by Larry Kramer
Fred has recently been hauled over a few coals himself for his own “arrogance and righteousness, sounding like he’s an official FUQU committee all his own,” wrote Daunghton Bates Wrist (gay journalists have always had their problems with Fred), who himself will die shortly in “a coma clouded by dementia,” as his doctor told Fred, but not before posting in The Prick a “Last Will and Testament,” listing all the people, including Fred, “in our community who have helped to murder me.” A few months later came a similar attack in The Prick by Vartan Greggovakis, who, only six months earlier, had sent Fred a Valentine’s Day card thanking him “for saving my life.” Upon reaching Land’s End Vartan saw fit “to second Daunghton Bates Wrist’s realization that Fred Lemish is to be condemned and not congratulated for all his shameful endeavors that have shortened my life.”
At this point Scotty and Sparks get along. Neither has the vision to see that two dictators in one hegemony cannot last. Sparks will win because he is mean-spirited and arrogant and Scotty is only vain and arrogant. And Sparks is also smarter. Studying economics and history at Harvard is more useful training than studying music at Oberlin. Sparks is—well, Sparks. Fred has realized for some time that Sparks is not likable. He appears to have few friends, and those he has are minions. But Fred has always loved Scotty. He will have a difficult time, Fred will, reconciling this affection with his discovery that Scotty has turned into a turncoat shit.
Sparks also has his reasons for wanting to leave the roost: the likes of Maxine and her interfering women. Yes, the historic battleground of men vs. women, lesbians vs. gay men, why should it not flourish here? Indeed, that it has not until now is a miracle of sorts. Fred had been given to speaking glowingly of how “for the first time in a major gay organization, gay men and lesbians work in harmony!” Fred is as naïve as Sparks is mean-spirited and Scotty is vain. Perhaps Sparks will soften up. Handsome young Gregg from Boston has fallen so in love with Sparks that he has let himself become UC-positive to join him in living together.
Does any of this validate the destruction of home? For home it is to many of FUQU.
What’s left are what Eric S. describes enthusiastically, and Sparks condemns disdainfully, as “social justice issues.” What is left among this brotherhood and sisterhood of the dying and the dead will now be scared away by those screaming for Help the Starving Armenian kinds of causes. Where there is an instance of discrimination anywhere in the world, it is suddenly important to place it immediately on the agenda. It didn’t have to be about UC; in fact, most of the new “This is a matter of life and death!” issues are not.
Where is Fred? Well, if you were to ask him, he would ask the very same. How can it be that the founder of this great thing might actually be sensing it going down the tubes and not doing enough about it? “It was something I could not own, no one could own, and no one could even speak for, as an individual. It belonged to all of them. It is democracy, but to a fault.” As Fred condemns Jerry for not being in charge of NITS, Fred himself can equally be charged for not being in charge of FUQU. That each and both of these “leaders” are constitutionally unavailable for leadership occurs to no one.
Yes, Fred is naïve. He did not study economics and history at Yaddah. What indeed did he learn at Yaddah? He no longer remembers. And years of working in the movie business does not prepare one for the Real World. Remember, he made his nest egg by writing a screenplay about a paradise avec monks.
Are we getting too far ahead of ourselves again? Or just repeating ourselves? By now chronology is no longer attended to. Every day is a drama and every drama is hurtful to some part of this big body in pain.
Does destruction lie ahead indeed? Is the only question when?
Yes, it’s all one big fucking shame.
