Mr. Gooch writes: “We were both addicts, needing our separate escape hatches from life and love, me with sex, he drugs. … The big revelation to him, and to me, though, was that he had been trying heroin seriously, and was having his first bout of kicking the addiction.”

Mr. Gooch attributed the heroin to his continuing association with Mr. Burroughs, a reasoning Mr. Brookner didn’t share. Mr. Gooch writes: “Howard implied to me that the need for a fix was a response to the pain of my going off and my betrayals.”

Later, he adds: “Probably the explanation was both, and I was implicated, and so do still carry a kind of junk sickness when remembering the first-heard notes of that harrowing little melody of addiction that would become a leitmotif from then on in our lives, rising, falling, like the Rhine maidens in Wagner, and never entirely going away.”

They first lived on the Bowery, and Mr. Gooch details how the East Village of the 1970s was scrawled with “Clones Go Home” graffiti painted by Keith Haring and his compatriots to preserve their primarily punk community from the bearded, flannel-shirted post-liberation gays (fashion is certainly cyclical) of the West Village. This battle over aesthetics and artifice was soon to be moot, as the book inevitably barrels toward the plague of AIDS.

“At the time, you had no idea what was going on,” Mr. Gooch said, “and whether it was coming from the air-conditioning system in the Mineshaft. It was like science fiction.”

Mr. Brookner died of complications from the disease in 1989, and Mr. Gooch recounts his battle unflinchingly.