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Tom Matlack, "I am a sucker
for real-life heroes, particularly the ones that
get overlooked. My profile work grew from my first
published piece, THE RACE, which describes my own
life altering experience in an athletic event
barely worthy of the local paper. Coaches and
athletes in the sport of rowing were my initial
focus before expanding to mainstream sports like
professional basketball. Music, film, and
television have proven fertile ground for heroic
journeys of a different, but related, kind.
Finally, I have continued to write bits and pieces
of my own story in an attempt to inspire and
enlighten."
Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of
The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead
investor in Art Technology Group, which reached $5
billion in market capitalization in 2001. He
founded and ran his own venture firm, started
companies like American Profile (sold to Disney for
$260 million) and Telephia (sold to Neilson for
$560 million), before turning to writing. His work
has appeared in Rowing News, Boston
Common, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe
Magazine and Newspaper, Wesleyan,
Yale, Tango, and Pop
Matters.
In 2008, Matlack founded www.TheGoodManProject.org,
with his venture capital partner James Houghton. He
has appeared on national and local television and
radio as well as print across the country. The fall
of 2009, Matlack led a non-conventional book tour
for The
Good Men Project that started inside Sing Sing
and ended in Hollywood with a screening of THE GOOD
MEN PROJECT documentary film followed by a panel
discussion including Matt Weiner and Shepard
Fairey.
‘Can We Tell It Like
It Really Happened?’: On Race and ‘The
Scottsboro Boys’
Male
Bonding
Questioning
My
Faith
The
Sweetest Sound
‘Can We Tell It Like
It Really Happened?’: On Race and ‘The
Scottsboro Boys’
Facing protests, Broadway production The Scottsboro
Boys will close this Sunday. Tom Matlack argues
that the show was misunderstood.
When I was 8, while my classmates were learning
their multiplication tables, I was thrown into the
back of a paddy wagon and dragged into court. My
dad—a Quaker activist—and I had committed
civil disobedience on a crisp fall day in Western
Massachusetts.
As a little boy who just needed to go to the
bathroom, I tried, futilely, to take a leak into a
single, seatless toilet in front of a cell full of
men. Those few hours behind bars scared me. I
didn’t want to go back. While many others who
had run-ins with the law at such a tender age went
on to serve time, I never stepped foot in prison
again as a young man.
But a quarter-century after my childhood arrest,
I did go back to jail repeatedly, this time as a
visitor. I went to South Bay House of Corrections
in Boston, a maximum-security prison in
Connecticut, and ultimately, Sing Sing. Sitting
with a room full of lifers, deep in the bowels of
that stone structure “up the river,” two
things struck me: the inmates were nearly all
black, and they looked so young. When they went
around the room to introduce themselves, it brought
tears to my eyes to hear that even the
youngest-looking boys had been inside for more than
a decade.
Nationally, unemployment among black men ages
16–24 stands at 35 percent. Sixty-five percent
of black boys grow up in fatherless homes. Of the
prison population of 2,424,279 inmates, 44
percent—more than a million—are black;
there are 919,000 black men enrolled in college. If
current trends continue, one in three black male
babies born today will end up in prison.
We Americans ignore the obvious because it is
far too uncomfortable to consider: Martin Luther
King’s dream is still far from being
realized.
Into this myth of racial progress enters The
Scottsboro Boys, a Broadway production that debuted
on October 31 at the Lyceum Theater. (Full
disclosure: I helped finance the play, in honor of
my parents who travelled to Mississippi in the
Freedom Summer of 1964, and to honor the
African-American inmates with whom I have spent
time in ancient human cages like Sing Sing.)
The Scottsboro Boys, about the nine young men
who were falsely accused and sentenced to death for
raping two white women in 1931, provides a screen
upon which our unresolved racism is uncomfortably
projected. It sticks its finger into the still-open
wound that is race in this country, forcing the
audience to watch the boys dance and sing in a
minstrel format as they struggle to find their true
voice.
