He was half of one of the first openly gay couples in Chicago.

He might also now be HIV positive.

He first met Chris whilst buying a house – and although they got to know each other intimately, for such a long time they denied their feelings for each other for fear of retribution or knock-on effects within each other’s lines of work.

You see, the doctor is an internal medicine specialist, one of the leaders in his field in American medicine, and is based at the hospital that ER was said to have been based on. A compare healthcare website tells me he studied in Sweden and Sarajevo before coming to America.

Part of their attraction was that as they were talking on an informal date early on, they had both divulged that at school they wanted to be artists. It was a time for experimentation, and they wanted to try new things, so returned to their carefree high school days and decided to start sending out messages. It was so exciting, such a release from the daily humdrum of prescribing drugs or selling properties.

Chris got the idea travelling back from a trip to New York, where he’d got talking to a young guy from Liverpool, England, on an art school trip, whilst dining alone in the Hard Rock Cafe. He liked his ideas, and went back and shared them with the doctor over a romantic catch-up meal. He felt a little guilty as he fancied the English guy a bit but was more bothered about using the inspiration to start a new project. After all, it was a new millennium – and this idea of writing messages on dollar notes wasn’t entirely original but felt anew to them.

One of their five dollar bills, which simply said HAVE FAITH, was intercepted by me in Las Vegas, August 2001.

Their project gathered momentum the following month.

The doctor has always been a minimalist – he didn’t like to carry a wallet, instead, he carried any important documents in his Glasses case. Receipts, prescriptions, his and Chris’s calling cards, that sort of thing.

One day he was in a rush to make an appointment with a newly married couple, who were trying for a baby and were travelling and in town for a couple of days, for some reason he really wanted to help them, and anyway he dropped it crossing a road.

It was picked up by an English couple, who just knew it would be the perfect souvenir from their trip for their eccentric son who revelled in collecting this sort of thing. They retrieved it from a gutter, perhaps he’d been looking at the stars…

His confusion and upset at losing this glasses case only heightened his despair. He was already in trouble for prescribing the wrong medicines, and falsely claiming expenses, so he could have done without losing some of the receipts he lost that day.

As you can see from the above passport photo, which I found in London last year, a trip Chris brought him for a surprise anniversary holiday, the doctor was also awaiting routine HIV test results.

He and Chris don’t have much time for art projects right now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under UNLUCKY FOR SOME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.