You were born in West Virginia in 1974. I was born in Virginia in 1983. I grew up in suburban Central Florida. You went to college in New Orleans, earning a degree in philosophy. We both moved to New York City in 2001.
In 2005, around when I graduated from New York University with a journalism degree, I saw an advertisement in the Paris Review for a new literary magazine. The ad said ‘submit’ in large lowercase font; in place of the letter i was a drawing of the backside of a naked, obese man wielding a sword.
I sent a short story with a very long title to [email protected] and asked where I could get more information on your magazine. Someone, probably you, replied, ‘The New York Tyrant is a brand spanking new strictly short-fiction publication that will publish issues quarterly which will be beautiful books on the inside and out.’
Seven months later, I got an email that said, ‘The Tyrant thanks you for the opportunity to consider ‘Cull the Steel Heart . . .’ After due consideration, however, we have come to the unfortunate conclusion that your story is not a good fit for our publication. Rejection is never a happy occasion, but rest assured that the anger and disappointment now stirring deep within your heart will only lead to greater things. Again, many thanks.’ Signed, ‘The Editors’.
‘I hate you,’ I replied. ‘No, just kidding. Thanks for the note.’ I submitted another story, then withdrew it when it was accepted elsewhere. ‘Damn,’ someone replied. ‘This is a good fucking story. Have anything else?’ I submitted another and withdrew it a month later and got this response: ‘Damn it, man. Give us a fucking chance.’
‘Dear Tao,’ you emailed me two weeks later. ‘Was at KGB the other night but had to leave before you read. Sorry I missed it. Look, we are already collecting for the second issue. If you have anything, send it our way. I promise I will read it as soon as it arrives. Your first two submissions got yanked so fast, we couldn’t do anything for you. But we love your shit, so please resubmit. Yours, GianCarlo.’
I submitted a story and withdrew it a week later. Three months later, I sent a fifth story, which elicited no response, and six months after that I emailed you a sixth story, which you rejected eight months later, in June 2007: ‘Hello. We’re gonna pass on this one, though. Thanks though.’ You signed the email ‘Giancarlo’ and didn’t ask me to submit again.
In 2009, you founded Tyrant Books to publish a novella by Brian Evenson, who’d sent you his book after getting two emails in a row from people surnamed Brown – one from your editorial assistant, soliciting Evenson’s work for your magazine – while working at Brown University. Brown, Brown, Brown – ‘I act on things like that,’ said Evenson in an interview.
Like Evenson, you paid attention to what you called ‘things that appear in strange ways’. The name New York Tyrant had come to you in a dream, and you later noticed, and explained in an interview, that ‘the letters TRN found in the word TyRaNt, can also be found in that order in my last name diTRapaNo’.
Evenson’s novella was published in November. In December, you emailed me to say you’d started writing for Vice. You asked for a review copy of my first (and to this day only) novella, which had come out in September. The email was signed ‘Gian’.
The next July, on my birthday, you emailed me, ‘Happy Birthday, Tao. I won’t say to have a great day, because that’s so hard sometimes. So have a good day.’
I thanked you, and you asked if I knew a doctor who’d prescribe Adderall, which you’d noticed me mentioning online. I gave you my phone number. We began texting.
We met in person four weeks later, briefly, outside New York University’s Bobst Library, where I worked on my writing every day. I traded you Adderall for Percocet.
‘How many of these should I take?’ you texted me after.
‘I’m good with half of one but I weigh 125 so maybe just one whole one,’ I replied, back in the library, seated at a computer. ‘Open it and pour the little balls into your mouth.’
‘Ooh fun. Thanks, Tao.’
The next night, we met at an in-progress reading in a dark room above a bar. I sat in the back, at a low table, across from you. You slid your phone across the table.
‘hi tao,’ you’d typed. I typed a reply, then slid the phone back. ‘sip’ you saw. I’d mistyped ‘sup’, or it had been autocorrected.
I don’t remember what we did that night, but the next day you texted me, ‘It was great hanging out with you last night. Still can’t believe I lost those fucking pills.’
‘I had fun. We should do it again some time. Thanks again for the oxy,’ I texted about the semi-synthetic opioid you’d given me.
‘sip,’ you texted.
‘Heh,’ I texted.
