For over a decade Matty and I were always riding around together, in hitchhiked backseats and upper levels of Megabus, or our rotating carnivalesque fleet of borrowed or bought junkers in which we ferried ourselves to house calls, book fairs, library sales. We crammed into the front cabs of rickety vans and box trucks rented to fill with the contents of someone else’s life, which we then drove back to New York to be folded wholesale into our own. Once we were pulled over on our way back from a library book sale in Poughkeepsie and Matty was briefly detained over an uncanny likeness in his attire and our vehicle to that of a bank robbery that had been committed nearby. These were early and especially lean years—once back behind the wheel, he turned to me and Hadley and muttered, “I wish we’d robbed that bank instead.”
Off the road we huddled among towering bookshelves that often seemed about to topple over onto us. In one apartment, we stood atop a swamp of books for three days straight. The titles we pulled were impossible to set aside, the ground being two feet of books piled wall to wall between collapsed bookcases that were vomiting their overstuffed contents onto the paper terra. We filled up boxes and shopping bags and tried to perch them in a way that they could surf the shifting dunes without falling and spilling back out into the chaos. Occasionally one of us would dig deep enough through the books to see tenement floorboard and yell out, I found some floor!
Will I ever spend as much time with another person as I did in thirteen years with Matty? The last long drive we took was Ann Arbor to New York all in one shot in a U-Haul filled with anarchist newspapers and situationist pamphlets. We left at 4:50 AM, a familiar time for us to get after it. The sun took its own time that morning as we drove toward its eventual rise in the dark and cloudy pre-dawn. After a few hours he told me: I feel like it’s never going to get light again. I laughed then, but now I live from where he spoke.
——
I am sitting near the banks of Lake Michigan. The early morning bugs swell and rattle in the trees. It will reach 100 today. This world no longer seems real, so completely did we braid our own into one another’s. We met when I was 23 and he 27, having both just moved to New York. He walked up at a party on the roof of the punk loft he was subletting and offered me a beer: “You’re the guy who lives in a van around the corner.” His concern was always in meeting people where they were at instead of triangulating cheaply shared similarities, although over the years we marveled at the many we found. Especially once it became clear to us we were communalizing our jointly filed lives in the dogged pursuit of Better Read Than Dead, the bookstore which together we conjured nearly out of thin air and built into a scrappy and persistent operation that spanned other partners and physical spaces and a few hundred thousand books and pieces of ephemera. But there was always and often only us.
We both had families of miners and ice cream makers and chased no degree above high school diploma. We held similar distastes for many of the social and worldly trappings of our milieux of punks, poets, other book dealers. But above all we were vastly different. As a partnership this was the source of our greatest strengths, just as it was at root our most constant struggle. Matty had a deep reserve of mood and temperament that strangers sometimes found off-putting: I keep a list in my head of those who did. I pity them. His genius was singular, and perhaps most striking was his almost unreal capacity for retention and recall of information. His intellect was a fortress missing about three bricks, few enough that on the occasions that he was mistaken in some fact, it took heaven and earth to move him away from his original assertion. But that’s a good thing. If he had operated under a higher level of self-doubt, the rest of us wouldn’t have had access to his stunning constellations of knowledge and critical thinking. As a bookman—his undeniable calling and proud vocation—his intellect and confidence were invaluable. Most booksellers keep a reference library, but to me it seemed almost unnecessary: we had Matty.
His approach to the world wasn’t quite occult, although it did run through an esoteric filter of his own design that could be considered spiritually correlative to the aggregational processes in some of his idols, namely Harry Smith, Charles Olson, David Rattray. He placed a peculiar faith in the guiding light of his huge self-collected data banks. An obsessive log of surviving soda bulbs in his neighborhood street lamps, for example, or a running encyclopedia of converted shipping container businesses, were ways to decipher his own city, his own bookstore.
A fraction of what he accomplished: aside from starting multiple bookstores, he also ran an art gallery, a small press, and a weekly newsletter for over a year. His Toyota Scion became host to a one-man driving school, freely lent out for lessons and for people to take their driving test with (“It’s so small you can’t not parallel park in it,” he would assure you with his sly grin). He goaded me into accepting that we alone could take on the 50,000 book collection of Tom Verlaine, a task literally no other bookseller or auction house had been willing to consider. His was an infinite and restless dreaming. Among his unrealized projects include writing a bibliography of American radical print shops of the mid-20th century, establishing a free communally-run print shop, founding a guild for booksellers that would reflect and empower the concerns and values that he was hearing from his peers, starting a movie theater in the adjacent garage to our own, holding a punk-run demolition derby upstate in which his own near-totaled car would be the first entry, robbing a bank over Zoom, and organizing the Lottery Player’s Union: he had crunched the numbers, confident the Powerball could be had and would pay out once it reached just a few hundred thousand members.
The loudness of his quiet came from this impossibly prodigious self-production. Over the years, I realized that in our time apart he was keeping even busier outside of work, a practice that in his self-effacement or humility he barely hinted at or acknowledged. Between shifts he would be hand-writing a science-fiction novel backwards (starting on the last page of a notebook), volumes of scattered poetry, fleeting studies of Moten and Artaud, or a memoir of his seasons spent working the sugar beet fields of Montana. When the limitations of running a small retail bookstore had repeated over too many years, he answered his own boredom with the weekly one-sheet newsletter The Alley, loosely covering the “alley” of shipping containers that housed our and other punks’ businesses. Edited, produced, and largely written all by himself, he invited the same editorial policy as Bruce Anderson of Humboldt County’s underground newspaper the Anderson Valley Advertiser: he would print anything sent to him, from anyone, as is. It was that kind of dare that Matty asked of everything in life: he never wanted to decree how to do anything, but would set his own standards higher than most felt comfortable challenging, or even answering.
Matty was scared of little. Maybe nothing, but certainly not death, a matter he spoke about occasionally but frankly. A few months shy of his fortieth birthday his heart gave out, seemingly under its own weight. I laid him down in our bookstore and started compressions, trying to buy him as much time as I could. A week later he passed in the company of his brother, who had come to help keep the constant vigil held by friends and family from all over the country. We steadily hold that vigil in the soft light of his memory, where I keep riding around with him still, always and everywhere.