The greatest decadent I knew was a failed artist and self-consciously derivative writer called Sebastian Horsley. “WHORE-sly,” he would drawl in his Youtube videos, making clear the connection with prostitution: a link it would have been pointless to ignore, especially considering that one of his videos was called “Sebastian Horsley’s Guide to Whoring”.

This ended with the splendid line: “Sex is one of the most beautiful, wholesome and spiritual things that money can buy,” delivered with great comic timing as well as evident sincerity. He was no Oscar Wilde, and he knew it, but he sure knew how to draw on him, to cultivate the witty paradox.

I became very fond of him but I would enjoy tripping him up from time to time. During a reading he gave at a central London bookshop (Foyles, as it happened: the most respectable and traditionally-minded of all London bookshops) in which he espoused the virtues and strategies of decadence, I asked: “if we’re all being encouraged to be so decadent, why are none of us allowed to smoke in here?” This earned me a rueful acknowledgement from him and some nervous laughter and much shuffling of feet from the audience. And after watching his “Guide to Whoring”, otherwise a very sensible and knowledgeable guide to .,. well, basically, treating prostitutes and their madams with respect and courtesy, I told him that there was one very glaring omission in his methodology: he had failed to acknowledge that one of the best ways to find a prostitute was to use the cards pinned up in phoneboxes everywhere around the central metropolis. He conceded I had a point. Before I got to know him at all well, he got wind of the fact that I was going to review his book, Dandy in the Underworld for the left-liberal British newspaper, the Guardian, and favourably, too. He wrote to me saying that he couldn’t believe such a strait-laced newspaper would run such a piece, and if I managed to persuade them to run it, he would, by way of gratitude, by me a session with his “favourite whore”. I demurred, on the grounds that I was already romantically involved, and that besides, I discovered, on pressing him on the matter, that this was by no means going to be some £1,000-a-night courtesan of great beauty and a Russian accent. It was still an unusual offer, and, looked at in one way, a tempting one.

He was a sight around town, that is both eminently visible and spectacular: already tall, he made himself taller by wearing a ludicrous top hat; he affected ties in garish colours with knots the size of a boxing glove; his jacket, a bespoke affair modelled on a huntsman’s pinks, had been modified so that there were little loops sewn into the lining, for carrying his syringes, all primed with a solution of heroin. His bedroom was decorated with skulls and he slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow. He once in the name of art gatecrashed some primitive island’s gruesome Easter ceremony so that he could himself be crucified, as some kind of performance artist’s stunt: he ended up not just horribly injured, but humiliated. The art world hadn’t taken him seriously before, and it wasn’t going to do so after that. So he turned to prose, which he would get one of his lovers – they all seemed to be, for some reason, called Rachel – to write for him.

He died of a heroin overdose, and opinion is still divided as to whether it was deliberate or not. Still, his funeral in Soho was a great send-off. Beneath what looked like a supercilious sneer was in fact the eternal dismay of a kind and sensitive man in a brutal and uncaring world.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had he lived. He represented all that was the opposite of what I had been exiled from: a stable home and family life. I reflected that if I had still been married, my wife would have freaked out. And I wonder what my children would have made of him, too (I think, after the initial terror, they would have loved him).

And I wonder what attracted me to him, and him to me. The decadent needs to have an audience in his (or, more rarely, her) orbit. And I feel the gravitational pull of the decadent, like the moon feels the pull of the earth. He would turn to me to look for something like common sense, a clear head; I turned to him to seek the exact opposite.

I suppose one of the ways I am not quite a true decadent is because I am quite simply not unhappy enough. True decadence yearns for the opiate, and I could never be doing with that. Heroin is for those who missed out on maternal love, and seek a warm embrace; my own preferred drug is more … stimulating. I remember an occasion, not too long ago, thinking all my birthdays had come at once, when a new girlfriend told me to wait as she was going upstairs to change; she came back down wearing a black catsuit, thigh-length patent leather boots, and bearing in front of her a plate, for me, and her, to share, arrayed with stripes of finely-chopped cocaine. But she had a respectable job.

I was once interviewed by a well-known TV personality for a programme she was making about “modern Bohemians”. She asked an increasingly inane series of questions, such as “if you’re broke, why don’t you get a job driving a minicab?” (I had tried to explain to her that the most significant characteristic of the Bohemian is lack of cash. Read the bloody book. It was turned into a silly opera.) I ended up opn the cutting room floor: it turned out all she wanted was flamboyant grotesques who would have looked startling on the screen. I remember sending her and her crew packing; and I wonder what she would have made of Horsley, or he of her. I like to think he would have taken out one of his syringes, looked her in the eye, and wordlessly pushed the plunger.

Nicholas Lezard is an indigent but well-respected writer who has not had a proper job, in an office, like almost everyone else, since 1989. He has reviewed books for the Guardian newspaper for 25 years or so; was a radio critic for the Independent on Sunday for ten years; and for the last fourteen, has been writing the “Down and Out” column for an otherwise respectable magazine, the New Statesman. He has lived in a hovel in central London, a castle in Scotland, and now lives in Brighton, a coastal town filled to bursting with degenerates, which he loves with a love that is deep and fierce.

A novelist and columnist, he is also a contributing writer for Decadent. When he can be bothered that is.