The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Velma Dimley writes a nasty piece about us in The Truth, identifying FUQU and me as UC’s chief troublemakers impeding progress, and praising Jerry for doing such a swell job.

  I try to outline the complexity of this issue in a letter I circulate to Push and Pish Dunkelheim, Martin Richtig (The Truth’s new editor in chief, replacing Jakie Flourtower), Dearie Fault, Velma, Omicidio, to name but a few. Long ago I learned that cc’ing the world often gets to more people than you might think. I got invited on to the Charlie Rose show to debate Omicidio. I never let him get a word in. I practically yelled out every fact from every speech and op-ed and I didn’t stop. He actually tried to hug me when it was over. What is it with this guy? I fucking creamed him. I was shaking. Daniel called me. “Fred, what’s come over you?”

  “Are we friends again?” I asked Daniel. “I’ve had enough of this a-tisket a-tasket.”

  “We were never not friends,” he said. “You just demand unbending loyalty and eternal fealty.”

  “They’re the same thing. And don’t you forget it.”

  It seemed an unsatisfactory conversation and so I said good night. I had wanted to know the latest on David.

  What very few know about Marty Delaney is that he and his group have a secret first-class hijacker who somehow manages to gain entry into any pharms factory and make off with bootleg supplies for their own secret trials. Our own Dr. Levi Narkey contacts Marty and gets some of their bootlegged drugs-in-the-making. Amazingly, not one of the raided pharms notices a thing.

  FRED KISSES OFF ALL HIS STRAIGHT FRIENDS

  TOMMY

  I was with Fred when he decided to lay into his straight friends. We went to Christmas dinner at the home of his old Yaddah classmate and friend Buddy Tinker. Buddy prides himself on being funny, a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain. He writes for The New Gotham. Fred and Buddy’s wife, Beverly, are close. He’s helped her through a couple of health scares by investigating research and directing her to the doctors and even to Shmuel because she was having a tough time of not only having survived cancer but also with Buddy. She’d told Fred, “I’m just not a person to him. I’m on some pedestal so he can worship me, and I’m tired.” Fred had asked for Buddy’s recommendation to get into some classy lit. org. he belonged to. Fred has a lot of trouble not being taken seriously as a writer by The New Gotham crowd. Buddy said, “I don’t do things like that,” or some such, and of course that was it for Fred as far as Buddy was concerned. Buddy had failed the loyalty test. This was to be the last Christmas dinner he’d have with this crowd, which included a load of New Gotham stars like Joan Didion and David Remnick. “And I looked around that table,” Fred said to me, “and I knew there wasn’t one of them I could count on, for anything. I suddenly felt like the token fag. I was that way for most of my straight friends. And I knew it wasn’t going to change.” He’d taken me and he had Sam, his dog, who was old and arthritic and doing nothing but just lying there when some straight woman arrived and started screaming, “I cannot be in the same room as a dog! It’s either it or me,” and when Fred could see that neither Tinker was saying anything, he got up, grabbed Sam in his arms, and announced in a very loud voice something along the lines of this: “I feel more and more estranged from my heterosexual friends. So many of you here have power, connections, media outlets, strong voices. Not one of you has used any of your gifts and connections during the long ten years of this plague to help stop the murdering of my and your gay friends. I have been your friend for many years. I don’t want to be your token faggot anymore. So, so long. It was nice while it lasted.” And he left and didn’t come back, as everyone expected him to (not me), leaving me to make small talk with a lot of straight strangers. I could have killed him. But he was right. When this harpy inquired later, “And who was your rude friend?” I answered, “We’ve lost a great many friends. Perhaps you’ve heard of the UC plague?” She shot up from her chair as if I’d infected her. Which of course said it all.

  So now Fred no longer talks to Buddy and Beverly, who were two of his oldest friends.

