My Fucking Nightmare

Hadn’t seen Matt in a couple days. I wasn’t too worried. It wasn’t unlike him to ignore my phone calls, since it happened once before. He got depressed, got drunk all day for a week straight. Eventually when we heard from him, he came right over to my place, sober as a judge, but ready to fall on the floor and cry like a little bitch.
So, needless to say, I expected the same from him. Only I had this bad gut feeling that something was off. I asked everyone else if they’d heard from him, then asked Liss if she had been talking with Harriet since the night she saw her at the 4100. I don’t think Matt quite recovered from that. He slept on my sofa that night, completely wasted out of his mind. He made Melissa go out and buy a couple bottles of Jack. She wasn’t about to say no to a two-hundred pound weight-lifter with mild temperamental aggression.
Nothing we weren’t used to, though.
Melissa woke me up around ten, three days after he crashed on the couch, and right off the bat I could see something in her face that made me somewhat uneasy. My first question was to ask if she had heard anything from either of them. Shaking her head, I wasn’t sure if I felt more disappointed or nervous. I snatched my phone off the night stand, checking for any messages. Nothing. Fucking nada. So I dialled Matt’s number and waited for the stubborn son of a bitch to pick up. Again, nothing. So I called Johnny. He didn’t pick up but I imagined he’d still be sleeping anyway. That didn’t matter.
My next step was to hurl myself out of bed and clean up so I’d at least look a little bit presentable when I burst through Matt’s front door. Like I said, a bender for him was the least of my worries. The man could handle his liquor. It was the depression that concerned me.
I kissed Melissa goodbye and rushed out the door, my mouth still covered in toothpaste foam I’d forgotten to wipe off. Probably forgot deodorant too. Didn’t matter, I’d only be there long enough to check on Bishop and see if I could find any clues about what that son of a bitch had been up to for the last couple days.
When I got there his vehicle was still in the driveway, so my worry slightly lessened. Not bothering to knock as usual, I crept through the door, hoping not to find a body on the floor or something fucked up like that. Instead, I found him passed out on his couch. His phone had been smashed on the kitchen floor. It looked like his house had been turned upside down by a hurricane, shattered glass lying all around the place. Broken pictures and some band merch from when we were first starting out…I was about to lose it at that point. That stuff isn’t just sentimental to him, but to all of us.
I slapped him across the cheek to wake him up, pinning him to the cushion with my knee. Matt feared me as I feared him: we were about the same height, same size, and I’d proven once or twice before that I could beat the shit out of him if he was stepping out of line. “Wake up, Matthew. We need to talk.”
He groaned and tried to roll over, but I pulled him back down by his shoulder and applied more pressure on his chest. He gasped and wheezed, yet I wasn’t going to let up. He reeked of piss and liquor, something I was used to as well. “You’re a fucking toddler, Matt. Wake up and smell the roses. You destroyed everything. For what? Because some girl couldn’t handle having a rock star boyfriend? Husband? Pathetic. Get up and clean this all up. I’m calling everyone else over here and we’re gonna have a talk.”
He grunted and growled, trying to push me off, but I held my ground and tackled him, pinning his arms down so he wouldn’t punch me. “Oh, for what, Brian? To beat the same fucking dead horse we’ve been beating since I found out about it? Don’t think it’s something so easy to get over, man.”
I rolled my eyes. “Listen, you fucking filthy coward. Get up, splash some water on your face. You’re a grown man who’s acting like a child. I’m sorry Harriet is being the way she is. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you could have done. Melissa told you the stories about her and her exes. You should have seen it coming.”
“You know what, fuck you man. Fuck you for having a perfect life with the perfect girl, the perfect fucking everything! I married her, went on the road, and came back thinking everything was going to be fine. She accused me of all that sex and drugs bullshit that someone fed her. Probably that guy she’s living with. Oh, I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him dead!” with another shove, Matt managed to throw me off him onto the floor, where I hit my head against the hardwood. For a couple moments I was dizzy, but when he came down on me with flying fists, I put it all in the back of my head and let him strike the first blow.
He was hung over, weak. The first punch probably left a nice bruise, but it didn’t add up to the first I threw, knocking him in the side of the face, sending out an audible crack across the empty house. Bishop came flying into the room howling and barking, trying to tear me off Matt before I broke his skull. My hand dripped with blood when I finally stood up and dusted all the glass shards from my clothes.
As I began walking away, I turned back one last time and spat on his floor. “We were gonna have a meeting about how to continue our fucking band like this. We’re not gonna be the next group of people to break up or have problems because our leader is a fucking drunk. Pull it together, Matt. Get over it.” Then I left.
When I got to the truck, I looked at my face in the rear-view mirror, and saw that a nice shiner had begun to form. Shaking it off, I punched the dash with my good hand, hoping to feel the same warm wetness running down my fingers. For a few minutes I sat wondering what to do next. I reflected on what I’d said about the band thing. Breaking up. Fuck, is that what it could come to? Is that what our destiny held in store? Avenged Sevenfold, ceasing to exist. I couldn’t imagine it. So I drove home. I didn’t want anyone else to know what I said, and surely Matt was too inebriated to remember. All that smell of Jack coming off his skin, god knows how much he had drank in the last three days.
