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

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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 Suppur