But I knew Allen forever.  And I ran into Allen for years at Naropa, which was a kind of Zen consciousness-raising grouping of individuals in Boulder, Colorado and Allen went there every year to teach.  And I finally saw him in New York.  And I even published The Complete Poems of Allen Ginsberg at Penguin, I think it was, in England; think Harper was his publisher in America.  And Allen says, well, why don't you publish it in England?  By that time I was the head of Penguin.  So I did.

And I even had dinner with him, maybe, less than a year before he died.  And it was very disheartening, because it was either a PEN dinner or it was some literary organisation's benefit dinner, and you could pick what table you wanted to sit at.  And every table had a famous author there.  So, at one table, Allen Ginsberg was seated, and I put myself down to sit there and see him again.  I was his publisher.  He also lived on 2^nd Avenue, which was very close to where I lived, but I didn't see him perhaps more than once a year after I published him.  And I sat next to him at the dinner.

And I thought I would have a wonderful sort of literary or intellectual dinner with him.  There were other people at the table, too, but he and I were the only ones who knew each other, and we were sitting next to each other.  And nothing of the sort happened.  He told me about all of his physical ailments in disgusting detail, and he had many of them.  And the last thing I wanted to do was hear about his problems at bed, in bed at night, and running to the bathroom, and draining from every orifice, and I don't know.  It was horrible!  That's all he wanted to talk about through this whole dinner.  And I wanted to ask him was, what are you writing now?  And where… and he was very, very nice, but he died relatively soon after that.  And I think he had a very unhappy death, because he was a mess.

But it started with a cab ride.  And your friend remembers that.  I did write it up somewhere, 1000 years ago.