  SAM

  Sam died. She was the best dog. She was the perfect writer’s dog. She followed me around wherever I walked in my apartment and she stayed by my feet when I was writing. I brought her to FUQU meetings all the time. Everybody loved her. I just knew she was in great pain. She looked up at me with her big eyes as if to say, Hey, Dad, I don’t feel well. Can’t we stop this? I had to wheel her in a little wagon because it hurt her too much to walk. Her vet wrote me this letter: “Dear Fred, What a personality Sam was. She lived a wonderful and long life and I always enjoyed seeing her. Even when she was sick, she was very stoic. I was very fond of her and I will miss her.”

  I tried to be a good father but I was very impatient with her sometimes. Felix loved her a lot. She still sleeps where he lay on our bed beside me.

  PROGRESS?

  “I have been allotted a place on the newly formed Community Constituency Group. Nineteen ninety brought us to a turning point in FUQU’s history. Our long campaign to gain access to power with the federal UC research infrastructure is proving to be a success. We stood at the gates of a newly intensified involvement with, and responsibility for, clinical trials of drugs to treat UC and its complications.”

  That’s what Sparks wrote in his memoirs. Perhaps he’d even convinced himself that such was the case. Of course he was dead wrong, emphasis on the dead. I do not like Sparks. I tried but I am not succeeding. I am discovering that some of my children are not nice persons. I got him a book deal to write these memoirs. The publisher found them too boring to publish. I found them upsetting. They were filled with a large number of unkind things … about me.

  He also wrote that he and Scotty had been meeting with pharmas on the quiet for much longer than I or FUQU knew. Wait till Max and the women in FUQU learn about this.

  SHITTING IN SOHO

  TOMMY

  She is in a store on Greene Street buying a cap that matches the rings and bracelets she wears to match her African headband. It is dripping down her inside right leg. She’s looking down at the store’s shiny black linoleum floor and she sees and I see there is brown shit in the heel of her flip-flop. She is standing in her own shit. She is going to have to leave here walking in her own shit. She looks around terrified. She grabs her Amex card back and gets out to the street, searching for a cab that will never be there in this Saturday afternoon rush hour, stopping only to grab a piece of newspaper from a corner bin to wipe her leg and flip-flop. Sort of. At this point something inside her explodes and she passes out before I can catch her. What is coming out of this poor kid’s insides is all over the place, not only shit but blood from her mouth. I call one of my emergency numbers and direct people to walk around her, while I stand guard, taking her pulse, which thank God she still seems to have. Her wallet tells me about the NYU freshman year she’s just starting, and various pieces of ID tell me she’s a diplomat’s kid from Saudi Arabia, she prepared at Exeter, and has various embassy contacts here in the city. My ambulance gets us to Table Emergency, where they certainly know me. I caution care in handling her, I give them various necessary bits of information, I go to call her embassy contact, I ask one of the interns who’s a buddy if I can scrub clean somewhere fast and borrow any outfit he can lay his hands on that would get me home. Of course the kid’s got UC. And she’s dead before I get home. I live near to where she collapsed on the street, so I called the precinct, advising some sort of fumigating near that boutique, and I’m told that already a couple of dogs are dead from lapping up the shit. This is the first transmission to animals that I’ve heard of. What comes next? She was really a pretty young thing. I’d already in my mind lined up a few folks who could help introduce her to other young people with UC. Funny how I can read their futures so easily now. I feel so fucking goddamn useless. So does Fred. I wish we could hold on to each other more. I wish a lot of things. They ain’t coming true.

  DAY OF DESPERATION

&n
bsp; FRED

  I feel every day brings something closer that isn’t good.

  Since I feel every day is such a day, why not turn it into a specific action?

  Throw everything into the hopper, the whole nine yards, Fibber Magee’s closet … Go for broke! Because it’s impossible for me not to accept that we aren’t getting anywhere. With all our actions, all my speeches, and articles, and op-eds, all I’m getting is a reputation for being the angriest gay man in the world. If I don’t call somebody “murderer!” people feel gypped. How long can things be held together? Let’s give it what we’ve got, girls and boys. Let’s outdo even ourselves.