A week later, you emailed me instructions on how to get painkillers from a Dr Zhao in Chinatown: ‘Go in and be like, “I got in a car crash when I was thirteen and I have back pains. I need a prescription of oxys (if you ask for oxys). It’s what I take and I’ve just moved to town.”’
There were nine more sentences, then: ‘Anyway, good luck. This is like Lord of the Rings. I’m like a troll leading you to the gold. (Oh yeah, this troll charges a finders fee of five pills from your first prescription.)’
When I went, I was told that Dr Zhao wasn’t accepting new patients. I bought three coconuts, drank their water, and returned to the library.
In mid-August, we met at Bar 2A in the East Village. You gave me five oxycodone tablets you’d bought from your dealer for me, and I gave you a hundred dollars.
Walking back to the library, I felt a pang of disappointment when I looked at the drugs. I texted you, ‘Hey. 4 of these are blue with cursive Vs on them.’ You replied, ‘I know. They look different but they are all oxy 30s. Trust.’ And I trusted you again.
Late in August, I texted you asking how you were doing.
‘Good, I guess,’ you replied. ‘I’m always bored. Even with drugs.’
‘Damn. Do you have an LSD contact? That might help (also if you do I’m “in the market” for some, hehe).’
‘No, but I can ask around. I love it if it’s pure LSD-25. Might know someone with mushrooms.’
In September, Vice published your review of my second novel. The review, titled ‘I Like Tao Lin Now’, began:
I never fucking liked Tao Lin. I’d probably have liked his books more, given them their fighting chance, if he and his books hadn’t been constantly shoved down my throat every day of the week for the past few years. Shit gets old, quick.
The anti-me rant continued for nineteen sentences, then: ‘But something must have happened to me, or to Tao Lin, or to the both of us, because I’ve been swayed. I kind of fucking love this guy now.’
We were texting regularly by then, mostly about drugs. It was 2010. I’d started using recreational pharmaceutical drugs the year before, mostly out of curiosity and boredom. They fascinated, excited and comforted me, allowing me to become a dramatically different person – cheerful, calm, uninhibited, unworried, social – for hours at a time.
I don’t know why or when your drug use began. Your cluster headaches, which started when you were sixteen, were probably a large factor. ‘In efforts to deal with this pain, I’ve orally ingested, injected, snorted and/or smoked oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl, Demerol, Dilaudid, cocaine, heroin, codeine, morphine and more, all to no avail,’ you would write in a 2016 article on the excruciating condition, which annually ‘shut down’ your life for periods of one to six months.
You introduced me to MDMA and your drug dealer. We helped each other relieve boredom. In text messages and emails, I asked you questions like, ‘Any parties or want to sell oxys to me?’ and ‘Any chance of me getting more MDMA tonight?’ and ‘Want to trade me mushroom for addy?’ You asked me questions like, ‘Where can I charge my iPhone in Soho?’ and ‘I have some oxies. Wanna buy?’ and ‘Know of any parties tonight?’ We discussed masturbation:
Me: In a hotel in rural Georgia. About to chug an energy drink and ‘jack off’.
You: lol. Does the energy drink increase the pleasure of the jack sesh? I never tried. Adderall makes me beat off like a madman.
Me: It does, I feel. More blood flow. Addy actually makes me hornier but harder to get/remain hard.
You: Yeah, same with coke. But that doesn’t stop me. I’ll pull on it either way. Like a madman.
Me: Me too. Me too . . .
We saw each other irregularly, at literary events, parties and small gatherings. You always looked deeply stoned, with heavy eyelids and a placid, dispassionate gaze. Sometimes you smiled and grinned a lot; other times you seemed somewhat depressed. Like me, you were shyer in person than online. We were both early, prolific, gleeful, brash tweeters.
In February 2011, you texted me, ‘I love you. Happy Valentine’s Day to you and Megan!’ Then, ‘Don’t know why I said I love you. I do, but like I’m kind of fucked up.’ Two weeks later, I texted you, ‘Felt an urge to txt you “I love you” & on only little Xanax and Vyvanse,’ and you replied, ‘I love you same.’
We had many ideas – some materialized, others were jokes. Drug corporations, we mused, should sponsor the literary world – PEN/Oxy Award, National Xanax Book Prize. You said Vice TV should send us to South America to drink ayahuasca. I published a selection of your tweets in my online magazine. On 24 June, you emailed me, ‘I was scrolling through the last year of our drug-addled text messages. Some funny stuff in there. Could be an “epic” Vice post someday.’
