The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Nausea, facial wasting, kidney failure, mouth ulcers, hair loss, blindness, peripheral neuropathy, lymphoma, rage, insomnia, skyrocketing cholesterol, lumps of fat, erectile dysfunction, ingrown toenails, arthritis, constant fever, eczema, oozing pustules, muscle collapse, constant farting, psychosis, swollen pancreas, brittle bones, persistent diarrhea, bad breath, gas, body distortion, enlarged breasts, hallucinations, mental confusion, vomiting, dementia, paranoia, nightmares, severe depression, suicide, pancreatitis, kidney stones, liver disease, heart attacks, death.

  * * *

  Who am I to complain?

  STATE OF THE PLAGUE

  Still, no one has discovered anything really worthwhile. There are many rumors and innumerable secret trials in and out of this country but the number of deaths grows staggeringly higher, so high that even the statisticians are filled with fear that they can no longer predict when deaths will top out. The White House has forbidden admission into the United States by anyone infected. Next come prohibitions disallowing any government employee from here going over there, to any foreign shore. Jeffrey Mannheim of the Budget Office is quoted in The Truth as saying, “It’s a waste of money, these overseas jaunts. America’s just not getting its money’s worth.” Caught off guard by the issue, Drusilla Lotsee of the State Department is quoted in The Monument as saying, “Of course we’ll still pay to send a spy or two. A president will always want to know a thing or two. This president wants everybody to know that … this president still wants to know … a thing or two.” Who is the president now? In this isolated world of science, some people actually have to think twice. Presidents and scientists live in different countries. Iran? Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria? Yemen? Arkansas? What are you talking about?

  Dodo had tried to announce that he desired the name of his discovery to be the Underlying Geiseric (UG), but that the government agency where all employee discoveries must be registered restrained him from such personal aggrandizement as being against some regulation or other.

  He’d also tried to announce that The Underlying Condition maintains a decline in T-4 cells as to eventually result in morbid, finally fatal, disease particles and an inability of the formerly high T-8s to reproduce enough to fight back. This should have been more or less obvious but no one was certain what he was talking about. “The only place you can get healthy-enough vectors for studying this is from the tissue of unborn worms.” This is crazy talk. Besides, the abortion issue being as divisive as it is, the use of unborn anything on government property is forbidden. Do not laugh or scoff. This is so. See Regulation XVIII29s, 2005, ext. 4. It does not seem to occur to anyone that if Dodo is correct and T cells are rearranging themselves so fast as to kill off, as of this moment, 270 Americans every 4.5 minutes, and 1,300 other human beings around the world in each segment of 5.3 Greenwich Meridian minutes, it would be more humane to use every unborn worm you can get your hands on, which in and of itself is not an easy feat, and fuck Uncle Sam, the pope, and Rep. Dingus.

  “When the furnace goes out, it goes out. I have discovered this in my lab. It is my parting gift to you,” he pronounces to the sparse crowd come to hear his farewell address.

  “T-Fours, T-Eights, what is he talking about? I swear to God I don’t understand what Dodo is saying. Is it whole cloth?” seems to be the general response. Besides, no one believes Dodo any longer. He’s been besmirched. And there’s something in the paper about Poopsie being indicted. Poopsie Popovich? Honestly! He’s only a Hungarian. Certainly he didn’t lie to our government office in charge of patents and procurements. He can hardly speak English. They probably just misunderstood him. With that thick accent. He’s taking the rap for Dodo for stealing the virus?

  * * *

  T-4s. T-8s. Yes, I answer to these two things. They will study them forever before they learn they are barking up the wrong trees. One-armed woman could have told them that. Two different parts of me can get together and make another new kind of me. It is like what you call having my cake and eating it too. No? This Dodo and his research only extended my existence more forever. In my life there is safety in numbers. I’ll miss the old guy.

  OWNERSHIP?