The show flips the traditional minstrel show on
its head, using it to humanize, rather than
caricaturize, the participants. In the opening
moments of the play, Haywood Patterson, the eldest
Scottsboro boy, asks, “Can we tell it like it
really happened? … This time, can we tell the
truth?” And by the final scene of the play,
the blackface is gone. The minstrel show is over.
And we see real men telling a real story of
injustice and racism.
Watching The Scottsboro Boys, I was made
painfully aware of my own racism. I judge people by
their skin color, their religion, their sexual
orientation. The fact is, we all do; it
doesn’t make us bad people—it makes us
human. But if we are ever going to get anywhere on
the topic of race, we have to stop sugarcoating the
discourse. We can’t let the election of a
black president obscure the fact that we’re
still locking up all the black men in this
country.
“The first time we ever did a reading of
the show was the day after Obama was elected, that
Wednesday morning, sitting with a group of black
men in a rehearsal studio, reading the
script,” the show’s writer, David
Thompson, told me recently. “And for a second
there, it was as if there had been a seismic shift
in the world. We thought: ‘Is this piece
relevant anymore? Have we discovered that
we’re on the other side of the
conversation?’ … We realized very quickly
that, no, what we’re having now is a very
veiled discussion. We’re using new words to
discuss racism. We’re screaming ‘You
lie!’ on the floor of the Senate to a black
president, because somehow that seems
appropriate.
“That’s why the minstrel show combines
that ability to have that strange laugh that you
would have at the expense of others,” Thompson
continued. “In South Park, when you’re
watching something that’s just so politically
incorrect, you still laugh, and then you think,
‘Well, did I really laugh at that?’
Because it demands that you question
something.”
A group in New York calling itself the Freedom
Party—a bastardization of the Freedom
Democratic Party, for which my parents risked their
lives to help blacks get the right to vote in
1964—launched a much-publicized protest
against The Scottsboro Boys, picketing the theater
and calling upon patrons to boycott. The protests
certainly contributed to its demise—it will
close on Sunday, December 12.
None of the protestors had seen the play. The
group’s leader, Charles Barron, a one-time
gubernatorial candidate, organized the protests to
raise his own personal profile, while attacking
artists who are asking tough questions about racial
injustice—the same racial injustice that the
Freedom Party claims to be fighting.
My question to the protestors is the one I ask
you: When are you going to stop the minstrel show
that is race in America, wipe away the blackface,
and start telling the truth, no matter how
uncomfortable that might be? It will always be
easier to lie when the system reinforces myth.
While the play was being protested outside, the
Theater Development Fund bought out two
performances for high-school students, most of them
black and who had never seen a live theater
production. The kids were leaning forward in their
seats, cell phones off, fully engaged in the story.
“They were laughing, they were screaming, they
were gasping, they were laughing louder than
I’d ever heard anybody laugh,” Thompson
recalled. “And they were more live than
I’ve ever heard an audience, especially toward
the end.”
Afterward, there was a Q&A with the actors.
One kid in the balcony shouted, “If you were
in a situation where you had the ability to get out
of … to get parole … if you just lied,
would you do it?” Somebody else asked,
“What was it like to put on blackface for the
first time? And what’s it feel like to take it
off?” Another kid asked, “Now that
you’ve been in the show, what is your opinion
about the death penalty?”
The kids got the play at the deepest level, even
when the adults outside did not. They were prepared
to ask the tough questions we all too often shy
away from. Part of our collective immigrant
heritage—whether Irish, Italian, Chinese,
Mexican, or Africans brought here as slaves—is
to leave our children a better world than the one
we endured. Are we really prepared to leave them,
black and white children both, a legacy that
perpetuates a fundamental fiction about race in
America?
Read Tom Matlack’s full
conversation with The Scottsboro Boys
writer David Thompson.
The Sweetest Sound
For as long as I can remember I have had the same
nightmare. My brother and I are in a prison buried
deep beneath a mountain. The guards beat us. A fire
breaks out. The guards flee, leaving us locked up.
