“Embrace Your Madness”

So he was cold and hungry most of the time. They all were. Violet and Art, too. Violet (not her real name) was his new girlfriend. Art DiFuria was his punk band’s recording engineer. Often, Dogboy would come over — he was the guitarist in the band. And they’d all sit on couches inside a roach motel at 13th and Walnut known simply as “The Frizz”: dangling wires, dirty dishes, rat-size holes in the floor. During the winter, they’d pass around Art’s copies of As I Lay Dying and Gargantua, drinking whiskey to keep warm. And then, when it got dark, when they’d had enough of being cold, they’d burst out of The Frizz and into the city, maybe to hear Tristan scream “ALL HAIL DISCORDIA” while running down the Rocky Steps in the rain … or to watch Tristan and Dogboy perform … to see Tristan all hot and demonic, perched on the balcony at the Trocadero, 20 feet up, his naked thighs smeared with chocolate pudding … an ogre plummeting in the neon lights …

… and never suspecting, any of them, that a subconscious alarm was starting to go off in Tristan’s head, louder than Dogboy’s guitar wail, louder even than his own gargoyle voice, telling him to flee.


HIS AMBITION IS what saved him.

It wasn’t like the decision to leave Philly was logical, carefully weighed. It was primal necessity, a blunt process of elimination. Each cocaine hit, each 40-ounce, was eliminating the chance, however remote, that he would someday publish his book. The book was everything. And the draft, the one he had been working on for the past year in The Frizz, was — as he would soon write in a letter — just that much shit. He blamed the drugs and the hunger. Maybe chaos and misery didn’t lead to good writing after all: If you don’t eat, you can’t create. Simple. He had to get away, far away, and figured he might as well do it in a place where American writers had always gone to get their heads clear, a place of literary legend. Paris. Conveniently for him, Violet was already there, writing in a little flat near the Luxembourg Gardens, right down the street from Hemingway’s old place.

In the summer of 1994, Tristan moved in with Violet, who paid the rent. He and Violet sat on the Île de la Cité, smoked cigarettes, watched the boats go by and talked about the future. “He wanted his work to live on,” she says. “He used to say, people are going to look up to us for what we’ve done.”

But he wasn’t bombastic like this most of the time. He worked on a letter to Art back in Philly. I’m doing really well right now, he wrote in a tiny font. I eat big breakfasts and hang out in Luxembourg gardens till noon, then write till dinnertime, go out for a bit … I hope I will one day be able to make a living this way, far out of reach of the tastykakes. He apologized to Art for being such a fucking pot-head and for stiffing him on a phone bill. I’m sorry. I’ll settle up when I get back.

And then, on October 23, 1994, everything changed. He was wearing a black skullcap and a down coat, busking for francs on the Pont des Arts, a picturesque bridge, when a girl with long black hair stopped and smiled shyly. He strummed her a few Bob Dylan tunes. She invited him for a cup of coffee.

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