Brian Desatnik
I am so sorry to hear of Neil's passing. My condolences to the entire family. I have wanted to visit Neil for years now but have not made it out, being on the west coast. The last time I saw Neil was in the late 1980's when he was living in an apartment in Adams Morgan neighborhood in D.C. I flew out from Chicago to visit at that time.
Neil and I were shared a bedroom for four months in Avignon, France at the Peru family home while studying there (the middle window in the attached photo was our room) in the fall of 1983. We became quite close and spent almost all of our time there together. We went to movies, dinners clubs, and travelling together many weekends to other cities in Provence. We would often stay out at dance clubs all night and the take a morning train back to Avignon. We played on a French basketball team together, would get picked up at the Peru house every week and shuttled to games. For some reason they did not want to disclose that there were two Americans playing on their team so made each of us use an alias French name. Mine was Jean-Jacques but I cannot recall Neil's. In December, at the end of the semester, we travelled together to Paris and rented an apartment for a month on the Rive Gauche. We had a blast. I remember we went to midnight mass on New Years eve in Notre-Dame and then stayed up all night partying in the streets.
When I moved to Chicago in 1986, I remember Neil trying to teach me the tricks of being a waiter at a fine dining restaurant and then agreed to be a reference for me, even though I had never worked in a restaurant.
I am also attaching a photo that I took of Neil in Paris, 1983. Lots of good memories - I will never forget the time we spent together.
