matt

I went steady with a boy the last two years of high school. We were each other’s first serious relationship, first love, first everything. He dumped me without explanation the weekend after the Super Bowl in our senior year. I have no idea why. And it doesn’t matter, because this installation of memory motel isn’t about him. It’s about the boy who came and got me after that. His name was Matt.

So I am going steady with Boyfriend and we smugly hang out with three other “married” couples for two solid years. All the girls sport their boyfriend’s class rings or little dorky diamond chips called “promise” rings and we all hang out at our table in the cafeteria during lunch and between classes and party together on the weekends. It’s all so ridiculous now, isn’t it? But at the time, it made sense.

Boyfriend played the trumpet and sat first chair in the band and also played in a pretty good stage band. He drove a bottle-green Triumph Spitfire convertible and every morning he picked me up for school.

Then one morning he didn’t show up. I called his house, no answer. I got my mom to drop me off at school on her way to work. There was Boyfriend’s car in the parking lot. But he wasn’t in his usual spot at our table in the cafeteria where everyone hung out before first period. I found him in his empty first period classroom. He was sitting alone, pensive, waiting. When I asked him why he hadn’t picked me up he was silent and avoided eye contact. He was shunning me, kind of a teenage Amish strategy, I guess. It was pretty gutless. I was stunned.

I found out a few days later that he was running around with a girl who was a cashier at the supermarket where he had gotten an after-school job bagging groceries. The really shitty thing about it was that she lived one block away from me, so when I went to and from school, I would often see the Spitfire parked in her driveway.

I was miserable. And here I was, half my senior year to go and I had no one to go to the prom with or any of those other senior events. It was tragic. I coped by hacking off chunks of my hair in the bathroom, losing a lot of weight and sleeping all the time. Looking back on it, I think I was probably clinically depressed, but my parents thought taking me shopping a lot and sending me to visit my grandparents in Ft. Myers for the weekends would do the trick to cheer me up. I did learn to make Rob Roys and Manhattans and granddad did teach me to chip and putt (their house sat on the ninth hole of the Whisky Creek golf course), and I did come to appreciate the therapeutic value of golfing with a bunch of old guys, but I was still a mess.

One Friday night some of my girlfriends dragged me to a keg party out on the point. It was March and close to my birthday and they insisted I needed to be aired out and so I went. The keg parties always consisted of a bonfire on the beach (totally illegal then and now, I suppose) and a lot of car stereos booming and a keg in the back of someone’s pick-up truck and kids standing around in knots of boisterous conversation and idiotic adolescent behavior.

We all stood around and daintily sipped beer from big plastic cups and watched the guys do beer shots through a funnel attached to a hose. I remember standing in a circle with my girlfriends listening to them chatter about their dresses for the prom. I looked at the sky and mostly tuned them out, then I noticed all the chatter had stopped. When I looked around, I saw that our circle had been breached. There stood Matt and he was looking at me expectantly.

“So, are you ready to go?” He asked, conspiritorially, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

I looked behind me, certain he wasn’t addressing me. I had never exchanged a word with this guy. But he took a step into the circle and held out his hand.

“Come on,” he said quietly.

I have no idea why I did it, but I took his hand and walked out of the circle to the astonishment of my girlfriends. They all gasped and sputtered protests, things like “What the hell?” “Are you high? What are you doing?!?” But I walked with Matt across the field and to his car and when he held the passenger door open for me I got in without hesitation.

Matt was our school’s melancholy, dark brooder. I suppose every school has one. Matt was really good at it. He had a mass of curly brown hair the color of cocoa powder and he had dark brown eyes. He was a big guy and very broad-shouldered. He played on the football team for three years but quit the team our senior year. He did not hang out with any guys but he dated a girl named Ginger for about a year. I had a class with her when I was in 11th grade and he would hang out with her outside the door until the last bell rang and I remember noticing him leaning into her, talking very quietly, murmuring. I never saw them touch but they always seemed so intimate that they didn’t need to touch. She was a year older than we were and after she graduated, I never saw Matt with anyone again.

