Marcus Evan Brooks

On September 10th, 2002 my best friend, Marcus Evan Brooks, died from cancer. Since then I have been thinking about him a lot, and I wanted to make something for him, so that other people could have a chance to see a little bit of what he was like. I'm not going to try to describe him, or say anything deep about him. I'm just going to write down some of what we did together, put up some of his art, and let you draw your own conclusions.

Meeting Marcus

I first met Marcus back in 1984, hanging out at Au Coquelet, a cafe in Berkeley. Honestly, I can't remember the very first time that I met him, but it probably involved me buying beer for him. For the longest time we knew each other peripherally - going to the same parties, going to dance nights at The Berkeley Square, drinking in the same parks and dating the same girl.

In 1987 all that changed when one of Marcus' roommates in San Francisco decided to move out. Marcus was in Au Coquelet and mentioned he was looking for a new roommate, and I jumped at the chance to move into the city. What followed were two of the best years of my life.

Living With Marcus

Living was Marcus was a blast. He would get excited about almost everything and I would get swept along in the wake of his enthusiasm. This led to lots of going out, lot's of drinking, and occasional art attacks that would end up with me crouched on the floor wrapped in a shroud of toilet paper while Marcus took pictures and told me to "look more anguished".

The things I remember most are the stupid things we used to do, like going to this bar on lower Haight called 530, where we would spend hours drinking generic beer and stacking the cans one on top of another. We would wave away the server's efforts to clear our cans and continue building our tower till it leaned precariously off to the side and eventually collapsed - either through it own weight, or the force of our drunken gesturing as we talked, smoked, and drank. I think the tallest we ever got without falling was about 14 cans which is a nearly 7 foot tall stack - not bad.

As we walked home, we would sing Robyn Hitchcock's acappela classic "Uncorrected Personality Traits" at the top of our lungs. Needless to say we were never harrased or hassled by anyone - we seemed too crazy to bother. Marcus would insist that he had to key the yuppie cars that we passed, and I had to stay relatively alert to talk him out of it.

In the mornings we had a tradition of "Beer and Breakfast" at 1705, a cafe on upper Haight . We only went to places with numbers for names. There we met Molly, and we both fell hopelessly in crush with her. Nothing ever came out of it for either of us, of course - it wasn't the kind of crush that you pursued, rather it was the kind that you indulged in by staring and speculating. We would spend our breakfast sneaking glances at her when she wasn't looking, talking about her, and wondering if she realized that the dry erase board in the cafe advertising "Haus wine" was, in fact, mispelled. We also both came to the conclusion that Molly was the cutest name ever.

Later we would run into Molly at a friend's house. Seeing her out of her normal context was jarring. However, she did sit and talk to us for a while, and briefly sat on Marcus's lap. I never heard the end of that.

We were pretty poor in those days, which led to even more fun when we ran out of money before the rent was due, or the power bill had to be paid. There were many days that we would run an extension cord out into the hallway so we could steal power from the building when ours was turned off, or that we would turn off all the light and sit very quietly while our landlady knocked on the door and insisted that we pay her.

It was shortly after this time - around 1989, that we started to loose touch. I moved out of the apartment, though only across the hallway, and not long after that, got married for the first time. Marcus was one of my two best men, and gave the toast at the wedding. It was a great toast - Marcus has a great talent for seeming to scoot up to the edge of offense, then gracefully pull away. In addition to getting married, I was also getting two step children. The toast went something like this - "I am really, really glad to be able to be here and wish Ed and Nancy all the best as they start out together. But what I really want to talk about is the kids. I think that it's really unfair - I think that the kids highlight life's unfairness". At this point he paused, and everyone looked a little uncomfortable, wondering what he was getting at. He continued, "It's unfair that these kids get to have parents as great as Ed and Nancy, while we all got stuck with our parents". Sighs of relief all around.

Unfortunately, after that we lost touch for a long time. Marcus was off doing his thing, I was off doing mine, and well, they were really different things. A couple of years went by.

In 1991 I was working for Visa International, in their Business Communications group, when we had to hire a System Admin temp for our network. Who should show up one morning, but Marcus. It was both great, and sad to see him. This was during a not very good time for him - those of you who knew him probably know what I am talking about. Despite that, during the two weeks that he was there, it was good to see him. He had everyone pretty much convinced that he was going out with another of the temps that worked for us (He later insisted that he never did, that she just gave him rides home). Frequently he could be heard wandering the halls softly singing Tones on Tails "Slender Fungus". Occasionally, he would get caught napping in the server room, though never by anybody important.

After about two weeks the regular Sys Admin was back on the job, and despite promises to stay in touch, neither of us did. More years went by.

While I wasn't around to hear about it at the time, he did a number of things while we were out of touch. He appeared way in the background of the cafe scene in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" (see the nearby picture), nearly got married himself, and continued to work on improving his art.

Around late 1995, or early 1996 a couple of things happened. I got divorced, and Internet email/phone directories started to pop up. Suddenly, I was back in touch with an old girlfriend, another old girlfriend got in touch with me, and I got a message from Marcus asking if I was THE Ed Gore. I said that I was, and we went out for a drink.

It had been 4 or five years since I had seen Marcus , and boy had they made a difference. He was doing a ton of freelance web stuff, and really had his act together. We started hanging out frequently, and I went to a couple of art shows with his stuff, and his painting had become just incredible.

Still the same sorts of disturbing imagery that definately indicated an awkward relationship with the fairer sex. Lot's of girls holding hearts in one hand, some of them with hammers in the other. It's funny, Marcus was pretty much always dating someone, but for the most part it never seemed to make him any happier. Either he could find something wrong with them, or he would be madly in love with them, and they would dump him. Frequently, it seemed, for being too nice. There were exceptions to those rules (and you know who you are), but it was certainly the overall pattern.

We hung out quite a bit - mostly going to bars and stuff. Probably the next big landmark was our trip to New Orleans in 1996. Marcus had been planning on going for some time, and asked if I wanted to come along. Okay, when I say "asked if I wanted to go", what I really mean is he got all excited and told me that I HAD to go, that there were swamp tours, and that we could stay with his freinds there and on of them looked just like Princess Leia. Who was I to say no? I had a business trip scheduled to New York the week before he was planning to go, and was able to get my flight set up so that I stopped over for a week in New Orleans, and it was actually cheaper than not going to New Orleans.

Because of the business trip scheduling, I got into New Orleans the day after Marcus did. When I got to the house he was out with his friends - I hung out with Indigo (one of his freinds who we were staying with). He got back in about an hour, bubbling over with stories from his adventures - seeing the albino alligator at the zoo, going to the the creepy Goth Museum. He was pretty sure that the goth museum was no meseum at all, but rather some goth had just decided to open their house to the public and charge people money to come in and look around.

That night we went to The Dragon, the Bar where Indigo bartends. Niether I, nor Marcus rememebered too much about that night, past the point where we were handed tumblers full of Chartreuse - a foul anise-based memory eraser associated with the city.