MORE ASHES
DARREN: I guess we started repeating ourselves, but who knew and who cared? Or rather, some of us cared about the same thing over and over and over. It was hard not to. It’s as if we have learned how to communicate telepathically through our shared pain. That’s how many of us somehow knew someone else who wanted the same things. I had Ralph’s ashes and I knew I wanted to throw them on the White House lawn. Correction: I knew I was going to throw them on the White House lawn. I don’t think I told anyone this, but George S. asked me quietly one night if that’s what I was going to do because he had his Monty’s ashes and was going to do the same thing come hell or high water. I remember it was the night it was announced on the floor that TAG was splitting off. I actually started crying because it really felt like the end of something wonderful and the start of something mingy and mean, which is how many of us thought about some of the TAG guys who were always so fucking high-and-mighty, and this was proving us right. That’s when I decided it was time to take Ralph to Washington. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Ralph’s last name was Smith and he loved that movie. I joined FUQU to save him. He was very sick when I went to my first meeting, and he never got any better. Each Monday night when I got home he asked me, “Any good news?” After a while he didn’t have to say the words when I came through the door; his expression of pleading hope said it all. I will never forget that expression as long as I live. That and seeing his handsome body cold and dead on a trolley being prepared for his incineration. I wanted to trade my life for his. He had everything to live for. We all did. I wanted to jump on that trolley and be burned up with him. Everything is still impossible for me to comprehend or accept.
I thought there were only about a dozen of us who were to meet in Lafayette Square near the White House. When I got there, or rather when we got there—I had Ralph in the cardboard box from the undertaker—I could see there were maybe thirty or forty of us, all carrying the ashes of someone they loved in their knapsacks or in little plastic baggies they’d hid under their coats. A large contingent from FUQU had strategically placed themselves in various places along our route in D.C. to the White House, sort of like a combination of an honor guard and a cordon of protection against anyone who might try to get in our way. As we walked toward the high fence around the White House lawn I came to see how many of us there were. My eyes filled with tears that all these fellow fighters had done this, had arranged it without our even knowing about it, to be there for us. There had to be many hundreds of us, and the police saw us and realized something was up. But our marshals had things so well organized that our people were all linked up even though all these police were on horseback and they were coming closer. We had just enough time, all of us with our dead lovers, to take a position along that fence and throw our ashes, the urns, the baggies, whatever, over this black wrought-iron fence and onto that perfect lawn. People were not only crying, they were moaning. You could actually hear distinctly this loud moaning cry of agony releasing from all of us. It was like some Greek tragedy where all the mothers are in mourning for all those things that they moan about in Greek tragedies. I never heard a sound like it. The ashes on the lawn started to be whipped up by sudden breezes and they were blowing in our direction. When we saw that, when we felt that, many of us spread-eagled our bodies against the fence so as to be bathed in these ashes, reaching out to try to grab some and rub our faces and skin with them, and clutch them to us like we had them in our arms, which of course we did. By then the horses were almost upon us and the marshals were crying out the orders they’d given us from previous experiences to “SIT! SIT DOWN!” So we all sat down and the horses stopped in their tracks. This set us all off into mass hysterical laughter. We were all covered with ashes and tears and we fell into each other’s arms in one huge big heap of sobs and hysterical giggles. I think we must have stayed like that for hours. It was as if we couldn’t stand up again. We didn’t want to leave this place where we’d buried our beloveds. I don’t know if we were in trances or we actually fell asleep in exhaustion. I just remember after a while a kind voice said, “Sir, you have to get up now.” I couldn’t believe it was a cop, but it was, and he had tears in his eyes too. So we all got up and left our other
halves there and made our way back to buses that the Coordinating Committee had thoughtfully arranged for us and we cried ourselves back home to New York.
A FUQU “MEMBER”
There is no question, we must punish you for your lives. Go right ahead, you deviants! Protest! Protest LOUDER and NONSTOP. You deviants just keep on going. Yeah!!!! The more you protest, the more you will be fought against by the likes of me. The louder you shout, the further you will be pushed back into hell. I have my master locksmith’s license now. And many shades of lipstick. Releasing my hatred makes me feel warm and comfortable and ready. Thank you, FUQU. Being in your group has been good for me. I have friends who already are on the wanted list by that Southern Poverty Jew group who keep all the hate lists. It’s been my ambition to be on their hate list too. Our leaders decided we don’t have to go to any more FUQU meetings. We have turned them against each other and set them up for their fall. It’s best we skedaddle before our luck runs out and we are uncovered. I’ll miss some of them, though. We had some good times. But Jesus said get going, get a move on, shake your asses.
