than three times a year? Why aren’t you focusing on treatments to cure OIs? Why must every committee meeting be in secret? Why are you neglecting people of color and women? Why are your grants for anything so small? Why don’t you coordinate your work at NITS with work being done at other agencies and institutes? Why don’t you speak out more forcefully when you don’t receive what you need? Especially when understaffing delays critical trials for so long? NITS was instructed to publicize locations of all trials. You list only the states where they are sited, not the towns, not the hospitals. Why do you continue to do dumb stuff like this? Don’t you and Marie Clayture talk every day? Put it this way, when was the last time you and Marie Clayture talked? And you wonder why the trials are underenrolled. It’s almost as if you don’t want them filled up. Why does NITS decline all grant applications from our own community research initiatives, like Dr. Itsenfelder’s and Dr. Krank’s, and Boston’s Fenway Initiative, and Washington’s own Whitman-Walker Clinic, while funding such bozos and dumbbells as … well, let us just say all the ones you do fund, not one of which has demonstrated an iota of the ingenuity and usefulness of our own clinics? I should have hoped that you had long ago weeded homophobia out of your ranks. Obviously not. You’re as negligent as this second president in a row. Is the White House dictating this silence?

  Finally, why, since your agreement to allow activists into committee meetings, are many of us, including yours truly, still prevented bodily from entering?

  Dr. Omicidio, you simply are not doing a good enough job. Nothing personal, mind you.

  No, I take that back. Everything personal.

  *
* *

  DANIEL: I was there and I couldn’t take my eyes off Jerry as Eigo said all this to him. He’d brought an assistant, Poppy Salad, that was her name. Poppy was some proper Smith or Wellesley woman with a spotless career of being assistant this and that in many should-be-important health-type organizations. I never heard a word said against her, which indicates to me that she was pretty useless except as some sort of tidy front. Jerry would lean over after every accusation and mumble something to Poppy and she would write it down. When Eigo was finished, all eyes were on Jerry, who stood up and thanked everyone for inviting him here and said it had all been an interesting evening for him and he looked forward to working with us, etc., etc. He asked the floor if there were any questions, which I think took everyone by surprise. They didn’t know that this was Jerry in action, dodging the issue, throwing the ball into the other court as fast as possible. When Sparks pressed him for “a response, any old response will do, as long as it’s a response” to the charges perpetually laid on him, Jerry stood there for a very long moment before finally saying something. It was at this moment that the thought occurred to me that he was an actor in a role he was getting better at playing with each performance. His timing was improving and his reactions and body language were becoming very smooth in portraying this Very Important Man of Mystery and Power confronting the enemy and saying nothing. Whatever love or lust I had for him is gone.

  What did he reply to Sparks? You know, I can’t remember. Whatever he said, it was a string of words pronounced with seriousness, conveying nothing. I could see how he’d be in his job forever and that nothing would change. It was a painful realization and, like so many others I’d come to about him, I wonder why it took me so long.

  It was as if he had watched and studied every bureaucrat who’d had to deal with a mess and realized that they’d never answered a question directly either. And they got away with it. The media never questions presidents about not answering any questions.

  No, Fred, who was there, and I didn’t speak to each other. We didn’t want it seen that we knew each other.

  WE SCORED!

  FADS approves DID for “pre-approval distribution” under “Treatment IND.” Mumbledygook that can be translated as “FUQU and T+D scored.” BMS must have put the fear of threat into Marie Clayture, no easy task. My threat to Abner Bumstead worked! Now our own Dr. Levi Narkey can continue his little trial with his no-longer-purloined stash, and we wait and see, knowing that Levi is now not breaking the law. As if we care.

  SCOTTY

  We scored. We scored! We fucking scored. It’s time to play TAG for real!

  FRED TRIES TO PLAY WITH THE BIG BOYS

  Why am I in L.A. again? I hate L.A. I’ll tell you why I am in L.A. again. I’ve written twelve—count them, twelve—screenplays for Adreena Schneeweiss. This woman is famous for driving people crazy. I have been experiencing it firsthand. Of course, she says that I’m the one famous for driving people crazy and everyone’s told her so. I guess you could say we have certain traits in common. She has owned the rights to my play about the early days of this plague since 1983. She says it is the most important thing in the world for her, to make a movie of it, yet each time it comes down to her actually committing to making it, she goes off to make something else, something crappy. “Stop telling me it’s crappy!” she yells at me when I tell her it’s crappy, whichever movie “it” is.

  Anyway, here I am again. She has recently, behind my back, hired another writer to write her a script. Not allowed, Adreena, not allowed. My contract calls for me and me alone to be the sole writer. “I have never granted any writer such exclusivity in my entire career,” she has told me too many times. “Well, this time you have or you would never have had this ‘property’ from me.” I hate how everything in the film business is called a project or a property, neither of which connotes that an actual act of creation is required. The screenplay by this other chap is really crappy. She of course has the chutzpah to give it to me. “Go sit by my pool and read it and tell me your reactions. I believe there’s a typewriter down there for you.” When I calm down I write a twenty-five-page letter telling her my reaction: it’s a piece of shit. This other writer, “we worked so wonderfully closely,” she cooed to me, insinuating that she and I hadn’t, which I actually thought we had, I mean, she did send me flowers once or twice when she said she was pleased with our progress. This other writer has of course made Dr. Emma Brookner the leading character, who zips around in her wheelchair all over New York and Washington and a number of other more exotic locations, fighting all the fights that I fought but am not fighting in this version. “You can make any movie of my play you want to,” I end my letter to her by saying. “Just buy it outright.” (She only has an option.) “The price, as you know, is one million dollars. You have one million dollars, don’t you?” The woman is said to have the first dollar she made. (I can attest to witnessing many examples of her legendary parsimoniousness, but not here.)

