This web site is dedicated to our friend Gary Brickman, who passed away on June 26, 2000. Hanging Out With Gary / page 2 Matt Jalbert, 14 July 2000 « previous Life in San Francisco includes eating out more often If there’s one thing I did with Gary it was eat. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of restaurants we dined at here in San Francisco. He’d always hem and haw over the menu and generally make the waitperson’s life a little less pleasant. At first this process made me cringe but soon I grew to appreciate it for the test it put people through and, learning to relax, I saw how Brick was exposing the real schmucks. In some too-cool eateries, I got really pissed when we got shuffled off by body-perfect hostesses, like at Thirsty Bear, where we were stuck in a corner I’m sure because they didn’t think Gary contributed to the frat and sorority look of the clientele. But most of the time we’d be cool. Gary would always speculate on the sexual orientation of any male servers. “Do you think he’s gay?” he’d ask me when the waiter was but three feet from our table. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” I’d say to the indefatigable Gary, smiling, as his eyes tracked the object of his desires across the restaurant. Not being gay, and perhaps lacking in decent compassion, I generally wanted to change the subject, but that’s one thing that was very sad in Gary’s life: his lack of romantic love. So many times I told him my stories of some heartache with my current girlfriend, and he always had a perspective that helped me get my head together. He was patient with me as I rambled on about 174 different facets of what was going on. Then he’d just cut though the mess and state a truth about the human condition that would make things infinitely clearer. And then, sometimes, he would remind me: “Hey, at least you have someone to be with. Me, I’ve never even had that. Never had a boyfriend.” I would fall into shameful silence, even though that was never his intention. To hear him say that tore my heart out. It made me realize what a huge heart Gary had. He could listen to my petty travails but still offer the comfort of a friend—despite the cruel heart the world had shown him. Way more hair than you Sometimes when we were hanging out Gary would look at me and say, “Dude! Jeeze, you’re losing your hair!” “Oh, bullshit, dude! You’ve got way less hair than me!” “Get outta here, man! No way. I have way more hair than you.” Two guys in their 30s comparing their thinning hair, each believing their friends were worse of than they. You’ve got to stop drinking In the summer of 1999, Gary convinced me to sign up in an acting class given by UC Extension. We were always doing impersonations together, acting out improv skits, and weaving the diaglog of “The Godfather” into our every conversation. In class, Gary was the bad boy, always trying to throw off the teacher’s rhythm with a wisecrack or a tiny improv bit. When we got our big parts and our partners, Gary really proved himself. He did a scene from a play in which he portrayed a man who’s wife was an alcoholic and whom he had to kick out of his home. In the scene, she had visited his New York apartment to beg him to take her back, but he was to refuse her. It was an intense scene wrought with drama and Gary did a great job as an actor, making us all cringe at the pain the characters were going through. I’m not part of that club Every once in a while I would remember that Gary was in a wheelchair. I never actually asked him what his condition was that stunted his body, figuring that if he didn’t want to bring it up then I didn’t need to know. We did, however, talk once about the handicapped situation, or, as Gary called it, “shortycapped.” He basically said that he didn’t like how some handicapped folks had made their disability the focus of their lives. I had mixed feelings about this—I don’t think fully-abled folks should expect handicapped folks to make them “at ease” with their condition. But even so, that’s what Gary did, and I now see that as one of his many admirable qualities: he utterly overcame the chair’s limitations, or simply used it to his advantage. CONTINUED: The blue smoke of Empire Gary Brickman, 1997 »home