(An appreciation by Patrick Works.)
Christopher Duane Mathes is my brother.
Most of you know him as Chris Negro, and as much as he’s been conflicted about that name, and the legacy of his race and how that placed him amongst us, he’d be the first to proudly tell you …
“I was born in Monroe, Louisiana, and I HAVE picked cotton!”
Rumor has it that he’s died. I don’t know. I’ve heard so many damned rumors and stories about Chris over the years that I’ve long ago given up taking any to heart. I never stopped telling those stories that I’ve either created from whole cloth or witnessed myself and embellished to positive effect (I believe) on his legend. He’s too good a character.
Truth is stranger than fiction however, and I’ve often thought that the real movie of our youth would be written as a first-person account from his point of view.
Think about that for a minute. He saw it all and did it all, and due to his odd place amongst us he was the ultimate fly on the wall.
I can personally attest to more than one occasion when we all believed he was dead before …
F’rinstance … By his own description when he and I had been up for a couple of days, I took the bold attack and asked him “Chris … why are you so g*damned f*cked up?!”
He told me his high-school days were spent at home with his family in North County somewhere, and in the days just before graduation he and his buddies all decided to go out for one last high-school party. One of these friends (never named by Chris) literally left the car to the party, ran inside to get his sunglasses from his bedroom and as he turned to go back out and join his friends, instantly dropped dead. Before he hit the floor he was a corpse. So graduation turned into a funeral. Buddies intending to do the cap-and-gown walk together instead were pallbearers.
The wake became a binge, the binge became a bacchanal beyond all description and the last thing Chris told me he could remember from that night was being with all those guys on top of a rural hill somewhere near Del Mar and throwing rocks at the PD helicopter that was shouting down at them, “Lay down on the ground right now!”
A week or more later he woke up in the hospital with his family all around him. … He was paralyzed. Over the next few months they bathed him, fed him, and slowly taught him to walk and talk again. This was somewhere around 1977 or 1978, as closely as I could reckon.
All the slurred speech, slow responses, and I think most of all the incredibly profound sense of friendship, brotherhood and love Chris would express to almost anybody is far more easy to understand having heard the story of this trauma and recovery. Chris would never leave a friend, even at risk of his own life.
He is also the 300-lb. gorilla in the room of all our memories here. He was everywhere. He knew everyone. He knew everything about everyone.
Most western cultures, and a fair number of eastern cultures, include the broadly drawn character of “the fool.” Most of us thought of Chris as our fool. I’m here to tell you he was nobody’s fool.
Christopher Duane Mathes is my brother.
Chris never had a dime, but somehow managed to get into any show he arrived at. The man had a way. He talked, he cajoled, he wound a tale, and then he was in. He usually got in early. Then he found something. More to the point, he found somebody who HAD something. … Chris usually got a piece.
Chris never slept in the dirt. My brother was chronically homeless long before those words meant anything to anybody. But he did not camp for a living. I don’t think even he could count, much less describe, all of the people he depended on through the years for a place to stay, an ear to hear and listen, and another heart to count among his friends. He was never ignorant of the vast talk and pointed humor at his expense. He understood all too well that he was the object of more derision than respect.
And he played it like a fine instrument.
Considered by many to have been nothing more than a sidekick to Steve F*cking Garris, long after Steve was living in Balboa Park and gathering aluminum for a living, Chris had a warm room with a clean bed in Clairmont.
Who was the sidekick to whom?
Indeed who was the friend to whom? I wish I could have been as good and unselfish a friend to him as he was to all of us.
A few things come to mind today:
Chris was estranged from his own family, but never lost touch with them entirely. I had the great honor of being introduced to his sister outside my place in North Park. She’d heard he was living with us for the moment, and came to say hello. She was as sweet lady as I could have imagined.
Chris always reminded me to respect and hold close my own family. He pushed me to visit my mom, call my brother, and went to battle with me when he’d heard my sister was having trouble with some guy. Chris would never leave you hanging but more to the point he would never allow you to leave somebody else hanging … if you wanted to be his friend, he’d insist that you be as true as he was.
Chris gave me the only lesson I’ve ever had on how to play harmonica:
“Pat…you gotta SUCK ON IT!”
I think that speaks for itself.
Chris took nearly fatal blows that were meant for me. I got into a stupid struggle over a relic of my father that was stolen by a mohawked fool who will remain nameless here. Chris got involved in the feud and took 3 hammer blows to the head as a result. Divots the size of quarters in his skull and ICU at Mercy Hosp.
All I could do for him was go to the sisters who ran the hospital and ask for a rosary. To his credit, Chris immediately turned the crucifix into an earring and left the hospital under his own power after showing the sisters what he’d made their rosary into. To their credit I think the sisters really liked it.
Chris helped save me from doom more than once. I remember in particular a time when I was sick, unable to report to my job, and literally starving. Chris knew where to get food. He took me up to University Ave. where there was a church built out of a theater. I told them my story, and they produced groceries from under their counter.
For all the times I’d fed him, for all the times he’d been fed by all of us, it became clear to me that day that he’d paid us all back far far more. Most of us were too young, too self-absorbed, and far too condescending to credit him with what he gave us first. Without condition. Without expectation. With great humor, and with love.
Christopher Duane Mathes is my brother.
— Patrick Works