The Real World

Gary Comenas, author of the much-cited website warholstars.org, nearly died of heart failure in July 2013. Visitors to his London bedside included English models and celebrity stylists he had befriended in New York in the mid-'80s, bringing back a magical time of ecstasy and nights out clubbing. His sister's visit recalls him to his boyhood in southern California-his loss of innocence at age twelve, a deep dive into the punk scene in San Francisco, heroin, love. The fun-loving Brits changed his world; he followed them to London. Working in the press office at Island Records, he continued his up-and-down "life of excess" through London's gay breakout and the transformation of AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease. In 2001, creating his website devoted to the "superstars" of the films of Andy Warhol, Comenas withdrew into the virtual world of the 1960s. The website became a nexus of information for the Warhol people, several of them becoming personally important to him, including actor Joe Dallesandro, photographer Billy Name, screenwriter Ronald Tavel, archivist Callie Angell, and art critic Bill Wilson, a leading authority on the collage artist Ray Johnson. And then they started dying. Death haunts his memoir as it haunts this stage of the author's totemic life. After a second heart attack and the implantation of a cardioverter-defibrillator (illustrated on the cover), he decided to write it all down.