I was about halfway through Edie: An American Biography, an absolutely fabulous account of pop art's favorite junkie, Edie Sedgwick, when I heard about Paul.

The book covers everything! Warhol, The Factory, the 60s, the Hells Angels, the long line of the historic Sedgwick family. But most of all, the drugs. The speed, the quaaludes, the heroin, the drugs that killed her. This little girl of about 80 pounds, according to her coronary report, died with .17% alcohol and .48 mg% barbiturates in her system. The way she consumed drugs was like she was on a mission to take herself down. She was 28 years old. 

I was reading the book on the subway, headed to a location scout with my friend Andy for a short film we were producing, when Andy showed me his phone. It was a photo of Paul, posted on Instagram by a friend of ours. In the photo he looked happy, singing karaoke at Pine Box Rock Shop – one of our favorite things to do together on a random Tuesday night. In the caption beneath the photo was a cryptic message about Paul. Andy began to text mutual friends to find out what happened, but we went underground without confirmation and I started to panic. "If he's just in the hospital, then I'll come visit him." I thought it over and over like a prayer. When we got above ground, Andy turned to me.

A: "Hey, Sam?"

Me: "Yeah?"

A: "Paul's dead."

Well, I can't say I was surprised. Paul, like Edie, had a reputation for burning bridges – every friendship, every relationship – so I always figured the bridge between life and death might not be too far off.

I’d also had a strange experience earlier that day that I’ve never been able to shake: moments before I got on the subway to meet up with Andy, I was almost knocked over by a sudden, strong gust of wind. For a moment everything got very cold, and I felt outside of myself, like time had slowed, and I knew in my heart that something bad was right around the corner.

Something like this has happened to me every single time I’ve found out about someone dying, for whatever that’s worth. However, Paul was the first person close to me that I lost, and you never actually expect these things, not really. The shock crept up on me slowly, followed by a heavy, helpless kind of sadness. I wasn’t close enough with him to be invited to his funeral in Florida, so I never got any closure. With nowhere else to put it, I continue to carry that sadness around with me to this day.

By this point, almost everybody I know had stopped talking to Paul. He started drama everywhere he went. He was unable to censor his thoughts – he just told you exactly what he thought of you. He was often rude, antagonizing, obnoxious. But he was honest, and I couldn't help but respect that. He was real. The problem was that sometimes he meant harm and sometimes he didn't, and it was often hard to determine the difference.

It had been a year since I’d last seen him. He had just started a new job waiting tables at a fancy vegan restaurant. He said he was entitled to a free meal and invited me to join him. We had a nice time. He talked a lot about Anders, his ex-best friend and my ex-boyfriend. Paul would complain about him and then apologize for complaining. I think he just missed him and knew he had messed things up beyond repair. And he had. He did a lot of shitty things to a lot of people, and one by one everyone I knew shut him out. Everyone but me – he’d never done anything bad to me, at least not yet, so I kept him at a safe distance.

At the time of this dinner, he had just returned to New York from a several-month stay in Florida, supposedly to "clean up." Before that trip, I was going through a bad break up with Anders and moving out of our apartment, and Paul was taking my place. One day, I went back to the apartment to get some of my things. Paul opened the door, startling me. “You look like shit, man.” 

He looked like he had been up for days. He was pale as paper, his blue eyes tinged red. He talked a mile a minute about the parties he’d been to and the coke he’d been doing and how he had been dancing with his shirt off – he then took his shirt off and began dancing, to demonstrate – and I just about shut the door in his face trying to get away. Shortly thereafter, he took a break and went back to Florida.

When he returned and invited me out to dinner, I suspected he invited me because he didn't have any other friends. He was desperate to show me he was an ok guy. He didn’t have to prove anything to me – despite the awful things he said about people, and the childish ways in which he'd try to hurt people, I remained friends with him because I believed he was an ok guy deep down.

When Anders and I were dating, Paul used to hang out with us regularly, bringing us movies to watch and records to listen to. He gave me a Morrissey t-shirt he'd made that I still wear whenever I go running. We went to shows together, and he'd ask me to dance if it seemed like I wanted to dance but was too afraid to initiate it. The last time we danced, he was exceptionally sweet – he spun me around and dipped me, making me feel like the belle of the ball. A few minutes later he began to nod out and fell asleep sitting up at the bar. 

I didn't realize that Paul was on heroin until it was too late. I knew he was on drugs, that much was obvious, but heroin just seemed like something that would be hard to keep quiet with him. He was a talkative guy, always bragging about his tattoos and who he was fucking and which bands he’d recently partied with, so I just figured he did a lot of coke because it was so hard to get him to shut up. I don't know if he was hiding it from everyone or just from us, but heroin never got mentioned. 

So on the night he invited me out to dinner, as we were riding the subway home, I told him that he seemed much better and I hoped he had cleaned himself up. I acknowledged that we'd never talked about his problems before, and wanted him to know that he could talk about it with me if he ever wanted to. I think I mentioned coke in there somewhere, because he quickly said that coke wasn't a problem for him and shut the conversation down. Things turned awkward, and shortly after I got off at my stop.

The next day, I received a text from him: "Thanks again for having dinner with me. It was really nice and I feel like you got to see more of actual me rather than what you saw when I left 6 months ago. I really just wanna leave that image of me in the past. I just don't wanna ever bring up the past again. I'm past it and I'm living a great life."

I never saw him again.

He texted me a few times after that, asking what I was up to, if I wanted to get a drink, if he could grab his records that got mixed up with mine. I didn't respond for the most part, being busy with my job and my new boyfriend and being reluctant to see him because I'd heard about the heroin by that point. I knew he didn't want to hear what I had to say about it, so it seemed best just to stay away. I always assumed I'd run into him again though, or that somehow we'd reconnect. I don't know why I felt that way because there wasn't any desire on my part to make the effort. He scared me a little, the way he could turn on people, the way he could be up one moment and way, way down the next. But I always had a soft spot in my heart for him, like an estranged little brother.

He died of an overdose a year later, alone in his room, not even 23 years old. I can't stop wondering what was going through his head in the moments leading up to his death. I don't know what drove Paul to drugs. I don't know why he drove people away. Paul always seemed like one of the loneliest people I'd ever met. Just a lonely, scared little kid, like Edie Sedgwick, like many addicts out there.

Live fast, die young. Burn bright, Burn out. These people zoom in and out of your life, elusive personalities – big! loud! talkative! – but never letting you get close. They are subjects of fascination, admiration and repulsion all at once. Was there anything I could have done? I don't know. I don't know. I will miss you, Paul. I missed you even before it all came to an end.