One was a happily married and internationally famous writer, the other a cool, funny hairdresser and ex-drug addict. Then a shock diagnosis pitched them into an intense love affair ...Sometime in the summer of 2017 I wrote in my journal, “Jesus fucking Christ, please save me.” I was trapped in hell, and I could see no way out. Our beautiful, sunny, two-bedroom penthouse apartment in the East Village – which I had rented for Rayya to make her happy in the last months of her life – had become a dungeon of misery, danger, degradation, drugs. Rayya kept the shades drawn at all hours of the day, not only because the light hurt her eyes but also because she had become intensely paranoid that she was being watched by the police, and that they were coming for her.And, to be honest, the police might very well have come for her (for both of us, actually), because our apartment now contained thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine – some of which Rayya was cooking down and shooting into whatever veins she could find upon her beaten-down, disease-ridden body, some of which she was freebasing, some of which she was snorting up her now constantly bloodied nose. But most of the coke, as of this moment, she had chopped up and laid out in thick rails on the coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray, a bottle of whiskey, several bottles of morphine and trazodone and Xanax, a stack of fentanyl patches and a cluster of empty beer bottles. And these heaping lines of cocaine she counted, weighed and studied all day long. Continue reading...