I said our texts were positive and considerate. You said we were ‘really polite and nice’. I said someone could ‘build a sitcom’ out of our messages. You said, ‘The dialogue is perfect because it’s actually real.’ You typed our text messages into a document, and I created a photo collage of us looking at our phones.
On 1 July, Vice published our text messages from July 2010 to June 2011, which you titled ‘Andrew: a Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kindness’ after (1) our dealer and (2) the main topic and tone, you felt, of our messages. (After you died in 2021, I learned that some-to-many of your friendships had featured taunting and insults; we never had that; we only ever praised and defended each other.)
I felt compelled to publish our potentially worrying, arguably unseemly texts, in which we discussed buying, selling, trading and using a broad assortment of illegal drugs, because I had no family in the US besides my brother, with whom I wasn’t close; because I also wasn’t close to my parents, who lived in Taiwan; and because I delighted and specialized, as an openly autobiographical writer, in creating art from life.
As an independent publisher, freelance journalist, and occasional, intimate memoirist, you also didn’t feel the need to censor yourself, and for whatever reason, or reasons, you seemed unconcerned with your family learning about your drug-heavy lifestyle. ‘I like my life to be an open book,’ you would say in a 2016 interview. Asked in a different interview if you’d ever write a novel, you said, ‘I feel like my life is my book.’
In January 2012, you texted me saying your new dealer had asked you about books. I joked that he wanted to be in our next ‘year of texts’, and you said, ‘Lol totally. He wants the fame. He’s tired of living a life of drug world anonymity.’
‘We should start our own drug dealing thing next year,’ I said.
‘Publish books from profits, like lit gangsters, would be fucking chill.’
‘Get writing residencies at Yaddo and use the time to figure out how to make our own MDMA.’
‘Show up to Yaddo with a truckload of chemicals and hazmat suits.’
‘We’ll need our food delivered once a day, and no interruptions please.’
In March, you texted me: ‘We need to hang more. I feel like you’re like my best friend but I never see you URL / irl / I never see you URL lol.’
‘Lol’d and tasted metal in my mouth,’ I replied. I’d been spending most of my time alone, working on my third novel.
In June, you emailed me:
Supposed to fly to Italy tomorrow to see my dad because he’s sick but am in the middle of a cluster headache season so I could get into trouble over there without my neurologist. I ‘loaded up’ on 41,500 of Imitrex shots and Stadol (nasal spray morphine, will save some to ‘party’ with you) yesterday to try and deal with them myself over there. I feel like my affection for painkillers is like my subconscious making up for all the pain of 20 years of these damned headaches.
Two weeks later, back in New York City, you said in an email, ‘Went and got more nerve blockers injected into my head yesterday so I have been headache-free for like 20 hours now. Seems like a long time.’ I said time had started ‘moving way faster’ for me. I asked if you’d experienced something similar, and you said:
Yes, in my late twenties is when it really started flying. A year is like nothing now. It used to seem like a lifetime. Also, there was like a four-year period where I did nothing but party and I don’t remember anything from that time. Maybe a couple of monumental moments, but mostly a blur of watching the sunrise every morning. I don’t mind time flying though. I feel like I’ve done everything I want to do in life. Now I’m just like waiting for disease or tragedy. I don’t know. Life is nice sometimes, but it mostly seems annoying/ridiculous.
You hadn’t had alcohol in two months because it triggered headaches. You’d been taking Suboxone, a drug used for treating opiate addiction. ‘I can like get work done, feel good, sleep good, and I haven’t been depressed or anything,’ you said, adding, later in the email, ‘Oh yeah, I smoke weed all day, every day, but I have done that my entire life it seems,’ which I hadn’t known. We’d never discussed cannabis, which in 2012 I didn’t yet particularly enjoy.
In July, on my twenty-ninth birthday, you sent me a song you’d composed on your piano. ‘I taught myself like three years ago,’ you said. ‘I have hundreds of songs. Can’t read music, don’t even know the names of keys.’ In another email, you said, ‘I have to record them to remember them. Otherwise they disappear.’
You sent me another song, and I said it sounded like the soundtrack to Gattaca, one of my favorite movies – in which a sickly, determined man overcomes expectations to achieve his dreams – and you said, ‘I fucking love that movie.’
