“Sell-out Matt” (Fast Forward: Volume One, Fast Forward Press)

Tall-legged, long-faced, slim-boned Matthew Garretty rolled into himself in a post-pubescent delayed-adolescent whirlwind engaging dance some eight years ago today.  He grew up in the catastrophic absurdity of a religious mama who turned from tweaker trash to jehovahistic judger upon the knock knock knock of a witness at her door twenty-seven springs ago while Matt was still hitching a ride on her uterus.  She was desperate, battered, ankle swollen and pregnant, and something about the perfectly pitched line or the prodigious promise struck some deep integral part inside of her that would incite a lifetime of prayer and devotion.

He grew up poor and white in Missouri without birthdays, balloons, pumpkins or presents.  He grew up estranged from mainstream American youthfulness, catching glimpses of it through the perpetual doorway on the other side of his mother’s eager fanaticism.  Little bright eyes blinking away the baptized boundaries of his life.  Nintendo dreams and easter bunny fantasies slid like pale rumors across the mat of his childhood.

At eighteen, after accidenting upon the treasure of a library Twain, the awkwardly tall and thin-faced teenaged Matthew decided he wanted to break the fast of his jehovah mission to go get a collegiate education.  He wasn’t trying to betroth another worldview, but rather indulging in a subliminal attempt at normality through his organic desire to educate himself.  His mom and newly acquired stepfather, along with the entire Kingdom Hall community, did not approve of this plan.  They told Matthew that the only school he should go to was the one that would further train him for door to door soul saving and paradise praying and that a public university would only introduce evil thoughts and false histories.  His mother and step authority threatened to take away their parental bond if he did not comply with their wishes.  And that marked the first time in Matt’s life that he formed a strong opinion about his home life.    

He said goodbye to his bare-walled bedroom one exasperated summer night and crawled out the rusty side window of his shotgun house into a new life of independence with a vehemently thirsty slate to quench.

Matt attended one semester at Missouri State University and flunked out.  He started reading Kerouac, drinking whiskey, having unexceptional sex, and six months after he left his dogmatic adolescence, he hitchhiked to Alaska with a plan to jump on a fishing boat and head to sea.

Bright-eyed and incurably grinning with the novelty of new places and people, Matt fell in love with a punk rock Yupik girl that he met in the southeast port town of Cordova.  He was reeling in his newfound life and riding a wave of inspiration that he couldn’t help but to see glowingly transparent in everything he looked at.  He grew his hair out long and greasy and began wearing a ponytail and then later two pigtails with a dirty bandana wrapped around his head.  He tried to instill ruggedness onto his face with an abusive amount of two-dollar Top tobacco and cheap plastic whiskey bottles, but the baby bright skin and puerile look in his eye could shine through even the dishevelment of a three-week razorless, bathless, sea sweating halibut hunt.

Matt followed his wild Yupik love affair north to Fairbanks where he found himself amid a community of crazed writers and hallucinating musicians.  He immediately began settling into a two-year stint of workshop words and custodial employment.  Even the mop happy shit paste he cleaned off university toilets gave Matthew a sense of accomplishment and an intoxicating appetite to write and read and revel in the company of new friends and ideals.  

That year Matt had his first birthday party.  It was ridiculously large and complete with pony kegs, marijuana cake, and a live band.  He drank himself into the cold Alaskan bonfire night until the sun never came up in the morning.  Feral northern lights howled overhead in a cosmic dance and brilliant words like poetry dripped out of Matt’s eager mouth and drenched everyone he touched with fraternal delight.  

Matt was home, Matt was happy.  He danced with long and clumsy limbs to the hepness of everyone around him.  He inspired us all and gave birth to the possibility of a newborn man with the mission to never sell himself back to the stagnancy of an indolent life or god.  He wrote about his family, his estranged jehovah culture and wrote so well that the phonetic flow born from his pen inspired descriptions and prose somewhere between Twain and Bukowski that Jack himself would have clapped his hands to hear.  

And then one morning Wendy left him in his Notforeverland, the writing group split up and out and Fairbanks grew cold with unfamiliar faces, so Matt packed up his new life and lore and instead of going anywhere else in the vastness of the unabridged world, he headed back to Springfield, misery.  He tried to keep his mentality alive on napkin scribbles at the back tables of barren bars, but a reunion with his mama, a boring new girlfriend, and the monotonous work of starting a twelve-hour-day roofing business left him dry and lackadaisical.  Matthew began to grow callous and old and forget how to make his pen sing.  And so it stopped and saddened and now wordless years have cowered by him and I wonder upon the unrecognizable sound of his voice on an incurious cell phone whether there exists a switch somewhere that has the power to turn on and off a human being—erasing memories, promises, and prose.