Gary Quan's Last Stand
From Bay Area playboy to poverty in Paraguay, addiction, guns, and madness.
Gary’s last legible message to me was spliced between dozens of images of makeshift home he had built in rural Paraguay, just 60 miles outside of Asuncion. It read:
"I had a rough patch homeless sleeping on the ground no electricity nor water 6 months. Changes a man. Priority changes after all stolen. Cannot trust a soul.I will shoot to kill and bury the body."
After that, the words started to lose meaning and context. Gary sent picture after picture of his (as he called it) “fortress in progress”. Occasionally there would be some muttered, convoluted sentence like “bitch got crack, but my goat sleeps in the bed and I shoot”, or “living the dream, two moats and turrets coming, teeth gone but booze cheap and shitty.” His fortress, as he saw it, was barely a standing structure. It had a dirt floor, some sort of brick in one part, and tackily-painted wooden walls surrounding the main part.
I hadn’t seen Gary in years, not since the party days in Buenos Aires. He started communicating to Pako, Ale Sena, and I around 2021 through Facebook and WhatsApp, showing off military-grade guns strapped to his small, shirtless, nearly 60-year-old Chinese-American frame. Every post or message felt like it was out of a movie about a man who had lost his mind. His teeth had fallen out, he slept in a sheet-less bed with farm animals, he drank indigenous grain liquor, and he had a plan to form his own local militia in Paraguay. His delusion was both frightening and darkly funny, until it killed him.
Oakland was never kind to Gary Quan
Gary grew up in Oakland, California in the 1970s. He was the grandson of a Chinese immigrant who had made a fortune in San Francisco in textiles, and the son of the founder of one of the state’s top private insurance companies. As a child, from what he described, Gary was spoiled materially but disciplined relentlessly. He told me of beatings from his mother, who abused him mentally and physically, eventually telling him she didn’t love him and severing ties. He told me of his emotionless father, who cared only about business. He told me of being a small Chinese American getting picked on by black and white kids at his school.
By any reasonable measure of interpretation Oakland was never kind to Gary Quan, so he moved to Los Angeles to fake his way through USC, and then to San Francisco. All of Gary’s jobs were given to him by his father. His hobbies were that of the typical emotionally broken elite: racing Ferraris, motorcycles, yachting, European vacations, shopping for designer clothes, and binge drinking with cocaine. Eventually, his outrageous behavior and disregard for others made him a liability in San Francisco, particularly to his family. Gary, unwilling to change, decided to run from his demons instead of facing them.
He moved to Brazil in his 40s, and then Argentina in his 50s, maintaining a paper title and salary at his family’s insurance agency. He also at one point had a large trust fund, but that had mostly been drained by the time he left Brazil. Luckily, in Argentina, things were cheap when you had US dollars, and his salary alone covered his rent and general living expenses. The prostitutes, cocaine, bar tabs, and lavish artifacts he collected all went into draining the trust fund even more. He was a man that seemed to survive despite himself, and was generous as long as you tolerated his madness.
Brian only drinks Heineken, man
I met Gary in late 2009 at The Spot, the bar I worked at in Buenos Aires’ old, posh, Recoleta Neighborhood. He was, by all accounts, one of the most eccentric gringos in the city. He often dressed in leather pants, nearly fully unbuttoned designer shirts, black cowboy boots, gold chains, and fur coats. He sported a Fu Manchu mustache and had shoulder-length black hair. The first time he came to the bar he was accompanies by a brown wiener dog. He sat down, put the dog on a stool, ordered a Heineken he poured into an empty shot glass, then smiled in glee as the dog drank it.
“This is Brian, he only drinks Heineken, man, no cheap shit.”
That is how I met Gary Quan, and that is how he was known for the first year of his presence at The Spot. Some people (including myself) thought the dog drinking beer was cruel, but it fueled his need for attention and lots of people loved it. When the gimmick wore off he’d leave Brian at home and come in solo, brazenly drunk and always loaded with a lot of cocaine. His behavior was typical for an eccentric drunk. He’d slur mumbled words, aggressively trying to get listeners to pay attention to some lost, drowned point. He spoke no Spanish and was barely understandable in English, so it came off as just noise to most.
He had mood swings that would range from fun, generous, party guy, to angry, belligerent asshole. Women were mostly intimidated or disgusted by this, but due to his small size and outrageous attire, men found it amusing and egged him on. I tired of the belligerence but tolerated it, hoping to get his good side more than his bad side as he’d walk in.
