I’m not going to pretend I’m a party animal, but I do love a good party and I’ve been to a lot of them in my time. It surprises me that, despite some of the craziest shit I’ve seen at parties, and the sheer number of private (and public, I guess) events that I’ve been to in my life that could reasonably be called a party, only two that I can think of were disastrously broken up. I already wrote about one of them, and this is the other one.

I had to consult with my friend Sean to properly get a timeline for when this happened, but we both eventually settled on it being in the summer of 1996 for a variety of reasons. There’s no need to go into all of those reasons now, as so many things happened after/around this time that I’ll end up talking about anyway. One example — the time I did liquid LSD — happened after this story, and is somewhat related to this story. As with that story, this one involves Madt. Actually, this one’s kinda all about Madt.

The reason I’m spelling his name “Madt” is two-fold : one is that this is a very specific person named “Matt” that I want to be able to reference without mixing him up with anyone else in my stories who was also named Matt. The second reason is because Madt was the bassist in the last of many ill-fated bands I had in my life, and in that band we intentionally misspelled our names in creative ways for funsies. That’s how I became “Mitcz”, for instance¹. Matt became Madt. Sean was Xion (much the same way Xochitl is pronounced “So-chee”). Trevor decided to be especially strange and call himself “SeErza” for reasons that are too complicated to explain and don’t really matter. Later, we replaced Trevor with another dude named Matt, who ended up being named Noyzgimp, since he was our noise-making keyboardist/sampler and we didn’t have room for two motherfuckers named Matt in the band. We also had a drummer named Travis who became Travice.

Madt was a few years older than myself and Trevor — I think he was 22 when we were 17-18 years old. As a fun little side-note : I actually recall the first time my mom drove me to high school in my Freshman year of high school and I saw Madt (and what would later become his first roommate, as mentioned in another story) standing on the corner outside the school smoking. They were goth as fuck, even before I knew WTF “goth” was, and my mom remarked “look at these two creeps and their cancer sticks”, while I was thinking “man.. those two are fucking cool as shit“. I never saw, or spoke to, Madt whilst we were both in school, as it was a memory I recalled quite a bit after Madt joined the band (and he always thought it was funny that I looked up to him for such a weird reason). He and I, and by extension Trevor, met when Trevor and I worked shitty minimum wage jobs at the local Paradise Valley Mall. He actually met Trevor first, since Trevor had the much cooler job of working at a record shop in front of the weird-ass “color changing shirts” kiosk where I worked. There’s like 4 stories in the preceding paragraph, but… that’s the basics for now.

Madt was a dark and brooding kinda fella. Super shy. Deep voice. Long hair. Only ever wore black. I literally can’t remember a single item of clothing, including socks, underwear, shoes, and hats, that he owned that wasn’t entirely black. He had a fucked-up life. He was adopted by a pastor with a Catholic-gone-Christian wife (who later went back to Catholicism) as their only child. While Madt and his father were really close, Madt’s mom was always suspicious of his dad and would conspire to get Madt to spy on his dad for her. Sometime around 14 years old, Madt’s father fell very ill and it turned out to be HIV. The story Madt told me was that his father was on a mission retreat with his church and was anally raped in a truckstop bathroom by an HIV-positive former convict. At the time, I — and certainly Madt — just took that as a fully-factual absolute tragedy all around. I realize now that… well, his dad was probably a closet homosexual bangin’ dudes in bath-houses on the side. The odds of a single encounter, in this highly unlikely scenario, leading to him contracting advanced HIV (his father died within a year of when this supposedly occurred) are just a bit too high for me to accept without intense skepticism. That said, Madt’s mother consistently talked badly about Madt’s father, and said he was constantly cheating on her and that he had a secret life, and she blamed Madt for not being more vigilant in his spy missions. I’m not saying she was right in how she handled the situation — she was clearly a terrible fucking human — but I think she may have actually been telling a more complete truth than what was sold to Madt by his father.

The point is : we all hated his mother, and he lived alone in a house with her, so we only stopped by his place to pick him up and then go party or practice or hang out somewhere else. At least until the summer of 1996.

That summer, Trevor’s mom thought he needed to get his shit together. At some point in the year prior, he’d dropped out of high school (when I met him was sometime after that happened so I don’t know specifics), but he still lived in the garage-converted-room off the side of his mom’s house and he wasn’t paying rent. Oh the fuckin’ crazy times Trevor and I had in what was basically a home of his own. At any rate, his mom was threatening to give him the boot and Madt’s mom was traveling the world for a few months, so Madt told Trevor he could basically chill at his place until they both could get a place of their own at the end of the summer. Since my mom and stepdad left for weeks at a time (as I’ve mentioned before) during the summer, I pretty much hung out wherever Trevor and Madt went.

Since we were all in a band together, and half of the band was still in high school, Sean also went to Madt’s house pretty regularly. It was a chill pad. Madt had a Playstation and we would all get super fucking high and play Resident Evil (which, Sean looked up earlier tonight, came out in March 1996) and occasionally we’d jam out in Madt’s living room. Sometimes it felt like we all lived there together. We’d come over, get high, get drunk, play videogames, write some songs, jam out in the living room, and party for days at a time. I had my mom’s car and the weird summer allowance she’d drop off to me when she stopped into town to refill her supplies, so we were free of consequence or any level of giving a fuck about much of anything.

One night, Madt invited the woman who later became his first roommate, and another girl he had a lifelong crush on², and I brought Sean and this girl Jennifer (who incidentally later became my first roommate) over for a party. That night, Jennifer and I got high on the couch in his entryway living room³ and somehow we ended up making out for awhile. It was weird, cause I’d known her for awhile, and even took her to a Godless gig once, and she was this super-Christian girl from a super-Christian home, so I always felt like I was too filthy for her but… man, she just tongue-attacked me that night. That party, like many that summer, ran into the wee hours until we all just passed the fuck out.

The next day, sometime in the afternoon, Madt and Sean are playing videogames in the living room, Madt’s drinking a tall glass of vodka⁴, Trevor and I are in the front living room getting high and talking about god-knows-what, and suddenly the front door opens and Madt’s mom walks in, holding suitcases. She looks at me and Trevor, confused and angry, and yells out “MATTHEW!” and I hear “OHHH FUCK!” in the other room. We scatter like cockroaches, trying to pick up our shit and get the fuck out of there. Madt’s mom walks into the living room, and Madt’s just frozen in fear. She walks to the sliding glass door that looks out onto the backyard. It’s fucking trashed out there. Bottles everywhere. Patio furniture overturned. Cigarette butts strewn about. The pool is a deep, swampy green. She’s giving a loud play-by-play of what she sees, and turns to see the living room similarly overtaken by trash and debris and her drunken 20-something son just sitting there, quiet and sullen.

Sean and I book it the fuck out of there, and jump into my mom’s car. We realize… Trevor’s still inside. Cause he’s trying to pack up all the belongings he moved into Madt’s house. He finally comes running out, without shoes on, carrying a bin of his shit. He says “I can’t find my fucking shoes!”. We’re trying in vain to tell him “fuck your shoes”, but it’s late summer in Phoenix. That’ll set your goddamned feet on fire. I agree to help Trevor sneak back into the house to grab his shoes. We open the door and, like a cartoon, we can hear screaming and yelling. Trevor sees his shoes and sneaks in to grab them, only to hear “AND WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?” and he books it back out again, we dive into my mom’s car and I peel out on the street and we hide out at my house for the remainder of the day.

We don’t see or hear from Madt until months later. 4 Months, actually. Trevor’s back at his mom’s place, back in his garage-house-room-thing, and he and I are hanging out. My pager lights up with a number I don’t recognize. I call it, and it’s Madt. He says “hey man. Do you still need a bassist?”.

As quickly as he’d disappeared, he was back in our lives again. I never did get an answer about those missing months, but I’m glad the dude finally escaped his mother’s clutches.

1. I truly don’t remember why I decided we all needed to come up with new ways to spell our names, or why I re-named myself in the first place, but I still dig that spelling so I’m sticking with it cause I guess I’m kind of a lunatic and also because typing that name into any search engine pulls up everything I’ve ever done on the internet ↩

2. who was, incidentally, gorgeous and clearly had no interest in Madt, but would chill with him as long as he didn’t get weird and gropey on her. When he inevitably did, she’d kinda disappear for a few weeks at a time. ↩

3. or is that a foyer? I still don’t know what a foyer is, but many Phoenix homes — mine and Madt’s included — had a main living room along with a smaller living room just beyond the front door ↩

4. that’s still weird to me — dude just drank full pint glasses of pure vodka, no mixer ↩