My first clear memory of Gary I was maybe eight and he was sitting on my bed in the dark, a slight tremble in his bones. My mother was getting hysterical in the kitchen downstairs. Gary was visiting because he and my mother were writing something about Shakespeare together. We were renting a house in the country from the artist John Chamberlain.

I can’t remember whether Gary was upset about a lover of his, or my mother was fed up with him because he was getting on her nerves like needles in her brain. I loved him so easily, probably, because he reminded me of her: the world’s most histrionic complainer. And the fact that, like my mother, he trusted me with his confidence and his heartbreak.

“Oh, Alex, I don’t know what to do,” he said. I looked into his watery, tender eyes. “Just stay up here with me,” I said. He let out a raspy cackle. I loved to make him laugh.

If my mother had upset him, then I would have wanted to make him feel better, but I also wanted him to stay with me because I wanted to hear all about his sex life. What exactly did he and his boyfriends do together? He didn’t get too graphic with me, but listening to him contributed to my lifelong fetish for hearing about gay male sexual exploits.

When I was nine, Gary and my father made a movie together called A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking. I played the precocious daughter of a dominatrix (Cookie Mueller) who was Gary’s new neighbor in the movie. Gary is in the middle of having sex when Cookie drops me off at his apartment while she goes out. I ask him to turn on Dallas for me before he goes back into the bedroom. In real life, I was dying to watch the sex scene, but my father wouldn’t let me. Closed set. Luckily, I could still hear the slurping and sucking sounds and I tried to imagine all the ways two men could pleasure each other.

I didn’t see Gary very much in my teenage years. At some point the little orange Hanuman Book with Gary’s face on the cover started hanging around my father’s editing desk, though I never opened it. It had never occurred to me to check out Gary’s writing, which was really dumb considering I went on to study literature at Bard and fancied myself a writer. Rent Boy came out the year I graduated from Bard and the same year I wrote that book about my childhood (in which Gary is a character) for my senior project.

In the late nineties, Gary moved down the road from us in upstate NY. I was married by then and had pretty much given up on writing. We hung out with him a lot during these years. He loved my husband, Nick. He would give us both—but especially Nick—big wet open-mouthed kisses that we sometimes gently avoided due to his cigarette breath. I still thought of him as my own personal E.T., if E.T. was a hilariously caustic big drinker, gossiper, and professional complainer. I had no idea Gary was working on Do Everything in the Dark. He never talked to me about his work and I never asked him about it.

When I had my first baby, we fell out of touch. Sometimes I’d run into him in the East Village and we’d hug and complain and not have to say much because we knew each other in that way that you can only know each other when you grow up together.

I contacted him a few years ago. I wanted to send him my book so he gave me his address. I’m afraid to look back at our email exchange. I was hoping for a blurb, but I still hadn’t read his work. Around that time, my daughter’s boyfriend was laughing aloud while reading. When I asked him what was so funny he held up a copy of Do Everything in the Dark and said, “Don’t you know him?”

I asked the boyfriend to loan me the book. After the first few pages I slammed it down on the table. I thought: all those years, the little older man who I thought was my hapless sidekick was actually a genius churning out one sharp and sparkling sentence after another? I kept reading, howling on every page, then ordered more of his books, still hungry for his voice, then I read interviews with him and read every writer he said he liked.

I wrote to him again. I didn’t mention my book, I was terrified to know what he really thought about it, no, I just tried to tell him how much I adored his writing. I felt compelled to tell him. He didn’t care, of course. He knew how good he was, he knew he was under-appreciated and my opinion didn’t mean anything to him and also, duh, he was totally unsentimental.

After I read I Can Give You Anything But Love, I sent him another note gushing about his writing. He told me he was sick—it was a short email, a few lines. Maybe he said something else, I don’t know, I’m still afraid to look at our exchange. I was planning to make a date to see him, to tell him how much I regretted wasting all those years not talking to him about writing, but then again I worried he would be annoyed by this sentiment.

I was still reading him when I got the news of his death. It felt like a physical blow. He is so alive in my psyche. Vile Days, Do Everything in the Dark, and I Can Give You Anything But Love are on my desk, marked up, dog eared. This quote is written out on a yellow legal pad: