Ian saw what I was working on and asked if I was gay.
I explained: no, gay bestsellers, real market, the writing is the point not the subject. He thought about it for a second and said he was down to do a book together. This was how Ian operated — no hesitation once the logic landed, immediate yes to anything that pushed somewhere interesting.
A few weeks later he overdosed.
So I wrote it anyway. Used his real name. Used mine. He would have loved that I did — the bastard move of writing the book he agreed to do without him, for him, knowing he'd find it hilarious and correct from wherever he went.
That's Hardcore Grief.
What the Book Is
Every chapter Ian tries to die. Every chapter I try to save him and fail. Then the chapter ends and we start again.
Like the Simpsons — episodic, each one its own death game, nothing fully resolved, the situation fundamentally permanent. Except it's not a cartoon and the OD at the end of the run was real and I couldn't go to the funeral. Couldn't do anything. Just sat with the fact of it until I could move again.
The structure is not accidental. Ian genuinely liked to toy with life and death. Not as a death wish — as a personality. An ancient poet who lived his words by example. The adrenaline, the extreme shit, the testing of limits — that was not self-destruction dressed up as adventure. That was a man who wanted to know where the edge was and kept finding out. His stories were up there with the Vietnam veterans and the Iraq war roommate and the dominatrixes. The real thing. Pure truth, or pure dope in that case, NYC style.
People said he wasted his life. They were wrong. He lived it at a velocity most people don't reach and would not survive if they tried.
The book is not a warning. It is not a cautionary tale. It is not anti-drug in the way that genre usually means anti-drug. It is a portrait of a true rebel — kind, funny, extreme, sweet to animals, loyal to the people he loved — written by someone who accepted him completely and who he accepted completely in return. Forty-three years of friendship. Forty-seven years I'm alive now. Best friends since before either of us knew what we were doing.
The Neighborhood That No Longer Exists
We grew up in a place that is gone.
Hardcore junkies. Mafia. Cops. Surfers. Bar owners. Blue collar all the way down. The kind of neighborhood where the Vietnam vets were your neighbors and the heroin was the Vietnam war's longest-running aftereffect and nobody called any of it by its clinical name because nobody had the vocabulary yet and the city was too busy surviving to stop and categorize.
That place is expensive now. Rich. Unrecognizable. The people are gone, the buildings are renovated, the price per square foot is the only thing that remembers nothing of what was there. That happens to a lot of neighborhoods and a lot of childhoods and a lot of people's pasts. The erasure is total and it is ordinary and it still feels like something was stolen.
