q descansen en paz

This fall the 24-year-old singer of a MA hardcore band, Dominic Mallory, passed away. His band Last Lights had just played a set at BU. Dom was helping the band pack up the van when he started to feel dizzy. He developed tunnel vision. He couldn’t feel his legs. He collapsed against a wall and his friends called an ambulance. Apparently he impacted a nerve during a fairly routine stage stunt in which he wrapped the mic cord around his neck and ultimately caused the aneurysm from which he died just a few hours later.

Although we have a fair number of people in common, I’d never met Dom. I liked his band’s demo and 7” a lot but never got a chance to see them. However, although I hardly ever cry, while reading his obit in the Worcester Telegram-Gazette in my kitchen at Fairmount, I broke down and began weeping. (I’m not sure I could ever describe another experience as one in which I’ve wept.) I felt so intimately connected to him, to his friends, to his family… It was so tragic that a 24 year old kid could just up and die like that, and perhaps even more affecting because he could have been any one of many kids that I know. Perhaps this isn’t unfair. In some ways I guess we were connected. Bobby and I had helped put on a show at Oxfam that was converted at the last minute to a fundraiser for Dom’s family. I spent that day, maybe two days after his death, with many of his closest friends, singing along to the cover of his favorite song. And that’s how it was. Beyond simple acts of solidarity like changing band’s profile pictures on myspace or sending notes of support, people really came together to help Dom’s family to pay his hospital bills and funeral costs. I heard that when all was said and told, donations and benefit shows and merchandise – the support of the hardcore scene – raised about fifteen thousand dollars. It was certainly Dom’s friends and family’s tragedy but it was, in its way, our tragedy – all of us.

This weekend a participant in the BA hardcore scene killed himself. From what I’ve been told, he had a girlfriend of a higher social class. Her family pressured her to break up with him. He tried to hold it together and distract himself all weekend but Sunday night he saw that she had removed all of the photos of them from myspace and listed herself as single. Some time after sending text messages to friends with the words “true till death” (the name of a famous straight edge song), he was hit by an oncoming train.

It’s an eerie thing to see photos of Matute, as he was called, with my new Argentine friends. I don’t really know if I should do anything, say anything to them. I found out about what happened in an indirect way, putting together pieces of the story deposited in different outlets. But I can’t help but experience some of the same feelings that I felt when Dom died. I am not a true member of the BAHC. I’m not sure I had ever seen him before and we certainly had not met; yet I feel connected to this kid and the wounds he inflicted not only to himself but to those that loved him. And while I wish I could communicate all of this simply – enough to explain that I am not a tourist to your emotions in the most meaningful of ways – there’s nothing I could say anyway to the grief my friends are feeling.

RIP Dom and Matute