Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “‘Shaved her legs and then he was a she’ . . . ? He?”

“That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having the Conversation. “You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.”

She grinned like a light going on. “Oh, Dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it. I’m not sure that I’d ever expected the Conversation to go quite like that.

I interviewed Lou Reed in 1991, over the phone. He was in Germany, about to go onstage. He was interested, engaged, smart. Really smart. He’d published a collection of lyrics, with notes. They felt like a novel.

A year or so later, I had dinner with him, with my publisher at DC Comics. Lou wanted to make Berlin into a graphic novel. He was hard work at dinner: prickly, funny, opinionated, smart and combative: you had to prove yourself. My publisher mentioned that she had been a friend of Warhol’s and faced a third degree from Lou to prove that she had actually been a real friend. Before he talked to me about comics he gave me something approaching an oral examination on 1950s EC Horror comics, and challenged me on using a phrase of his in an issue of Miracleman I’d written. I told him I’d learned more about Warhol’s voice from Lou’s lyrics in Songs for Drella than I had from all the biographies I’d read, all the Warhol diaries, and Lou seemed satisfied.

I had passed the exam, but wasn’t interested in taking it twice and anyway, I’d been around long enough to know that the person isn’t the art. Lou Reed, Lou told me, was a persona he used to keep people at a distance. I was happy to keep my distance. I went back to being a fan, happy to celebrate the magic without the magician.

I’m sad today. Friends of his are sending me brokenhearted e-mails. The world is darker. Lou knew about days like this, as well. “There’s a bit of magic in everything,” he told us, “and then some loss to even things out.”

Originally published in the October 28, 2013, issue of the Guardian. I wrote it on the train between London and Bristol, the day after I learned Lou was dead, and I borrowed from the interview/article I did in 1991. I’ve now taken most of those bits out, as that article is the next thing in this book, but some sentences might seem familiar.

Waiting for the Man: Lou Reed

I

WHEN I WAS about fourteen I found a copy of a Lou Reed lyrics book in my local bookshop. It was a cheaply bound mimeoed affair, with a stippled caricature of Lou shooting up on the flimsy cover: pirate publishing.

I wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t afford it (and the police had just busted up a junior shoplifting ring at my school and I’d had to return the copy of Lou Reed Live that Jim Hutchins—the John Dillinger of the ninth grade—had obtained for me at a price significantly less than the record store was asking, so even that option was kind of out).