  But my purpose here is not only to tell you yet again that Adreena Schneeweiss, grand diva-heroine assoluta to 20 million faggots, is not telling our sad and tragic story. It is to say that on this particular trip to Los Angeles I finally met Nathan Perch before he was murdered.

  Nathan Perch had been Mayor Kermit Goins’s boyfriend. He’d been paid off and told to get out of town fast and stay out. Tommy and I had been looking for him but hadn’t been able to find him. And here, at a fund-raiser for some local gay politician running for an office he’d never win, this guy came up to me, a reasonably attractive fellow, and said, “Hi, I hear you’re looking for me, my name is Nathan Perch.”

  Well, better late than never, fast-thinking me opines. Goins had just been defeated for a fourth term, so getting the old boyfriend-in-the-closet out in the open to confess, as we’d wanted him to do, was no longer the helpfully damaging ammunition against Goins we’d longed for. But there is always residual value in any major shit fight.

  We went to some dark Chinese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley where we were the only customers (“I thought it was important to not be seen together,” he said). It brought forth plenty of dish. It was both riveting and sad, that each of these two human beings behaved so basely to each other, Kermit Goins, the mayor of New York, making Nathan Perch, his “executive assistant,” grovel so (Nathan had to suck Kermit off while kneeling under his office desk), and Nathan doing it (“I really didn’t like him very much. He was ugly and unkind but I was just so in awe of his power”). He appeared to have made a life for himself out here, selling, of all things, hospitals. In not too long a period of time he will be said to die from UC, although Deep Throat says he was actually murdered. His will set up a foundation to help gay men deal with their self-loathing. Could it be possible that Kermit carries the virus? Wouldn’t that be justice? Well, so far Kermit’s still walking and talking like the straightest of shits; no virus has visibly felled him beyond the bugs of arrogance and ignobility, not unfamiliar insects that consume not-nice persons whom nobody likes.

  What Nathan did do for me at this dinner, in this knock-three-times-and-whisper-low dive in the Valley, was to restoke in me a particular fervor. As long as I’m out here, I must talk to the big boys. Gather them in a room and lay it all out for them. I knew Randy Dildough. I knew Sammy Sircus, Trafe Elohenu, Kipper Gross. I knew Derry Humpher, who offered to gather them in his office. None of them liked me, except maybe Derry, whom I had known in London. But I hoped that a request for a face-to-face meeting would flush them out, if only out of fear of what I might write about them if they didn’t show. By now Mike S. (in charge of FUQU’s media) and I were learning how to use our voices in more shall-we-say targeted ways.

  I had tried to enlist Adreena’s help. “These men, whom you know so well, must be made to participate responsibly in the fate of their brothers,” I said to her. “Just like you are doing,” I said to her, “for the sake of your infected son. And all the gay men who are your most devoted fans.” Et ceter
a. She was not unfamiliar with my spiels. After all, they were embedded in many of her speeches, as Dr. Emma Brookner as written by me and even as rewritten by young Mr. No Talent.

  She would have none of it.

  “We don’t work that way out here,” she said. “You would be perceived as a threat. Adreena Schneeweiss does not threaten.”

  “How about throwing a little lunch and we get tipsy on champagne and dream dreams about what all your respective fortunes could buy to help get rid of UC,” I suggested. “No threats. Just dreams. All your songs are about dreams.”

  “I am singing so well even I am amazed. I am preparing an international tour to sing in all the great cities one last time. I cannot believe my voice is still as good as it ever was.” That was her idea of an answer.

  “It will take at least a year. I can’t possibly think of anything else for a year. I’m going to open in Las Vegas. On New Year’s Eve.”

  Great. Now I had to wait for a year for her to tour the whole fucking world.

  Sammy Sircus had bought the Jack Warner house. I wonder if Sammy knows how much Jack Warner hated fairies. Sammy is by now overwhelmingly rich. He can’t decide which of his palaces to live in, on Fifth Avenue, or in L.A., or in the Hamptons, or on Fire Island. Everything he’s touched in his business life has turned to gold. He fucks cute little hairless boys, thinks he’s in love for a minute, and then dumps them. “All they’re after is my money,” he says as if this was a surprise.

  “Don’t tell me what to do with my money,” Sammy says to me when we do get together in Derry Humpher’s office. “You’re worse than your Scotty What’s-his-name in FUQU. He’s always hitting me up for money. All your T-shirts, I staked him the up-front money to order them. Did you know that?” I didn’t know that. “Cute little ass he’s got. A lot of good it did me.”