Not long after things ended with the Scotti brothers, I was hunkered down in bungalow three at the Chateau Marmont hotel. John was thoroughly out of control at this point. He had come to LA to try to sell a screenplay, but the studio didn’t like it, which pissed him off. I think that pushed him to do more of what he had been doing. So there I was, just twenty years old, doing blow with my pal John Belushi. Tiger Beat magazine should only have known what was going on. When I saw him throughout the week, I could tell things were bothering him. He wasn’t his usual fun-loving self. He was doing more drugs than I remembered him doing, and his energy level had changed. He seemed tired. Things seemed to be catching up to him. He called me at home one day and told me to come over to the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying on that trip. I had been to the hotel a number of times to visit friends and for some parties but had not been in one of the private bungalows before. John was staying in number 103. The hotel sits back from Sunset Strip and is very private and quiet in a Gothic, even creepy sort of way. I love it there. The bungalows are even more secluded than the rest of the hotel, and the moment I found my way along the private path back to where John was staying, I knew things had changed for him. He had always done a lot of drugs and drank a lot, but there had always been a party atmosphere to him. He was loud and colorful. But on this night, the moment I entered the small bungalow, I could sense how things had taken a darker turn. Cocaine was being both smoked and snorted in the room, which was occupied by a handful of his friends, including some very famous ones. John put his arm around me and said, “How you been, kid?” He seemed out of it. His eyes were dead. Robin Williams was there, too, along with several other well-known people, everyone huddled up getting high together. They were kind of freaked, I think, that I was in the room. Sort of like, “Who is this guy?” But John assured them, “He’s cool; it’s okay. The kid is cool.” Less than a week later, they would all be back in that same bungalow. Without me. That was the night John died in that room after a speedball was injected into him.