The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel

By Larry Kramer

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374720643

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer, the founder and former chairman and CEO of MarketWatch, Inc., is currently an adjunct professor of media management at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Over the course of his career, he has been a senior adviser at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, and served as the first president of CBS Digital Media. He currently serves on the board of directors of sev-eral media and technology companies, including Discovery, American Media, and Answers.com, and is an advisor to tech and digital startups such as JibJab, Newser, Crossborders.tv, and others. Kramer also spent more than twenty years as a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, and the Trenton Times. He divides his time between Tiburon, California, and New York City.

Book preview

PART I

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.

FROM THE COVENANTS OF THE DISCIPLES OF LOVEJOY

We keep the departments small so that the structure of each, and of each to each, and of each to the whole, remains stable. Each is headed by someone with enough influence and contacts to keep his site intact, operational, and productive. There is no doubt all our policies reflect what our fellow Lovejoys wish to do and have done. Our fellow Lovejoy, Senator Vurd, constantly reminds us that this particular essential task was identified long ago: to remove them from all areas of life. He has also suggested partnering with the Catholic Church, which disdains us but hates queers as much as we do. So he has arranged with the Vatican to share generously in our campaign to rid us all of this scourge.

What we are doing is the will of God. Homosexuality is a crime and a sin. Thus our honest and noble and healthy hatred is quite naturally an established moral imperative, not only for us but for all God-fearing peoples.

We call it the Grand Elimination.

INTERVIEW 102.3497PJ

Subject: Twenty-year-old male. Was in Partekla before St. Purdah’s. Both parents missing, possibly deceased.

I cry all night but they don’t believe me. I have no idea why I can’t go out into the world. They tell me I’m not ready. Why is a nun taking care of me? All the doors are locked. Who’s paying for me to be here? How can I get out of here? I think I was happy once.

Patient takes his life the day after above interview wherein he had signed over all his worldly goods. He had several hundred dollars and a gold and diamond ring. He hangs himself with his sheets, the method most often used.

—PJ

FROM DAME LADY HERMIA BLEDD-WRENCH’S HISTORY OF EVIL

BLOOD IS VERY COMPLICATED

I am digesting and redacting this evil history as quickly as I am uncovering it.

Dr. Grodzo was among the many Nazi scientists covertly hired to advise The American People. He had much to share, for he was an original planner of the Mungel experiments, which, judging from the young David Jerusalem’s horrid report, indicates an imagination unparalleled in this new field of incarceratory treatments.

I am here to observe, to learn, to sniff around ("herum schnuffeln). In Germany I shot my load (verdamte gekaufen). The Ivy Lee office, through Amos Standing, facilitated Grodzo’s transfer. I was surprised to learn that Grace was appointed his supervising overseer. It seems that as a boy Grodzo’s father knew Grace’s father when he was murdering women in the Black Forest. Dear Cousin Grace never told me about any of this! Boris Greeting is his corporate sponsor," and it is unclear how he got in on this act.

It was Brinestalker’s idea, this importation of enemy scientists, and he evidently sold it quite easily to Hoover. Brinestalker father and son had been much in touch with German scientists for many years. I knew little about this Hoover but the little I commence to learn is uncomfortable. You don’t understand, Dame Lady Hermia, my contact on this Hoover chap said to me, Washington is all about power and one obtains it quite often by messing in matters that no one else wants to. So you pick up all the pieces of paper off the floor that no one wants to pick up. Then they’re yours. People are increasingly terrified of Hoover, including at the White House. One gathers he’s picked up many pieces of paper from many floors.

Since 1924, J. Edgar Hoover had been head of the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been around under one name or another since that other Roosevelt, Theodore, started it in 1908. In 1927 Edgar sees the photograph of and hires one Clyde Tolson, whom he will appoint as assistant director in 1930. They are both young and rather handsome. Clyde is very solemn-faced. From the beginning they are obviously inseparable. Some believe Clyde had the brains. David Jerusalem will tell us otherwise. Hoover will run his kingdom until he dies in his office in 1972. Clyde will die in 1975. From 1924 until 1972 is a very long time for any single individual to acquire so much power. Hoover found ways to make himself untouchable and irreplaceable, indeed invincible, until he was virtually a king. I know you people are not familiar with kings and what they can do with power. You should be. No president could get rid of him. The files he collected on tens of thousands of people were sufficient as to pose enormous threats and Hoover wielded this information mercilessly.

There is no question they were bound together, Hoover and Tolson. Scholars are reluctant to call their relationship a homosexual one, God knows why.