Gary would invite us to lavish dinners at his huge apartment, left big tips, shared his blow, and was often genuinely kind and caring, even thoughtful. He “dated” a Paraguayan prostitute who spoke no English, and she’d sit silently when he’d bring her along or have her at home during his dinners. He paid her a monthly stipend, paid for her rent, bought her a car, and paid for tuition for her to go to school. I genuinely believe he confused this for love. Gary had never felt real love in his life. Not from his family, not in Oakland, LA, San Fran, Brazil, or Buenos Aires.
Paraguay was a huge mistake, but Gary was too fried to reason with
At some point in Buenos Aires, Gary’s addictions spiraled into vile social toxicity. He was barely welcome anywhere in public, and he chose to drink and drug at home mostly because of it. One day, without any warning or plan, he jumped on a plane to Paraguay and posted about it on Facebook. He was moving there to go find his estranged prostitute girlfriend, who had returned to her actual husband she had been lying to Gary about for two years. He posted a few more times from Paraguay during his first year there (2014), and then just disappeared.
His projection of his life in Paraguay seemed to be relatively cool. There were pictures of a huge suburban-type home with a garden, luxury furniture, fish tanks, guns, and of course, his girlfriend who he had reunited with. The idea of this mad man in one of poorest, most rugged places on earth was startling, but Gary was wild, so it wasn’t unexpected. Apparently he had fled some big debts with friends in Buenos Aires, but he, like all psychologically damaged addicts, was selfish, and obtusely unaware of the damage he did to anyone in his life, friend or otherwise.
I didn’t think much about Gary Quan between 2014 and 2021. He’d post political rants on Facebook every now and again, but never really reached out to chat. That all changed some years later, when he reappeared to a small group of us online, a totally unhinged, broken man. His demons had caught up with him, and between deep mental illness, dangerous substance abuse, and delusion, he was in a permanent state of mania. There were no more linear conversations to be had with Gary. He simply ranted.
He told us that his home was stolen from him by police gangsters. He told us he had been beaten to near death. He told us he had drained the last of his savings and stockpiled weapons, bought a truck, and was building a fortress in the countryside so the “bad men” could never hurt him again. This rattled Pako, Ale, and I to the extent that it was so dark it became funny. For a year or so during the COVID doldrums, it was entertainment. Toothless Gary and his machine guns, drinking moonshine shirtless or kissing a dead goat with a live snake around his neck. It was funny until it wasn’t.
Gary Quan had no chance to run from death any longer
About a year into our online group chat madness with Gary, his communications got darker and less frequent. We started to talk without him about our worries for what comes next. We knew Gary was going to die doing there, we just didn’t know how or when. The fortress photos stopped coming in, and it was clear that it was unfinished. The boys and I contemplated flying to Paraguay to get him, film his story, and make an online documentary about his life. At a certain point, we just wanted to find someone to take him home, back to San Francisco, to some sort of rehab or psyche facility.
Communications from Gary stopped abruptly. He posted a picture getting an IV somewhere outdoors, eyes completely cloudy, saying he had “bad blood”. Then he just vanished from his online presence entirely. I knew he was dead after a month of silence. We all did. We would write, fruitlessly every few weeks but got nothing. He had no family we could contact online and his Facebook friends were mostly old men from his playboy days in the Bay in the 90s. They barely knew who he was by then.
Roughly one year after his vanishing, I checked his Facebook again and saw that a friend wrote that he had died from a parasitic infection. I found it deeply ironic that the decades of booze, drugs, and self-abuse didn’t kill him — Paraguay did. A microscopic, water-born bacteria at his makeshift fortress took him out before turning 60. There were no friends to help with getting the body out. The guns and animals most assuredly went to the local police. The fortress demolished, or occupied by squatters. Gary couldn’t run from reality in Paraguay. It chased him down and took him out, forcing him to see all the pain he had hidden from for decades.
Gary Quan was a good man, but he chose to gamble with consequences early, and they found him like they would anyone. His last stand was his most tragic, but his life was an adventure that most could hardly dream of. He got what he paid for, but knowing Gary, I think he knew it was worth it for the wild ride.
A most tragic story. I remember New Year's Eve and the turkey dinner he cooked in his beautiful apartment and the balcony view at midnight watching the fireworks. Rest in peace, Gary,