The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  But if he tells, his happiness will be taken away from him.

  He once loved being a doctor.

  He fingers lots of dead penises. I have seen him do that. “The cock is still a little warm. Blood remains in it. Blood doesn’t drain out of a cock so quickly, like it does from the brain,” he said to me once.

  He has also said to me: “I belong with all the dead guys in this ward.”

  He knows the story of Linwood Wallis, Lucky Lindy because he’d coattailed onto a Nobel Prize having done none of the work but all of the pretending. A most beautiful woman, the most beautiful Jerry had ever seen, stately and noble, with cascading black hair streaked with white, a Jewish woman with numbers from a camp tattooed on her arm, had been sent to NITS for observation for a rare viral fever, perhaps harbored still from the camp itself, so long ago. Lindy had his primary medical training in postwar Germany tending to victims. He believed he had blood on his hands he could never wash off. He was so overcome by her beauty and her existential situation that he came to her room in NITS and apologized to her for all that man had done to her and then he fucked her, telling her that he’d save her life. For a moment she believed him. Then her stomach hurt her. She tried to get word to Dye, the president, B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Refugee people; the more noise she made, the more she was ignored. She poisoned herself in her room. Many victims from the camps still carried pills like this, always expecting the worst. She was an Orthodox Jew and now felt “irrevocably soiled, forever.” Lucky Lindy got transferred to Bosco’s monkey farm in Florida. But only for a few months, when he got that Nobel for something or other, and he came back here on staff and was promoted to captain.

  Just like Lucky Lindy, Jerry wants to jerk off his dead handsome young men and have semen come out of them to show that he’s really still alive, that he can perform some miracle of bringing the dead back to life like Lindy caught kissing the dying woman over and over and fucking her to make them both feel alive.

  You have to be a doctor to understand stories like this.

  “I should have made him take an experimental. Which experimental? All of them are worth shit and I know it and I don’t say so out loud. ZAP is shit, and I told everybody to take ZAP. The White House ordered me to do it.”

  He’d almost told Fred about Goose. They were alone here in this very ward, Jerry examining him and wanting to give him something to earn his friendship, to explain his position, his life living in a vise. He started to say, “Once I…” and that was all he said. But I could tell that Fred knew he was going to tell him something. I’m sure he’d been through dozens of confessions by straight men over the years that started just like this. I was at the nurse’s station pretending to do something.

  Goose was long ago. In boarding school every guy had a Goose.

  Once when we were all drunk at a Christmas party, Jerry asked Dodo if he ever considered he was lying. Or faking it.

  “No. No, man. Dodo really believes. I have to. I have to.”

  “How can you always be so certain, saying all the definite things you do?”

  “The best scientists are always certain. The best ones don’t give a shit if you agree.”

  Jerry faked ZAP data so G-D could get FADS approval.

  He wakes up every once in a while in a hot sweat, dripping wet. It’s one of the symptoms of UC, he knows, but he’s tested himself enough times to know this sweat is from other fears. He pretty much always has the same dream.

  “I go to the White House for one of those private briefings with Ruester or Trish or Vertle, and I say all the appeasing things I know they want to hear and will keep me in my job and my lab. And the three of them grab me and tie me to a table and … violate me. On my own lab table.”

  It’s hard to be a good doctor and a good scientist and a good American in this place. They all conflict with each other.

  “Can I go to jail for killing so many kids because I know the people who run this country don’t want these guys saved?”

  Since almost the very beginning Jerry knows and Stuartgene knows and Dodo knows and Paulus knows and Grebstyne and Middleditch and Manny know and Purpura knows and Dredd knows and every head of HAH knows, this is a plague. (Ruester wouldn’t know his name if he saw it printed in the paper.) But nobody says anything about the plague out loud. America isn’t to be told the truth.

  Jerry picked up the phone and calls Removal. The line is always busy. He has to call an operator and ask for an interrupt. “Dr. Omicidio, I don’t have anyone to send,” a woman will tell him. “You’re … seventeenth. We just don’t have anyone.” So the kid has to stay there a little longer.

  Goose. This one looks just like the young Goose. It’s nothing to do with right or wrong. It’s just what is.

  He looks up. How long have I been standing here? He thought he’d closed the door.