It would appear that Boris Greeting, after the war, has a few things he wants studied in human trials. The Greeting vaults had revealed many concoctions acquired over the years of its history. He has blood samples from all over the world. Neither NITS nor COD is set up for human trials, leaving Partekla as the only place for a fast track. Human trials, fast track, this is science fiction talk, Dr. Frankenstein talk. Your American Congress is not about to fund human guinea pigs. So it has not been informed about Partekla, which has a secret budget from … where? I wonder if someone exceptionally prescient set up Partekla in the first place, knowing … what? That another war might be coming and you are not prepared? Is this a Cold War tool? Get there before the Commies? I had in fact been considering Partekla as a germ warfare factory of some sort. Every country had one and still does. But Grace had her own ideas to investigate, with no other place to do so legally. She is thinking that the blood and vaginal discharges of women could be revelatory, particularly after contact with men. She is exceptionally clever. Hookers usually are. What are smart ambitious scientists to do when they are bursting with the conviction that what, come-hell-or-high-water, they must test would save humanity? She reminds me of the iconoclastic work done by our joint ancestor Lord Guelph at his laboratory at St. Simon’s on the Wharf. I am discovering that Cousin Grace has my growing approval. I wrote to tell her so, and we have been meeting and talking quietly here in Washington at her monastic residence-cum-laboratory. (It was a very touching reunion, after so many years. Age can do that for one.) For her, Partekla is a dream come true. But she is right to keep her mouth shut for the nonce and until she has something to show.

An awful lot of ex-Nazis, and many not so ex-, take up permanent residence on your safer shores after the war, and, we are discovering, before it, and, we are discovering, during it as well. It is the policy of your State Department that it’s better to have the important ones here than there. Much research must always be done on blood. "Blood is sehr important." Grodzo agrees with Grace.

Who is really paying for this Partekla place?

I find that there have been grants from NAFTRA, NonComp, PERK, and PUCS (all new government agencies set up by who knows whom to do who knows what), which are now allowed to support specific nonspecific scientific research programs. Corporate gifts from Vidalia Farms, from International Frats, from Nasie-Ever-More, from GreetingBaxxterDridge, among numerous others, do the same. If one were paranoid one could see that some sort of takeover is revving up, some sort of infiltration by aliens from another planet. What in God’s name is PERK, or PUCS?

The first batch of questionable blood arrives in Lot 21098xcv458trn/abed\frish Vat 69, from GreetingBaxxterDridge Pharmaceuticals. It is sourced from twenty-seven ‘donors.’

Grodzo evidently doesn’t like what he sees.

What’s interesting to him is not from whom the blood comes but from how many it comes. Indeed, twenty thousand donors per lot of pooled plasma are required to concoct a batch of what will shortly be marketed by Greeting as … I must remember the name of this drug: Factor VIII. Twenty thousand donors needed per batch. No wonder things get so out of hand.

This is not so good, Grodzo writes, as I look through my microscope at a coil of rants. No, no, no! What I see in here. Bad!

He writes a letter expressing his concerns to GreetingBaxxterDridge Pharmaceuticals, which had sent the blood to Grace for testing for (she told them) a potential cure for the mismitosis she suffers from. She had developed several profitable products for them in the past, such as Vel, a hormone-measuring technique that won her the Nobel Prize.

Your blood is not so clean. Your blood should be more clean. You have in your blood a number of Grade 98723l032l impurities (see attached list). It is my strong recommendation that before you put your blood into further testings all of said Grade 98723l032l impurities (see attached list) are removed from your blood.

For an old Nazi, Grodzo seems to be harboring awfully good American instincts. Grace advises him to keep his mouth shut. "Aber dieses Blut ist immer noch Scheisse, Grodzo protests, meaning, But this blood is still shit."

So is everyone in Washington is Grace’s knowledgeable reply.

Also noting that the blood is shit is Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder, a young gay doctor from South Africa at NITS on a fellowship. He cannot believe his eyes. This blood from GreetingBaxxterDridge is not only Scheisse, it’s triple Scheisse. Are these people serious? He tells Monserrat Krank, with whom he’d done cancer research at Cambridge (for a few years they thought they’d discovered its cure), and who, more important, is very rich. How did Rebby see this blood? Grodzo is also at NITS. Blood is so complicated.

In due course, A. W. Napp, the executive in charge of New Blood at GreetingBaxxterDridge, replies:

Our blood is clean enough. We have followed the guidelines promulgated by the Federal Government on 17 Sept 1928. It is not necessary to obtain your approval. We sought it only as a courtesy to Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, and at the same time to show to you and others what important work we are doing. Please be advised that we have received approval from Dr. R. S. Napp (no relation) of FADS for continued development of our product pursuant to its sale to the public.

Neither a Napp at GreetingBaxxterDridge nor a Napp at the Department of Food and Drug Supervision can I locate on any personnel list of this era.

Our product? What product?

Blood is very complicated.

A DREAM COME TRUE?

FRED: Indeed, for many who knew about it, Partekla was a dream come true, a veritable ground zero for the killing fields, to utilize current palaver, imposing itself insidiously on our daily life. Can we not begin to sense, to smell, as Hermia does, how all the little bitty pieces of paper are coalescing into the evil that is this postwar world? The notion of for the sake of humanity, which our Florence Nightingale and your Clara Barton fought so valiantly to introduce into all matters of health, is not taking root.

