At about one in the morning on Friday, August 12, I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat at M.K. I was surprised. The extravagantly talented young painter, once among the more visible night birds of Manhattan’s haute bohème, had become famously reclusive. The reason was not a secret. He was locked in a battle with heroin.

The upper floor of the club is baroquely lit, but he looked changed—midriff fuller, face plumper. “That is you, Jean-Michel?” I asked.

“Yeah . . . ” A front tooth was missing with disconcerting effect. His eyes were remote, his smile wan. Oh, well. Basquiat was notoriously moody. I moved on, past the pool players, down to Bryan Ferry’s postconcert party on a lower deck.

Basquiat had arrived, typically, with a couple of young women, both stunning, Kelly Inman, a makeup artist, who lived in the basement below his studio, and Kristen Vigard, a young singer, whose long red hair was now very short and bleached white, and he had only come at their urging. “We wanted to get him out of the house,” Kelly remembers.

One of the people that Basquiat bumped into was a close friend, Kevin Bray, an N.Y.U. film student. Bray, like so many, had supported Basquiat in his struggle with his addiction, and had been delighted when the artist had returned from Hawaii ten days before, ebulliently announcing that he had finally kicked the habit. “But I could tell he was really high,” Bray says. “I was very discouraged.”

Inman and Vigard were wandering around somewhere. Impulsive as always, Basquiat suggested to Bray that they leave. He wanted company. Basquiat took a cab the twenty blocks downtown to his Great Jones Street loft, Bray bicycled. “We sat, and drank Gatorade,” he says. Recently, Basquiat had been loquacious with his close friends about his plans for a new life, which were colorful, if sometimes contradictory.

Certainly he was leaving Manhattan. Almost certainly he was, at the age of twenty-seven, giving up the mercantile and treacherous art world. Perhaps he would be a writer. Perhaps he would take what he called an “honest job,” like running a tequila business in Hawaii. The following Thursday, he was leaving for the Ivory Coast, where he was expected in a Senoufo village five hundred miles inland from the capital, Abidjan. Here he would take a tribal cure for the heroin— and other New York wounds.

Tonight, though, Basquiat was quiet. “He didn’t really want to talk about anything,” Bray says, “and soon he started nodding. And I said, I’m sorry—I just can’t stay around. I wrote kind of a weird note . . . I DON’T WANT TO SIT AROUND HERE AND WATCH YOU DIE . . . And then, YES, YOU DO OWE ME SOMETHING. Because we have an ongoing dialogue . . . why he should stop [drugs], why he should keep on painting . . . he never thinks people understand the paintings.”

That agonizing present tense, when the fact of death hasn’t quite sunk in.

Bray passed the note to Basquiat, but he was too loaded to focus, so Bray read it aloud, and left, fuming. “Somebody who gets that high is dying over and over and over again,” he says now.

Kelly Inman got back from M.K. at about four in the morning. “I didn’t see Jean-Michel,” she says. “I went downstairs to bed.” She was woken by the telephone at 2:30. It was Kevin. Jean-Michel was going with him to a Run-D.M.C. concert that evening. Inman climbed into the bread-oven heat of the upstairs bedroom—the air conditioner had failed, an annoyance that Basquiat, with a characteristic twinge of paranoia, blamed on his landlord, the Warhol estate. He was sleeping, she decided not to disturb him.