LETTERS LETTERS letters MORE LETTERS
Fabio suggested gathering letters of support for the project. Well, I had worked at gathering support for TAKE A BITE OF THE APPLE several years earlier, and all I’d gathered had been letters of support and they hadn’t made a bit of difference—the project died after several thousand dollars and three years of work. It was to be a short animated film promoting literacy using a song I had written; people said that they liked the idea and the song, and wrote wonderful letters, but money never followed. What the hell, unless somebody puts it in writing, nobody is going to believe that so and so is behind you anyway,
I went after the King, Dr. Brinkhaus first. I wasn’t sure he would go for it, him being The King and all and me the kid from left field. I figured maybe he thought I was some famous documentary guy which would be as likely for him to know as most people knowing that he was a famous blood guy with a bunch of dogs. Luckily, Stephen the vampire Pemberton was in our corner. I called him frequently and he began working with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus on our letter of support. As pale and skinny as he was, working as an underling in the halls of research, the meals must have been appreciated. He didn’t look as though very many people bought him lunch. I kept expecting him to eat raw meat instead of veggie burgers.
The excursions into the bread-basket of North Carolina with BG continued. Dale and Paul were HIV negative. Craig Epsom-Nelms was so far out of the closet and working at ACE that it was his business for people to know that he had AIDS. He was on so many pills, he told me, that his daily ritual, morning and late afternoon, had become religious experiences of ingestion and libation. I had met three positives at the camp, the Earl, the Duke and the Roman, and had spotted SP8 imitating a turtle, but BG seemed to be holding back, checking me out, before she took me any deeper to see if I was really sincere about treating the hemophilia community objectively and with compassion.