When I first met Nic Pizzolatto, he was teaching creative writing at DePauw, a small liberal-arts college in Indiana. He was a young professor at work on his first novel, seemingly just another member of the academic multitude, but there was something different about him, something edgy and strange you noticed right away. He registered as bigger than his moderate size, powerful, with a wicked grin. He had an old-fashioned intensity. We spoke for a few minutes, then, a few minutes later, I forgot all about it. That was in 2008, two days before yesterday.

The next time I met Nic Pizzolatto was in a bungalow in Hollywood. I’d been hired to work in the writers’ room of Magic City, the Starz show about Miami Beach in the late 50s and the scene around a hotel much like the Fontainebleau. The show’s creator and executive producer, Mitch Glazer, was introducing me to the other writers when a young man in jeans and a leather jacket smirked from the couch, saying, “I know you. We had a serious conversation once, in Indiana. We talked about God. Don’t you remember?”

I spent the ensuing weeks across a table from Nic, hashing out plotlines. It gave me a chance to study him at close quarters. No one was more vehement about character and motivation than Nic. Now and then, he’d do the voices or act out a scene, turning his wrist to demonstrate the pop-pop of gunplay. He was 37 but somehow ageless. He could’ve stepped out of a novel by Steinbeck. The writer as crusader, chronicler of love and depravity. His shirt was rumpled, his hair mussed, his manner that of a man who’d just hiked along the railroad tracks or rolled out from under a box. He is fine-featured, with fierce eyes a little too small for his face. It gives him the aura of a bear or some other species of dangerous animal. When I was a boy and dreamed of literature, this is how I imagined a writer—a kind of outlaw, always ready to fight or go on a spree. After a few drinks, you realize the night will culminate with pledges of undying friendship or the two of you on the floor, trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

Pizzolatto and Vince Vaughn on the set of Season Two of True Detective. By Lacey Terrell/HBO.

Working on a television show is surprisingly intimate. You talk and argue and make up day after day. Such relationships usually end gradually—this one ended abruptly. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say Nic slammed his hand on the table, then stormed out, vanishing in a cloud of expletives. I was on the porch a few minutes later when Nic screeched out of the lot in his beater, an angry man in a small car, the interior filled with his fury. That was in 2012, the day before yesterday.

The last time I saw Nic Pizzolatto was just a few months ago, in downtown Los Angeles, on the set of the second season of his brilliant and astonishingly successful HBO crime series, True Detective. I stood outside his trailer like a supplicant, surrounded by handlers, as anxious as a pilgrim. The critical acclaim for his show, its noir-ish mood and cult-like aura, the way its heroes seemed to shamble after some esoteric, Pynchon-esque truth had turned Nic into something more than just another TV writer or show-runner. He’d become an auteur, rich with wisdom, packed with answers. Stepping out of the trailer, he enfolded me in an all-encompassing hug. He was the same but different, having joined the upper echelon of the upper air, knighted by showbiz. What had been rumpled was now smooth; what had been dirty was now clean. He led me inside, where I watched as he polished dialogue for a scene he’d shoot later that day. An assistant quietly placed what looked like a power drink at his side, the top pre-loosened, then stepped away. When I first met Nic, in Indiana, I thought he was in my life. I now realized I’d been in his life. I was just another one of the technicians at ground control, watching the rocket make its way from launchpad to deep space—corduroy-coat-wearing professor to writers’-room hack to Orson Welles—in three blips across the radar screen.