In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis, the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems. The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation’s conscience. In Kramer’s telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.
Release date:
January 7, 2020
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
896
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Your Roving Historian welcomes you back. Let us continue to follow our bouncing ball.
* * *
This is your virus speaking. I, too, am glad you’ve come back to learn more about my taking over the world. Your author considers anger “a healthy and productive motivating force.” Thank goodness he talks too much and accomplishes so little and words are cheap. My English is much better now, don’t you think? My anger is also what is motivating me. And I am, as you would say, “getting my own back.”
DAVID JERUSALEM GOES TO WORK AT MR. HOOVER’S HOMOSEXUAL WHOREHOUSE
Mr. Hoover started his whorehouse to trap male spies and gather information “to save America.” It’s called the Club. He says he started it because a Senator McCarthy and a Mr. Sam Sport were criticizing him for not doing his job. I recognize Dickie Fratragelli from Partekla and other guys on staff here look familiar too. There are thirty-seven of us. We’re required to wear jackets and ties and keep ourselves clean and smelling nice. There are boys from farms, and Indians and Negroes, and from foreign countries. Each of us has our own room and shower. Showers are popular because if you can get your customer hard again after sex that’s another ten bucks.
The Club gets a lot of business. I do everything without much feeling. I ask some of our guys if they really feel, and some say yes and some say sometimes and some say no, but they all give me a funny look for asking, as if they’ve never thought about it.
I think about feeling a lot. I think a lot about how am I going to survive my survival. After that camp they held me in when I came back from Germany, what am I meant to learn in this next chapter? And Mr. Hoover suggested I start my next chapter here. What am I supposed to learn?
Each guy has been chosen for something special he can do. The Indian kids can take it up the ass for hours, and they’re particularly affectionate. I’m no good at either. Dickie said we don’t have to do what we don’t want to do. It’s the scars on my back that make me “special.” Some customers run their hands and lips over them. They want me because of my scars. When they want to know where I got them, I’m told to say, “From Mr. Hitler,” and see if that brings forth any interesting information from them. But sometimes my scars make a man start to hit me, at first slapping my back softly, but then working up to more, which I don’t want or like. That’s when I’m told to call in Sammy or Charlie.
Dr. Horse doesn’t like such weakness. “You must at least try everything,” he says. “If it doesn’t get you excited, take another Dridge Ampule.” That is how I get erections a lot of the time. They make you forget the outside world.
We tell Dr. Horse all we can after each customer. What we could find out about his work, and his life outside of work, and how he felt about anything we could get him to talk about in “casual conversation.” Dickie, who took lessons on how to do this at Partekla, was great at this. He could get guys to tell him their entire life. “In the end, they’re all sort of boring and not all that different,” he said. They don’t sound like spies to me. “You let us be the judge of that,” Dr. Horse says. He takes notes on what we tell him. We get an extra bonus if we can get the guy’s phone number or address.
I recognize Dr. Horse from Partekla too. He’s very handsome and a cutup, goosing guys and telling jokes. He’s called Dr. Horse because “I’m hung like one.” But he isn’t. He’s regular size. Being in charge, he’s older than the rest of us. He has silver white hair but his body is hard like a younger man’s. He works out every day with weights. He has lots of young customers.
There’s a lot of laughter. The guys here all think this is fun and don’t mind if their cocks or asses are sore from twelve customers a day. Borff and Sammy have competitions at Sunday breakfast to see who can get bigger and shoot farther. Everyone’s punchy from being up all night. Someone runs into the kitchen to bring back a big bowl and a measuring cup, and someone turns on the radio, which only has loud church organs. Clyde often comes to watch and see how much gism we can shoot into the bowl. One Sunday morning everyone got erections and started playing with each other, which isn’t allowed. A kid named Tiger who’d just arrived stuck his hand in Clyde’s crotch, trying to be friendly. Clyde’s cock wasn’t hard, and so Tiger started massaging it for him. There was immediate silence. Tiger was fired, and Borff says it’s only a matter of time before he’s found dead in the park. Sammy says that’s because Tiger found out Clyde has a small one.
