I’m guessing that Dollard has veered into the realm of his jihadi-killer fantasies, or that he is in some sort of meth psychosis. The final moments of the film play. Dollard stares at the decrepit-satyr version of himself on-screen executing the money shot. When it’s over, he turns to me. “So what do you think?”

All I can think of is Ben Stiller’s line in Meet the Parents after Robert De Niro asks Stiller for his reaction to the awful poem he reads about his deceased mother. “Wow,” I say. “Your film contains a lot of information.” I urge Dollard not to send it to HBO.

“Our taste may be too cutting-edge, too extreme,” he admits. Despite these reservations, Dollard stands. “We need to film Sunshine more.” He tells Josiah to phone her and ask her to come back over. It turns out Sun- shine has a responsible day job. Josiah reaches her, but she refuses to come over. Dollard takes the phone and pleads, “We’ll make right on the mistake from when you were here the last time. I promise.”

He hangs up and drops onto the partially burned couch in the living room. “Josiah,” he says, “we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that she may not be coming back.”

The Geographic Cure

Dollard does not get a deal for Young Americans. Nor does he send Nevins a copy of Three Days. He drops out of sight for nearly a month. About a week before Thanksgiving he resurfaces in a phone message: “Where you been, dude? I’m having the D.T.’s—it’s awesome. Give me a call. Bye.”

We speak. “I feel like suicide, or going into a hospital,” he tells me. Dollard says he nearly died recently while smoking meth. “I couldn’t move. It was like my body had turned to ice.” He mourns wrecking the prospects of his film, then adds, “I failed Josiah in all of this.” A few days ago Josiah totaled the Humvee, and Dollard kicked him out. (Dollard subsequently found an attorney and helped pay nearly $5,000 to defend Josiah in his outstanding case, but in March 2006, he was convicted of receiving stolen property and sent back to prison with a four-year sentence.) “Do you think you could help get me to a hospital or something?,” Dollard asks.

I call Impact House, and they agree to take Dollard back. I don’t reach him again until after midnight. I am about to deliver the good news when Dollard cuts me off. “I need a favor,” Dollard says. He informs me that he e-mailed a Marine Corps public-affairs officer who offered him an embed spot if he could get to Kuwait in the next 72 hours. The only problem is Dollard’s credit card is maxed out and he can’t buy tickets. He wants to know if he can use my credit card to buy the tickets. “What am I going to do in a rehab?,” Dollard asks. “I’m going to feel like shit no matter where I am. I’d rather be lying in a hole in Iraq than in a bed somewhere in L.A.”

Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism analyst with Rand, has argued, like other experts in his field, that a primary lure of jihad in radical Islam is the notion that war offers “purification.” I am beginning to think that it’s much the same for Dollard in his indomitable drive to purge himself of his afflictions.

I give him my credit-card number. In recovery-speak, people might say I’m “enabling” the “untreated alcoholic” by helping him run away from his troubles with a “geographic cure.” I know this because I have had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol. It’s probably why I like Dollard, feel a kinship with him in his madness. Unlike him, I haven’t had bad experiences with people in 12-step meetings. But from what I have seen you just can’t force it on someone. The way I look at it, if the untreated alcoholic wants to take his geographic cure by going to Iraq, that’s his business.