Yes, blood is very, very complicated. It cannot be stated enough.

---

I have learned many tricks to survive. I keep hoping a brilliant person will appear with a discovery we all can live with. It has troubled me that we are all traveling different journeys that do not allow that to happen. More than ever I now see it is either me or you.

I thought I could infect the world during this past Great War, and then live forever. I killed many but evidently not enough.

I will not fail this time.

THE COEUR D’ALENE RATTLESNAKE

The Coeur d’Alene Rattlesnake reports, Dazed young men are wandering about the North West, bruised and speechless. Their bodies are covered with black and blue marks and scabs. They drift off into the distance. Good luck to them. We did not want them here but we nevertheless wish them well.

DR. ISRAEL JERUSALEM WRITES IN HIS LAB AT ISIDORE SCHMUCK

I am reminded of Kristallnacht in Germany. This was the first big sign from the government of Hitler that Jews were not wanted in any way. Partekla reminds me of this. Someone is saying that homosexuals are not wanted in America in any way. I have a patient who works for that Hoover in a top-secret job. He confides in me that 3,500 young homosexual men have been imprisoned at Partekla—at least—and that few of them survived. I tried to discuss this with Grace but she would not talk about it. Indeed, she became hysterical. How dare you imply I know details about something so awful! How dare you, Israel, not trust me after all we’ve shared with each other! I hope she will calm down so we return to our work, which was beginning to prove interesting. I am seeing more new infecteds no one knows what to do with or what is wrong with. They are infected with strange things. I believe I have seen such before.

The war is over but it is not over! It is really never over. Where is the congressional hearing about any of this?

At the center of all history there is always a terrible secret. I am too familiar with this feeling of warning.

TWO OF OUR LEADING CHARACTERS MEET EACH OTHER

They’d seen each other many years ago when perhaps they looked sufficiently different to keep them from remembering each other now in the Masturbov Gardens drugstore.

Do you remember me? Daniel, now twenty-one, asks Fred, now all of fifteen, who is staring down at a turquoise Estabrook fountain pen in a display case. Isn’t it beautiful? I use ink the same color. I write everything in turquoise ink. It’s my color.

Fred looks up at him and answers. It’s my color too! But you must have it!

No, no, I use a Parker Fifty-one. You must have it!

I haven’t got enough money yet, but I will after I babysit a few more times. Then, You remember me? Fred asks.

Of course I remember you. Grace Hooker babysat us a couple of times together when our parents went out to the same blood thing. Our moms know each other from their work.

Pudgy Waffle! Fred exclaims. I wonder what’s happened to her. He looks at the pen again, and then back at Daniel. He said it was the last one ever.

Here, let’s put a deposit on it, so they’ll hold it until you can get the rest. Daniel summons the clerk and hands him a dollar bill. We’d like to place this deposit on this beautiful turquoise Estabrook fountain pen that you say is the last one. So you can hold it for Mr.…

Mr. Fred Lemish, Fred tells the clerk. He’s disappointed that Daniel doesn’t remember his name. He corrects the salesman’s spelling. One M. I promise I’ll pay you back. Do you still live in Masturbov Gardens?

Yes, but I’m away at college now. I go to Yaddah. I’m going to be a doctor. Would you like to go for a walk in the park across the street?

What were you reading so seriously? I saw you there before.

Come to the park and we’ll sit down and you can read it.

Homosexuals in government, 1950

Congressional Record

Volume 96

Part 4

81st Congress 2nd Session

March 29–April 24, 1950

(pages 4527–4528)

ON THE FLOOR OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:

Mr. Arthur L. MILLER of Nebraska. Mr. Chairman, I realize that I am discussing a very delicate subject. You must know what a homosexual is. I would like to strip the fetid, stinking flesh off of this skeleton of homosexuality and tell my colleagues in this House some of the facts about them. But I cannot expose all the putrid facts, as it would offend your sensibilities. Make no mistake several thousand, according to police records, are now employed by the Federal Government. It is amazing that in our Capital City of Washington we are plagued with such a large group of those individuals. Washington attracts many lovely folks. These are not they.

In the Eightieth Congress I was the author of a sex pervert bill that passed this Congress and is now a law. It can confine some of these people to St. Purdah’s Hospital for treatment. We learned two years ago that there were around four thousand homosexuals in the District. The Police Department the other day said there were now between five and six thousand in Washington who are active and that 75 percent are in Government employment. There are places in Washington where they gather for the purpose of sex orgies, where they worship at the cesspool and fleshpots of iniquity.

You will find odd words in the vocabulary of the homosexual. There are many types such as the necrophilia, fetishism, pygmalionism, fellatios, cunnilinguist, sodomatic, pederasty, sapphism, sadism, and masochist. There are many methods of practices among the homosexuals. Some of those people have been in the State Department, and some of them are now in other departments. These people are likely to be known to each other.