Guys are always disappearing, like in Germany and in Idaho, and now here.
One day, Dr. Horse called us all together to “vaccinate you against disease.” He said, “You boys are interacting with a great many men in a great variety of different ways and we all know that the body is a great big harbor of all kinds of nasty dirty things. So this shot will protect you. We consider ourselves very lucky that because of all our wonderful work in Idaho we have this shot to protect us.” Then he laughed as he patted his dick.
Mr. Hoover assured me that we were protected by something. Of course I was forbidden to say anywhere that he was our “employer,” or had anything to do with us, which made no sense what with Clyde coming around to be so social.
I fucked with man after man in that whorehouse and now I assume I gave them whatever it was I had been given. Have men died because of what I’ve done with them? Will I die from what was done to me? I don’t know why I’m so sure of it now, but I am.
I don’t know what got me through Mungel and Partekla, and now here. I’m not certain about everything that happened to me there. I am like some sponge. How do I squeeze it all out of me or vomit it out and clean myself up or what?
Will there ever be a time when I know anything but sorrow, pain, and loneliness and death? I’m not sure why Mr. Hoover thought that working here would teach me what I want to know.
Grodzo had taught me at Mungel that not everyone reacts the same way to the same illness or what he called “bodily intrusions.” And that being exposed to something can sometimes make you not get it and stay healthy. And that Philip and Rivka gave me good genes. Dr. Omicidio will tell Fred that in the early days what some of us got was maybe weaker and not as strong as what was in the guys who died later. And that that’s why the plague didn’t really get going for another twenty years.
It would be a while before I figured out that Mr. Hoover knew all along about Amos Standing, who worked for Hitler, and how Amos loved my father so much he wanted to live with him for the rest of their lives. And he knew that Philip didn’t want to stay in Berlin with Amos Standing, but to come back to America because he was feeling guilty about leaving my mother and brothers, and so he promised he’d return to get me. Amos just in case made a deal with Mr. Hoover. I was the deal. Mr. Hoover talked to Mr. Hitler and I was safe. And once upon a time I’d been told I was going away to school in Boston! When I asked Mr. Hoover what he wanted me for he said he found me “a most interesting case.” I was cute and made him smile.
Mr. Hoover said he saw me playing with Skipper across the street from his house when I was five years old. Funny how some people stay in your lives. I have a couple of customers who are of particular interest to him. He asks me lots of questions about them. One is someone named Boris Greeting. “He is potentially a very dangerous man,” Mr. Hoover tells me. “One reason I opened this place is for people like him and other high-level men to have somewhere where they feel safe to come to.” He also wants to know what I do with a man whose name I will learn is James Jesus, who is evidently also very interesting and “in charge of our country’s spies.” “Well, he is very what here is called ‘nelly,’ and likes to put on women’s underwear and for me to fuck him, which I can only do when I take a Dridgie,” I tell him, which makes him laugh.
Borff and Sammy and Dale have been taken to the hospital. Vaughan is off duty until his ruptured anus heals, which it may not. Hare has disappeared. They will find Tiger dead.
Dr. Horse says, “You will live forever.” Dr. Horse now gives us vaccinations every week. “This is miracle stuff I’m giving you! You’ll never get sick. You are lucky you’re here to get this.” He calls it a “booster shot.”
DR. SISTER GRACE
What the fuck? I have blood from here in Washington, I have blood from Partekla, I have blood from Mungel, I have blood from San Francisco and St. Louis and from Chicago and many other American cities. I have contaminated ancient shit from the Table family discovered by Nesta Trout. Grodzo has obtained tests from Max Planck Institute scientists that he says I must see. Von Lutz and Brinestalker and Nostrill have given me names of hundreds of homosexuals. I have no frigging idea what anyone expects me to do with them.
A SON’S CRY FOR HELP
Momma, if anyone comes to your house and asks about Ralph it’s me they’re talking about but you must pretend not to know anything about me. I’m being followed, Momma, and I’m afraid. I wanted you to know I’m still alive. I hid in a delivery truck all the way to Boise. I’ll stay in touch as best I can. I love you, Mamma. I am sorry I left you. But you and Poppy didn’t understand.
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