Robert E. Brown. Tales From the Land of Entrapment

Near Death by Multiple Choice.



Who you choose to surround yourself with helps define who you are.

That being said, one may wonder who I am. So many people in my life have been fascinating studies in an inherent subconscious, or in some cases, a conscious desire to self destruct.

I met Jonathan Jarden when I was still in high school. Our friendship lasted nearly a decade. Jon was highly intelligent, charismatic, loud and gregarious. Jon also had an amazing penchant for bouncing from one horribly dangerous and disastrous situation to the next. He was a couple of years older than me. He had been living in California making a living as a petty drug dealer. After selling coke to an undercover, he fled the Venice boardwalk into rush hour traffic. An oncoming car bounced him into traction and a full body cast. His family had money and arranged to smuggle him out of the state and he came to live in Lost Causes with his father. Within a few weeks of his arrival he got stir crazy and sawed off his last leg cast and showed up unknown and unannounced to a party; held up by a cain and limping like a gimp. This impulse decision allowed his leg to to heal crooked and the limp became a permanent part of Jon's life. I really feel like this introductional anecdote defined Jonathan. That self induced disability was his perfect metaphor.

While I often found myself compelled to get dangerously close, even hang off the edge of a cliff, Jon felt compelled to bound past me and jump straight off. I think we had a symbiotic relationship. I was hooked on the insanity he attracted, he needed someone to (at least try) to be a voice of reason.

I had just moved to Albuquerque to go to school and distance myself from the Lost Causes click. But soon Jon showed up in town and the rest of the Las Cruces townies began to follow. There was no escaping the old crew. That's when we had our quick encounter with Matt Green.



While Jon was a long standing fixture and drama magnet, Matt Green was a fast, dangerous blip that passed through our lives. I entered Matt's orbit right at the moment of his supernova end that almost took me with him. Matt was a hard drinking punk rock combat fetishist. He was obsessed with guns, knives, martial arts and fighting. Everyone has met that that guy. But Matt didn't fit the creepy stereotype. He was likable and funny. Somehow he pulled off a Colonel Kurz steel toe, black pajama chic. The first time I saw him he was trying to fist fight two skin heads outside a Melvins show. He held his own for a while and then got the shit kicked out of him. I thought, "this is a guy I want to meet." We all hit it off well and it seemed that Matt was destined to be a new and close member of our click.

Matt's ability to ingest huge amounts of chemicals and booze far surpassed ours. It became clear that this mixed with his love of lethal weapons and Jonathan's terrifying recklessness was a dangerous combination on the first night we went to his house. The three of us and our respective girlfriends had retreated to his run down apartment after the bar had closed. The girls all laid on his bed and I stretched out on the floor while Jonathan and Matt stood above me maniacally discussing guns. After a few minutes into the conversation Matt offered up a special treat. He reached under the mattress and pulled out a shinny chrome plated .44 magnum. Jonathan held it with awe. "Is that loaded?" My girlfriend Jennifer asked."Let's see" Jonathan laughed and pumped a round into the floor right next to me. The blast was so loud that I felt like someone had hit me with a crowbar. I went deaf for a split second before the wind tunnel ringing set in. I looked next to me in a dizzying daze and there was a crater in the carpet about 4 inches wide, right next to my leg. I looked up, straining to focus as Matt pulled the gun out of Jonathan's grip and unloaded the pistol onto the carpet, scattering shells all around me.

Now a man of good judgment would have said "This is not a smart place to be." I was there the very next night.

Jonathan's girlfriend Kim was driving us home from a party and he began a sloppy drunk fight with her. The argument escalated and Jonathan demanded that she drop us off at Matt's house a mile from his own. While Kim was a sober ride, I insisted that we get out with him. Matt's friend Tom was visiting in town and answered the door. "It's a bad scene" Tom said. "Matt's wasted, I don't think you guys want to be here." Jonathan laughed and knocked over a beer can pyramid trying to get his hands on the last drops of cheap whiskey sitting on the table. Matt stumbled into the room with a glazed blank look in his eyes. He was holding a 12" Bowie knife and tried handing it to me handle forward. I declined and brushed it away. "Uh, Matt, are you okay?" He just stared and tried handing me the knife. I brushed it aside again. "Uh, no thanks." He smiled re-offering again. On the third refusal he sat down in a beat up easy chair with the blade still in hand and blankly stared into space. Jonathan sat next to him and began drunkenly rambling, oblivious to the fact that Matt was holding a huge knife and hadn't said a word. Alarm bells were ringing and I called Kim and begged her to come back and get us. After five more minutes of Matt's eerie silence, she arrived. The second she pulled up, I grabbed Jennifer and we hopped in the back seat. Kim had decided to bring Jonathan's huge Rot-Chow mix breed for the ride and it cheerfully panted at us as from the front seat as Jonathan and Kim screamed at each other in the street. After some time the doors opened. Jon sat in the driver's seat and Kim adjusted the dog on her lap in the passengers side. "No fucking way are you driving" I said. "Hey, you make the choice" he slurred. "You can stay or you can go." From my curb side view I could still see Matt still staring off into space with his knife lit through his living room window and I said "...drive."

We screeched out onto the empty streets. Jonathan wasn't weaving, he was careening. We bounced up one curb, then he pinballed into the opposite lane, then back to the first curb at 50 mph. "You're driving like a maniac" Jennifer screamed from the back seat. "You want to see crazy?" Jonathan laughed. He slammed on the brakes. The car spun out of control and bounced off another curb, spinning the car backwards to a smoking stop. The giant dog flew into the back seat and it's paws raked across Jennifer's bare legs. The scratches ran deep enough to leave scars visible for years. My head hit the side window leaving a bloody crack in the glass. Everyone but the driver immediately ejected from the car to veiw the damage. Suddenly Jonathan put the car in gear and drove off with two flat tires and a bent axle. Kim chased after him on foot and we watched their ridiculous slow speed chase fade into the distance.

Matt disappeared for two months until one day I saw him on campus. He was sitting on a bench, sullen and defeated. His arm was wrapped in bandages. I asked him what happened and when he answered a chill ran down my spine. After we left he had started hounding Tom to take the knife the way he had done to me. Finally Tom accepted the knife. What Tom didn't realize was that he was accepting a knife FIGHT. Matt had another Bowie knife sheathed behind his back and when Tom took the knife he pulled out the second one and stabbed. Tom put his hand up in defense and Matt thrust the blade straight through the palm of his hand. On realizing what he had done to his friend, Matt decided to punish himself by thrusting the other knife between the bones in his own forearm and ripped the blade up his arm. Matt was blacked out drunk and had no memory of any of it. He slowly sobered back into consciousness in a hospital room to the news that both he and Tom had nerve damage and neither were going to be able to fully use their wounded appendages again.

I didn't see Matt for three years after that. One day I bumped into him walking down the street. I couldn't believe my eyes. He was standing in front of me with a shaved head and orange robes. After things blew over from that night, Matt went sober, moved to Santa Fe and became a Buddhist monk.

Jonathan however, never had that one brutal lesson learned. His was a slow, horrible decline.

My Company