"I got an e-mail from somebody one day saying, “I understand you’re a friend of Kathy Acker’s. She’s currently dying in a hospital in Mexico.” I immediately e-mailed the UK and said, “She’s dying in a hospital in Mexico,” and a mutual friend of mine and Charlie’s, a guy named Igor, said, “She’s not dying, she’s just got flu, I checked around. She’s in San Francisco with flu, she’s just being a drama queen.” So I wrote back to the guy who said she’s dying and said I’m told she’s the flu in San Francisco, and they wrote back, “She’s really dying.” I phoned her in the hospital in Mexico. We chatted a while. She was very weak. It was good. This week has been a particularly rough one on me because my friend John M. Ford the writer died completely unexpectedly. And it’s everybody who knew him and loved him is completely devastated, and one reason we’re devastated is he was sending us e-mails the day before and his heart went or his kidneys went in the night and he was gone. With Kathy I never had that. I’ve always missed her, but I got to phone up and say good-bye. That was good. That sort of somehow made it copable. Then she was gone, and she died in room 101. As Alan Moore said, “There’s nothing that woman can’t turn into a literary reference.”"