Dad is trying to get to us but he can't. Just as
the flames reach our cell, I wake up. I would stare
into the dark and try to see something real tofocus
on-something to erase the images in my mind. Mom
said that I'd often scream for quite some time
before she could wake me up. Apparently, the
unconscious drama had to play out to a certain
point before I was allowed to escape death by
fire.
During my waking life I've always been tormented
by noise-voices in my brain that turned terror into
self-hatred. The sensation in my body was bone
grinding on bone. Tracing the origin of the noise
is like trying to unravel the mysteries of the Big
Bang. I am sure my parents' utter commitment to
justice, combined with my fragile nature, planted a
seed that sprouted and flourished as my size (I was
already six feet tall in the sixth grade) made me a
freak. It became a cancer that grabbed my soul with
its dark tentacles.
Despite being a swimmer of great promise, as a
teenager I'd gorge myself on Oreos and banana bread
until my stomach was distended, then look into the
bathroom mirror with an overwhelming urge to smash
my blond-haired, blue-eyed image. I discovered some
small respite by going out for my daily 10-mile run
through the hills that surrounded our house. I was
always alone. I liked to run the same paths to
reduce the mental energy required to figure out
where I was going. The physical pain of running up
those hills was what I sought. At the top, I could
swear at the top of my lungs and no one could hear
me. The payoff was the dead, dreamless sleep I
craved. The noise stopped at least until the next
morning, when I'd have to figure out a new way to
obliterate my senses.
From age 17 to 27 I was in a blackout. I
experienced moments of freedom rowing boats in
college, crushing opponents in our wake, but the
main focus was all-out drinking; it required less
effort than my physical trips to the other side. I
flipped a car on the Massachusetts Turnpike, threw
a couch out a high rise at a UCLA dormitory, got
kicked out of Tuck Business School before attending
my first class for lying on my application, put
holes in any number of walls in frustration over
relationships with random women-and still woke in
the middle of the night in the prison of my own
making.
One time after college, when I was living in
Central Square in Cambridge, I called my dad at one
in the morning. I needed to tell him something
important, that my body had succumbed to my
repeated abuse by waving the white flag of a
mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome. I had woken in
panic but knew Dad would be up. I needed to tell
him how much I loved him because I was sure I was
about to die.
After regaining my strength, I found heroin of a
non-pharmaceutical sort. I discovered that I had an
aptitude with numbers. I also began to see that in
business, most people are afraid to lose-they run
from risk. But since I was going to die, losing
didn't matter. Losing at business was much less
scary than flipping a car. I took huge personal
risks with my professional career. If I won, I won.
If I lost, I'd just roll the dice again and again
and again until something worked. The result of
this suicidal fearlessness, combined with a
mathematical gift for which I take no credit, was
more power and money than I could handle. By 29, I
was the chief financial officer of a major media
company whose assets included television stations
and cable television networks as well as a daily
newspaper.
My outside success only served to heighten my
interior agony. One Saturday morning, just days
after being on the front page of the Wall Street
Journal, I found myself in a church parking lot. My
wife had kicked me out of the house and told me in
no uncertain terms that I shouldn't expect to ever
see my two-year-old daughter Kerry or
three-month-old son Seamus again.
I called my mom and then drove to Dorchester to
sleep on my brother's couch that night. He came
down to check on me every hour or so to make sure I
didn't do anything stupid.
That's when I remembered just how much I had
always wanted to be a dad. I had seen how beautiful
my daughter was when she was born and how I'd drunk
Budweiser in the hospital room to numb her out. My
son had been a miracle of equal proportion. He'd
been born on a Sunday afternoon and I'd gone back
to work the next morning-only to show up at his
christening green with alcohol poisoning, having
spent the previous night booting my guts out.
