All You Can Ever Learn - 1

I knew the first time I saw Matt… Mattie… that he was living a lie. He had that same look on his face that I’d had before I figured it out. Realised who I was. Before I saw the look though, I saw how beautiful he was. He was tiny or rather compact because he wasn’t weedy, it was more like there just wasn’t any more of him than there needed to be. Nothing superfluous. His hair was pitch black with the fringe straightened to within an inch of its life and the back teased and sticking up everywhere. Typical everykid emo hair. His eyes were not everykid though. They were a kind of honey brown, like liquid caramel and huge. If they were any bigger they would almost have been freakish. He probably didn’t need all the black eyeliner he had ringed thickly around them, they would’ve popped out all on their own. He had full snakebitten lips that he chewed on nervously almost all the time. I wanted to chew on him.
Our bands were playing the same scene. Scraping an existence opening for anyone who would take us. Third fucking support for bands who could fill 200 capacity venues if they were lucky. Sometimes they went on first sometimes we did. There wasn’t much to split the difference at that level.
Me, frontman for a kind of screamy alt-emo-pop-fuck-whatever band called Angry Mango. Think AFI… kinda. Him, lead guitarist for an electro-rock, 80’s inspired outfit… more Kill Hannah… called Feral. Let’s just say we opened for My Passion a lot.
We crossed paths with Feral all the time. Our drummer, Titus… Tites to me… (yeah, I dunno, his parents were not stable) liked to drink with their drummer, Levi. They were not typical drummers. Both of them had delusions of wanting to put their kits in the front of the stage and had to be constantly kicked to where they belonged, in the back generating beats. So they liked to get together and bitch about how annoying the rest of their bands were. I’m kind of fiery. I can’t help it. It comes with the hair. So Tites and I have a tendency to either have more fun than we strictly should have together or hit each other. There is no in-between. The night I first spoke to Mattie, Tites and I had come to blows in the “dressing room”. I had a cut over one of my eyes. Tites had a blood nose. We were not talking to each other and our guitarist, Seth and bassist, Kelly, were not talking to either of us. I know if Tites wasn’t such a demon and I didn’t have such a good snarl or a way with synths they would have turfed the two of us and all our equipment out of the van about 10 minutes after we started the band.
Up until that point I was actually doing my best to avoid Mattie. I knew he hadn’t realised he was gay yet. He had a girlfriend. God horrible little scenester who turned up everywhere and whined, all the fucking time. If she wasn’t speaking for him, she was putting him down. He looked so miserable around her all the time. It was a pity the misery made him even prettier.
I didn’t want to be around Mattie because looking at him made me want him with a ferocity that was hard to contain. He was painfully shy and constantly nervy. If he wasn’t chewing on that bottom lip he was biting the varnish off his black-chipped nails. When he got on stage though and he picked up his guitar, it was like he picked up his soul and suddenly he moved and strutted and he was fierce. Take it away and he retreated like a turtle back into his shell. But standing strong on stage or quivering like a rabbit, I found him attractive to the point where I couldn’t stand to breathe if I got too close.