  SPARKS

  There will be a new drug shortly! So we can officially go on two-drug (plus or minus ZAP) combo trials. How dare Fred and Maxine say TAG will have no power! The new drug will be there because of us! And because of our scaling the Berlin Wall of Presidium and demanding release of their proton-alphas that they paid us to study. Fuck you, Jerry. Fuck you, Fred and Maxine. From day one Fred screamed for “drugs into bodies” but you couldn’t deliver.

  Well, now TAG will be delivering.

  OWNERSHIP!

  DR. JAMES MONROE

  These smart-ass kids are bragging too much. Right now it doesn’t bother me too much. Yet. But it will. I am setting our price at $40,000 for a year’s supply. That will be a bargain when our successful results are released and visible, enabling me to raise the price again. Everyone will want Peturba, which is what I’m going to name it. Bart Shovels says it’ll be a bargain at any price, although he’s unhappy it will keep too many homosexuals alive. I told him he can’t have it both ways. We are both greedy, but for different things. Well, he is my protection at the White House and at the CIA. I am assuming that in all of this we can each get away with murder.

  My smart-ass kids were blissfully obnoxious in Berlin. When I described it all to Dereck he roared with laughter. He wants to hire them to make trouble for him. His father had bought him a chain of hotels and he wants to get rid of the tenants.

  DERECK DUMSTER

  My father did not buy me anything! I am a self-made billionaire! Me, myself, and I did it all by myself! And don’t you ever forget it!

  GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

  There are those who question the total validity of the whole package of Underlying Condition assumptions that are now pretty much accepted by almost all scientists. Those disagreeing are pariahs, outcasts, the ones who do not mind being viewed as crazy, unlike those who have learned to keep their mouths shut since there is no profit in being a naysayer in this world of yea-sayers. Two of these outcasts are sitting, not next to each other, because they hate each other’s guts, but still close, near Dodo, whom they hate even more and who’d actually invited them to this farewell reception, where his wife served her special pasta.

  These two most important Dodo naysayers—as differentiated from the Total Denialists, who insist that UC is not the cause of UC at all and really are crazy—are a scruffy lot. That makes for part of their problem—that those in disagreement should be so physically unappealing. It’s really hard to take people seriously when they’re so unkempt.

  Why do these two cringe from Dodo’s every word? Once upon a time, early in the history of The Underlying Condition, Dodo trumpeted that the Nector and the nimroid (or was it the nector and the Nimroid?) were one and the same, or somehow related, or at the very least best friends. Or was it mortal enemies? Dodo announced his “discoveries” for each. Now we know that nectors and nimroids were different and never got along with each other and that no one talks about them anymore. How could such things as nectors and nimroids disappear from the scene just like that? You could ask the same question about Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder and Orvid Guptl. They may be sitting near each other now, but shortly they will just be gone. Tomorrow, perhaps. Later this afternoon, perhaps. So fleeting is fame. Well, neither of them was particularly famous, even if they were important.

  Rebby and Orvid hate Dodo because for many years Dodo owned this plague and they both knew Dodo was lying about much of his work. What is that stupid expression, ownership is nine-tenths of the law? You get written up enough times, the world thinks you must have done something. Media is so naïve and stupid, and complicit. Thus this stupid expression about “ownership” will continue to be true, and those who are foolish enough not to have friends, not to have made allies and forged alliances, not to have done much but hurl shit über alles, or almost alles, and m
ost important, preferring to hide behind the only protection they’ve ever known, their unending paranoid fits of disenfranchisement, will have no choice but to pass into the missed of history.

  So, so long, Rebby. So long, Orvid. There is no point in wasting any more time on either of you. You had your chance at bat. You didn’t stick it out. Historians must often be as cruel as this, even when, as in the case of Rebby, much love for this man existed and still does. Your beliefs held certain truths your lack of social skills kept you from conveying. Monserrat has had enough of you.

  Orvid, we’ve already lost in the murky shit of pigs. Swine flu. What a stupid escape hatch. Orvid, you too were on your way to making history and you blew it.

