My Friend Matt
Matt Mellon turned me on to Physical Graffiti in my dorm room one afternoon. It was the spring of 1977. I'd brought a new one-piece turntable/stereo to boarding school along with a handful of vinyl platters - Toys in the Attic and Rocks by Aerosmith, Crystal Ball by Styx. I was gonna rock out.
Matt was one of the older kids in my dorm. He had a certain influence in the dorm, which was mostly populated by 5th graders like me, though I do not recall him ever exercising official authority like a proctor would. He looked at me briefly and said, "Wait here, you're going to like this." A few minutes later he was back, holding a gray double-album that depicted an apartment building. He unceremoniously extracted a black disc, dropped it on my turntable, and brought the needle down on the start of Kashmir.
Now ordinarily this would have been a real breach of protocol, but Matt had a way about him. He was impossibly slender, almost translucently fragile. Sometimes, his skin seemed so limpid I felt like I could see partway through his head, veins and all. But there was a force of personality that made it all seem fine. I sat, listening, and debating whether I needed to assert my territorial rights to my own stereo. From that time I counted Matt as my friend.
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Being friends in boarding school wasn't exactly a choice. It was more the people who you could manage to spend time with, who made the experience bearable. Above all was accessibility. If you lived in a dorm with someone and they were tolerable, you'd hang out. Matt was more than tolerable - he usually had something interesting to say, new music, and a genuinely sassy attitude toward the authorities - who were ever present. You wanted him to think you had something new to say too.
I remember he had a framed certificate of some kind on his wall. Sometimes he'd refer to it bitterly as some money he was supposed to get when he graduated. I assumed he was skeptical about it being worth anything, though I also assumed the bitterness was, as with most of my classmates, a result of the apparent abandonment by a family that would put its children in a boarding school in the first place.
For my part, I considered myself a transplanted street kid whose hippie parents had no home to miss. I viewed the calamitas of my privileged mates as an obvious result of their ensnarement in conventional society - or ultra-rich society - that my young life as a counterculture juvenile had happily spared me.
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That first listen to Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti didn't leave much of a musical impression on me, but I must have eventually come around to the soaring soprano of Robert Plant's crescendo on Kashmir, because I distinctly remember holding my uncle hostage to it later that year.
My Uncle Peter was not a blood relative, and he bullied me almost as badly as the upperclassmen at school. He'd insist on "shaking" my hand and grind my knuckles painfully, grinning with overtly aggressive gregariousness. I did manage to lure him into my grandparents' basement to listen to the copy of Physical Graffiti Matt had (to my surprise) let me take home over the break. Uncle Peter didn't much care for Led Zeppelin - he liked old 50's Rock N' Roll like Fats Domino.
"Wait," I commanded as Peter stood, clenching a tumbler of bourbon. Robert Plant was screeching and the instruments were about to stop. "When I feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllll..."
This was it, the moment. "You think it's over, right?" I prompted Peter winningly.
"Oh God, I hope so." He replied.
"But it's not!" I finished. I knew he was making fun of me but I couldn't care less. Matt was the one whose approval I valued. Peter was just an old guy who didn't understand.
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In retrospect, I'm pretty sure Matt actually was the dorm proctor - he was around 2 years older than me. He just didn't act like one. In fact, if the school administration's intent was to put us under the tutelage of someone who would indoctrinate us into compliance with school rules, I'd have to say the selection of Matt as our proctor was a pretty radical misjudgment.
Over the next couple years, Matt and I drifted apart. I was moved into a house-like dorm called The Cedars. We figured we had it made, because it was actually a house instead of a long, prison-like hall. The last thing I remember hearing about Matt was he'd been rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped and wouldn't be back - something about a smuggled bottle of vodka. The guy was like 80 pounds soaking wet.
It's in the way of boarding school life that - particularly at that age - expulsion is a sort of death. Accessibility is indeed a requirement. Once you're gone, you no longer really exist to the rest who've been left behind. The departed are recalled, if at all, with obituary-like remembrances, tales of rebellion and fortitude.
Even today, if you'd asked me, "What happened to Matt Mellon," the reflexive answer would have been "vodka and hospital", and that's it - even though in my adult mind I know he had to have gone on with his life. I wonder if I could ever have gotten in touch with him, though obviously he moved in stratosperically different circles than me. I guess maybe that's one reason rich families send their kids to boarding school - the last thing they want is school chums showing up on their doorstep.
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So here I am, some forty years later, in my comfortable middle-class family life. My uncle Peter has been gone for quite some time. I always wonder why they don't talk more about cancer and alcohol. I open a new tab in my web browser and one of the suggested articles is entitled, "What Happened to Matthew Mellon?" Holy crap. Last year it was Andrew Getty, but I barely knew that kid - they pulled him out within less than a year. Matt was a friend. So I read the article - history of substance abuse, inherited millions when he turned 21, heroic doses on a daily basis, deeply loved by those who knew him, dead at 53. Yep, it's got to be him.
Ann Coulter tweets, "Rest In Peace, Matthew Mellon. Such a happy, fun person, with a sad & terrible problem. His 9 lives finally ran out." Jesus Christ, now she's said something that actually makes her seem like a human being. Today is turning out weirder and weirder.
If we had bet on who wasn't going to make it to 50 among my friends, Matt would have been up there on the list, and one of the first to say so. He overshot by three years. I guess that graduation money turned out to be real after all. Maybe he was just pissed about something else. I have to wonder how many of my other classmates are dead, but weren't rich enough to show up in the headlines.
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