 Trocchi acquired his lifelong heroin addiction in Paris.He left Paris for the United States and spent time in Taos, New Mexico, before settling in New York City, where he worked on a stone scow on the Hudson River.This time is chronicled in the novel "Cain's Book", which at the time became something of a sensation, being an honest study of heroin addiction with descriptions of sex and drug use that got it banned in Britain, where the book was the subject of an obscenity trial.