Much later, standing in some particularly bullshit kitchen, more of a saloon than anything resembling a real restaurant, I wasn’t the sort of person to look back in puzzlement and regret, wondering where I might have gone wrong. I never blamed bad choices—like the heroin, for instance—or bad companions for my less than stellar career trajectory. I don’t and never did refer to my addiction as my “disease.” I’d wanted to become a junkie, after all, since I was twelve years old. Call it a character flaw—of which drugs were simply a manifestation, a petulant “fuck you” to my bourgeois parents,
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