At a bar later that month – soon after Vice published a second year of our texts, including the text where you said you felt like I was your best friend – you introduced me to a man I’d never met or heard of before. I remember him and/or you seeming kind of sheepish as one of you said he was your best friend.
Discussing the Vice post by email, you said, ‘Would be sweet if one of us died and then the one remaining (hopefully you) would just do one of lonely unreplied-to texts to no one,’ regarding a potential future post of a third year of texts.
I said the last text would be ‘are you there?’ and that if we both died the post could have an epilogue of texts by two other people, saying ‘did u hear gian and tao both died?’ and ‘yeah lol’.
‘yeah lol,’ you said. ‘laughing.’
One reason we got along so well, you would explain in a 2013 interview, was because we shared ‘a humorous and enjoyable nonchalance regarding “overdoing it” and our possible deaths’. Other reasons: We strove to be ‘open books’, valued novelty and eccentricity, felt a kinship with emotionally troubled outsiders, and were captivated by drugs and literature, braiding them and centering them in our lives.
Besides texting each other around a thousand times in 2011, 2012, and 2013, we also emailed each other that many times during those three years (when our communications plateaued), usually about writing-related matters (we wrote for the same magazines, both ran small presses, and published some of the same writers), but also about other things.
I sent you a mattress recommendation. You sent me a link to a fully head-enclosing pillow. I sent you comically bleak drug-related excerpts from a John Cheever biography. You sent me a video of a person smoking Salvia divinorum. I sent you a song titled ‘Kids of the K-Hole’. You sent me an audio file – ‘ketamine concerto’ – of you playing your piano in your apartment on ketamine.
You again invited me to submit work to your magazine, which you were considering ending – it was a ‘moneysuck’ that no longer ‘excited’ you – to focus on publishing books. You’d published four by then – a novella, a book of drawings, two novels. I submitted an excerpt of my third novel – my seventh submission – and you published it in the tenth and last issue of New York Tyrant.
You told me about your skin. ‘I suffered from horrible, grotesque, not-ever-wanting-to-leave-the-house-and-see-anyone acne all through high school and some of college and afterward.’ I said your skin looked ‘great’ now, and you thanked me. ‘I could have turned out a lot worse, like deep ass scars and shit,’ you said. ‘I took Accutane twice. It’s like this hardcore acne medicine that apparently causes suicides. But I think all of the suicides were caused from the acne. Whenever I see someone young with terrible acne, I kind of pray for them.’
In October, I said I was worried because I kept extending an in-progress drug-binge, and you said, ‘I get in that postponing the end of binges too. Man, I think I’m really fucked up maybe. Whenever I like don’t do painkillers for more than a week I have these vomiting attacks. And only eating painkillers helps me feel better. It’s like not even my mind but my body that keeps “forcing” me to do drugs. I think I’ve ruined my stomach with drugs. Oh well. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
Hurricane Sandy – the largest Atlantic hurricane ever measured and second to hit the city in as many years – arrived a week later, resulting in widespread blackouts, thousands of downed trees, scattered looting and other chaos. Combined with a global doomsday meme that claimed the world would transform or end in December, the natural disaster encouraged me and you and our friends to use even more drugs, including one night at your Hell’s Kitchen apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. This was the only time I went into your home. It was low-lit and cramped.
Two weeks later, in mid-November, you came to my place in Kips Bay on the East Side to interview me in anticipation of my third novel. We talked from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m., seated on my bed with ‘a small party going on in the other corner of the room’, you wrote in your introduction to our conversation, which Vice published after we edited it down to half the length.
In a deleted section, you said the characters in my second novel seemed to make fun of ‘obese people’. You asked if I thought the obese people who’d read my book would be hurt by this. I said I hoped not. I tried to explain that the characters actually empathized with overweight – and other marginalized – people, identifying with their suffering and underdog status, and you seemed to express something similar, saying:
I don’t know, I feel like a lot of my attraction towards like fat guys or whatever comes from some kind of sympathy. Like I feel bad how they’ve been treated all their lives and like it’s, to be honest, sometimes I feel like that’s something . . . and then I think that there are other people that have been treated bad for other reasons and I’m not attracted to them at all so . . . I feel like there’s some kind of endearing quality in the fact that they’ve put up with a lot of shit for their entire lives and for some reason that makes me love them or something. I don’t know. It’s really weird that it manifests itself through sex.
