

In February, Epic Beard Man (aka Thomas Bruso) became an Internet celebrity after video of an altercation he was involved in on an Oakland bus went viral. (Background here.) A slew of spin-off memes, mash-ups, and even a video documentary quickly emerged. (My favorites focused on "Amber Lamps," the headphone-wearing young woman in the background of the video who seemed completely oblivious to the violence taking place just a few feet away from her.) What happened to Bruso since the fight though? The current issue of the SF Weekly tells the tale of this eccentric and unlikely Internet sensation. It's not a happy story. From the SF Weekly (image below by Frank Gaglione) :



The phone rang, and Bruso asked me to answer it. In the month since he became Epic Beard Man, he has become wary, and not just because of the kids who call to ask him how much he'll charge to shine their shoes. You can't have a gloves-off racial clash of the kind rarely seen by polite society and expect to avoid the fallout. Dozens of black men posted videos on YouTube taking Bruso's side, arguing that he was defending himself against a fool who read racism where there was none. Yet white supremacists commenting on message boards saw an all-powerful white man triumphing over a scraggly thug. The far-right Occidental Quarterly referred to Bruso as a "folk hero to hundreds of thousands of White Americans who are tired of being perpetual victims of violent hate crimes in their own land." Bay Area National Anarchists, which preaches white separatism, attempted to organize a rally to support him.

There's no doubt Bruso uses wildly politically incorrect terms, but people who know him insist he's no racist at heart. His best friend, Junior, who is black, will tell you so, and Bruso attends a Baptist church with mostly black parishioners. Even the bus driver, who is also black, told police that she didn't believe Bruso was making the racial remarks "in a mean way." According to the police report, she said he "didn't know his comments were insulting and … appeared to have a mental disorder." When the cops arrived after the bus fight and arrested Bruso, he was committed for 72 hours to a psychiatric ward at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland. He was charged with battery resulting in injury of a transit passenger, but Lovette told police he wasn't interested in pressing charges. Yet as soon as Bruso was released from the hospital, white racists started calling to congratulate him, their salutations turning to threats upon finding out he didn't share their views. Black people called with promises of violence.

Bruso started to worry. In his big-talking moments, he'll say things like, "You're welcome to come to the funeral, girl. I've been threatened 17 times already. It's just a matter of time before they sneak up on me and blow me away." But behind the exaggeration, he got tired of the attention. Soon after the fight, he shaved off his epic beard. But then a video of him without his beard was posted online, too.

I picked up the phone. It was one of Bruso's sisters, calling from Wisconsin. She demanded that I leave immediately: "It's all a bunch of lies!" she shouted.