I ask you to bear in mind how many of these homosexuals have had a part in shaping our foreign policy. How many have been in sensitive positions and subject to blackmail. If all the facts are known, homosexuals have been used by the Communists. I believe many of them are Communists.

I believe there is physical danger to anyone exposing the details and nastiness of homosexuality, because these people are dangerous. They will go to any limit. These homosexuals have strong emotions. They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group.

They are now not knowingly kept in government service. They have been locked up in a place called Partekla.

Upon their release they must not be employed in Government. I trust both sides of the aisle will support my amendment that will prohibit them from so being.

Daniel watches as the young Fred slowly and intently reads the pages with bowed head. Do you understand it? Daniel asks. Do you know people like this?

Do you?

The people I know are mostly nicer, Daniel answers, as he adds to himself, Yeah. Like Uncle Hyman.

Our neighbor across the hall disappeared last week. He and his friend were gone. They took all their belongings in the nighttime. We didn’t hear a thing. They’d left their door wide open. Mr. Nelson was teaching me how to type. I’ve bought a Royal portable typewriter from my babysitting.

Now Daniel remembers Fred’s sad and lonely eyes, with which he identifies.

So you know what a homosexual is? Daniel asks.

Yes.

Do you have feelings for other boys?

Yes. I want a friend. A boy friend. Do you have one?

No.

So you have feelings for other boys too.

Oh, yes.

Fred confesses. Have you had them for as long as you can remember?

Daniel smiles and nods. For as long as I can remember. Then he stands up. Excuse me, young Lemish. I must get going.

When will I see you again?

Oh, we’ll meet again. We’re bound to.

But when? I don’t want to let you go! He grabs for Daniel’s arm.

When the time is right. When you get your lovely turquoise Estabrook pen will you write to me? Your mother and my mother can find me.

And then Daniel is gone. He cannot bear to look at young Lemish and his eyes and his bowed head a moment longer for fear it will break his heart. He reminds him of his young self who had also wanted a special fountain pen to write with to a boyfriend.

And young Lemish longs to see Daniel Jerusalem naked. Now he knows they both belong to a people the House of Representatives doesn’t want to see at all.

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!

A fucking virus is a fucking virus if we’re at the fucking right place at the fucking right time.

Yes, yes, I learned this from the Iwacky! Please, why necessary are so many fucks?

Because there are so many fucks is what this is all about!

You know this for certain?

I am Dr. Sister Grace Hooker! I am the Queen of Blood. You are Dr. Israel Jerusalem. I have studied under a stronger microscope the samples that you sent me. We’re going to get another fucking Nobel Prize!

Then she asked him: Tell me again. What did you win your Nobel Prize for, so long ago?

The cause of an ancient disease.

And with what proof?

My Iwacky boys eat each other.

Exactly.

You have lost much weight.

I have had much stress. We will be in touch. I must go somewhere far away at present.

TWO OF DORIS HARDWARE’S WHORES

Today’s girl is Jinx Seeley. When Mordy Masturbov hears her name on the phone from Clothilde, who does the bookings for his mother’s Hardware House, he doesn’t recognize it. Mordy has his own first home away from home. A very large and elegant house, built by one of Abe’s companies in one of his big-deal neighborhoods near Isidore Schmuck. Mordy is just over twenty. He’d decided to start Sexopolis. Instead of going to college, he just tells Abe he’s launching a big enterprise and Abe’s sufficiently intrigued to let him off the hook. After all, he never went to college himself. Claudia helps Mordy decorate. He’s still in love with her. A lot of good it does him. He knows she’s working for his mother. He’d been writing articles about her for Sexopolis before it was even in print. He figures loving Claudia was all the pre-on-the-job training in the romance area that he needed to get. So he started Sexopolis. From its very first issue it’s been a roaring success.

When Jinx arrives she turns out to be unexpectedly perky and amusing, qualities unfamiliar to him.

My name is Jinx Seeley and my parents are Mr. and Mrs. Horace Plotkin and my real name is Rebekkah Regina and my aunt and uncle are the Chesterfields, he’s the famous rabbi and I believe she’s dead. I lived for a while in India. Seeley is for the soul I didn’t find there. Jinx is for the mess I’ve made. You sure are younger than the usual. Where’s the bedroom?

Can my cock handle funny?

She walks around the house. It’s like George Washington at Mount Vernon. She gawks and studies and admires and occasionally sighs. "I know how much that’s worth! She’s impressed. She walks through the foyer and into the dining room with its enormous table peopled by dozens of stern high-backed chairs (for some dinner party you won’t invite me to), and then back to what she calls the main lobby," and again, without invitation, she goes up the curving staircase to the floor above. Mordy follows, not knowing quite what to say.

You’re a very charming act, he says finally. You have a very charming act, he repeats, trying to keep up with her.