Melissa met me at the door, unsure of what to say. When she saw my shiner her jaw slacked, but I shrugged it off. Played it down as not the first time we got rowdy with each other. Well, it didn’t end there. She made me call the other three. Involve them like I decided not to. I was glad it was me to have taken the hit. Johnny would have been knocked out cold. And the other two going home to their wives with an enormous, swollen black eye would mean a whole other can of worms being opened.
However I did as Melissa said and called Jimmy first. He was there in a record ten minutes. Kicking and screaming when he walked in the door. And like Melissa, when he saw my black eye, he fucking lost it. “Are you fucking serious, Brian? Why would you go there yourself? What if he did worse than that?”
I scoffed. “Believe me, he couldn’t tell his ass from the couch when I got there. It’s just a little bruise, no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Melissa chimed in. “Brian, Matt’s gotten worse. Way worse. He’s violent, angry. We’re not there for him, we’re criticizing his weaknesses! Twice now he’s gone through this kind of pain. And for the same reasons, let’s not forget. He’s had a rough run of it. Maybe he’s thinking there’s something wrong with him.” She touched my face, brushing my bruise with her thumb. Her touch calmed me as it usually did. “We can’t shut him out and let him believe he’s the problem. It’ll break him.”
“She’s right, Brian. Maybe you and I ought to go back there.”
As I agreed, we were about to leave until Johnny blew through the door, panting. Totally red-faced. “Guys, he left a message on my phone this morning. Said he was going to church to ask for forgiveness.” Wait, when I got there his phone was smashed. Unless…he just smashed his phone before I got there. Fuck.
“What does that mean?” Melissa yelled above all of us, quarrelling within our trio. “Guys, what does that mean? You said before Matt wasn’t a religious guy…I mean I knew he played the organ at church services when he was younger, but he’s not…oh, no.”
“What?” I cried out, trying to make all the connections she’d obviously already made. “Melissa, what?”
We all watched the colour run out of her face. “He’s gonna hurt himself. He’s asking for forgiveness because he’s gonna hurt himself.”
Nothing else was said, because we were already halfway out the door. Scrambling to our vehicles, I started yelling out what almost felt like total nonsense. I had no idea what church Matt was even affiliated with, so my best guess was to check all the closest ones to his house. “Jim, you go to the one by that Starbucks at the bottom of that hill, by that off-ramp. You know what I’m talking about?” He nodded and climbed into the seat, and sped off as I was dictating to Johnny. “Check the big one by the supermarket near Zack’s house. Call Zack and tell him to meet me at Matt’s place. We’re gonna go see if he’s still there.”
By the time Melissa and I reached Matt’s place, his vehicle was already gone. Honestly, I was now completely pissed off that he was behind the wheel, obviously still intoxicated. I’d likely be following a line of carnage, had I decided to pursue him. But instead, we went inside and checked the place for any other evidence that something was wrong.
As Melissa expected, he left a note on his dresser by Harriet’s picture. ‘Sorry for not being good enough’. Oh, fucking hell, no. Bishop was crying in the porch, Melissa found, after following a trail of blood. Guess the poor boy cut his foot on one of the glass shards from something Matt smashed. Melissa was on the phone with Harriet, I could tell by the yelling, and I wasn’t about to wait around for my anger to start bubbling about that.
Zack pulled up just as I’d hoped that Johnny made the call. I met him at the door, sweat dripping down my chin. “Whoa, where’d you get the shiner, bro?” He asked, just as I was pulling him through the door. “What’s going on? What the fuck happened here?”
“I take it the runt didn’t tell you much.”
“No, he just said you couldn’t find Matt and that he was acting like a total fuckwad…Brian, what’s happening?”
I sighed. “We think Matt’s in danger to himself. I told Johnny and Jimmy to check the churches, since he told Johnny he was going to church to ask for forgiveness. Smashed up his fucking phone, too, so no one can call him.”
Zack covered his face with his tattooed hands and exhaled a long breath of exasperation. “Okay, what should we do? Should we call the cops?”
“No, he’s been drinking. The sooner we find him, the better. If he gets a DUI his career is over anyway.”
“And if he kills someone?” Zack retorted.
“He’s probably thinking of killing himself!” Melissa shrieked at Zack. Tears were forming in her eyes. She curled into my chest and let out a bunch of stifled sobs. I rubbed her back and tucked my chin into her hair, unsure of what to do next.
A minute later, my phone rang. It was Johnny. “I found the church he was at. Priest said he came in, confessed to what he was going to do, and left. Never said what he was gonna do though, only said he was sorry for the crime he was going to commit. Brian, where the fuck could he be now?”
I paused, looking down at Melissa, whose eyes were just as fearful as mine. “Harriet’s.”

Notes