When I moved from Las Vegas to Seattle in 2002, my dear friend Julie Brewer gave me a sort of care package encased in several of her husband Moss’ cigar boxes. She called it a “Julie Conjuring Kit,” and it contained a box of Nag Champa incense (“so you can smell my house”), two boxes of tea (“one that you like, and one that I like”), a Tibetan prayer flag (“because everyone should have one”), a million dollars in fake money (“so I can buy you a drink once in a while”) and a half-smoked pack of Camels with a “cool old lighter that may or may not work, but looks good anyway.”
The box also contained some photos of the amazing going-away party that Julie and her husband Moss had thrown for me—complete with music by Mark Huff and The Nines—and a few candles to lend further atmosphere. “You’ll provide the music,” she wrote. “You know just what I like. Use this kit in case of emergency! (Or any old time you want to.)”
And so I did. Upon hearing of Julie’s death on August 22, I immediately took a cab home from work, broke out the kit, set the incense and candles burning, loaded the CD player with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Moby, poured myself a shot of bourbon (I had long since drank all the tea) and waited patiently for Julie to appear. When she did not, I immediately realized what I had done wrong: I wasn’t in Las Vegas. Whatever it was that made Julie the proud mother of Sophia and the loving wife of Moss, the friend to so many in Las Vegas’ arts scene and the woman who stuck a flag at Fourth Street and Charleston when it was nothing but flophouses, crack whores and lawyers is much too big to be contained in a cigar box. The last time I saw Julie she was in Las Vegas, and there her spirit will always remain.
There are not enough pages in this magazine for me to begin to tell you how much Julie Brewer gave to this town or to tell you how much she meant to those who knew her. The facts speak for themselves: She was the original owner and operator of Enigma Garden Café, the best café this town will ever see, and she was one of the founders of Whirlygig, the producers of First Friday. She wrote brilliant satire for the now-defunct Spinzo Magazine and wrote passionate letters to Vegas’ dailies and alt-weeklies in defense of the town’s eternally beleaguered arts scene. Everyone who ever made coffee, art or music in this town knew her, or knew someone who did.
Whenever somebody wanted to open a creative business in Downtown Vegas, Julie would usually get the call, and she’d graciously give as much advice as that would-be gallery/coffeehouse/club owner was willing to take.
Even though Enigma is long gone (even the trio of early-century buildings it occupied have been torn down), anyone who frequented the joint can close their eyes and summon the place as if it still existed. The café had a weird, organic feel; it had seemingly sprung from the ground, like the fig tree and other leafy greens that once shaded its tranquil courtyard. You could hear Julie’s favorite music—Miles Davis, The Beatles, John Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—before you entered the courtyard and walked into the kitchen, where you’d find Julie and her crew hard at work making Mexican mochas, Spring Fever Fizzes, sandwiches and scrambled eggs, which they would prepare ingeniously by steaming them with the espresso maker.
You could take a seat at one of the vintage tables inside the kitchen building, underneath the clock in a cage and Eva Steil’s photographs, and look for the random phrases hidden in the rippled plaster on the walls (“On another level, perhaps this is all nonsense,” read my favorite). Or you could sit in the “garden,” which always seemed cool even on the hottest summer days, hear the wind rustling the trees and relish the scent of the ice melting in someone’s tea. At sunset, you could sit and listen to live music from Paul Summers or Tony Wood or Herbody Cinnamon, or you could grab one of the Enigma event fliers that Julie and Anthony Bondi painstakingly created every single month—each one a work of art—and head into the Vegas night, feeling like you had done something genuinely valuable with your day.
Julie herself hardly saw any of this. Almost without exception, she was in the kitchen, keeping the engine running. Years later, she asked to see the video I had taken of the many bands, poetry readings and events that had happened in Enigma’s courtyard, because she had barely seen any of them. “It’s like I wasn’t even there,” she lamented.
But she was there, of course. Enigma was Julie, in personality and in visage. In creating it, she did more than serve up coffee and acoustic music; she planted a part of herself, and it took root and grew. Even now, an entire decade post-Enigma, Downtown Las Vegas is shaded by its branches.
However, Julie Brewer was much more than the café she ran or the monthly gallery walk she helped to create. Julie was in her every atom an artist: She colored the world around her, filled in its details, accented its absurdities. She dressed like a golden-age movie star, spoke in dry sentences worthy of Dorothy Parker, smoked Camels with a playful hauteur. She was wholly approachable and found worthiness in everyone, from city politicians to schizophrenic drunks. Some of the best days her friends ever had were spent just sitting in Julie’s living room, drinking her perfect coffee—she had a way with a French press that few could hope to match—and talking about subjects ranging from Eastern philosophy to Hank Williams.
There is too much more that I can say, but the lady herself would tell me to wrap this up. Julie didn’t want a funeral and would have called bullshit on an obituary.
(“It’s lovely that you’re doing it, Geoffy, but I ain’t reading it,” she might have said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke to punctuate her thought.) Besides, it will take years for those who loved Julie to sort this out. We’ll think of her whenever we smell Nag Champa incense. We’ll think of her when we hear Miles or Coltrane or Hank Williams or John Lennon. We’ll think of her whenever we see a piece of art that touches us, or whenever we sit in the shade of a leafy tree. And we’ll think of her for as long as Las Vegas is on the face of this Earth. As tumultuous a relationship as we may have with our hometown, it will never seem like a bad place to us, because it gave life and purpose to Julie Brewer.