Is it? I’m glad this hugeness is yours. It’s right and proper that a man of your prominence should have this house all on your own. You’re so young, though. You certainly are a prodigy. That’s a new word I just learned. Do you know what it means?

Is she putting him on? He has little sense of humor, Claudia has told him on more than one occasion, and he seems unable to do much about it. He never remembers jokes; he usually fucks up the punch line of those that he tries to tell. It’s not about jokes, Claudia said when he asked how to right his deficiency, it’s about lightening up, which he understands even less: he isn’t heavy, he’s very light on his feet, he’s a good dancer, he can swim a hundred yards in no time. Forget it, she finally said when she realized he didn’t get it. Which of course he picked up on. He doesn’t like this feeling. How do you get a sense of humor? Does he even want one? He sort of likes being stern and unsmiling. Shouldn’t a powerful editor/publisher be both?

By the time he enters his bedroom she’s already yanking off her clothes. The bedspread is still on. This she rips off, making him feel that the order of things is slipping out of his control. In this baronial room—his lair, with the huge phallic mahogany bedposts, the thick black carpet, the gaping fireplace that could receive a pig, the canopy of drapery protecting the bed like a bulletproof vest—in this room, there she is, inattentive to him, not paying him one fucking bit of attention as she neatly folds her clothes and places them on a small armchair that she talks to. So thoughtful of you to be here just for my undies and the undies of those who still wear undies and who come here to take off their undies. She’s still smiling and being perky. I genuinely do like this house, patting her palms together pleasurably, like a flapping seal or a kid in a sandbox. She is now completely naked, which he sees pleases her: she’s comfortable in and with her body, which he isn’t. He’ll call his article My Adventures with Jinx.

You’re a Jewish girl?

You’re Jewish too.

I haven’t had much experience with Jewish girls.

Most Jewish men haven’t.

It’s been my experience that Jewish girls are rarely hookers. And Jewish girls are never so relaxed naked as you, he says, sitting on the edge of his bed and bending to untie his laces.

Now commences, as always, his consciousness of what he considers his deficiencies: the slight roll of fat that bulges a bit as he bends down, the looseness of all of him because he hates physical exercise, loathes the outdoors; the strange patches of his red body hair that display little regard for symmetry (a right shoulder with a smaller blotch than the other, a left nipple sprouting, the other bare, the chest with little settlements, rare villages in the desert, his pale white legs, and the effusive tuft around his penis that sprouts upward and cascades forward). He displeases himself aesthetically. He’d waited so long for his body hair; why, when it finally came, did it arrive in such a disorderly fashion? Claudia told him if he didn’t like it to take a scissors and trim it, or take a razor and shave it off, or visit an electrolysist, or make an appointment at Elizabeth Arden for a waxing. Or forget it. He will observe it. He’ll write about it. This problem must be others’ too. He is always composing new feature stories as he lives them. Perhaps men’s bodies should be styled as much as women’s. Is there an Elizabeth Arden for men?

He grabs for Jinx before she can study him like she’s studied everything else. She smells nice. She feels nice. She wraps her arms around his back and her legs around his waist and she feels like a big soft beach ball he’s carrying. She is nicely pale, not brazenly white like he is. Her body looks like it belongs to another time, like a flapper’s perhaps, fragile yet sturdy: breasts small but proportionate to the rest of her; arms flighty and sparrowlike in their dartings and never-restings, her palms running up and down his back, touching his face gently as she looks into his eyes; legs thin but strong, like those of runway models who stride forth best foot forward. Her neck is amazing: very long, as if her head, from which she observes so much, needs a special perch from which to gaze and swivel. Suddenly she stands up on the bed and regally looks down at him.

Are you ready to be master of all you survey? she says at length.

He’d wondered whether he should be haughty and masterful, or if this would make him look as silly as he felt, his fleshy midsection rolling over the elastic waist of his underpants, his pouch of genitals still docile, inert, like a kid’s pawful of silly putty still waiting for a stick to protrude from it, a flag on the top of Mount Everest. Men’s underpants are in no way as seductive as women’s underpants. He’d been meaning to have sexy ones designed so his readers could buy them. Hell, this isn’t the way his seductions usually transpire. He drops them both to the mattress and sticks his finger in her crotch.

Don’t believe much in foreplay, huh? Just off with the rags and smack-dab into it?

He rolls off her. He’s certain it has never looked more shriveled. He’s angry with her. It’s her fault.

I guess we’re off to a bad start, she says. Let’s not tell your mother. From the foot of the bed she hauls up an afghan comforter of intricate pattern and soft heather colors. When he keeps lying there, looking a bit silly, a bit fragile, a bit petulant, no, a lot petulant, his skin even whiter from the goose bumps some sudden chilliness brings to him, she tucks him under the comforter. I hope you’re not thinking of bringing out any exotic drugs to get you going. I don’t do drugs or alcohol or whips or chains or Dridgies. I’m a naturally healthy and happy woman.

