Editor-At-Large: Janet Street-Porter

I wish I could write this week about fashion or music or the finalists in the prestigious Stirling architectural prize, which I am helping to judge and which will be televised on Channel 4 in October. By now I would have crossed the length and breadth of the country celebrating excellence in design.

Instead I am marooned in a hotel room in Los Angeles watching scenes of utter panic and devastation unfold on every television channel. In a room upstairs one of my best friends is dying of cancer.

Los Angeles is the city where I belatedly learned to drive in my late twenties. From the minute I arrived here five years earlier I'd fallen in love with the place. My first husband (who still lives here in a beautiful 1920s house in Hollywood) was a photographer, and brought me here at the end of an epic journey across America via back roads, dilapidated drive- ins, cheap motels and diners.

It was 1971, and my pink hair caused outrage in Memphis. I remember fleeing to the ladies' washroom to escape general ridicule. We ended up living in an artist's studio in Venice. It was not then the fashionable funky beach resort it is today, but a haven for the poor, the deranged and desperate, alongside a community of artists and writers. I fell asleep to the sound of constant bongo drums and took mescaline on the Fourth of July.

The boardwalk was a zoo, with a turf war between drug dealers and confused crumblies from the Jewish old people's home down the street. It soon became obvious that an inability to drive was a fundamental disability, and so, on the very next visit, I spent five consecutive days having driving lessons, mugging up for the written test by staying up all night swotting and drinking tequila. Equipped with a provisional licence I took to the streets of Santa Monica and the actual test itself.

Astonishingly I passed by one point. I'd worn a very short skirt hoping for a middle-aged male examiner. I got a stern young black woman instead. I mounted the pavement during the three-point turn, terrifying a local resident tending his lawn, but it didn't seem to be a major issue. Armed with my new licence I went to Rent a Wreck and was soon posing about in a shocking pink Mustang convertible, cruising through the sleazier parts of Hollywood and being asked if I was available for sexual services. It was that kind of car.

Decades later I can happily drive about for hours drinking in the heady cocktail of smoggy air, ridiculously luxuriant foliage and bizarre street life. I enjoy the simple pleasures of LA, like a trip to any large drug store. Twenty minutes later you emerge with stuff you never knew you needed, from herbal tea to Mr Vegetable wrapping paper to the latest over-the- counter sleeping pills (Tylenol PM are my special favourite) and a full bag of scandal sheets. I've stayed in the Venice Beach hotel all the body- builders like to haunt, and eaten at Pinks on La Brea, home of the world's best chilli dog. I can spend days doing very little except hanging out, playing a bit of tennis at rich friends' houses, and buying X-rated knickers and T-shirts at the Hustler department store on Sunset. I once gave Elizabeth Hurley one which read Porn Star. It might have been one of the reasons why the up-tight people at Estee Lauder thought she was too much real fun for their image.

I am informed that their new "face", some personality-free 26-year-old, has a body covered in tattoos, so presumably she won't be promoting their moisture-drench (or what whatever it's called) body lotion. By the way, I spent a week's holiday this summer with Ms Hurley, and there is no better person to have a girls' laugh with, whether playing cards or grisly word games. In my opinion, Elizabeth, not the ghastly Anne Robinson, should be presenting The Weakest Link on American TV. She's got the deep Joyce Grenfell bossy voice, the dominatrix manner. Plus a lot more ratings-grabbing assets.

But the reason for this trip was not to socialise, shop or hang out. It was to say farewell (and we'll meet again) to my friend Steve Fargnoli. Steve was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and his life has been a series of tremendous ups and downs ever since. A successful rock manager - of Prince, for the decade of his most prolific and productive period, and Sinead O'Connor. Anyone who can deal with those two needed patience, intelligence and wit. Steve had all three in spades.

I say "needed" because, by the time you read this, he may well be dead. In his suite in a luxury hotel in Westwood (where they filmed scenes for Pretty Woman by the outdoor pool) Steve lies on a huge bed just refusing to die, surrounded by ex-girlfriends, employees, old and new acquaintances, people from 18 to 60. This motley group (and a dog) hang out, order pizzas, take Polaroids, stroke Steve with wet towels, and hold him down when he tries to run for the door. The gang are past crying. We are watching an epic battle now, between a man who refuses to die and a body which is switching off.

I hate cancer more than anything else. It has taken so many of my friends, both famous and ordinary. It is relentless, silent, never leaving when you think it has given up its plan to invade your body, but returning in a new and more insidious guise. My friend Lucy died a few years ago, and in those final stages, dosed to the eyebrows on morphine, I dressed her in a Chanel suit, put on all her jewellery, full make-up and bright- red lipstick. She wanted to go to a bar for a Bloody Mary. At the hospital we got as far as the lift before her husband stopped us. I never forgave him. I have sat with dying people so much now I can't fear death. But death by cancer is so cruel. Steve spent his whole life at the centre of the party, issuing orders and having fun. And that's how I want him to die. I don't want to see a comatose vegetable slip away. I want to say goodbye to him sitting up in bed ranting (albeit unintelligibly) watching TV and planning more boat trips, more girls to get round and party with, more tours to set up and more records to promote.

We had our club, Desperate and Dateless, meeting several nights a week for dinner and clubbing. I was between husbands; my friend Sharon was never going to find Mr Perfect; and the final member, Mark, had just come to work in the UK and was on the look-out. Steve orchestrated weekend trips, one of which ended up in a disco with our hotel waiters and waitresses in a village hall in County Cork. Steve invented the world's most lethal cocktail, Doctor Death, a mixture of Stolly on the rocks with apple Schnapps. Three of those and you were ready for anything.

Desperate and Dateless have all come to say goodbye to Steve. Three of us are still not married. But what times we had together. It was perfectly fitting that on the day the three planes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Steve should stop lying down sleeping and mumbling and enter a new, highly active verbose phase, refusing to sit still, attempting to get out of bed and get dressed in order to fly to Nice, get his boat and sail to Antibes. I told him all the airports were closed and, not surprisingly, he didn't believe me.

Steve is on another journey, and it's not one he chooses to take. Even now he can't believe it's not possible to get off the train. The events of the last few days are surreal enough. To most young Americans, war was something you went somewhere else to do. Now it's arrived right at the very centre of their everyday world. The sense of shock is profound. Their lives will never be the same again.

Just before I arrived a week ago, Steve was sitting up in bed when an earthquake (four on the Richter scale) shook the whole building. It seemed to be an omen. Now I can see that his journey towards death has been as eventful as his life, with comedy and tragedy all mixed up. Party on, baby, as they say.