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We met a week later at a Moroccan-themed bar. We sat in an alcove, downing gin and tonics and Vicodins that I had gotten from the gas-happy dentist. Her mom was from Kiev: I made her say ridiculous things in Ukrainian to me. We made out messily. I don’t remember if she came home with me.

She worked at a jealously regarded web company—this being the height of the cash-shitting internet boom—that would one day crash and dwindle to nothing, along with all the other jealously regarded web companies. I met her there to take her to dinner. She was glassy-eyed. She didn’t eat. I should have asked for a bump of her dope right there.

I had been in the band for seven years, and I had given up. I didn’t know yet that I could beat the stuff that was killing my heart. I listened to Stanley Ray, who shook me to my core with masterful strikes of passive-aggression when I made feeble efforts to convince him that I could leave—because I couldn’t just walk away from the band, I needed someone to tell me it was OK to do so. I believed the dudes in my band, who did all they could to keep me insecure. I believed my manager, who commissioned on gross, of course, and thus would make more money if we stayed together.

So I woke up one morning in 1999, and there were a few bags of dope left over from the night before. I said to myself: There’s no way off this despairing march. My promise to myself to keep the heroin use somewhat in control, because I wanted to protect my artistic faculties, had become laughable. Why? I was going to get high first thing this morning, and the next, and the next. I’ll stumble along, show up when they tell me to, sing when it’s time to sing. I’d eke out a mediocre existence. The very worst thing that could happen, death, seemed outlandish, but, were it to come, maybe wouldn’t actually be the worst thing at all.

When my flight back from Cambodia landed, I immediately convinced the girl with the unsingable name to call her heroin guy. We went back to my tiny place on Rivington Street, cut lines on a CD, and sniffed them. We lay in bed all night, listened to Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, and felt that spreading ease. “Must Jesus bear this cross alone?” they sang. “There’s a cross for everyone. I know there’s a cross for me.”

She bumbled out of bed in stark white morning light—I didn’t have curtains—and off to the lavish loft of that internet concern. She took a bag of dope. She told me later that she liked to do little bumps in the bathroom during the day, using a pen cap as a spoon.

I put on my t-shirt with the skull and crossbones and the admonishment to watch for land mines, and set up my video camera on its tripod. I then sniffed a line, and smoked some weed from the ceramic-skull pipe. The tape rolled as I nodded out in a chair.

One morning we woke up together, and were junkies, and she was in love with me. The first month of our three-sided love affair—me, heroin, and the girl with the unsingable name—was beautiful.

We kept listening to the Soul Stirrers. Redemptive songs: Jesus, the woman at the well, touching the hem of his garment, the river Jordan. In delirium, I began to think of myself as a Christian. Of course, I thought, anybody who says they believe in god is lying; but to profess a belief in god, to go through the motions, to be among other people who knew you knew that they knew that it was all a sham: there was redemptive power in this. I wrote “Help me, Jesus” on a Post-It and put it up over my stove.

I sniffed some dope before going to sleep, though I didn’t need any more to pass out—“You’re going to build up a tolerance,” the unsingable girl chided—but I wanted that soothing tingle as I drifted off. The moment before oblivion was the best part of life. The girl with the unsingable name had these tiny hairs on the back of her neck; I would spoon her, brush my lips back and forth across them, smell her smell, raise chill-bumps on her flesh. We stopped having sex—our intimacy was transmitted through the heroin and the hairs on her neck.