Things started going badly after those first sex-comatose weeks. For one thing, we were always, always high. As soon as I walked in the door, before anything else, Keith would spark a joint, and when we woke up in the morning, he’d light one and watch me smoke it before class, as if it were my vitamins. Soon he was bringing back coke after the shows. We stayed up all night with it, and I’d have to give him endless blow jobs just to get him hard enough to fuck.

Around this time, I started wondering exactly how old Keith was. I guess part of the rock ’n’ roll fantasy is that your talent gets discovered a little before, not a little after, its flowering, so I understood why he was sensitive about his age. But after a certain point, it seemed like he was actually hiding it. And he was. I snuck a look at his driver’s license while he slept, only to discover that the man lazing there in the early morning, burned out on cocaine, dried semen on his leg, was twice my age.

Soon we were fighting all the time. I’d try breaking up with him, but he always found a way to talk me back, to turn my resolve into mere confusion. By the time we got done fighting, I was too stoned and exhausted to go home, and his bed would swallow me in cotton folds.

Over time, the fighting also ceased to be exciting. Finally I told Keith I was leaving for real. That’s when he smiled, as if his face were slowly unzipping, and brought out the videotape.

“Before you make up your mind,” he said, “you should know about this.”

I think I already sensed what was on it, but I let him slide the tape into the VCR and saw myself snort a line off the bedside table and spread my ass for him. I watched as he shot come on my back. I still feel sick when I recall the delirious sound of my orgasm. It’s horrible to admit, but these are the only permanent images I have of myself in the act of sex.

Keith had copies. He told me that almost offhand.

Not a single choice occurred to me. With the tape, he’d simply out-maneuvered me, so I stayed, I did the drugs, I took him in my body. Those are pitch-black weeks. I remember feeling like a skull staring out through skin, and sensed—with indifference—that this was the precondition of a suicide. I was nineteen years old.