ABSTRACT
Charles got sick at my house in 1986. I was elected by Charlie to provide unconditional support, and I tried my best to supply it. These days I have a young friend here in London, a theatre director, madly stage-struck, very like Charlie at the same age. He’s working on an unpublished Tennessee Williams play, the text of which Charlie had magically come up with. My English friend had read that Williams thought Roberta Flack the best singer of the seventies, but he’d never previously heard of her, let alone heard her voice. So I played him a few songs, including one that Charlie and I loved, in common with our entire pre-AIDS generation-the ‘Ballad Of The Sad Young Men’. Many of you will doubtless remember how this was invariably played as a late-night smooch-song in bars and clubs in London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, everywhere in the early and mid-seventies. Rickie Lee Jones does a heartbreaking version on her latest record, which Charlie played me last November. And we just clung together, and wept and wept for the sheer horror of all this. And trying not to hurt the catheter in his chest. How can we explain this? How do we carry on, with this endlessly accumulating immensity of loss, pressing us down and down and down?