He wonders why, emotionally and physically, he is immobile. Why can’t he speak? He is not supposed to feel for this woman. He should have jumped her by now, should have entered her by now. He might even have had her in and out and finished by now. (No, that wouldn’t make a good story.) But he has to fuck them all, don’t you see, or they’ll go out there and say, Mordy Masturbov’s a lousy lay. (His readers would identify with that.) If he does it quickly he can say, You’re my third of the day. That way they can’t say, Mordy …

Are you going to climb into Momma and let’s fuck?

He lies on top of her quietly. He puts his hand over her mouth, hoping she’ll understand it just means for her to shut up. He lets her fragrance seep into him. He gets hard. He climbs into her.

What am I feeling, what am I feeling? is always the thought that runs through his head as he pumps and pumps, as he kisses, caresses, embraces, pinches, licks, sucks, fondles, strokes, and, if he thinks it’s desired, hits, strikes, clobbers, perhaps even ties and binds. He may be young but he’d read all the books Abe left for him. This one wants to kiss and kiss and she emits her sighs of pleasure when he does so, all over her, top and bottom, bottom to top. Kisses are easy for him, and they excite him. He stays harder when kissing. He seems to be enjoying this Jinx Seeley more than some others, but all of them, even Jinx Seeley, remain faceless if his eyes are closed, which they usually are. He says to himself, If I remember her next week, if she pops back into my memory with a good feeling next week, then I’ll know that she’s something a bit more meaningful.

They never pop back to him.

Dr. Ludens suggests it might be because he knows nothing about them, that he should engage them in personal conversation. On the contrary, Mordy protests, I know everything about them. He only sees Dr. Ludens to please his mother, who’s worried he’s too young for what he’s doing.

Okay, you did it, this jinx woman says when they both reach orgasm simultaneously. Just like it’s supposed to be done. Very textbook. Every guy should do it so good.

It’s usual to be polite and say, ‘Thanks, that was great.’

Who says it wasn’t great?

You’re saying it. Your tone is saying it. You are sounding very facetious.

"I don’t know what that word means. It was great, it was great, it was great. It just wasn’t very personal. Tell your psychiatrist it’s not because you don’t know anything about me. It’s because you don’t give anything of yourself."

How do you know I go to a psychiatrist?

Oh, please.

Please what?

It’s the latest thing since the war’s been over. Rich guys got nothing better to do except talk about themselves. And come to hookers like me, of course. I have clients who go every week, or do it by phone. From what I can tell, docs all say the same thing: the problem is that you don’t know anything about the women you’re with. Men are in trouble, dear. The war’s over but you still don’t know what you’ve won.

I’m not in trouble.

Of course you are. And so you should be. Isn’t that why you want to teach the whole world how to fuck better?

He wants to ask her right this moment to sign on to Sexopolis as a columnist. She would appeal to younger readers.

She then proceeds, like some clairvoyant, some astrologer who announces truths, to tell him things that of course he knows and of course would be known by any Perceptive Other who has just fucked with him for forty-five minutes. Still, it frightens him that he could be so nakedly known by another who has merely seen him with his clothes off.

Your cock is like a piece of wood, very hard, but brother, if you had any feeling in it throughout all that we did, I’d be surprised. You never have a lick of trouble getting it up and keeping it up, but that’s as far as it goes. Don’t ask me how I know so much about you, how closed and constipated you are, how selfish you are with sharing your insides. Hookers know everything. I’m going to go now. You plumb tuckered me out. Most of the guys are easier to earn the money with. Although now I can splurge on a couple of pieces of pie for dinner. One thing about being a hooker: it saves going on a diet.

He nods and gets up and finds himself giving both of them robes and leading her downstairs to a handsome but obviously little-used kitchen where he sits her down on a stool and lays out many kinds of pie and cake and ice cream.

Pigging out! she screams, raising one hand above her head and pinching her nose with the other as if jumping in a pool’s deep end. Both do appear to be having a rather good time of it.

I guess I’ll have to go on a diet for a few days, she says ruefully.

We can work it off again.

I don’t think so, she says seriously. I don’t want another hammering from that piece of wood. You hurt. Nice little Jewish girls don’t like to get hurt, especially by nice little Jewish boys. Gentile boys is another matter.

She’s putting on her clothes, the undies and the soft green dress that ties around her waist, when he pulls her into an adjoining room that is his office, with its Regency mahogany desk and throne of a chair, and next to it, sitting on a Roman column under a glass cover, his very own stock ticker, ticking away. He opens the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a ledger, proudly unfurling its pages of columns and rows with a proprietary smile, as if to say, Look at all I have. Jinx looks on with complete detachment, saying nothing as he actually caresses the glass covering his rapidly accumulating wealth.

Don’t, she says softly. Perhaps he doesn’t hear her.

This is what really counts. His finger locates the column. Total value of assets owned by Mordecai Masturbov as of this date—

Please don’t. She covers her ears and goes back to the bedroom. Mordy cries out after her, If that’s how you feel you can go fuck yourself! But he follows her, his feet follow her, and as she finishes fixing her face and hair in the mirror he stands in the doorway blocking her exit. Have dinner with me, honey?