HI, MR. LEMMISH
We just came across a fifteen-year-old boy, unknown diagnosis and lost for care. I am UC site coordinator for this clinic. It just break my heart and make me very angry that this child been struggling and there is no plan. It is so fragmented the care, just documenting things not a real plan.
It is just not right that people has to wait long hours to see a doctor who have no time to speak with them. We are just following what insurance company wants. Sorry I just needed to ventilate.
Please come and talk to us at Montefiore! I can’t get any doctors to do it.
—Diana Ramirez R.N.
P.S. I forgot to mention some man says he’s a doctor comes to ask us to try out new treatment cure he has from checkoslovakia. He said it must be confidential. You know anything about this?
FRED ONCE LOVED HER BROTHER
In Globa, Utah, at another one of their “secret” repositories of “special” situations, Delia Montagg Swindon, a direct descendant of a founding Disciple of Lovejoy family, is, since the commencement of the UC plague, in charge of dealing with all the “unfortunate happenstances coming down that pike.” The Disciples of the Brothers of Lovejoy accepts unto “our safekeeping” every body of a Disciple dead from “this destiny of sin.” These bodies are embalmed and they are then wrapped in that same holy material utilized in many of their daily sacramental garments, like their underwear; and they are then stacked on shelves in climate-controlled underground vaults situated inside a hollowed-out mountain “for eternal safekeeping.” Most important, in their eyes, is the fact that these bodies have not been blessed upon dying, as all “healthy” Brothers are so blessed that they may then enter heaven and join the rest of mankind. But Lovejoys are nevertheless determined somehow to catalogue everyone who’s ever lived.
Delia Montagg Swindon is now unhappy with this decision. Originally she’d have burned the lot of these sinners from the get-go. That is, until one of them turns out to be her brother, Robby Swindon. He’d been a sinner, going off to the big city instead of remaining home to “give back” to his people for the great education in interior decorating that Herod Furstwasser University had given him. Her brother, “whom I know you knew and wrote about in some book he wouldn’t let me read,” she writes to Fred, well, she wanted Fred to know that she would not burn her brother or leave him inside the holy mountain unblessed. In fact, she has done so, blessed him, although strictly speaking, she’s not been given this kind of ecclesiastical permission; no woman ever has. This annoys her too. To have reached her age and not been claimed as a wife to any Brother Disciple has also always annoyed her. It’s not as if there were too many wives running around. Robby told her she was being wasted out here. She never gave it much thought until, on one of their tour visits, she met with members of that FUQU Women’s Committee traveling around the country to raise support for including women in an official definition of UC. Maria and Maxine both told her she was a fool “taking so much shit from men and for so long.” She’d never allowed herself to think this way. But then she’d never been out of Utah and wondered if the time’s come that she should. Robby’s and her favorite song never stops running through her head. “Time waits for no one. It passes you by.” She wished she knew what she was waiting for. Going inside that mountain wasn’t doing it for her. She told Fred all this, ending with a plaintive “Do you know what Robby would tell me to do?”
“I thought you said he told you to get out of there,” Fred answered.
FROM HERMIA TO FRED
Wherever you are, God bless you. I can feel your stress. It radiates itself down the eastern seaboard night and day to yours truly, your Hermia.
FROM DANIEL TO FRED
Fred, I apologize for my silence. Each day is more a nightmare than the one before. Yesterday the combined number of deaths from UC at NITS and the Army wards at Walter Reed and the Navy ones at Franeeda and my own private practice totaled 1,512. In one day. No one bats an eye. Jerry isn’t here. He’s on one of his international jaunts, showing up at a number of conferences. Today he’s in Buenos Aires, where the topic for consideration is malaria. I told him yesterday’s numbers and he said, “Live with it,” before hanging up. Our ZAP studies here still produce scary results. Deep Throat was fired because he sided with Garibaldi. Jerry’s been invited yet again to the White House when he gets back. I understand it to be a top-secret discussion directly with Dredd Trish to which, of course, I am not invited. My own spies tell me it’s again about somehow quarantining people with UC. Trish has heretofore evinced absolutely no interest in UC. He hates you and yours for so publicly shaming and constantly attacking him. My spy source says Trish said, “Fucking fairies won’t get a dime out of my government. Period.”