In a 2010 essay about A Confederacy of Dunces, which your dad gave you when you were twenty-one, you’d written that you ‘fell hard’ for the novel’s protagonist, Ignatius, a ‘waddling, unkempt mammoth toddler’. You wrote, ‘Until then, I’d always thought of myself as straight. I walked straight and I talked straight. I dated girls, I slept with girls, when I jacked off, I jacked off to girls.’
You quoted a scene in which Ignatius masturbates in his room, climaxing after his childhood dog appears unbidden in his mind, jumping over a fence, chasing a stick. ‘This is the page where I went fag,’ you wrote. ‘The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off – on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual.’
Your mom hadn’t believed you when you told her you were gay. She ‘came around’, but at first ‘it blew her mind, and she was kind of not into it’, you said on a podcast. Your dad, who was ‘more worldly’, a fan of Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal, was supportive from the start. In multiple interviews, you praised your parents; like mine, they gave you the freedom to pursue what you wanted to do with
your life.
You gifted me an action figure of a masked, big-bellied man in a yellow jumpsuit, who probably represented you, I realized two years after you died, when I saw a drawing of it on your Instagram with the caption ‘Me irl’. I sent you a link to my favorite song by Swearin’, titled ‘Fat Chance’, and said it made me feel ‘deep empathy’, and you said, ‘what a great song. there should be like a fat music genre.’
In December, I reached a low point with my pharmaceutical drug addiction, which continued for another half-year, until the summer of 2013, when I finally began, with the help of psilocybin mushrooms and the persuasively optimistic ideas of psychedelics-promoter Terence McKenna, to effectively wean myself off pills and powders, replacing them with cannabis and psychedelics.
You got my new interests. You smoked weed as assiduously as McKenna had, and you dearly prized psychedelics, specifically 5-MeO-DALT and psilocybin, for ending your cluster headaches, which are also called ‘suicide headaches’, that year – ‘nothing has provided me with even a 100th of the relief that psychedelics have’, you’d write in your 2016 article, which ended, ‘I’ve now been pain-free for three years. Unless you suffer yourself, you have no idea just how beautiful that actually is.’
In early August 2013, seated on my bed peaking on psilocybin at around 3 a.m., I sobbed from joy and gratitude that I finally felt empowered enough to begin to end my pill addiction. I’d wanted to do this for more than two years by then, but had lacked the determination.
A little later in the trip, I texted you, saying that an alien was ‘in me’, using my body to learn about ‘this thing we’ve got set up: family’. You replied, ‘You don’t think they have families?’ I laughed and called you; this was probably the only time we talked on the phone.
Years later, while writing about this in my non-fiction book on psychedelics, I asked you about the call, and you said:
I can remember saying, ‘Don’t forget that you’re on drugs so whatever is happening will wear off once the drugs do. Just don’t forget that you’re fucked up at the moment.’ I think we were laughing? You also said you thought I was controlling you but I convinced you that I was, in fact, not controlling you. You might have said something about my voice being soothing. I was a little worried at first but after talking to you for a bit, I knew you’d be fine. I was doing shrooms like every day for my clusters during that period so felt like I could kind of understand the trip you were having.
In late August, I emailed you praising your profile of Junot Díaz in Playboy. You said your dad had read it and emailed you, ‘I am so proud of you I am about to burst. I’m telling all of my friends about my brilliant son.’ You said, ‘He’s never really complimented me before, or said he was proud. The email made me instantly cry. But like a joy cry.’
That fall, isolating myself in my apartment, I used large amounts of cannabis to buffer the dysphoria and other withdrawal symptoms – which would continue for many more months – from ending four years of amphetamines, benzodiazepines and opiates. I distanced myself from most of my friends, who remained mired in pills and bleak worldviews, but we continued talking, in part because of our new shared interests in Terence McKenna and psychedelics.
In March 2014, you encouraged me to pitch a column on McKenna to our editor at Vice. After I emailed our editor, outlining a potential weekly column, I emailed you, thanking you for your encouragement, and you said, ‘It was an encouragement of a selfish nature because I want to read that shit.’
One day, I emailed you, ‘i can hear so much shit going on in apartments around mine when i’m very stoned. i hear someone talking to his dog and i’ve never heard anyone talking to their dog and i like never hear a dog. i hear like 5 dogs right now.’ I lived in a six-story building, two and a half blocks west of the East River, a 45-minute cross-town walk from your place, two and a half blocks east of the Hudson River. You replied:
lol. It’s weird that in my building i sometimes feel like I can hear nothing from my neighbors and then other times, I can hear all kinds of shit. Like the guy upstairs with the piano who I started hearing play the songs I write and play on my piano. Like he heard me and then learned them and played them and I could hear it. Sometimes we would play at the same time and kind of play to each other I felt. Like I would play some, then he would as a kind of response.