I wasn't given the privilege of spending
Christmas with my children that year. Instead, I
bought my nephew a big red fire truck with a cool
extension ladder to try to make up for the
emptiness I felt. But it only worked for an hour or
two; soon I was in New York City getting drunk. The
next morning I stared with a very different kind of
desperation beyond the skyline at the faint blue
winter sky. As I tried to scrape the cigar smoke
off my tongue and wash the cigarette smell out of
my hair, it finally came to me that a good man
seeks the truth about himself rather than covering
up one lie with another one.
I sneaked into my first AA meeting in downtown
Providence. The guy at the front of the room told a
story remarkably like my own. I heard enough to
convince me that addiction was at least part of my
problem. I spent a year in a weekly-lease apartment
overlooking Route 95 and going to meetings every
day.
A year later, I got a permanent apartment in
Boston and took the first shaky steps toward
actually learning how to be a dad. I fed Seamus,
just over a year old, a bottle in my darkened
bedroom. The world stopped as I listened to the
sound of my boy suckling in my arms, spent time in
Mommy and Me classes and logged countless hours at
the local playgrounds. Over the course of the next
six year I learned how to care for my children,
even though I realized they would always live with
their mom.
I met Elena, who met my superficial
criterion-beautiful, smart and warm-but there was
one thing that mattered way more than any of that,
the thing that had kept me from remarrying: I
trusted her with my heart from the start. She had
lost a husband and I sensed both a non-verbal
understanding of my hardships and an inner calm
that set me at ease. Equally important, though,
Elena was the first woman I trusted with Kerry and
Seamus. Soon, Cole was born and he sealed our
family unit. Kerry and Seamus fell in love with
their little brother and he worshipped them in
return.
A decade after my crash, I had learned how to be
a good dad and loving husband-yet some part of my
manhood was still missing. I'd still wake up in a
cold sweat. Elena complained that more than once I
delivered a sharp elbow to her forehead, thrown as
I fought some imaginary enemy in my sleep.
The dreams began to re-invade my waking hours,
too. Elena and I built a house on a peninsula in
Westport, Mass. On a beautiful summer day three
years ago the three kids, plus their cousins and
neighborhood friends, were playing happily in the
yard, running back and forth through the field that
separated our house from a white-sand beach. But I
couldn't get out of bed. I pulled the blinds to
block the sun: The beauty outside the window was
too much.
A visit to Sing Sing last October filled in the
last gap. I had spoken at several prisons before,
but this time was different. I got there early and
found my way to the visitors' parking lot on top of
the ridge. I watched the sun rise over the Hudson
River as a heavy mist covered big chunks of blue
water. I looked past the guard towers and directly
into the prison, and shot a short video of myself.
I looked not like an author at the first stop on
his book tour, which I was, but a man still haunted
by his demons.
I walked down hall after cement hall and was
buzzed through locked gate after locked gate until
I finally entered a room in the bowels of the
prison, where 13 men waited for me. As I sat down,
one touched my shoulder as he offered me a cup of
coffee.
"We're so glad you are here," he said.
My fear melted in that one human touch. The
inmates went around the room and introduced
themselves: The minimum time served in the room was
16 years; the longest, 32.
I told my story, including the part about
talking to my mom in that church parking lot. My
hands had been shaking uncontrollably, I told the
men, as I tried to explain to her how I had gone
from wunderkind to homeless in a matter of hours.
When I was done, I asked each man to describe a
moment that defined his manhood.
An older African-American man explained that
inside, when your parent is dying, you have to
choose whether to go to the deathbed or the
funeral-you cannot do both-and when you do go, you
are shackled and escorted by four armed guards.
When his mom was dying, he wanted to see her alive
to say goodbye. As he shuffled down the hall of the
hospital, the nurses pleaded with the guards to
remove the shackles. They would not. "The nurses
wrapped a towel around my wrist," he explained, his
eyes trained on me and forming tears. "I couldn't
even hug her goodbye," he whispered as his body
began to shake with sobs.