Matt eyed me wordlessly then light up a cigarette. He reached down and picked up an eight-track tape off the floor of his Datsun and shoved the tape into the player attached to a rack under the dashboard. It was Bob Dylan singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I’d never listened to Dylan before, but Matt listened to no one else at the time. We sat in the car for a few minutes, silently, he looking at me very studiously, as if he were trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I concentrated on the words: “Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?”

We drove out to the highway that runs along the beach and drove for about an hour in silence. I felt very comfortable with him and though I had no idea what he was up to, it didn’t matter to me. I trusted him in a way I had never trusted anyone before. And then he took me home. He knew where I lived which didn’t seem strange to me and I turned to him and said “thanks” as I got out of the car and that was it.

My girlfriends were beside themselves about this development and they demanded to know what had happened, what he wanted, where we had gone. I told them nothing. Even ex-Boyfriend became alarmed. He appeared next to my locker one morning and asked me what I was doing with Matt; did I even know what I was doing? I coldly told him it was none of his fucking business and walked away. What a thrill that was.

One night, a week after Matt rescued me from the keg party, he knocked on my bedroom window at 1:00 a.m. I opened it wide and popped the screen out and he crawled clumsily through and landed on my bed then flopped on the floor. He pulled a tape out of his pocket and asked me to play it. I stretched out on my bed and he sprawled on the floor and we listened to “Shelter from the Storm” from Blood on the Tracks:

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Matt fell asleep on my floor and I woke him the next morning after my parents had left for church. We went out for breakfast and drank pots and pots of coffee while he scribbled notes in his notebook.

Matt and I became companions. It was the first adult relationship I ever had. We spent hours together not talking because there wasn’t a need to. We were comfortable being in the same room and there was no need for constant interaction. We spent a lot of time at his house, a beautiful home that he shared with his elegant, detached mom and his yellow lab, Sonny. He slowly told me about himself, things no one at school knew about him. Matt’s dad had been a pilot in the Air Force and he had been shot down in Vietnam. Matt’s mom never remarried. She spent a lot of time volunteering at the art museum in town and taking painting classes and wasn’t home very much. The house had a vacant feel to it and I know Matt liked my company for this reason. We never talked about Ginger, but I think she broke his heart somehow, though he did keep her picture on the bookshelf in his bedroom. I never asked and he never brought it up.

He was into the Beat poets, especially Ginsburg and he loved Woody Guthrie but he was on a Dylan bender at the time and so we listened to Dylan constantly.

I dropped out of everything at school and only attended enough classes to actually graduate. It was a huge relief, really, to be free of the social activities and all the traditional bullshit and the expectations that went along with it. I felt like all that was a million years behind me already. My parents were freaked out, but I was 18 and about to leave home anyway, so they threw their hands up and let me go.

On the morning of graduation, we woke up in the bottom bed of his bunk bed, Sonny draped across our feet, and realized the ceremony started in a half hour. We made it in time, but my parents were horrified and embarrassed (though my grandparents were intrigued and amused). My girlfriends glared hatefully at Matt and looked at me like I was mentally ill. It was the last time I ever saw most of them.

Matt’s mom rented a cottage on the beach for him for three months as a graduation gift. He and I skipped the prom and hung out at the cottage, drinking beer and eating crab legs and hush puppies. He had a huge round raft that he tied a concrete block to and most days that summer we would fill the raft with beer and drag it out into the water, drop anchor and drift and drink and smoke and sing and laugh for hours.

As fall approached and I prepared to leave for college, Matt grew quieter. I tried to tell him how grateful I was that he had seen through me and saw something more than a cheerleader, a stupid, spoiled superficial girl whose boyfriend had dumped her and made her a high school pariah, a self-absorbed drama queen. He had freed me and saved me all at the same time and I loved him for that. He didn’t want to talk about it.

He called me one night from a phone booth on the corner by the beach cottage. I could hear the rain hitting the glass partitions of the booth. He said he wanted to play a song for me and then he held the receiver to the tape player and I heard Dylan singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right

Then he hung up the phone. I listened to the dial tone for a while before I hung up. I never heard from him again.