  That’s what Fred said to himself as FUQU responded favorably to his challenge of such a full-plate Blue Ribbon special. Was there still enough hope around to override everyone’s growing sense of despair?

  Just visualize hundreds of people in little groups, many carrying coffins, all over the city, with gallons of fake blood dumped outside the World Trade Center, to tombstones lined up outside homeless shelters in Harlem, to the Citicorp atrium with bags of chicken bones covered in ketchup dumped down on the courtyard on people eating their lunch …

  INT. CITIBANK LOBBY. DAY.

  Members standing on balcony, throwing ashes down on the people eating lunch in the courtyard on the floor below.

  ANN (yelling and throwing): This is the body of someone who died from UC!

  Other members are echoing the same.

  DOBBSON: Ground-up chicken bones dyed red.

  ANN: Be quiet, Dobbson. We don’t want to give it away.

  Crowd in lobby below jumps up and scatters out quickly.

  O’MALLY (announcing): This is the body of someone who died from UC! (Hurls out some more of the concoction.)

  TRACY: It could be your brother or your husband or your son or your best friend…!

  PHOTIS: Stop murdering us!

  * * *

  Every bridge and tunnel into and out of New York is shut down and plugged up with piles of coffins cops are afraid to touch. Flyers hurled out everywhere sending flurries of the outrageous facts out and down like rain. Little by little our groups coalesce as they move toward midtown, a bulging body blowing itself up bigger and bigger, dropping off an occasional coffin as a memento that we were here. From every direction our rivulets become streams and finally a river into Grand Central Station. Yes, we take it over. Every train and subway has been stopped.

  INT. GRAND CENTRAL STATION.

  A mob of FUQU is blocking stairways and entrances to tracks. Many carry the posters from various indictments through their history. Dobbson and Photis hold a long banner reading FUQU’S DAY OF DESPERATION. Scotty, dressed like the Statue of Liberty, is standing on the clock. Mulligan and Dorothy set off foghorns as cops come in and start arresting members. Jill supervises the arresting. Mario is filming her. A police officer is checking her out. She holds an ID pass.

  JILL (to the cop): I’m their dyke lawyer. They’re more than willing to get arrested. They’re going to die and know they’re going to die. So arrest is nothing to them.

  A huge number of purple balloons is released and float up. Many cheers. Suddenly something is happening:

  EIGO: Body coming through! Spencer just collapsed. Tell the cops to get an ambulance.

  Barnaby and Sheila and several new faces are carrying Spencer’s body aloft as the crowd parts for them to get through. The police officer has left Jill to deal with Spencer.

  POLICE OFFICER: Body coming through! Spencer … what’s his last name? coming through.

  Jill is talking to several cops.

  JILL: I don’t know what he does in the outside world.

  She breaks with the cops to go with the group carrying Spencer. Everyone is in a state of shock. A group releases more purple balloons, which float up to the roof bearing a FUQU banner. Someone yells out: “For Spencer!” The roar of the crowd is mighty.

  FRED’S VOICE: And you won’t read about it in tomorrow’s New York Truth. Everyone in the station is looking up at the balloons on the ceiling. I am looking at the pile of coffins at the bottom of the stairs that Frank and his team of carpenters are loading into his truck. And at the cops in their protective clothing carrying poor Spencer out. He’d stopped taking his ZAP. I hope this doesn’t mean he’s going to die.

  HOW DO YOU WANT TO DIE?

  JOSEPH

  We had been reading and talking about David Wojnarowicz’s book Close to the Knives and the passage in there that says, “Every time somebody dies of UC, I think their lover, their friends, should drive with their bodies a hundred miles an hour down to the White House, and throw their body over the White House fence.” And we started thinking—goddamn right, that sounds just about right to us. So we decided that that’s what we were going to do. We would carry out this mission.