Tears rolled down my cheeks in recognition. I
was in my nightmare now. But there was no fire. I
was no longer afraid. The noise that had plagued me
all my life was gone. Looking into the eyes of a
man who'd been dressed in the same green jumpsuit
for the last two decades and would probably never
know the feeling of a worn pair of jeans again, all
I could hear was music-the sound of one man's heart
breaking for another's. Before leaving, I hugged
the men to thank them for showing me once and for
all that I didn't have to be afraid of the
dark.
The digital clock read 4:47 when I woke up this
morning. Four-year-old Cole was nestled in his
mom's arms. My arms wrapped around her in a
three-way spoon. My little boy laughed in his
sleep. I wondered what storyline in his unconscious
could possibly cause him to make a sound so
sweet-and how I could have lived without such grace
for 45 years. I wondered whether my struggles might
serve as a beacon to my Cole and Seamus of how easy
it is to be distracted by false gods when looking
for goodness in one's own maleness.
Then Cole laughed in his sleep again. A street
lamp provided just enough light for me to make out
his blond hair and angelic face squeezed into a
joyful contortion. And in that moment it wasn't one
man's heart breaking for another's. But one man's
heart simply beating for another's. My
son's.
Questioning My Faith
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, or someone
would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, the great pull in
us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to
hear? ~ Hafiz
(Poems thanks to Julianna Parker)
"What religion are you?" my thirteen-year-old
son, Seamus, asked me the other night, as we were
driving home from an ice cream shop. His mother and
I have been divorced since he was six months old.
He’s grown up a strict Catholic, serving as an
altar boy, going on a mission to Haiti, and now
attending a Jesuit high school under his mom’s
watchful, Irish Catholic eye.
"Buddhist," I quipped in response to his
question, as Moose Tracks dripped from our cones
onto our fingers.
"Really?" he asked.
"Nah, I just have read a lot about it and done
my share of meditation. So it’s the best
answer I have at the moment."
Seamus was satisfied enough with my answer to
finish his cone. But his question stayed with
me.
The next morning I got up early and looked out
my bathroom window. A cold front had come through
overnight, and after days of soupy fog and
humidity, the air had finally turned clear and
cool. A full moon, shining a vibrant white over the
Atlantic Ocean, hung perfectly in the frame of the
window. A couple hours later I took Penny, our
four-month-old yellow lab, for a walk. She sniffed
clumps of grass, chased small birds, and tried to
lick a toddler who ambled by, while I thought more
about Seamus’s question.
I was born a Quaker, tenth generation on my
Dad’s side going all the way back to Timothy
Matlack, who is said to have been the scribe who
put the words to the Declaration of Independence on
paper. But Timothy wasn’t much of a Quaker. He
was kicked out of meeting for betting on cock
fights, bear baiting (where, just for sport, you
chain a bear to a stake and then unleash waves of
dogs to attack it), and participating in the
Revolutionary War, against the protests of his
pacifist relatives.
My parents were hyper-intellectual hippies whose
Quaker faith was more about protesting the Vietnam
War than finding God. At least that’s how it
seemed to me as a young child. While I respect what
Quakers stand for, I wouldn’t call myself a
Quaker.
I am more of a Timothy type of Matlack. I became
CFO of a big company and then a venture capitalist
as my own form of rebellion against my do-good
parents. In the process I got myself into a heap of
trouble participating in my own version of bear
baiting as a drunk with an emphasis on bad
behavior. I eventually wound up on my knees,
pleading for God’s—any
God’s—intervention. Throughout history,
Muslims, Jews, Christians have died for their
faith, but even in my most desperate moments, when
I was ready to embrace religion, I still
couldn’t figure out what I was.
But now I know.
I have Seamus, with whom I share a secret
handshake ending in a father-son, jumping chest
bump. I also have a four-year-old son, Cole, who
climbs into bed with me before my eyes are even
open and spews whole paragraphs about Batman
without stopping for air. And I have a teenage
daughter, Kerry, who, despite her shy temperament,
performs in her schools plays with so much ease and
pleasure that she moves the audience to tears and
laughter every time. My wife, the most beautiful
woman I know, tickles me when she thinks I am being
arrogant and rubs my feet after particularly long
days. I can ride my bike down the huge hill near
our house and scream at the top of my lungs, not
caring if anyone hears me. And some mornings, the
moon appears in the frame of my window just for
me.
