We took a small propeller plane the ten minutes or so across the water, landing at the airport with no ride, no plans, no friends I was aware of, and no place to stay. A famous guy said hello to my friend by the luggage carousel. They exchanged witty banter. He did not, however, offer to let us crash at his place. There were no taxis in sight.

From a comfortable rented villa on a nice island, where—despite my nightly flirtations with vehicular homicide and suicide—I was at least able to swim, eat and drink fairly cheaply, and eventually sleep securely in my own bed, I now found myself suddenly homeless. Worse, my partner, as I quickly discovered, was a spoiled, drunk, and frequently raving paranoid-schizophrenic.

And cokehead. Did I mention that?

Any pretense that mysterious Russian friends with a villa would be there for us had somehow dematerialized somewhere on the flight over. Similar departures from reality would become a regular feature of the next few days. After a long time, we found a taxi to a hotel—where, once the staff laid eyes on my mysterious but increasingly mad companion, a room was hastily made available for a night. A very expensive room.

One of the things I’d forgotten about seriously wealthy people, something I’d noticed during a brief previous exposure in college, was that the old-school, old-money kind of rich people? Those motherfuckers don’t pay for shit. They don’t carry cash—and even credit cards seem always to be…somewhere else, as if whatever small sums as might be needed are beneath notice or discussion. Better you pay. And pay I did. Days and nights bingeing on overpriced drinks, bribing bartenders to scoop us up in their private vehicles at end of shift and drive us off into the dark to wherever she thought we might stay that night. One crappy motel-style room after another that cost what a suite at the St. Regis would. More drinks.

By now, I was a prisoner of her escalating and downright scary mood swings and generally bad craziness. She’d turn on a dime from witty and affectionate to hissing, spitting psychotic. One minute we’d be having overpriced mojitos on a lovely beach, the next, she’d be raging at the manager, accusing the busboy—or whoever was at hand—of stealing her cell phone. Fact was, she constantly misplaced her cell phone, her purse, anything of value she had. She’d get sloshed, forgetful, impulsively run off to dance, to search for coke, to say hello to an old friend—and she’d lose track of shit. She’d forget where she’d put things—if she’d ever had them in the first place.

I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy. From the first time I saw that, our relationship was essentially over. She accused me of “caring about waiters more than I cared about her,” and she was right. From that point on, I was babysitting a madwoman—feeling obliged only to get her crazy ass on a plane and back to England as quickly as possible and with as little damage done as could be managed. I’d gotten her here, allowed this to happen, it was impingent on me, I felt, to at least get her back in one piece. This was easier said than done.

People were afraid of her. I noticed this early on.

She had mentioned something earlier, back in England, about an ex-boyfriend who’d supposedly “stalked” her. How Mom had had to call some “friends” to “talk to” the fellow in question. How there’d been no problems after that. Somehow I’d blown right past that flashing red warning light, too—along with all the others. Now, all I wanted to do was get her on a plane back to London, but it was like reasoning with a wild animal. She didn’t want to go. Wouldn’t go.

By now, middle of the night, she’d jack the volume on the TV all the way up and flick rapidly back and forth between news stations, raving about oil prices. Strangely, neither neighbors nor management ever dared complain. I went to sleep each night not knowing where we’d sleep the next, if I’d wake up in bed soaked with blood of indeterminate origin, afraid to open my eyes to find out if the girl had cut her wrists—or my throat. I tried, really tried to act as I thought one does with a genuinely crazy person: solicitous, like a gentleman—until one can get ’em safely back in the bughouse. But she’d dragoon people into helping us—strangers and distant acquaintances who seemed to like the idea of chauffeuring around a crazed heiress and giving her cocaine. She crashed parties, jumped lines, scarfed grams at will, a magnet for indulgent enablers, reptilian party-throwers.

“What does she do?” I heard one admiring bystander ask of another as my roomie bounded, gazelle-like, across the dance floor toward the bathroom—there, no doubt, to fill her nostrils.

“Nothing,” was the answer. As if this was the proudest profession of all.

Apparently familiar with her rapier wit, her way with a lasting cruel remark, those who knew her from St. Tropez, from Monaco, from Sardinia—wherever fuckwits and fameballs went that year—they cowered at her approach. No one stood up to her.

Maybe it was because they all hated each other. (It seemed the point of the whole exercise.) I soon found out that to move in this woman’s poisonous orbit was to willingly attach oneself to a sinister global network of Italian art collectors, creepy Russian oligarchs, horny Internet billionaires, the wrinkled ex-wives of Indonesian despots, princelings from kingdoms that long ago ceased to exist, mistresses of African dictators, former-hookers-turned-millionairesses, and the kind of people who like hanging around with such people—or who make their living doing so. All seemed to have come to St. Barths over the holidays in order to find subtle new ways to say “fuck you” to each other. With a smile, of course.

We spent a somewhat less than romantic New Year’s Eve at a party hosted by the Gaddafis. That should tell you something. Enrique Iglesias provided the entertainment. A detail that lingers in the memory like the birthmark on one’s torturer’s cheek.

Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still—waiting to identify a weakness—looking for somewhere and some way to strike. People jockeyed for position, cut each other’s throats over the most petty, nonsensical shit imaginable. This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world.

I was lingering over the buffet on a Dr. No–size yacht with the appropriately Bond-esque name Octopus: huge interior docking inside the hull, a six-man submarine, landing space for two helicopters, Francis Bacon originals in the crapper. I looked up from the sushi and got the impression that anybody there—any of the guests dancing, schmoozing, chatting politely at the party—would have watched my throat getting cut without the slightest change in expression.

By the time she lost her wallet for the third and last time, I was ready to dig a hole in the sand and drop her in it—had I thought for a second I could get away with it. But she spoke daily with “Mom.” And the option of simply walking out on her, leaving the wallet-less, fund-less, coke-crazy schizo-bitch to her just deserts, broke-ass in a hotel room from which I had every expectation she would be removed at any hour—this, too, I was uncomfortable with.

I also had a very real concern that even were I to do something as measured and sensible as simply walk out on her, what remained of my Caribbean sojourn might end with the arrival of two thick-necked fellows from Chechnya holding a tarpaulin and hacksaws.

I was a bad person in a bad place, with another bad person, surrounded by other, possibly even worse people.