Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss

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      Patrick Miller was a legend, as far as I was concerned. Better known as Minimal Man, he was a pioneer of electronic and industrial music with at least six albums to his name, and had played with many legendary experimental and alternative musicians of the eighties.

      But when I met him, he had fallen on hard times. He was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, outside of the Dominican drug dealers in the neighborhood, I seemed to be the only person who visited his basement apartment. I would stop by every other day and he would regale me with stories of punk, industrial, and new wave musicians.

      On his wall, alongside prints by Bruce Nauman and Dennis Oppenheim, hung his own paintings. I recognized them from the covers of his albums, which I played regularly on my college radio show at the time. They were all variations on one image: a featureless head, usually wrapped in strips of bandages that were peeling off to reveal a discolored, decomposed face.

      One afternoon during my junior year of college, I came by to accompany him to a rock-industry convention, the New Music Seminar. But after an hour of puttering around his house, he didn’t seem to be any closer to leaving.

      PATRICK MILLER: I want to find that guy from Play It Again Sam [Recordings] and make him pay me. You know, that’s all the seminar is: musicians looking for record executives who owe them money.

       Are you ready to go yet?

      MILLER: I’m thinking of building a holding tank here.

       For your cat?

      MILLER: No, for drug dealers. . . . I feel like there are ants under my skin. I need to get high if I’m going to have to deal with this.

       If you do that, we’re never going to get out of here.

       Miller walks into the kitchen and continues talking as he scrapes white powder out of a pot on his kitchen counter.

      MILLER: For some reason, pharmacologists, doctors, and nurses are always attracted to my music. That’s how I got started. They’d invite Minimal Man to play all these parties, and then feed us coke. (Drops the powder into the end of a glass pipe.) I invented Minimal Man as this wild person, and then I actualized it and took all kinds of drugs and stuff because I felt guilty for not living up to this fiction. For a while I was shooting an eightball a day. That’s like a hundred shots. It got so crazy that I thought I’d take something to cool me off, so I got into heroin, thinking that it would help me free myself from drugs. Do you know how heroin works?

       More or less.

      MILLER: Your body is in pain every second of the day. Every molecule of air that is hitting it is causing a pain reaction. But because the body produces its own opiates, it blocks the pain. So when you take heroin and get those opiates externally, your brain stops producing its own painkillers. That’s why it’s so hard to withdraw, because when you stop, you feel all the pain you never did before.

       I try to distract him to keep him from smoking the crack he’s heating in the pipe.

       Ever heard of that band Lights in a Fat City?

      MILLER: Shh.

      He takes a deep drag off the pipe. Seconds after he exhales, his eyes start darting around, as if there’s something hiding in the shadows of the room. He snatches a flashlight from his desk and turns it on, even though the lights in his house are already shining. He then begins scanning the room, looking for something, as he backs into a corner. Suddenly, he pulls a chair in front of him, crouches behind it, and grabs the book Rush by Kim Wozencraft off his desk.

      MILLER: Is there a fly around? I can’t stand flies. I’m prone to hallucinations. As soon as I see a little thing buzzing around in front of my eyes, forget it. Kill those fuckers.

       He begins batting at the air with the book, as if invisible flies are trying to attack him. As he does this, I look up at one of his paintings—the bandaged, decomposed head that stares fearfully from his album covers—and realize: It’s a self-portrait.

       The following day, Miller sells the painting to me for forty dollars and checks himself into rehab. Several weeks later, he returns, clean-shaven, well-nourished, and wearing newly bought clothes. The first thing he does is buy the painting back from me. As for his paranoid reaction during our last encounter, he explains . . .

      MILLER: I have a feeling I just staged that so we wouldn’t go out.

       After relapsing later that year, Miller moved near his family in Los Angeles to clean up. We remained friends until he died in 2003 of hepatitis C, a blood-borne disease that he most likely contracted from a used needle.