I’m not your honey. I’m your afternoon fuck. That’s all I want to be. I don’t want to know about all your money. I don’t want you trying to impress me as if I have to be bought, which I do, but on an entirely different level. If you follow me.

Yes, you do have to be bought. You’d leave me in a minute if I don’t pay for you.

And you’d send me away in a minute if I didn’t look and act the way I do. That’s our barter and our bargain. Nothing new. Old as time. She reaches up and runs her hand down the side of his cheek. He refuses to look in her eyes, and she takes her hand away. For a second she feels sorry for him. He still is so very young. Not that she isn’t. He grabs her hand and puts it back against his cheek and pulls her clumsily to him. I don’t seem to want you to leave. When we made love, I didn’t let myself go, I watched myself, watched to see how hard I got, my eyes all the time peeking to see how you reacted to every single thing I did, hoping your breasts and your … everything would drive the emptiness from my body.

You didn’t look at me one second.

This throws him. I most certainly did. I saw you. I saw you…

She isn’t going to let herself cry at his confession. She isn’t certain if it’s real or a speech concocted for any old broad he wants to stay with a little longer. But she knows that’s her problem.

She pulls herself away and says, I’m sorry, Mr. Mordecai Masturbov.

As always after sex, when the women leave him, while his cock recovers from its soreness (it’s always blazingly sore, as if its feelings come to life only postcoitus), he feels abandoned and alone and discarded. Sex has ballooned more and more into such a huge part of his life. He goes each morning to Dr. Ludens. Mordy trumpets sexual freedom and Sexopolis to her, and to anyone who will listen.

---

Claudia and Jinx talk about how they feel safer at Doris’s than anywhere. Some of the other girls think they’re nuts. Some feel terrified of men. Some feel terrified of so many men. Some fear that one of them will go crazy in the middle of sex and kill them. Or one of their powerful clients will have them murdered to shut them up. This is Washington, remember. Some of them are worried they’ll get infected with something that doesn’t show up on their monthly blood tests. Some talk about going away, as a group, to live somewhere in the sun. When they make enough money. Which will be never. They make good money, but they spend good money. There’s usually someone or something to send the money to or spend it on. Some of the girls think everything’s just fine. So what if some of the other girls think they’re nuts. Jinx wishes Claudia would open up more when they talk. They’re both still so young to be in a place like this forever, but that’s how it seems to be playing out.

No, Claudia isn’t good at talking with the other girls. She knows that however she sees things, no one else will understand. A pattern is emerging. She memorized the Kierkegaard maxim anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which Nutra, the black whore recently hit by a truck and instantly killed, had hanging in a frame over her bed in needlepoint. Claudia has difficulty correlating freedom with the fantasies that are requested of her—whippings, penetrations, even slashes that might bleed, being bound and left alone, oh so many acts of humiliation that evidently bring pleasure to the beneficiary. What about to her? She had thought she had never cared. Stephen tells her it’s okay to have fantasies, and okay to act them out, but she worries—she seems to have become a worrier—that she will come to love some man who performs them too adeptly. This perplexes her. She had come into this place to get away from the world and her new world is turning out to be more complicated.

She is aware that it was only days, nights, after her arrival at Doris’s that these questions came to be more her friends than any friend. She doesn’t understand these thoughts, and there’s no Daniel to tell them to. There hasn’t been for some time. Often she wants to call him, but she doesn’t. He knows where she is. Why doesn’t he call her?

She thinks of unloading onto Doris. Doris would understand. But Doris is on this kick that what they’re doing is legal and should be recognized as such. Most of the girls look at Doris as if she’s going nuts. Anyway, Doris would say something like just be careful you don’t fall in love.

A gentleman caller is downstairs. An international tycoon of something or other who likes to get pissed on. Claudia always keeps her clients waiting. She’ll douche until she’s so empty that she’ll ache in there, a void. Water will drip down the insides of her legs as he rings her bell, and she’ll make him lick her dry. It sounds so silly that she giggles.

It is interesting that she thought she would be safe here.

Claudia still thinks she will be safe, after she’s stayed here long enough.

So, too, does Jinx.

That’s why they’ve sort of bonded.

---

A man walks into a clinic in Ahashueras, Kitonka, South West Africa. There is much bloodshed going on in this German territory. People are murdering each other, more and more.

This man wants someone to take some blood from him because he hurts. He believes this will take away his pain. It is an old custom in his tribe. You did it in your early America. He says he hurts because everyone in his family was eaten by another family. And they all have eaten many monkeys. This I think you did not do in America, at least as I remember. The nurse takes his blood. He walks away. The nurse gives the blood to that lady with one arm I worry about.

What is she doing here?