  He smiles. I come to him and put my arms around him. “Another one?”

  He nods.

  “I don’t know how you handle it. I don’t know how any of us stands it.” I hate myself for saying such stupid things over and over. I try to make a joke by slapping my mouth. “Oh, mouth, shut up!” I smile, or try to, and he does the same.

  I know he loves me. I am always painfully honest. He calls me a saint. But such a saint that all his guilts are multiplied tenfold when I’m the first thing he sees each morning and the last each night. My unblemished belief in him gives him the worst dreams and makes him toss and turn even more in sweat.

  I think he’s a hero.

  I don’t see now the hero I wanted to marry. He was chief intern and I was one of his nurses. He was a catch. I am furious he keeps his mouth shut. Yes, we loved each other, two people drowning in deaths, trying to hold on to something, which in the end, and to the surprise of each, turned out to be each other. Together we’ve formed an alliance that keeps him going.

  Yes, you’re dead, and yes, my husband is attracted to you, but can’t you see that it’s only the dead ones he can touch? I want him to have some sort of physical pleasure with someone alive.

  Yes, I am a saint.

  I’m having a worse time than he is.

  TAG keeps trying to murder him. Why does TAG hate him so?

  Why does Fred hate him so?

  He takes me in his arms and begins to kiss me everywhere, first my cheeks and lips and arms and neck, proceeding … proceeding to everywhere, everywhere he doesn’t go in the privacy and comfort and safety of our own bedroom. He gets down on his knees in front of me, kissing my legs and going up under my skirt, kissing the insides of my thighs and then licking my vagina. I shiver. I fall to the floor, and his head pops out and his arms lay me back, taking off my clothes, then yanking off his own stuff and … his body is black with hair everywhere, he looks like an ape under his neat suits and ties and uniforms, once a month he must wear an officer’s uniform, all NITS doctors are officially in the armed forces, yes, he looks like an ape under all of this, no one ever sees this forest of fur but me—and Goose—and I know he is ashamed of the fur. “I’m not such an animal as this makes me look like,” he told me once, honestly, tenderly, allowing me to see a scratch of vulnerability beneath his polished, uniformed surface. I love it, his fur, his bearness, getting lost in the voluptuousness of his velvety, wiry texture, and he is entering me now, and I close my eyes, no longer seeing the dead body that hovers there still, levitating in the air above us, nor aware of the many other dead men in their beds in this same room, and I smile, actually smile, as I realize how often we make love in hospitals with dead bodies, never in our own bed, rarely in a bed at all.

  I come and he comes and we both know that when he comes he comes and that’s it and back to work we go. I’ve learned to leave quickly, before his brusqueness makes me ill. I peck him on the forehead and depart for the corridor to finish dressing more properly in an empty room. One thing about Jerry’s UC wards, there’s hardly ever anyone in them for very long.

  COITUS INTERRUPTUS

  DEEP TH
ROAT

  It’s quite dramatic, what Emily wrote. Mother would never tell me where he got this. One time or another of all our years together I’ve been in dying wards with Jerry and witnessed a version of this scene. I’d be on the other side of the ward attending to someone and he’d be thinking he was alone and she’d come in having eyes only for him. You’d think a ward of dead guys would be private enough but it isn’t, it really isn’t, certainly not in a hospital the size of this one.

  Here is one of the ones I saw myself. He didn’t know I was in the ward, of course. Jerry is naked on the floor. He’s fucked her and he’s come and she’s left and he still has a hard-on, and it’s for him on the bed up there, the nameless one on the bed, the dead one, up there so far away but not so far. Jerry stands up with his penis sticking out like a compass needle and he jumps up on the bed and stands over the guy, looking down past his own erection. He is huge, this short, compact, exceptionally hairy man with the enormous uncircumcised penis. The few drops left in him fall on this handsome dead young man, down there, still dead, so far away, but not so far, and still dead. He, the living one, is crying.

  Jerry falls on him and kisses him, all his for this moment only, in his arms, cradling him, kissing this floppy dead thing he couldn’t save. Even I was moved, I must confess. Finally, he gets up. He wipes himself with paper towels from the toilet. He wipes his semen off the dead body. He dresses himself. He covers the body with a blanket.

