Moodswing - True nature

If I had a penis like Matt’s, I’d probably have it hanging out all the time, too. I’d probably wave it around like a concert conductor every chance I got, which pretty much sums up what Matt does.

“Matt had his dick out again last night,” Grant says.

“Really?” I say, perking up.

“Yep, he was standing at the end of the bar, I glanced over and there it was.”

Grant’s seen Matt’s dick 700 times, starting from way back before Grant began bartending, whereas I’ve only seen it less than half that much, so the sight still holds novelty for me.

“How’s it lookin’?” I ask Grant.

“Like it’s carved out of marble.”

I like to think Matt’s dick-wag fervor started five years ago when he began hanging out with Grant — who is famous for corrupting people and calling it “the search for truth” — though the truth is, Matt may well have been corrupted beforehand. After all, Matt had been robbing banks for a long while before any of us ever even met him.

But Matt likes to point out that he wasn’t the guy who actually went into the banks with the fake bombs and whatnot. Rather, Matt just provided getaway transportation for the gang. Got it?

But that still makes him a bank robber according to the FBI, which I’d say is a pretty important distinction. They threw him in jail, but he was out again before I got around to visiting him. I felt bad about that until Grant told me Matt hadn’t wanted visitors. Matt has been out for a while now, back to wagging his dick on impulse. “Same ol’ Matt,” Grant says.

“Let’s hope so,” I say.

The truth is Matt wasn’t the same. For one, he worked out while he was in prison, from the looks of it almost every day, and his body was as buff and smooth as polished pine. He still looks like an angel and probably always will. But now, sometimes he also looks like he wishes people wouldn’t fall for the act so easily.

Well, it’s hard not to. That act is his second nature (as vastly opposed to his true nature). The first time I saw Matt, he was holding a puppy. Yes, a puppy. He was sitting on the stoop outside the apartment of my friend, who lived down the hall from me. His hair was long and blond, pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes were the size of coffee saucers, blue like the Caribbean Sea. When I looked at him, it was all I could do to keep from falling over and foaming at the mouth. The puppy really didn’t help, either.

“Sarah,” I called my friend later, “did you know there’s a blond god sitting on your doorstep?”

She did. Later he moved in with her. After that, he moved across the hall from her. And somewhere in between he met Grant and portrayed the crucified Jesus in Grant’s art installation at Mary’s in East Atlanta in 1998.

Matt had been a bank robber for about two years by then. But even so, out of the gaggle of Grant’s friends, Matt was still probably the best qualified to play Jesus. If not for him, Grant might have had to use Lary, who has long blond hair as well — but Lary is a fermented, misanthropic old lunatic who can’t hide his true nature. Matt, on the other hand, was expert at it.

For Grant’s opening, Lary had custom-built a massive wood cross with a step-shelf for Matt’s feet and big pegs to which Matt’s hands were tied. For $5, Grant would provide you with a Polaroid of yourself next to Matt under a sign that read, “HANG WITH JESUS!” Matt wore pretty much nothing but a big thistle crown and large drops of fake blood. At first there was a whisper of a cloth covering Matt’s loins, but I hear that soon fell away and nobody bothered to re-drape it.

That night, a freakish bond formed between Grant and Matt that endures to this day, and sometimes I wonder who is the poorer influence on the other. Before Grant, Matt was pretty good at hiding his true nature. But before Matt, Grant was pretty certain nobody’s true nature was worth hiding.

“Do you kiss men?” Grant says Matt drunkenly shouted at him across the bar one night. “Because I can’t do that — you know, kiss a man.”

Grant and Matt have kissed each other roughly 5 million times, even more than Matt and I have kissed each other, but this is owing to our days as neighbors, and all that kissing just seemed so innocent. Then I moved away, and Matt went to jail and emerged with a harder body, among other things.

“Hang with Jesus,” Grant laughs, “because Jesus is hung.”

If Grant had a bell at his bar, he’d ring it every time Matt unzips his pants — except that the bell would constantly be ringing, and pretty soon patrons would be clutching their bleeding eardrums. So, like everyone, Grant simply allows Matt to drop his act on occasion, because Matt looks too much like an angel for his own good. He can act like one, too. But at least he’s not such a shit as to allow people to fall for that act without flashing them a clue, now and again, to his true nature.

__hollis.gillespie@creativeloafing.com??

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