STORIES

I was driving home the other night, when the late Rose Laurens’ song “American Love” came on my Spotify playlist.  In that instant, I was transported back to a damp, cold, foggy, and rainy night in mid-1980s Paris.  All my memories became so vivid.

After supper at our favorite cheap but cheerful restaurant, Lenny and I went to a small club in the Marais.  We drank beer, peppermint schnapps, got a little crazy, danced for what seemed like hours.  I remember watching Carlos, the MTA booth guy from New Jersey, dancing and sweating, his tee-shirt off, his perfect body gyrating under the lights, seemingly not a care in the world.  It was a wonderful night, and this track seemed to get played over and over again.

But there is a sadness in the melody now.  It triggers a kind of inexplicable pain, a hopelessness and resignation to the ultimate end that awaited us. There is a poignancy in the lyric:

  And I know the way you go
  I will be cast away
  And I pray in my sorrow
  Will you come back and stay?
  American love

That particular night in this club was a cohort of American and English boys — many of whom we knew, including Lenny’s little brother Jeffrey — all of them in their early 20s, hopeful that time spent in Paris might mean they could have their lives ahead of them. Secretly, though, they knew there was no hope of this.  But they understood that their willingness to participate in early AZT drug trials may mean more understanding of the disease, the possibility of better treatment, or even one day a cure.

Lenny, Carlos, Jeffrey, Andrew, Eddie and many others who knew about the research into new HIV medications travelled across the world to France, away from everything they knew, and at a time when they were so vulnerable.  They are heros.  Knowing as we did that there was no cure, they pushed on regardless, being injected, prodded, biopsied, examined, humiliated, ostracized, hated and judged.  And within three years, they had all died.

Their extraordinary courage and willingness to participate in the first real HIV drug trials at the Pasteur Institute was critical in the development of the medications we now take for granted.

The toxicity of the experimental drugs was at times grotesque. I still have nightmares of Lenny heaving, crying and pouring sweat as his tolerance to new, different combinations and formulations lessened as his immune system continued to slowly break down.  Despite constantly trying to fight vile opportunistic infections, disfiguring viruses, and the general indignities such illnesses can bring, he never once expressed a willingness to pack in and go home to Miami.  He was 25, I was 23.

I loved that boy deeply, and to spend that time with him whilst his life ebbed away was a privilege.  And it is extraordinary how the power of a song can so brutally rip open your heart again, 33 years after he died.