Image: Author. The Apartment

Charles and Leonard

Sometime past, I think it was in January of that year, Leonard invited me to attend a concert at L’Olympia, Paris. He told me the name of the artist appearing. I was seventeen, the name he mentioned meant nothing to me.

I’d met Leonard almost a year earlier and we had become great friends, despite a near twenty-five years age difference, and even though him being a habitual user of drugs, he made damn sure I wasn’t going to go…