In the summer of 2002, I’d just returned to L.A. from Eastern Europe -- Belgrade -- where I could live cheaply and so work full-time on a novel. To my frustration, the novel still required extensive surgery, and one night, in lieu of taking an axe to my computer, I drove to Ralph’s Supermarket on Glendale Boulevard. It was three in the morning, but there was a longish line at the cash register, and the customer immediately behind me was Elliott Smith. The checker wandered off, and I wondered if I should say anything to Elliott.

Elliott and I were strangers, but I’d once given his girlfriend -- let’s call her Kate -- a ride home from a Trail of Dead show, where she’d been accosted by a deranged groupie type who’d been stalking Elliott. Kate was Scottish; gregarious but fiery -- a friend of my friends in Trail of Dead. At the time she and Elliott were living in a bungalow complex in Los Feliz. The bungalows looked like Tudor dioramas at a history-themed amusement park. (I would later recognize them as a key location in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive.") We sat in my car for close to an hour while Kate cried and talked about Elliott’s problems, hinting at his fondness for heroin, which hardly came as a shock, considering the many allusions to heroin in his songs: “The White Lady Loves You More,” “Needle in the Hay,” and so on. She thought L.A. was bad for him, and she was trying to get him to move with her to Scotland, where in theory he’d be safe from pernicious influences.

It was a curious exchange -- the sudden intimacy of it all -- and now, almost a year later, here was Elliott, standing behind me at Ralph's with a carton of ice cream in either hand -- in fact, I think he was holding three. Funny that I remember what he was buying, when I don’t remember what I was buying myself. It couldn't have been liquor -- not at that hour.

The checker kept us waiting. Finally I turned to Elliott and mentioned the ride I’d once given Kate. They'd had a fight, he volunteered -- that's why he'd gone to the store. To me it explained the ice cream: sugary compensation for a bitter spat. He was obviously troubled, but, then again, he was Elliott Smith -- what did I expect? At one point he said something about getting into therapy, and I said, "Well, therapy's so pat, you know. I'm not sure it'll work if you happen to be a genius."

"I'm not a genius," he half-laughed, adding that his father was a therapist. One of us -- it was probably him -- raised the subject of heroin. I told him I used to fool around with heroin, and I liked it, but not enough to form a dependence.

"Oh, I loved it," he said. "Right from the start." I thought, "Jesus Christ, I'm standing here talking about doing heroin with Elliott Smith at Ralph's Supermarket!" The checker returned, and after paying for our various items, Elliott and I walked outside to the parking lot, where I expected him to quickly get in his car and drive away. Instead, we continued talking for another fifteen minutes, mostly about his spiritual malaise. I tried to advise him, but I wasn’t at my best, because I still couldn’t get over the fact that I was talking to Elliott Smith. Then, after I returned home, I did something that now makes me wince: I posted a message on a music-oriented Yahoo group to which I belonged to brag about having bumped into Elliott. How about that, people? Ain’t I kewl?

I never saw him again, though shortly after that encounter, he broke up with Kate and moved to an apartment a few blocks from mine in Echo Park. That’s where he was living when he killed himself with a stab to the heart in the fall of 2003. I thought of Kate when the news broke: her saying that L.A was bad for him; her wish that they could live together in Scotland. I thought of the way he looked that night at Ralph's -- bad skin, witchy features, scraggly hair -- yet there was something so instantly likable about him. I read somewhere that he took umbrage at hearing his music described as “fragile,” but it was fragile, and so was he.

A friend of mine regularly meets with a psychic, and he told me that during one of their sessions, Elliott came though. They'd never met, but my friend is a musician, so they'd traveled common ground. Through the psychic, Elliott said that he only wished he'd known how much his music meant to people while he was alive. Still, he was doing well on the other side. My friend asked about Kurt Cobain. "Kurt's divided," my friend reported Elliott as saying, explaining that in the afterlife souls can sometimes be spread apart.

Unlike my friend, I don’t place much stock in the metaphysical, though I try to keep an open mind. I don't pretend to understand the mysteries of life. I have my guesses, but I know that's all they are. Still, I've never quite shaken the notion that I squandered the chance that night to say something that might've kept Elliott from killing himself. Yes, we were strangers, and it was only a brief exchange, but I once saved myself from getting mauled by an attacking pit bull by freezing rather than fleeing -- a tactic I’d picked up years before while channel-surfing. Sometimes something as random as that can make for a world of difference. And now I'm writing about a talk at Ralph's Supermarket at three in the morning, and that by itself tells me that every moment counts, or it can potentially, if you haven't given up on the world altogether.