In the beginning I had asked some of my writer friends to come on the nights when Andrew was playing, but they found the music cold and repetitive; they preferred conversations in bars or living rooms. They didn’t stay out all night. They did not see the freedom I saw in music with few lyrics. I sensed their skepticism and their judgment of my

The door people, who were functionally anthropologists, had the task of maintaining the vibe while also keeping the club porous enough for the unexpected to happen.

Sometimes, when a psychedelic didn’t quite take hold, what I experienced instead was a deep misanthropy.

problem. I would be tasked with completing a particular assignment as a journalist, which demanded in the writing the adoption of a tone of authority and a focus on information. But in every journalistic assignment there would be a parallel experience, the real one, which would have been far easier to write about but useless for the task of

the hangover acted as a reducing valve that made it easier to focus and write. Occasionally blowing my mind with drugs had the consequence of focusing my thinking to a single channel instead of multiple ones, such that I could concentrate with rare intensity.

The two conflicts, the closing down the party when he went out and the generation of the black hole on nights when he stayed home, were in fact the same, and rooted in my hatred of being forgotten altogether, and of the way Andrew could simply turn me off in his mind when he needed to. I had no such ability. I was always aware of where he was in

But no, I hated the neighborhood. Smugness oozed from its leaves and blossoms. I would watch the privileged children of Park Slope walk to their segregated public school each morning with their BPA-free bento boxes packed with seaweed snacks and feel unreasonable disdain. Not that I was not part of this problem, whatever it was, the class politics

Afghanistan. Americans loved an act of cheap, self-congratulatory patriotism as a cover for a botched response, for systemic failure.

The confusing thing was that I liked that he was a stoner. I had an extant teenage fetish for skateboarders; I would be flooded with affection watching him sit in the windowsill, his deep inhales and slow exhales, the soft bubbling of the bong.