RICKETS

In Ahashueras, at this same moment in time, a Western-backed study of rickets is under way. Some children have bones so soft that they can’t stand. The study is financed by the Baxxter-Bissbee-Box Corporation (known as BBB or Threebee), a leading manufacturer of diapers and baby foods and owned anonymously by Greeting-Dridge. Dr. Francine Punic is in charge of this study. She believes that what’s going on has something to do with one of her primates.

SEXOPOLIS!

After the first issue of Sexopolis had sold fifty thousand copies Mordy found himself constantly seeking newer methods, newer versions for his libidinous outpourings. He writes about what he thinks are acts required for maximum enjoyment, and then he expands his notes into feature stories. He tries all his ideas out for himself, with one girl after another, as in some Betty Crocker bake-off, to find out which ones are winners.

Years before, Mordy had been walking in Miami Beach, where Doris had taken him and Abe for a treat. All these tanned men of all ages walking by want something, he realized. They need something. Just as he needed Claudia. They don’t get it. Just like him, again. Even with tans and even in Miami Beach they don’t get it. Even after all their years of hard work and all their millions they don’t get it. There are some things they just don’t know how to get. He will serve them all as well as himself. It’s then that he decided he wouldn’t go to college and that the time was closer for his launch.

Now that Sexopolis is out there more and more he feels men watching over his shoulder. They’re always waiting for him. They want him, Mordecai Masturbov, to tell them how to get what they can’t get. In hundreds and soon thousands of letters they tell him they’re hanging on his every orgasm, his every quiver of pleasure in that wooden cock of his. We want to know! they say to him. Tell us more! I’ve somehow survived the world and I want to learn before it’s too late! Mordy’s wartime experiences had been more pacific. He’d been too young to serve so he doesn’t talk about it. Sexopolis is what he talks about. It’s his gift to my fellow returning warriors.

And so every month he writes editorials for my men. Hang on! Be patient! Believe! Read my magazine! Tell your friends to read my magazine! I will not desert you! You will not be lonely for much longer. Every month Sexopolis sells more copies and Mordy teaches them more acts to perform.

Now he has everything he dreamed of. And when you print 153 million copies a month worldwide, which he’ll be doing in not too many years, you should realize that you’ve touched a nerve.

At first it is mailed in brown paper envelopes. Then it brazenly dares to appear on newsstands. You can even open it up at newsstands and look at exposed female genitalia, staring right at you, and some men can actually get an erection standing at newsstands staring right back. That’s right: from coast to coast men browsing at newsstands can get erections staring right back.

Sexopolis will change the sexual mores of the heterosexual world. As Jinx had tipped him off, winning wars frees up a lot of fellows with a lot of time. At first various censorship restrictions and government edicts and religious denunciations will be troublesome, but they will drop by the wayside after (most often) being kicked in the balls by one Sam Sport with his young sidekick, Dereck Dumster. Heterosexual men who want to fuck are emerging as a powerful force for getting what they want, this sexual freedom to which Sexopolis is leading them. It will be harder and harder to argue with 153 million erections, worldwide, of course.

Block by block his grandfather and his father had bought up whole neighborhoods to become Washington’s biggest landholder. For now it’s all in trust until Abe dies, which he very well may do—Sexopolis may kill him. He’d thought that Doris’s house would do it. That his son Mordy is his mother’s son only adds to Abe’s heartbreak. Enough already, dear God, my no-longer friend.

MASTURBOV GARDENS

Masturbov Gardens is now twenty years old. The little bushes are now ugly trees, pissed on by too many dogs. Abe walks around it every day. Accountants and old ladies who check invoices and dun people for back payments look after the properties he owns. The trusted Nate Bulb rules their roost. Abe doesn’t much like Masturbov Gardens. It isn’t pretty. He owns an awful lot of pretty. But here there are no ghosts. This place is honest. He set out to build good value for good people, and he did. For him Masturbov Gardens is the most neutral place on earth, as safe as the cardigan sweater he never changes, once vaguely stained, now more visibly so, like the clothes of absentminded aging people.

Abe. Doris. Each becomes richer as the days pass. They talk to each other five times a day, like brother and sister, like best friends, like trusted advisers and confidants. She never relays the details of her activities because she knows they bother him. They do. He invests her money. From the amounts she gives him he knows more than he wants to know.

---

I was in Romania and Libya at the turn of the century. I was a big success. They were just such ugly and filthy places to live. I realized that America was the place to be. I would clean you out once and for all. I would make America even greater! Isn’t that what all your presidents are always promising? Out with the old filth! In with the new clean slate!

NAMING NAMES

They’re naming names, again. One has only to read the newspaper files of these days, or the many volumes written about Naming Names by such scholars of this act and era as Victor Navasky in his book of that very title, to comprehend the enormity of the bombs being hurled at the social fabric. Presumed Communists and homosexuals named publicly, out loud, are expelled from the once safe harbor offered by American democracy and its rights of privacy supposedly guaranteed by a Constitution and