  TALES OF THE VIRGINIA WOODS

  Tolly McGuire summons his many members to one of those conference inns hidden in the Virginia woods for their annual spring get-together. A big crowd is invited and a bigger crowd shows up. Tolly realizes he doesn’t recognize half of them and he left his glasses home so he can’t read their name tags. Every fucking pharma in the world has a rep in D.C. now. He’d like to believe they all were one, working together to save the world. That’s why he went into pharmacology. Ten minutes on the road and all these guys hate each other. They all started as sales reps, which is competitive as all hell and you only get paid on how much product you’ve unloaded. So you told lies about every other company’s unloadings.

  People are still arriving. Names and more names. Rolf Voss from Interswiss Pinkus, Margery Guest of Schwein-Audacia, Barney Osterveld from Prinkus Maxwell, Diane Globbenger from InterAmerican, Arnold Botts, Gobbel, Shovels and Monroe from Presidium, Farse-Fehl-Forgotson (Three Fs), Boozer Feltwass, Garbast-Stokes-Helsen, Packer Drum, Terpsus Finnegan, Uriah, Pfisterer-Pipette, Nordsee Ogunquit, Mistere Pfiaf, Salvatore Avventura, Santa Maria-Missione-Glunck, the mighty Greptz, oh, and Molly Trachtbart from NEJS. Time to start melding the journals into the drama. Yes, we’re all in this together now.

  “My people tell me there’s enough to work with now.”

  “That’s funny because mine don’t.”

  Tolly raises the main issue: “Is the consensus that we work together or work apart?”

  “Well, it’s cheaper to work together when the alternative is taking a bath.”

  “Remember Invidia.”

  “Remember GallstonePlus.”

  “That was just such an awful name.”

  “I’ve been wanting to name a drug FAGPlus.”

  There’s obviously much subtext in the room. Drug companies are ultra-suspicious of each other. Everyone’s really spying on everyone else. They all want to cash in in the biggest possible way. The virus is out in the world now and they stand to make the most if they’re the first to find the way to kill it. And if not kill it, then to disable it. They’d all settle for a big disability. That way they can add new drugs as they discover them. Better a continuation than a cure! They’ve been quite profitably able to not cure cancer for decades. Each person in this room is waiting for somebody to tip their hand and say, “Manny Grlic in my lab is interested in going after the proin or the pyrokine or the volblatt.” But no one is giving anything away. This only makes them all more suspicious. It verifies what each suspected: they’re all working on something secretly already. And they’ve all made progress of some sort.

  Each notes with interest that participants haven’t come alone. They’re all accompanied by small groups of others. A good sign if these are salespersons, the power that keeps them all afloat. No doubt they’ve all done market research and discovered that the potential of the market now is HUGE. No one says, “How did it get so big already, so fast?” At least and at last some folks have figured out why.

  More likely, Tolly knows, these extra blokes are their lawyers.

  Because they don’t speak English, a lot of Chinks and Japs, the smart scientists who sniff the earth, the soils and plants and oceans for newer ingredients from nature, sit to the side, better to hear their own interpreters.

  Everyone in this room recognizes among all the faces people who have worked for him or with him, or have stolen from him or have been fired by him or the reverse of each of these interactions. This is not a collegial business, making medicines. These people are not humanitarians.

  To take the earth and turn it into an active weapon targeted against specific molecules is a black art, to say the least. That it sometimes works is usually a surprise to he who observed it. Nothing is out of bounds. Everything’s ripe for consideration. Even shit. Remember that fossilized ancient American shit that was found on Table hotel land on the Gulf of Mexico? With absolutely no doubt it’ll be in one of these “new” discoveries. Arthur Table and Gideon Greptz are cousins.

  There is no representative from any government agency in attendance. Nor is there anyone from the UC activist movement. “We’re on our own now, baby,” Phil Owens from Greptz says. “The NITS didn’t welcome us before. We don’t want them now.”

  The consensus Tolly hoped to bring forth remains stillborn.