In April, we discussed our ethnic and sexual identities. ‘I wish Asians did more for me, they don’t do shit for me,’ I said wryly. ‘Totally,’ you said:
I wish gays did more for me. I feel like I don’t reap enough minority benefits from being gay. Maybe if I added it to my twitter bio. But I guess if anyone ever attacks me (in writing or irl) I can always say that they are a homophobe or scream ‘I’m being hatecrimed!!’ Really need to exploit this minority position in society. Gays just don’t like me, I think. I only have one gay friend (Mark Doten) and the gay community has always treated me weirdly. Like just because I have none of the stereotypes, they don’t feel like I am truly ‘one of them’ but I guess they are right. I don’t feel like one of them.
(On a podcast, you said people never thought you were gay and that you couldn’t ‘act stereotypically gay’ even if you tried.)
I replied, ‘Felt strong connection with you on this, replacing gay with Asian.’ Other East Asian Americans seemed to readily gather into friend groups, but not me. I tended to drift away from groups, toward other alienated individuals.
‘i’m extremely stoned,’ I emailed you in May. ‘i just started daydreaming and thinking of how productive we’re being during these past few years and how it’ll be interesting to look back on things in like 10 years, in terms of literature. made it feel fun to keep going and see what happens,’ and you replied, ‘Totally totally totally, all counts.’
‘dude,’ you emailed me in June. ‘I did some h last night and I fell asleep standing up in my bathroom for 4 hours.’ You seem to have snorted or ingested heroin irregularly, not addictively; once, in 2012, when I said I was buying some heroin, you said you hadn’t done it in years. ‘I slept, standing straight up, for four fucking hours. I woke up mid fall face first into shower curtain and bathtub. Wish I could have that on video somehow.’
Eleven months later, in May 2015, you said you’d been eating ‘a large nibble’ of psilocybin mushroom every four days:
I felt my headaches coming on twice this year and so ate like half a dose you would take to trip and it clears my head up and the headaches don’t start. It’s so amazing. It’s like the only thing in life that I feel like being political or an activist for. Gonna freakin’ march on Washington or some shit lol.
You sent me a link to our second year of text messages, from June 2011 to July 2012, and said, ‘rereading this, dying laughing. feel like it didn’t get the accolades it deserved.’ I liked that you revisited our projects, folding time over itself, stretching it, slowing it. Once, you sent me our Vice conversation and said, ‘Just did some coke and am drinking beers to sleep and looking at old shit that makes me smile.’
That December, while visiting my parents in Taipei, I updated you on my evolving drug use – ‘Been alternating days of weed capsules and days of LSD while in Taiwan.’
‘Nice weed and LSD cocktail,’ you said. ‘Should be good. Seems I am inundated with powders here in the city. There is always some kind of powder around to sniff.’
You were going to Italy in two weeks. ‘When I was just there, I think I fell in love,’ you said. ‘I mean, I did fall in love, but I can’t tell if it was just for four days or if it is still happening to me. I’m totally sabotaging every aspect of my entire life lol.’
Your Italian grandfather emigrated to the US in the early 1900s. My Taiwanese parents arrived in the 1970s. You were the youngest of five kids. I was the youngest of two. Growing up, we spent summers in our ancestral homelands.
‘Falling in love, that seems good,’ I said. ‘There are pros and cons. I would say more pros. Who is the person?’
‘This guy I met in a train station in Campoleone, IT. Soon as we met he took me to have dinner at his mom’s lol. Going back on the 30th. We’ll see. I could just be being retarded. I feel like I’m halfway creating all this in my head. Oh well.’
A month later, in January 2016, you said, ‘Went back to Italy and I am in love. Breaking up with Chris and moving to Italy in April to live with this guy. Crazy.’ In an interview that year, you said you felt healthier, happier and ‘more at home’ in Italy. In the same interview, you said, ‘I used to do a ton of drugs and I’ve never been ashamed of it or tried to hide it or anything. I love getting high.’