  Like all the men in this ward he is gay. Like all the men who work for him are gay. Only Fred somehow senses this. But then Fred says that everyone is gay. He’s probably right. But because Fred says this about so many, no one believes him. Mother believed him, though. “I’ve been through many versions of the same situation,” he confided in me enigmatically.

  ANOTHER OPENING, ANOTHER SHOW

  PERRY

  Sparks spoke out too early with his promises. Protease, protease, we are still waiting for the protease. (Proton alphas, they’d been called.) Sparks was in charge of sitting on Presidium. Scotty had been in charge of getting more money out of them. “They will be our lifesavers!” Sparks had told everyone. “TAG can take credit for this!” Levi’s trial of Presidium’s proton alpha provided the best of anything out there, so Scotty uses this info to get even more money from James Monroe. “Something is working! Something must be working!” say Claudette and Spud. Levi says, “OIs are down in our trials! Deaths are even falling.”

  Enormous and very nasty rivalries have been escalating as each pharma fights to possess the drug. There’s a lot of arm-twisting behind the scenes, “mostly by stockholders as greedy as the manufacturers,” David G. says, “as they raise not only the dosage but the price—twice as much in some cases.” Barbara reminds us that a Greptz drug is about to be launched. “Everybody I talk to is frightened of Greptz. They’re so powerful. I’ll bet that’s why Presidium is holding its horses.”

  Insurance companies, smelling multiprofits in drug combos, had raised premiums. ZAP had cost “only” $10,000 a year. There would be more excitement on the patient front if any combo didn’t have such uncomfortable side effects. Never plan a route without knowing where the toilets are. Never leave home not wearing a Depends. Social lives are so fucked up that adherence rates fall noticeably. Now it’s Levi Narkey’s turn to plead, “Guys, stay on our drug!” Our very own Dash Snicker is making the same appeal. But a number of trial participants aren’t so concerned with this argument. “You try and live in shit all day!” Grosse Wildeschone says to Levi. The most popular over-the-counter item is still Imodium. A few guys try butt plugs, but boy, do they not work.

  Then, then … Not one of the next-in-line five or six drugs still in combo testing, being tested on hundreds of people, is working for long enough. One by one their manufacturers pull their own plugs and unload the losers on the Third World, where they’ll take anything. Last fall these were the golden hopes, now these are pieces of shit. So suddenly there’s nothing actually out there on the table. So the dosages of all the losers are upped. “Yes, of course! Why didn’t we think of that? Increase the dosage! Just in case!” Sparks says this with excitement. “Of which one?” I ask. Sparks answers, “All of them, you ninny! Do a trial! Do two! Do a dozen. Until we get Levi’s final tallies.”

  So a bunch more tests get started. Even the PIs are listening to us.

  But then suddenly—mutations! Working meds turn into no-longer-working meds. Why? What happened? What’s a mutation? TAG doesn’t have anyone sitting on mutations. Something’s got bent out of shape. What? Quick. Develop a test to find out what our old friend UC is up to. Tests for mutations, please! The only one who knew how to make tests like this was Poopsie. Forty-three lawyers immediately say Poopsie is a no-no, even if they could find him. Another Rumanian immigrant who can’t speak English who works for another genius somewhere whips up a test. Everyone must now absorb an entire new terminology.

  “My Two, Thirty-six, and Eighty-seven have mutated.”

  “I hear Eighty-seven is a pisser. You don’t want your Eighty-seven to mutate. The Two and the Thirty-six won’t be covered.”

  Each manufacturer of the next-in-line proton alphas starts touting theirs as the most beneficial to take first, as against any of their competitors’ PAs, each claiming their mutations are less dangerous than any of the others’ mutations. It’s actually quite funny, if a bit macabre, each bragging which danger is less dangerous. “My mutation is smaller than your mutation.”

  I’m the naysayer on all this. Sparks orders me to shut up “once and for all, this time I mean it, period.”

  There’s no doubt that every pharma and every scientist is still in way over their heads. But you know, it’s like settling the Wild West. Who’s going to stake out their land grants first? There’s no trepidation on what to take. Guys will take anything! Three proton alphas? Only three? Why not four! One worked for ten seconds. Two lasted maybe a month, maybe two. A woman patient who lived in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, actually lived six months. Should we all move to Truth or Consequences? The obvious rejoinder is “we’re there already.” Some guys do move to Truth or Consequences, which actually has a gay population and a gay doctor who can count T cells and has some bootleg stuff. Some people will go anywhere to get the latest. They’re called “trial junkies.”

