The Night I Walked Into a Mission District Coffeehouse and Encountered a USMC General

Two decades ago I spent an evening hanging with my old UCSD roommate in San Francisco. We were in the Mission District, and Scott wanted to grab some coffee, so we walked into the first coffeehouse we came across. We were going to sit down and catch up, but a very obnoxious stew-bum who reeked of alcohol and week-old sweat was loudly pounding the table, insisting that he had been a general in the Marines. It cast a pall over our nostalgic reunion, so we got out of there as soon as our orders were filled. A few days ago, Scott found a thank-you-note/comic I drew memorializing “General” Brooks and passed it along.

The last panel is a close-up of the General’s eye as I remembered them–red veins blotting out the white of his cornea, his tear ducts exuding a viscous brown substance.