The Music Man of Barf and Puke

I'd heard about him for some time and finally met him at a backyard theater piece in which I performed. It was late November, so people were walking around with blankets on their shoulders and we did the show in a crumbling 19th century shed in a sleepy neighborhood in Baltimore. I saw he was short, with a sour grin, but I never got the chance to look at him straight on. His head was always angled slightly askew, so it was like viewing a Picasso portrait - flat planes of sight, but never an actual full, contoured image. I said "met" him, but as I think of it, I never actually met Marc, though I tried to several times. "Hey, Dan, that's Marc," and I sought to catch his eye, but his head swiveled left, just as I looked at him to say hello. A woman was rehearsing a Psychedelic Furs song on the ukulele and it was as if she were singing from beyond the door of an open portal at the end of the galaxy or had seized the song from the top of a mountain in Taos, New Mexico, which is where she had driven in from to do the show. So, I was content to listen to her singing.

There was another time I should have met him. It was on the second floor of a Victorian house divided up into grad student and artist rooms. We were on the couch drinking wine and he breezed into the room with some women in their early 20s and declared to his ex-wife, "She's ambergris! She's going to be ambergris!" indicating one of the women and referencing her role in the show they were DIY-touring with. He was in motion across the room, walking in S shapes, and I tried to catch his eye - but only the flat plains of sight and blurring, disappearing gestures again.

I never met Marc, but he did finally look directly at me one evening. Right before his derangements would shatter the fragile community we had built, I, my partner and Marc's ex-wife Pilar booked two weekends to do a performance at the theater space he ran downtown. As a show of good faith, I went to see the new show that he had written. Marc was on stage next to a guy with a long beard and glasses and a young woman and the two of them were verbally and physically abusing Marc in a kind of arch GG Allin-meets-Punch-and-Judy act. The characters occasionally coughed loudly and retched and there were some visually dazzling elements, as the two tormentors circled Marc on tall bicycles, taunting him. But there was an undercurrent of coldness that only grew as the show wore on. Each time Marc would grab the old-fashioned crooner microphone and sing something in his powder blue tuxedo jacket, he looked directly at me. I couldn't tell if he was challenging me or trying to be open and vulnerable. I returned his gaze, but didn't understand what was happening.

At the end of the play, a box was passed through the sparse audience and, through some mimetic gestures, Marc let me know that I was to open it. I did so. But I can't remember what was inside - I think, maybe a plastic flower or even a plastic bloody finger, but I can't recall. After that night, Marc's madness jumped a fence and my friends and I would not do any more shows in the backyard shed or talk on the couch in the old Victorian house with the candles burning or walk the hills of the city together, sharing our ideas and impressions.