My friend Matty, the Robo Messiah who started it all...

The only person I ever met who swore by DXM was a guy I knew named Matt. Matt was an interesting guy who had done a lot of drugs in his time, but when I met him he was basically a robo man. He would do acid now and then when he could find it, and he smoked weed constantly, maybe a little GHB too, but robo was his daily thing.

Now Matt didn't really have a permanent address, he kind of drifted from crash space to crash space until he got kicked out or was forced to leave. By the time I lost contact with him he was homeless and sleeping in a various parks in Seattle, emerging every now and again to check his e-mail at one of the few internet cafes he hadn't gotten himself kicked out of, which was a common problem for Matt I guess, something about being belligerent and freaking out the other customers.

Matt's day started with a fat bowl of pot and a bottle of Robitussin Maximum Cough. He said he liked the flavor. He wouldn't chug it, he'd sip on it for about an hour until it was drained then go out walking around the city, spare-changing and trying to hook up little dope deals on commission for people. I never saw him eat a single piece of food, but the robo bottle was never far away. In the evening he would start on another bottle of robo, which I guess was dinner, and then around midnight he would puke his guts out and fall down unconscious somewhere. I knew him for a span of maybe two years and this was pretty much his daily routine.

I never knew Matt pre-robo so I don't know how sketchy he was to begin with, but I did find out later from someone who had known him longer than I had that he had actually gone to college and was married for a while before his life fell apart. I don't know if the robo was the reason he fell apart or just something that came along with the package, but he said he did robo because it made him feel better about his situation, and it made him less angry about all the bullshit in the world and all the shitty things people had done to him in his life. I don't know specifically what these shitty things were and why he was angry, but he styled himself as some kind of robo boddhisattva, wandering around the city with no shoes and sleeping under bushes in parks as if it was some kind of spiritual pursuit.

Although he could carry on intellectual discussions about many things -- most often about paranormal and metaphysial topics, sometimes about politics and the future -- it was evident at times that Matt had lost something upstairs. Sometimes he would talk and what came out was pure gibberish, and then he would get upset when I asked him to repeat what he was trying to say. He'd say something like, "Forget it, you wouldn't understand." Matt was also constantly under the impression he was being followed by someone, sometimes narcs, sometimes just people who were spying on him for some unknown reason, maybe to steal all his spiritual secrets. He would always be looking over his shoulder saying things like, "We have to go this way, they won't follow me in here," cutting though people's backyards and stuff like that. He also thought some people could read his mind, though he claimed the robo helped shield him against psi attacks. He once told me the guy sitting across at the coffee shop was a narc trying to record our conversation. He said the shoes gave him away. I looked, they were just shoes.

I once asked him if he would consider not using robo for a while and he told me that it was the only thing keeping him alive. I don't know if this meant he would commit suicide without it, or if he actually thought he was deriving nutrition from the syrup, but he was pretty serious so I didn't push it. He talked endlessly about the big DXM article he was going to write for the magazine, and actually wrote a few paragraphs before deciding he needed to do more "research", which I suppose meant doing more robo, or finding an internet cafe that wouldn't kick him out.

Matt once told me that he did robo to keep from getting lonely and depressed, because in the robo space he felt accepted and at peace and, "didn't have to deal with anyone else's bullshit." This bullshit theme came up over and over again, and was pivotal in one of the last face-to-face conversations I had with Matt when I tried to explain that dealing with other people's bullshit was just a fact of life, and could even be fun sometimes (you know, like getting intimate with someone) and that unless he was going to be a hermit he needed to get over it and just get on with things. He sort of agreed that he was really lonely and afraid of being intimate with people, but claimed that robo only helped him overcome those problems, not the other way around.

I received a phone call from him a few days later saying he could be finished with the article in a day or two but was having trouble getting his notes off a disk because the guy at Kinko's was being an asshole and was out to get him, or something like that. He wanted me to drive him thirty miles North to his friend's place so he could use his computer, which I guess was stored there with a bunch of his other stuff. Since I was one of the few people he knew who had a car, Matt would often call me up and ask me for rides to do all kinds of strange things, which I would often do because I genuinely liked talking to him (when he was coherent), and he knew a wide variety of unique and interesting people who we would hook up with just for fun or in the hopes of finding Matt a place to crash for a few nights. But I was unable to drop what I was doing that day to taxi Matt around, so I told him no.

I have not seen or heard from him since.

Perhaps he got pissed at "all my bullshit" because I couldn't give him a ride on that particular day and stopped calling me. Perhaps he's dead. Perhaps he got arrested for something. I don't know. No one I know has seen him or heard from him. One person said he may have left town to live in the country and eat raw food or something like that. It is still a mystery.

While I knew Matt for a few years and hung out with him probably once a month or every couple months, he never talked about himself so I never really got to know much about him. He could play guitar like a motherfucker, one of the best soloists I've ever seen, and every time I hung out with him he would mention that he saw this help-wanted ad for a guitarist to do licks for videogame tracks. He told me he was thinking of applying for the job. Over a span of two years he mentioned this help-wanted ad *every single time* I saw him, like he seriously thought he could just walk into the videogame office after a year and a half and say, "I'm responding to your ad for a guitarist, when do I get paid?" I never had the heart to tell him that the job and the videogame company were most likely gone by now, he probably would have thought it was just "more bullshit," more evidence that life was out to get him. My wife wonders why I ever hung out with him at all, but he was without a doubt the most interesting cats I ever met, and I sort of felt like I owed him something even though I didn't. I even tried to give him a guitar once but he wouldn't take it because he didn't have anywhere to keep it. Finding a place to keep stuff was just more bullshit, and he didn't need stuff anymore because he'd found robo.

Why I am telling you all this? Well, because Matty was pretty sure he was supposed to be the robo messiah, and his article was going to be the first step in turning the world on to the wonders of DXM, making it a bullshit-free place to live once and for all. I'm guessing he's probably not going to finish the article, so I'm here to spread the book of Matt in his stead, though I think I may be preaching to the chior already. Matty, wherever you are, this one's for you...

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