character :: Matt Williams
“I might have nothing, be nothing, and know nothing – but my sons are fucking awesome. That’s enough for me.”
Matthew Williams was born in a hospital. That’s what he tells himself, anyway. A happy mother, a working father, and surrounded by grandparents who held them one at a time and kissed his chubby belly as he wailed and hopefully pissed on everyone there. God knows they’d have deserved it, because at some point, that smiling mother and grandparents with well-wishes, even the doctors and nurses and passer-bys with congratulatory looks all melted away to nothing. It meant nothing. Because at some point, when the arguing all became too much or when his father found a good heroin provider, it all shook apart.
Matt can’t remember the day they moved into the housing projects, but it must have happened sometime around the age of four. He made himself a fast friend, a boy about two months younger than him, and after that point: Mattie and Alex were inseparable. They did all the things that boys growing up should do: they grossed each other out in the dirt finding worms, snuck junk food into their rooms, and even made themselves a little man-cave in Alex’s room after the dry-rot in their back-to-back closets made the wall weak enough to push in. They talked about everything and did everything together: so, when Alex’s dad began touching Matthew, he knew by the look in Alex’s eyes that it’d started happening too. That summer, they stopped talking about everything. They just knew.
Matthew turned to the heroin his dad cooked after the prostitution started. He would sit in the closet in the dark, so high he were dizzy, and wait for Alex – and there, they hatched a plan. In the night, probably a Tuesday, they would sneak away. They would run the streets of Los Angeles until they found a new home, a good one with food and warm blankets and water hot enough to scrub away the filth that seemed to permeate their brains. Alex and Matthew were in love – they knew it – and they’d get out of there alive.
But on a Saturday, when Alex disappeared and the brunt of his father’s rage landed on Matthew; it all shook apart. Again. Six miserable years later, Matthew walked past a dirty pile of discarded bloody rags in the kitchen on his way to his room; which was not unusual. The unusual part came when the rags started crying.
And this is just the first chapter of his life. Matthew somehow kept himself alive for years, and not just himself, but a baby boy he vowed to protect. When Alex, now known as Xander, happens across him in 11th grade biology – all hell breaks loose. Somewhere along the way, he meets himself a beautiful girl who is harboring a dark secret herself, and nothing goes so well with pain as misery. For his third chapter, Matthew turns to the passion that got him out of Cherry street: his music. He finds himself three men who develop into an impromptu and unlikely family; including a son that, like Victor, he never asked for and never knew he needed.
