Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 1, 1991 TAG: 9103010098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"A little old lady walked right up to my car and spat on my windshield," Pratt said.
"My trailer has been ransacked. I've lost lots of friends."
He has lost some teeth, too. He's fought off shingles and swollen glands and night sweats.
Pratt has AIDS-related complex. He is 26 and he is most likely dying, though slowly.
James Adams is dying slowly, too. He is 59, and for 45 years, he says, he's been addicted to drugs - heroin and cocaine, mostly - and lived on the streets in Norfolk and in Newark, N.J. He lives in Roanoke now, and he's cleaning up his life and it is ending. Adams has AIDS-related complex.
Pratt, a native of Willis in Floyd County, is an Air Force veteran and divorced father of a son. He got AIDS through sex with a homosexual lover.
Adams changed his life last year when he tried, but failed, to end it with an overdose. He got AIDS from a dirty needle.
Pratt, who is white, grew up in rural Western Virginia.
Adams, who is black, grew up in urban New Jersey.
Different by age and race and circumstance, Pratt and Adams are now linked by AIDS. Both fight it.
Neither man is a fiery speaker, but stories like theirs need no embellishments.
On Wednesday, their oral, autobiographical essays riveted 80 eighth-graders at William Byrd Middle School in Roanoke County.
The kids asked: Why is there no cure? Aren't you afraid being out here with all these germs? How do other people treat you?
There was some, but not much, whispering or fidgeting, even in the back of the room where that sort of behavior is chronic among eighth-graders.
There was quiet. These were men with AIDS, or bound for AIDS, sitting at the front of the room, talking about dying and sex and drugs.
Pratt and Adams were there because a system worked properly.
Last year, at the same middle school health fair, Mike Long of Blacksburg was not permitted to speak to students. Long has AIDS. School administrators at William Byrd said they didn't know he was coming until hours before he was scheduled to speak. That wasn't enough time to advise parents, as is done, administrators said, with all outside speakers at the school.
Minutes before he planned to leave for the school, Long was told he was not invited. It was ugly and it hurt and the true losers weren't administrators or Mike Long. They were eighth-graders.
This year, parents were advised early. Eighty students signed up for the AIDS seminar, one of 11 topic choices. No parents yanked their kids. Only one topic - sports medicine - drew a larger audience.
Last year the AIDS seminar was botched - it ended up as a videotape of the U.S. surgeon general played on television - when adults skirmished.
This year, the AIDS seminar was a triumph.
Dawson Pratt and James Adams shared lessons that all eighth-graders ought to hear.
by CNB