So, I’m getting kind of a re-do here. I find myself writing a little tribute to my friend Andrew Martin, a eulogy of sorts. But I’m writing it for the second time. A decade after the first time. Andrew would appreciate this, with a certain level of dark humor that we shared.
It was the late 80s, early 90s. Andrew and I shared some of the same haunts – mostly cabaret spots, often ending up more or less closing out the bar together at Don’t Tell Mama in the West Village or Marie’s Crisis in the theater district. We were young. Younger anyway. I suppose I was in my early to mid 30s, he in his early to mid 20s. I was the food and wine writer for QSF Magazine. One day Andrew came to me with a proposal – he was launching a new publication centered around the cabaret scene, CaB magazine. He wanted to include some restaurant reviews each issue, along with other content that wasn’t necessarily cabaret related, but might be of interest to those reading it. He asked me if I’d write for him, and I did, issue after issue from June of ’92 until June of ’94.
Along the way, we became friends. We even dated a couple of times, but found that our attempts at romance tended to devolve into fits of hysterical laughter rather than steamy encounters. We left that part of our friendship to the wayside. And then one day, he announced that he needed a break, was going to stop publishing CaB, and get away for a little while. He had his demons, we all did. And he disappeared from my life.
And then he died. We had plenty of mutual friends at the time, and at least half a dozen of them told me that he’d passed away. It was always a little suspicious. An illness, an accident, no one seemed to know what had actually happened. But apparently he’d spent time somewhere, far from New York City, and was no longer with us, having gone to that big cabaret in the sky. I wrote a small note in memory of him on my website on the page with the index of the various articles I’d written for CaB. Now and again, mostly when I was revising something on the site, I’d think of him and wonder what the real story was.
A decade later, in late 2005, October 22nd to be exact, I woke up to find an email in my inbox from an Andrew Martin. My momentary thought was simply that it was a coincidence, it’s not exactly an uncommon sort of name. I clicked on it, and lo and behold, it was him. Not dead. He’d come across my little paean to his demise on my website and wanted to assure me that he was alive and well, living in New York, and participating with a comedy troupe, appropriately given the moment, named Meet the Mistake. I was thrilled. I had also just moved to Buenos Aires a few months before, and was not there to run over and give him a welcome back from the beyond hug.
But I did that just a few months later on a return visit. I went to one of his performances. I waited at the door, gave him a big hug, and a flower, which he assured me he’d place on his own gravesite. We went out for drinks, we caught up. And, though not by any stretch regularly, we kept in touch, an email exchange back and forth every couple of months. Then, a few years later, Facebook hit the scene. He was one of my first connections, and we took to commenting on each other’s trivial posts, and both being night owls, having the occasional late night chat when we found ourselves online at the same time. Not every day, not every week, maybe every 2-3 months. We flirted a bit – harmless flirtation, I’m happily married to Henry, and he was dating someone.
His mother passed away last year and we had a few more regular talks at night. Somewhere in there he went back to school, planning on a new career outside of the theater world. I had my upcoming 40th high school reunion (which was last weekend, I didn’t make it), he had his upcoming 30th, this coming weekend.
It wasn’t uncommon for a bit of time to pass without us talking. We were both busy. We lived in very different worlds, both geographically and the direction our passions had taken us. He often started chats with reminding me that he was still alive and kicking, usually involving some peculiar and humorous gag related to voices or visits from another realm.
And somehow, I missed it. He passed away the first week in June, a heart attack followed by a fall and head injury, found a day or two later. There were plenty of posts on his Facebook page about it, from his twin sister, and from friends, though none mutual, which might be why it didn’t burble to the top of my Facebook feed. Much has been written about him there, and tributes to him far more eloquent than my contribution may be in other spots. Sweet and charming when he wanted to be, a razor-tongued hellion when that was the direction called for, and funny, pretty much all the time.
Today would have been his birthday. 47, 48, I’m not sure which. It’s how I found out, when I went to his page to send him a message. All I can offer is a raised glass, a toast, a “Here’s looking at you kid”, for the second time, for real. Or as he would have said, “Love ya, babydoll.”
