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She was at my house days after I had broken up with someone, and I let her go down on me; I didn’t come, because I was so freaked out that I was getting sexually involved with somebody I should’ve been helping into the rooms.

Years later, she started going to meetings. She found a meeting she loved in which she was the lone girl among a bunch of elderly blue-collar dudes. A tattooed, quasi-porn goddess among these loving, funny, profane old men.

She married a guy, got pregnant, and moved to a farm. She put up pics on the site where her belly stretched the tattoos to comical shapes.

She had made an arrangement with a distinguished tattoo artist; she gave him the chopped-off finger in ajar, and he inked her for free. His shop looked like the interior of an H. R. Giger painting, grotesque organic forms covering the ceiling, but he was a rather aw-shucks kind of a guy.

He called and told me that a friend of his, another model from that site, was in and out of the rooms in Minneapolis, getting clean and then shooting dope again. She was a fan of mine. As it happened, I was off to Minneapolis to spend a month or so working on a recording.

So we met. She came to my hotel, after a job dancing for a bachelor party, and drove me to a meeting. She drove a sumptuous Jeep: dancing is lucrative, and, not incidentally, hard to walk away from.

She was fidgety. When she drove me home, she gave me a recovery book called Twenty-Four Hours a Day, in which she had written:

You have an amazing energy, and you’re a beautiful man with an amazing voice (I mean that in a few different respects). I hope you keep in touch, and I can call you a friend. Live in Love, Erika.

She texted me while I was in a cab in Brooklyn to tell me she had a crush on me. She said it obliquely, in such a way that I could simply choose not to answer. Which is what I did, just ignoring it, rather than saying: You’re beautiful, but I can’t get involved with you. Your feelings are, as should be expected, pretty wild at the moment: no drugs to regulate them. You don’t know their powers yet. I don’t want to mess up your recovery.

The next time I was in Minneapolis, she had relapsed, then come back, and had about a week clean. We went to a meeting, then she came back to my hotel room to watch TV. I let her talk her way up to my room. But I wasn’t going to try anything.

We lay on the bed watching The Wire.

“I’m going to cuddle you,” she said.

Okay, I said.

She lay at my side, with her head on my chest, that position that feels like she’s a battery and you’re the recharger.

I came back a month later and texted her. No response.

She’s relapsed again, I figured.

I left her a voice mail, saying nothing about it, just, Hi, I’m here. She could call if she wanted.

The hotel’s internet was malfunctioning. When it was back up, I logged on and found everybody she knew eulogizing her in the comments on her page. She had overdosed and died.

Her last blog was a day or two before her death. She described a dream in which she is running from something and comes to a house. She opens a sliding door to enter and suddenly realizes it is the house of somebody important to her. She finds him there, in a suit and tie, wearing a corsage. She leaves, running through the trees in the snow, and suddenly the guy’s there again, but there are two of him. They peel off in two directions, and she doesn’t know who to follow, so she follows neither.

I found out a few things about her after she passed. For one thing, she was married.

A year later, I texted her old number: I’m still thinking about you.

A text came back. Who is this?

I typed embarrassedly that I had the wrong number.

Are you sure? came the response.

Twenty Four Hours a Day is sitting in a pile of half read books by my bed. Sometimes I open it up to look at her handwriting.

That final blog is still there on her page.

I was stopped for speeding as I drove out of Athens, Georgia, on a local highway. One cop was missing half his teeth.