Matt

Matt was crazy, or that’s what some people said. Once, in the midst of a panicked and angry moment, he sat down right in the middle of Braddock Avenue and refused to move. Drivers honked in confusion and yelled out their windows for him to get the hell out of the road, but he wasn’t going anywhere and certainly not for them, no matter how angry or leering or even genuinely concerned they might have been. I can picture him, contemptuous and sneering, so small in his oversized shirt and ripped jeans, sitting in the middle of the road, squinting against the coke dust and gravel kicked up by the cars passing too close by. The dump trucks hauling their piles of steaming slag drive by at every hour on their way from the mill, and I wonder now if Matt was hoping one of the drivers would fail to spot him there over the long expanse of the hood and flatten him into the asphalt. In the end, Cassie sat down next to him and pleaded with him to move, at least to the curb, so they could talk or go somewhere. I wasn’t there, you see, but she told me about it after. I think she ended up dropping him at his dad’s. These things happened with Matt, sometimes. 

I met Matt while I was standing in the playground eating a taco. He walked up to me, a Black teenager dressed in dark, loose, goth clothes, and said, “Cassie says you’re in a band.” I think I demurred a bit, maybe embarrassed to acknowledge that I, an adult, still did that kind of thing, or maybe I came right out with it; I can’t remember exactly. Either way, Matt told me that he was into metal and liked to play guitar. “Oh yeah, like Metallica?” my friend Dan asked, having overheard our brief conversation. Matt’s eyes rolled and he said, “No, I like slam and goregrind. Metallica sucks.” Dan and I were surprised and delighted by Matt’s refined and niche taste in extreme music, and we talked for a bit about death metal and grindcore. Matt told us that he was working on the music for a project he was thinking of calling Suppurating Vulvectomy, which we agreed was appropriately offensive and disgusting. I saw him weeks later sitting astride a miniature dirtbike outside the Family Dollar, dressed all in black with his arms draped lazily across the handlebars. “I saw you,” I told him, “in Wilkinsburg on your bike.” He just smiled and said simply, “Yeah.”

Just about a year ago, Matt shot himself and died. It was spring, and he had stopped showing up to the job he had through Americorps. Cassie and others in his life were concerned. He had been doing well, she had thought. “I don’t want to live in a world you’re not in,” she’d told him the day she got him out of the road. But what kind of world was he offered? What place had been made for him?

At his funeral, gospel music played and a slideshow of pictures of a little girl flicked past on a flat-screen TV. Matt lay in a white casket tucked into white sheets. Though the face of the person lying in the coffin was unmistakably his, the only recognizable pieces of the Matt I’d known were his fingerless gloves and his black beanie. “At least he has those,” I thought to myself, “even if they are to cover scars.” Cassie said some words to him while I struggled to remain stoic, and then we went to the back of the chapel and waited for the service to begin. By the time it started, the room was full, with family seated to the front and friends to the rear. “We gather here today to honor our sister,” intoned the pastor, and Cassie quietly told me that I had been right, it would be too hard to sit through a funeral service like this, Matt absent, another person in his place. We quietly exited and drove home. 

What we heard later from those who stayed is that when it came time for people to eulogize Matt, Matt’s father had taken the microphone and had castigated Matt’s mother for how little he felt she had cared for him. The situation devolved quickly and a fight broke out. Family members, friends, funeral home employees; all rushed for the exits fearing an escalation of violence or gunfire. They leapt into cars that went careening back down Frankstown Road and I can imagine the moments after, the heavy silence hanging in the air, Matt lying in his casket, hands crossed, the chairs scattered haphazardly as if by a strong wind, in a room, alone.