Marcus
A quick story from the France trip that I’ve been looking forward to telling, but hadn’t quite found the right moment for:
I took the TGV back up from Tours to Paris, as it turned out, with the organizer of the conference I’d just attended, as well as another attendee. We chatted on the train, and then, disembarking at Montparnasse, discovered that we were all taking the same Métro line on to our next destinations.
Walking through the maze of the Montparnasse Métro station, Éric (the conference organizer) said how sorry he was that I didn’t really get to do anything in Paris during my trip, since I spent the majority of my time in Tours.
“Actually,” I told him, “the night I arrived, my friend Marcus had a vernissage for a new group show he’s in, and –”
Éric stopped dead in his tracks.
“You know Marcus McAllister?”
Yep. My college roommate, and my roommate once again in New York. My best old late-night meaning-of-life debating pal. The guy who once went with me to a Halloween party, for which he dressed as me dressed as him, and I dressed as him dressed as me. (We were both wearing bluejeans, white t-shirts, and old sport coats. It seemed pretty funny at the time.) That Marcus.
I always knew that kid was going places.
28 April 2004, 1.51 am
Hi!
Guess what? marcus had yet another vernissage last night and he told me about your blog. So here I am writing you about you writing about me!
Hope things are going fine in California.
Cheers,
Éric
29 April 2004, 11.54 am
See, I knew it was a small world. I’m increasingly of the opinion, though, that Marcus is some kind of small-world-nexus. Which, of course, he’d love. Someday people will play Six Degrees of Marcus McAllister. Or we’ll brag about our low McAllister Indexes. Or something.
And then when people talk, as they inevitably will, about how they’re such good personal friends of Marcus’s, I’ll be able to ask them if they know about the time he had his tonsils out. Or if they ever met Cassie, or in fact even know who she was. Or if their apartment walls have ever been lined with twenty-five enormous paintings of a naked Marcus.
And if not, I’ll tell them, talk to the hand. They don’t know from Marcus.
(Good to hear from you, Éric—and keep in touch!)
10 January 2006, 7.42 am
Now I never had Marcus’s naked paintings in my apt. (though I do remember them). But I DID have a naked Marcus in my apartment from time to time :)
Yes, I knew Cassie. I’d even been to Little Rock with Marcus.
I haven’t really thought about him in years, but I hope he is well (despite what he may think after my embarrassing drama in Ithaca). So if anyone talks to him, tell him Scott says hello and wishes him every success in the world!