I also wanted to leave New York City, where I increasingly felt beleaguered and nature-deprived, but I stayed to write the first draft of my psychedelics book – an expansion of my McKenna column – and because in fall 2017 I also fell in love.
In March 2018, you emailed me, ‘remember the doctor i went to and tried to get him to see you?’ about Dr Zhao with a link to an article titled ‘Doctor made 41M selling Xanax before bust: cops’.
You invited me to Italy, where you and your new husband lived in an apartment in the center of Rome. You’d started a writers’ workshop called Mors Tua Vita Mea (‘Your Death, My Life’) at a family villa in Sezze – your husband was its chef and tour guide – while continuing to publish books, increasing from two a year in recent years to three that year.
That August, you moved to the countryside in Naples and I finally left New York City, living in rural New Jersey and then upstate New York. My girlfriend visited from Manhattan on weekends. In November 2019, I visited my parents in Taiwan for six weeks, after which I went to Honolulu, Hawaii, to house-sit for my mom’s friend.
Three months later, in March 2020, when lockdowns began in the US, Italy and elsewhere, I was still in Hawaii, on the island of O‘ahu. I’d decided by then to stay in Hawaii. One night, alone in an Airbnb, I messaged you on Twitter (I’d replaced my smartphone with a flip phone and stopped texting) a link to a book titled SIP and said, ‘It’s our book.’
‘lmao NICE,’ you replied. It was 29 March in Hawaii, but in New York the date was 30 March, exactly one year before your death. ‘Chapter One’, you wrote:
The event was crowded, but at least he had drugs. ‘I’ll never find a place to sit to listen to this boring shit,’ Tao thought just as he saw someone stand from their seat and walk towards the bar. He scurried over to the bench and sat down, filled with the small joy of not having to stand for an hour. Tao was blankly staring at the glass table at his knees when a cell phone appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the table before him. The screen was illuminated and open to the Notes app. One word, three letters: sip. What could it mean?
In my memory of that night ten years earlier, in 2010, it was me who had typed ‘sip’, but now, after reading your message, I wasn’t sure. I replied:
Gian made his way to the back of the reading, choosing a seat at a table where he couldn’t see the readers and wasn’t facing the stage. He noticed a small Asian person sit down across from him. It was that annoying Chinese-looking kid who was always promoting his books online.
You replied:
Tao looked up from the phone and across the table. Smiling, and obviously on opiates by the look of his eyelids, sat this guy named Gian who had just written a Vice piece about me. It was called ‘I like Tao Lin Now’. This confuses Tao. Why didn’t Gian like him before? What has he done to him? But Gian had confessed his new feelings in the article and the love in the article dominated anything between them in the past.
By April, you’d ‘gotten used to’ the lockdown:
it’s kinda how i lived before anyway. i’ve always worked from home. sucks though because we can’t even go for walks or leave the house for anything except grocer and pharmacy. and been running for past few months but can’t now. it was so hard to get into i’m afraid i won’t be able to pick it up again.
On 1 July, you said, ‘man it was 3 months here in the country, only leaving for the grocery store. now it’s all back to normal.’ You’d been swimming fifty laps a day in a pool. ‘i love it,’ you said. ‘i feel like i’m never gonna see people from america again,’ you said. ‘kind of scary. what a whack-ass year.’
I said I’d been swimming too, in the ocean, and that my girlfriend, free now to work remotely, was joining me in Hawaii soon. Many people had left New York City, which was ghost-town-like after months of protests, riots, fires, looting and closed businesses.
In January 2021, my girlfriend and I moved from the North Shore of O‘ahu to the east side of the Big Island. While listening to a new interview with you one day, I messaged you, ‘Liking your talk with Sean a lot. Making me miss you and also want to write.’
A week later, we discussed an idea you had for an anthology featuring the same short story edited by many different editors. We worked on a list of editors to include. We brainstormed which story to use. You said I should publish it. I said you should.
We discussed other things, then you said:
dude / i tripped my balls off last night / such a long story / but i thought i was god’s angel here to do his work / and had all the power in the world / so wild / i called my brother and sister and freaked them out / i was just medicating for my clusters and went too far lol / but so beautiful / the most beautiful experience i’ve had in my life / i was convinced i would be king of Italy lmao / feel so happy today.
Two days later, seemingly out of nowhere, you said, ‘wild to think where we were 8 years ago.’