  When four fades out, why, of course there are five, mix and match. Just like detergent manufacturers. New! Improved! Fuori il grigio! as the Italians say. Out with the dirt! The doctor in Truth or Consequences is from Naples.

  Hasn’t Jerry now said, “Healthy UC asymptomatics not currently on antiretroviral therapy may have additional treatment options a year from now”?

  Jerry has actually made a major statement! Gee, thanks and no thanks. Another whole fucking year! Jerry baby, what the fuck is a healthy asymptomatic with UC?

  Onward, Dripp! Onward, Pinkus! Onward, FFG! Audacia! Boozer Feltwass! P&U! And, of course, our Mother Church, dear G-D. Excuse me, Greptz G-D.

  What? There is no more Greeting-Dridge? The G-D part of Greptz G-D was sold to Presidium? How did I miss that one? So fleeting is fame, as Fred says.

  The pharmas are taking over the world and we are all holding hands. I was there when Sparks and Scotty took the payola from Presidium. But they aren’t releasing it yet. The first protease inhibitor, which is what proton alphas are now being called, will be from the mighty Greptz. It’s being called CRIX.

  Oh, and the D drug that guy at Yaddah made has been sold to Greeting-Dridge, excuse me, the Greeting part of Greptz. Some guy named Arnold Botts Greeting owns it.

  Oh, and Scotty told me that he’s already collected $150,000 each from every pharm working on any of this shit. I had to go to bed with him to get this dish. I just knew something fishy was going on. Wait until Maxine hears about this!

  I forgot to mention that the protease from Muck, which was released to great acclaim, has tanked. Too many damned mutations appeared, almost out of nowhere, which hadn’t showed
up in its first wide-open PI clinical trial by Farrell What’s-his-name in San Francisco. Muck’s a big German monster and it’s not happy. The rumor is that Muck’s chief scientist on this was murdered when the home office in Germany heard the bad news.

  GASLIGHT

  In an operating room at Isidore Peace, Dr. Halycion Vrobuck is attempting a drexylated infusion cum transplant cum excision. This is an experimental operation involving the thymus gland, tried without success in Japan and Belgium. It requires two patients, preferably twins. Suddenly air circulation is turned off, and gas is pumped in. Everyone in the entire operating room, including medical students, fellow surgeons, and visitors, is asphyxiated to death.

  A note is found hanging from one of the disengaged valves: ALL FAGGOTS MUST DIE. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

  OLD SOLDIERS ALWAYS DIE

  A German publication disputes all the great contributions of Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, her vel particularly. That she was wrong. That all she stood for is incorrect. What with both Grace and Israel now ignominiously refuted or ignored or disappeared, neither of them here to defend themselves, how is what they discovered to be carried on? That’s what happens to old scientists. Over and over again, ways are found to hate. Very few prominent members of The American People go to their graves unscarred.

  MOON OVER MIAMI

  The Tiara-on-the-Beach Ball. It could be Balalaika in 1979. Or the Toilet Bowl, same year. Now it needs no darkness, no mirrored spinning ball of twinkling lights. No, it takes place out in the open, under the Miami Beach sun, in broad daylight for all to see. The bodies doing these things are older, wizened even, spotted with this and that, their tans the wrong shade of honey, only emphasizing their age and not disguising it. It is as if some Important Power determined that this annual event must still be seen, borne witness to, in all its unimaginably imagined unflattering detail. Bear witness? A peculiar expression for such finery of sequin and feather and satin, leather and denim, and chains and whips certainly, too. You would have thought that rimming, “eating you out,” i.e., sticking your tongue and mouth into a partner’s asshole, i.e., rectum, would have gone with the wind, pun intended. It hasn’t. You would have thought that cocksucking, without benefit of a condom, swallowing semen, straight, no pun intended, would have gone up the lazy river, metaphor intended. On all counts you would be off base. Orgies of all this on the beach, on the sands of this ocean, under this glorious sun, without benefit, again, of condom—this is more than tempting fate. This is saying Fuck You to life.