THE WHITE HOUSE
Dr. Omicidio is ushered into the inner sanctum. Dredd Trish invites him to sit down before him. There are half a dozen others in the room. They are all royalty from Saudi Arabia. Dr. O. is not introduced to them. Instead Dredd plunges right in. It is obvious that he wants these robed royals to witness this conversation.
“Dr. Omicidio, as one of our chief representatives in charge of the health care of our country, I am interested in hearing your declaration that this spreading thing called The Underlying Condition is limited to only certain American cities and presents no danger to our close friends and important allies in other nations. Ms. Trooble, are you getting all this down?”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“That is what statistics from COD would indicate, Mr. President,” Dr. O. says.
“Come, Doctor, we must be told more forceful information than that.” This comes from another man, sitting among the sheiks.
Trish says, “Dr. Omicidio, this is Floyd Harmish. Floyd and I were Bones at Yaddah and together at the CIA. I asked James Jesus to assign him to help us with this disease. He is particularly expert on the pharmaceutical industry. He will be working with you.”
“I look forward to working with you, sir,” Jerry says to Harmish.
“No,” Harmish answers unemotionally. “I look forward to working with you. What is happening on the treatment front?”
Omicidio replies: “Nothing is really working. I believe there’s some action in the pipelines.”
Trish asks: “Is there anything our Arab friends could help facilitate?”
“That’s not my department, sir. I would assume a number of the pharmaceutical manufacturers might not be averse to some financial stimulation.”
Trish: “Look into that, Floyd, will you?”
MOTHER HAS JERRY’S PHONE LINE TAPPED AS HE’S TALKING TO HIS WIFE
“They think I’m the one in charge. They’ve figured out so fucking much, why can’t they figure this out too? Why are they blaming me for absolutely everything? How can they know what I’m doing is wrong? Why do they think I’m in charge of everything! Why do they think it’s all my fault? No one
’s in charge of everything. Goddammit! Tell your rich powerful Republican brother to get me out of this shit.”
ANOTHER USELESS EDITOR PEDDLING THE TRUTH
Fred Lemish is having lunch with the new editor of The New York Truth!
The first thing I notice is that he’s a drip. It’s all over his face and posture that he’s a schmuck. He knows very little about UC, even though his wife works at a UC clinic in Harlem. He doesn’t want to know what his paper is not writing about because he believes if they are not writing about it then it must not be worth writing about, and in any event it would be a conflict of interest because of his wife in Harlem. Only a schmuck husband could maintain such an attitude. I wonder if she begs him at home to ante up. Somehow I rather doubt it. He asks me to send him a list of stories I think are important, ones they haven’t dealt with. He is a rather subdued man, not a look-you-straight-in-the-eye type. I would say he’s shy but for my sense that it’s a deceptiveness more than a shyness. I guess you don’t get to become the editor of The Truth without knowing how to be deceptive. I wonder, as I do when I meet “important” guys like this, if he ever has that guilty fear that he’s putting something over on the world. Why have you never written about Omicidio? I ask him over and over again at lunch. This I particularly try to drill into him. Along with NITS, NITS, NITS! There has never been any investigative writing about NITS.
I send him a list. Perry and Gregg write a long report, “The Unwritten Stories about UC Research,” to send to him. Not one story we suggest ever appears. I write him a follow-up letter. “Your wife runs a UC clinic in Harlem! How can you not write about UC in your newspaper!” When I write him yet another strong letter, he writes back, “Your tone is so mean and vindictive.” Well, I’m glad he at least can recognize that.