‘yes,’ I said. ‘2013. damn.’ The year we were closest to each other. The year psychedelics helped to end my pill addiction and your cluster headaches.
‘lmao,’ you said, ‘i was a freakin mess / “gian r u there” “the aliens” “they’re interested in this thing we have” “family” / i owe you for getting me to this place where i finally feel happy and enjoy life.’
‘lol, forgot the aliens texts, and calling you,’ I replied. ‘your voice was coming out of my head, or from in my head, it seemed. was so sweet / nice, glad you feel that way. i owe you for getting me into and out of whatever happened i think.’
‘lmaooooo / we owe each other. nice.’ We seem to have followed each other deeper into and then gradually out of our unsustainable lives in New York City.
You asked if I had WhatsApp or Signal. ‘wanna tell you about something like just in texts or whatever but i don’t think i have your number or even if you use a phone anymore.’
I didn’t have either app. I gave you my Google Voice number, which accepted texts. I don’t know what you wanted to tell me – you never texted – but maybe it was about your new press.
Ten days later, on 1 February, you tweeted, ‘I’m launching another press soon. Please stand by . . .’ with two images of the logo for the press, which was called DiTrapano.
‘sweet logo and name,’ I messaged you. The logo was a drawing of your Twitter profile pic – a car whose entire top half was on fire.
‘thanks man. it’s gonna be huge launch. honor sean molly brodak gabriel.’
‘excited.’
‘me too like tons. dreamt you said it wasn’t good.’
‘damn.’ That was our last communication.
On 31 March, while visiting the west side of the Big Island, I learned from a mutual writer friend that you’d been found dead in a hotel in Manhattan, which you were visiting to have meetings for your new press.
A bad batch of heroin was going around New York City and multiple people had died, according to the writer friend. A different mutual friend, who seemed to have some knowledge of the toxicology report, blamed the combination of ketamine and cocaine.
One of the last people you talked to was a mutual friend who was a chemist. On his podcast, this friend said you’d visited his apartment, and that while there you’d briefly left to buy heroin – not for
‘some kind of dark, destructive use’ but as ‘a pure celebration of life’, the friend said. You’d told this friend that your dealer had said the heroin had been triple-tested for fentanyl. He’d told you not to believe your dealer.
But then later, in an email, the chemist friend told me he’d analyzed the heroin and had found no synthetic opioids other than heroin, and that he’d heard that only ketamine and cocaine had been detected in the autopsy. ‘A combination of cocaine and ketamine could cause a dramatic increase in blood pressure, but still I think that would be an odd way for him to have died,’ he said.
Your family didn’t release the cause of your death. However you died, it seems to have been an accident. You didn’t seem to have anything deathwish-like by then. You were forty-seven and had seemed to be firmly in the start of a happier phase of your life in Italy.
After your death was announced online, there was an outpouring of praise for you and your work. You’d published twenty-four books, many pieces of your own writing, and more than 16,000 tweets. The Believer and the Paris Review published collections of remembrances by your friends and colleagues. More memorials followed in other venues. The New York Times called you ‘a defiantly independent publisher’.
‘Feel heartened by all the praise of Gian and the sharing of memories of him. I feel like he’s out there, seeing all this,’ I tweeted. I imagined you passing through the internet on your way elsewhere. As you left, people thought and talked and wrote about you, collectively slowing time by immersing ourselves in the now-completed book of your life.
I posted a screenshot of our messages from six weeks earlier, when you’d said you ‘finally feel happy and enjoy life’. I reread our correspondence and collaborations, read all your interviews and writing, and organized a collection of memories from me and thirty-three of your other friends, publishing it in my online magazine six weeks after you died.
Eleven months later, I dreamed I was behind you in a crowd, looking at your backside as we walked in the same direction.
Seventeen months after that, I dreamed we were walking toward each other. You were smiling widely. We greeted each other briefly – as if we knew we’d meet again soon – and continued in opposite directions.
A week after that dream, our writer friend invited me to read at an event in Manhattan for a foundation that had been created in your name.
Two weeks later, I was back in New York City for the first time in four years. It was November 2023.
The bar holding the event was near Hell’s Kitchen, I realized while walking there with our friend on the night of the reading.
‘We’re near where Gian lived,’ I said.
‘Really?’ said our friend.
‘Yeah,’ I said, waving my arm across the dimly familiar buildings to the west. ‘He lived somewhere over there.’
Feature image taken from Instagram