  More and more we are beginning to talk about how we wanted to die—like, when we died, what we wanted to happen. Burning of bodies on pyres was high on the list. To hear Tim and John and Mark, those closest to death, talk about this, it was very serious, and you as a still healthy participant just knew that whatever it was they wanted, that’s what we were going to do. But it wasn’t just about them, it was about me and everybody else, too. That was what made the dynamic in the group so amazing. We were very much there for each other. No matter what.

  It was like family, you know? We were very close to each other. It didn’t matter what you did in that outside world. We met people that we’d probably never meet in our entire life under any other circumstance, and here we were—we got very close, and that was it, for life, while planning our very own deaths.

  It’s overwhelming. It took your breath away.

  KENNEBUNKPORT, MAINE

  TOMMY

  We and the masses of cops took up the whole town, which admittedly is pretty tiny, every street and artery that fed down to that monster mansion out there on this island, like some rock fortress we could never get anywhere near. The people who live in the town must have thought the world was coming to an end, or that the Russians were invading, because they went inside fast and locked their shutters and we could see kids peeking out through slats as we marched past. Sure, we all really got off on it, it was a lovely summer day, etc. And yes, Dredd and Taddy must have looked out their windows too. But like Fred, I wonder, we’ve done all this, over and over, what’s the next step?

  Perry somehow discovered that the president’s house doesn’t even have central heating. Can you believe it?

  At least Fred and I walked down the main street holding hands. We went and stood opposite the house. Maybe someone was looking at us through binoculars.

  TORTURE AND PUNISHMENT

  SCHWITZ ODERSTRASSE: I learn most things in Germany, things science can do to human beings. Humanity is always second place to results. Mungel and Mengele and Grodzo, they push envelope is how you say it. Much interest is in Grodzo for trying to discover what is homosexuality at Mungel. Much the same for Mengele for trying to understand what means twins. They have not produced any important information for good of humanity. Probably, probably not, too early to tell even this late date, for much interesting work done in past. You never know when old work becomes foundation of new work. You see how difficult, philosophically, it can be to draw a line between what is acceptable in science and what not to be allowed.

  What is acceptable, even if something important lies at other end of tunnel of ignorance all scientist always enters sometime or other?

  One thing I can do is recognize infected blood, corrupt blood, blood that has been, how you say, fucked up. I saw no work going on at Partekla that is any good for humanity. Dr. Dye tells me I wrong. He committed to experiments stranger here than any we work on over there. And Grodzo, he is fairy, so why he so interested in finding out ways of how he made and not accept he is just made by God to be fairy?

  Dr. Dye organized Partekla so that there are many patients available for, how you say, rent, although he does not charge. He offers the
se patients to outside doctors to come here and test on his many patients almost anything these doctors want research. This is godsend to almost any serious researcher in the world. It is hard to locate guinea pigs to do anything you want to on them without interference from outside, higher-ups, across the streets, wherever. Many doctors come to Partekla just for this. Loth Schline come all the way from Japan, for instance. (She in fact becomes he at Partekla, another branch of research going on.)

  Dr. Sister Grace Hooker had rare disease called mismytosis. She want to find cure for mismytosis, even though so rare only few people get it. She prepared many different bloods in her own laboratories she wants to test here on people which is not legal in outside world.

  Dr. Dye will take each of her patients and use his own experiments to dissolve their humanity into ashes, into nothing. I do not think this is right.

  It is true I do not like fairies. They do not add to world any more of God’s people necessary to keep us going. Stuartgene tells me his work will take care of much of this someday. There are many people in America who do not like fairies.

  I have learned that what you are doing here is as bad as anything was done in Germany. People everywhere do terrible things to each other.

  * * *

  DEEP THROAT: I accepted my situation with Jerry in order to do my work as a pathologist and explore my ideas. One might say that Jerry provided me with shelter for my outrageous no-bullshit persona, but one might also say that the rent at NITS was pretty high. I was forced into premature retirement with no appeal. The only person who could have gotten me out of the pickle was an admiral in the Public Health Service. That admiral, Jerry Omicidio, M.D., chose to let me hang until you came to my rescue.