From Daphne Athas

I'm so glad you're doing a book on or about Max, and I want to
be of help.  When it comes to anecdotes I'm a dodo, Unneat.  I'd
probably have to be prompted as in an improv comedy.  Since I knew Max
for so long --  He always used to say 'she's my oldest friend,' and
then he went and fell down his  stairs, damn him.  I was in Greece at
the time and Bland called to tell me of this.  I had busted my knee
tripping over his oriental rug a few months before he did his Mother
Goose Jack and Jill, when he ordered me upstairs to get his PayPal
card out of some pair of pants of his which was on his bedroom floor
-- he was on the telephone trying to get me some cheap computer part
over eBay and thought he had struck gold, and as I didn't have that
credit card along, he was going to pay and I'd pay him back, so I was
trying to hurry, but I was leary of those stairs, took them slow and
speeded up when I got down to the living room  because I have
arthritis of the hips, and he was back to me at his roll top desk with
his high-backed chair and didn't see me drop out of sight.  I neither
squeaked, hollered, nor said anything, and when he called to make me
get there quicker, I said I'm coming, and he couldn't understand where
my voice was coming from.  It sounded like a ventriloquist.  He knew
it was hurt pretty bad, but it was a Sunday so after I crammed my leg
into his big old Saab we went around to Walk In Dr. places.  They said
it was fractured.  He was trying to avoid the Hospital.  I totally
concurred.  But there he was stuck with me to the late hours at
Memorial Hosp while we waited.  It was a fracture which made me a bit
late to get to Greece that summer.  After that he kept worrying about
me falling down all the time.  I think his mind was on Falling Down so
much in the general  that he did it instead of me.  And it really
seemed predictable. If you keep thinking of it, it becomes a phrase in
music.  You have to obey it.  And so Bland called me in Greece to tell
me, and I was furious with him.  For one whole week I kept making up
these sentences and hearing him say he always said, like put downs
and other witticisms, which  closed conversations to full stop.  I
thought of the Solomon Grundy Poem, because he achieved death over no
more than a weekend.  I carped at him for doing himself in by keeping
the phrase Falling Down, Follow After as in Jack and Jill and the
pail. And then I resurrected what you do on Monday, Tues. and so on
through the week, till you got to the end of it whe Solomon Grundy was
dead.   You idiot! I kept telling him. I talked to him while looking
out of my hotel window on the Mediterranean.

.... For he was lucky, having Fallen on Friday and died on
Monday without even breaking his neck.  It was just bad for everybody
who loved him.