Moretti is temperamentally the opposite of Casablancas, the joker, the glass-half-full guy—the warm emotional heart of the band. He keeps the beat, Ringo to Julian’s manic-depressive Lennon. One imagines he’s gotten them through some rough spots. Last night we pledged undying friendship and talked for hours about music and books and our girlfriends. Trying to recall what he said, I can barely read the few notes I managed to scrawl out: “We were playing a show in Indio, California. Ryan [Gentles, the Strokes’ manager] introduced me to Drew. I came down to the lawn, and I was really intimidated. She was talking about Stephen Hawking. She said, ‘Do you like Prodigy?’ And I said, ‘They scare me.’ And she said, ‘Well then, look at me.’ My God, I love her.” At one point, Fab started quoting from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. Watching him leave now for the concert, I can’t help wishing I could join him.

Waiting in my room, I get periodic calls to stand by for my meeting with Casablancas. At 11:30 p.m., after watching a TV movie about Michael Jackson that portrays him as a Christ-like figure, I order room service from the Nobu downstairs. When he finally calls my room, it’s 2 a.m. “You wanna meet downstairs?” he asks. “Or we could have breakfast tomorrow.”

“I’m tired of bars, I’m tired of these drunks and cokeheads,” says Nick. “I’m trying to live responsibly.”

Let’s not and say we did is what I want to tell him. I’m too fucking old to be waiting around on some egomaniacal 27-year-old who’s flexing his self-importance after studying Chapter Two of Rockstar 101, by Mick Jagger. And come to think of it, Jagger was only twenty minutes late when I met him for a profile in the mid-eighties.

At least now I won’t feel awkward asking Casablancas about his drinking; if I’d had to bring it up at ten over a pleasant dinner with a couple of glasses of Burgundy inside me, I might have felt bad. Now I’m almost relishing the prospect of making him uncomfortable. So much for my theory, developed over the course of the previous week, that all the shit I have read about his erratic and imperious behavior was largely attributable to all that drinking he used to do.

And, indeed, after he sits down in the lobby of the Metropolitan at ten past two, he seems taken aback by the question of his drinking, even after I put a positive spin on it and tell him how the other guys in the band all say he’s much easier to work with now, that it’s the best thing that’s happened in the history of the band. “Yeah, whatever,” he responds. “If they say so.” He looks like he’ll have something to say to the guys tomorrow when he sees them, and I feel bad for them in advance because I like them and I can see that they live with a tyrant.

“I didn’t feel so mentally altered,” he ventures. Yeah, yeah. He tries to stare me down, and normally he could, but it’s not working because I’m in such a bad mood I can stare right back until finally he blinks. After a long silence, he amends his last statement. “The problem was that it was taking away from my time. Now I’ve got so much time, I have all these songs popping out.” And after another long pause: “I’d lash out when I was drinking. I said things I shouldn’t say. I’d say everything that was on my mind.” Another long pause. “I drank a lot since I was 14. I couldn’t really take it any further. I reached that turning point somewhere in the darkness.”

After that he seems to register my poisonous mood and apologizes for being late. He starts talking to fill the silence. “I’ve been doing interviews all day,” he says. “The British press can be so annoying. They jerk you off with one hand and smack you with the other.” (The British press has always loved his debauched rock-star ways; in naming Julian to its “Cool List,” the NME remarked that “nobody holds a half drunk bottle of Heineken quite so stylishly.”)

“It’s like an inner struggle for me, between saying I don’t give a shit and trying to make it work. You want to do the right thing, but I’m sick of people thinking I’m difficult.”

I suggest that making people wait five hours probably doesn’t predispose them to be sympathetic.

“I’m really sorry, I fell asleep,” he says. “It’s just been a bad day. I’m a little bit sad. People in our camp are making me feel bad about doing it the way I want to do it. They want me to do cheesy things. I feel like I’ve given up a lot of my fantasies, just in terms of how we do things. I just want to do things differently, and to a lot of people that’s annoying. I like weird stuff. I always hoped if we had a big success it would be on our own terms.” He’s chewing on his thumbnail, looking seriously depressed.