This is what I am. I have no idea what you call
it. But I believe in all of this. None of it is an
accident. This is my religion.
Some Kiss We Want
There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body.
Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling!
At night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press
its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door and
open the love window.
The moon
won't use the door, only the window.
-- Rumi, translated by Coleman
Male Bonding
There's a gash under my left eye. My right thumb
throbs like a sonofabitch. I keep seeing stars. My
whole body hurts. “I'm 46; I’m too old
for this shit,” I think on the flight back to
Boston from Florida, where I had been sucked into
an all-out basketball war by Seamus, the one person
who can do that to me.
My strategy during the games was to pick my
spots—look for a momentary lull in his defense
and go Kamikaze through that opening before
returning to my slumped-over, hands-on-knees
defensive posture. The court was slick after a
tropical shower, making the ball heavy and footing
tricky. Halfway through the contest I felt sure I
was going to have a heart attack.
As we do whenever we play, Seamus and I agreed
to complex rules of engagement: best two out of
three games to 15, and you have to win each by two;
loser's outs; use of profanity is a one-point
deduction (I lost more points than I care to
admit); shots made from beyond the arc are worth
three if you are down by six, otherwise they are
worth two; one timeout per game for me (I spent
each lying on my back with a shirt over my
eyes.)
I have four inches and 50 pounds on my opponent.
I’m right-handed, but I’ve developed a
behind-the-back move to my left. I can't shoot
lefty, but if I get good enough position going left
I can get the ball to the rack. And I've been
working on a pull-up jumper as well as a reverse
layup to the left. Seamus is worried enough about
my ability to go left that once in a while I can
glance that way and burst right for an easy
bucket.
But I don't have the legs to win in a three-game
match. I have to win in two or its lights out for
me. So I always work hard to win the first game and
then settle in for a slugfest in game two. Our
game-two scores usually go into the 20s. If the
score is tied late, I launch balls from behind the
arc. More often than not pure desperation provides
the motivation for me to try delivering the dagger
shot.
On this day, I won the first game, 15-13, on a
couple of hard drives right. I was ahead in the
second game, moving to the hoop with relative ease
until one time, as I tried to make a layup, Seamus
pushed me in the back. And then on another layup,
he did it again.
"Don't do that again," I warned him. .
The next time I got the ball, I set up sideways
with my left shoulder forward, dribbling the ball
low to the ground in a posture faintly reminiscent
of Magic at his peak. I glanced left found a clear
path to the right, and then…another push in
the back.
I waited until Seamus had the ball before
retaliating. He has a better shot than I do and 10
times the energy. But he still seemed afraid. He
doesn't quite know what it means to play hard,
really hard, when it counts.
I let him go past, and as he approached the
basket and jumped for his layup, I pushed
him—hard, maybe a little too hard. As he
landed on his back, I heard the ugly sound of
shorts and sneakers and flesh scraping against
pavement.
He bounced up with rage in his eyes. If I were
anyone else he would have punched me in the nose.
Instead, he looked down and muttered to himself. He
called the foul and took the ball.
From there, the game was like skiing downhill;
it was over quickly. I couldn’t score another
basket. Game three was closer. I got a little run
going, but he put me away with a bomb that I didn't
have the legs to get out and contest.
His defense was smothering. He had found a
different gear, and I couldn't keep up.
We didn't talk on the walk home, until finally
he noted that I should expect to get older and
fatter every day for the rest of my life, while he,
at 13 years old, was expecting to grow taller and
stronger. That night, I heard my son tell people
that he not only beat his dad, but that he beat him
up.
He was right. My body, wedged into the airplane
seat, is aching. But I smile anyway. Getting beaten
up hurts, but getting beaten by my son felt
good.
©2011, Tom
Matlack
* * *
While all complain of our ignorance and
error,
everyone exempts himself. - John Glanville
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