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May
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.
©2011, Tom
Matlack
* * *
While all complain of our ignorance and
error,
everyone exempts himself. - John Glanville
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.
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