It’s been 30 years since Peter Gravelle handed his friend Sid Vicious his last half-gram of heroin, and in Sid, By Those Who Really Knew Him, a documentary out next month in the U.K., he’s finally coming clean. Gravelle says he ran into the Sex Pistols bassist by chance at around noon on February 1, 1979, as Vicious was being released from a 55-day stint at Rikers Island. Vicious asked for help purchasing heroin, so that night Gravelle brought about $200’s worth to Vicious’s girlfriend’s place downtown. They hung out, talked, did some of the drugs. At around 3 a.m., Gravelle left to see a band uptown. “The next day,” he remembers, “I got woken up by a flatmate telling me that my friend’s face was all over the newspaper. I ran out, picked up a newspaper and Sid was dead.” Gravelle says he doesn’t feel guilty anymore. “If he hadn’t got it from me, he would probably have got it from someplace else. Sid took a lot of chances. But he was too young to die. I never expected him to die.”
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