  DR. JAMES MONROE

  Yes, I see them all here, all the crooks and Ponzi schemers I’d studied for years. I was a reputable scientist, in Berlin and Czechoslovakia, and I had worked for the biggest prick of all, Von Greeting. Everyone in this gathering is getting away with murder. I hate everyone here, every single shit-eating selfish one of them. I am going to screw each and every one of these bastards by beating them to the punch. Von Greeting taught me every trick in the book. Only he wanted everyone dead, killed of course by the meds he’s developing to get rid of them. People don’t believe drug companies kill them after they rob them blind. Gideon Greptz paid himself a salary last year of $75 million! Pinkus of Interswiss took a salary of $45 million. The Audacia blokes the same. Drug manufacturing has turned out to be the most profitable business in the world! I have the first drug I guarantee will stop UC. It will be out there before any of these jerk-offs get theirs out of their toilets.

  I hit upon the way I can do what I want. It’s called FUQU and their TAG. They and my shit-ass powerhouse board of monsters will make Presidium the biggest game in town. Correction: world. I will cure the world of this plague and I will, repeat will, be paid most handsomely for my humane generosity.

  OUT, OUT, DAMNED SPOT

  Good old Boy Vertle is “forced” to take action and fire his new surgeon general for advising America to teach masturbation to schoolchildren.

  A SADDEST LOSS

  TOMMY

  Bruce Niles died. He was so tough. Anybody else would have been dead long ago. He was completely covered with scabs. His skin kept blistering and peeling off him. He couldn’t even turn his head. He couldn’t breathe without an oxygen mask. He just wouldn’t let go. He held on to my hand and said to tell Fred we should never have stopped being friends. His last words to his attendant evidently were “Keep fighting.”

  I’m finally starting a new job that even Bruce would approve of. Here’s hoping!

  NEWSREEL FOOTAGE

  The March on Washington brings half a million gays to parade through the city. The evening newscasts on all networks announce and show this.

  EXT. WASHINGTON STREET. DAY.

  The FUQU/TAG contingent is larger and marches all together. UCGATE and SILENCE = DEATH posters, as well as posters attacking Ruester and Trish and Vertle. Also one that says, THE GOVERNMENT HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS, with red handprints. Fred and Tommy and David walk in front of the crowd, Fred’s arms through each of them for support. This is his first reappearance in public, and lots of folks wave to him and blow him kisses.

  EXT. WHITE HOUSE. DAY.

  A line of marchers picketing, being arrested one by one by policemen wearing protective yellow gloves. The posters are being taken away from them. Fred is there, with David and Tommy. They stand posing for Mario photographing them directly in front of the White House. Then Fred throws his cane away and grabs a cop for them to be photographed with the White House.

  RON AND MEMBERS (ch
anting, re. the cops): Your gloves don’t match your shoes. You’ll see it on the news.

  EXT. MALL. WASHINGTON. DAY.

  A huge screen shows Fred speaking passionately to the enormous crowd that is spread out on the Mall as far as can be seen.

  THREE DYKES

  “Tommy was with Bruce when he died.”

  “Stop, Tallula! I don’t want to hear any more death!” Viv holds her hands up to cover her ears. “We are here to celebrate. To show the bastards how many of us there are.”

  Tallula Giardino, Pam Able, and Viv Brody are three tough dykes. Each had wanted to change their world. Pam and Viv have come to Washington for this parade and to visit their buddy Tallula, who now works in the White House itself, one of the earliest “out” lesbians to do so. Boy Vertle has assigned her to Personnel, and the only out gay man on his staff to Forestry. So much for all Boy’s promises of inclusion and participation. They are watching the parade from a bench on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “It’s embarrassing seeing how few women we can muster up,” Viv says. “This was to be for dykes, too. To also show ourselves to Boy and Maude. Particularly Maude. What do you mean you work in Personnel? If I want a job in the White House I call you?”

  “It’s been a disappointment,” Tallula says. “But he gave me the choice, this or nothing.”

  Pam asks, “Do you really think he’s our friend?”

  “No straight man is our friend.” Which one of them said this? They all believe it.