Mike Pendo, who had spent the past decade as an HIV researcher in San Francisco, died this week of a heart attack at his home. He had been my friend since the two of us attended CAL in the early-80's, although, ironically, he spent the first year of my knowing him trying to kill me (literally) for having autographed/defaced one of his posters. Mike was the next-door neighbor of my best friend from high school in the Spens-Black dorm, and it was together with him and his roommate that we watched re-runs of Brideshead Revisited and became Phoebe Nicholls fanatics. He, the aforementioned roommate, and several other people from that dorm bought a three-story house in the Castro District in the early-90's, back when that was still possible off the combined income of schoolteachers and law clerks, and he lived there for most of that decade. I didn't get to see him much when I visited the house in recent years, but every so often he would drop by, and he would always ask me whatever happened to the PhoeNix. He was a sweet, funny guy, and he was just 41.