| Excerpt:
It
was four days later, on the evening of Thursday October 8, 1998, that
Mike Sweeney, a regular at Diedrichs, the café downtown where I
had been working for over two years, called there looking for me. Steve,
one of the guys who was working that night, gave me the message when I
stopped by for a cup of mint tea on my way home from dinner.
"Evidently," Steve said, "Mike saw something on the news
tonight about a guy who had been tied to fence and beaten up. He said
that the guy's name was Matthew Shepard and that he lived in Laramie,
Wyoming. He wanted to know if you thought it was the same Matt who used
to come in and visit you at the coffee shop."
Mike was an older gentleman, probably in his mid 50s, who spent a lot
of time at the café and had really taken to talking to Matt when
he would come in to see me. He told me once that what he appreciated most
about Matt was his ability to have adult conversations about politics
and life. I could only imagine how hearing that on the news would have
upset him.
"I guess it would have to be," I said, "how many Matthew
Shepard's can there possibly be in Laramie? Did he say how bad the guy
had been beaten up?" I asked.
"No," Steve said, "just that he had been tied to a fence
and beaten up. And that now he's in the hospital."
The story sounded ridiculous to me because I imagined it being some sort
of scuffle, a fight like anyone would have, and I couldn't imagine the
circumstances under which Matt would engage in that. He was self-confident
in some ways, but he hardly weighed 100 pounds and he certainly knew his
physical limitations. I envisioned the scene almost comically, something
like a bully holding his palm to Matt's forehead, antagonizing him, and
standing just out of reach while Matt, his face scrunched up in frustration,
swung his fists wildly. I imagined the fence being chain link and the
bully tying Matt to it, maybe smacking him around a little bit, more for
the humiliation factor than to actually hurt him. "Poor thing,"
I remember saying to Steve before I left, "he's probably in a hospital
room right now with a broken arm."
I called Mike as soon as I got home hoping that he would have more information
and was immediately caught off guard by the solemnity of his tone. "I
saw a story on the 6:00 news," he said, "about a boy in Laramie
Wyoming named Matthew Shepard who had been attacked and beaten pretty
badly. They found him tied to a fence out in the plains and now he's in
the hospital." It was the same story Steve had told me at the coffee
shop, but it was Mike's words, attacked, found, badly, plains, and the
uncharacter- isticly slow way he spoke them, like he was trying to explain
to me a concept he knew I wouldn't understand, that gave me pause.
"Oh," I said, "well is it serious, because I can't even
imagine…"
"It didn't really say in the news report," he said, "but
I'm sure it'll be on the 10:00 so make sure you watch it." He got
off the phone before I could ask him any more questions, though I felt
there was more he wanted to say. I wonder now if he actually knew how
bad it was but couldn't bring himself to be the one to tell me.
The 10:00 news wasn't going to start for another twenty minutes or so,
but already thoughts had begun to move faster in my head as I finally
began to comprehend the severity of what I was being told. I needed new
information, something to help me see the picture more clearly so I called
my sister Trish because she lived in Laramie and owned a store there.
Its not a very big town so I was sure that if something had happened there
that she would have heard about it. When I got her on the phone I tried
not to sound as desperate as I felt. And I didn't want her to know right
away that Matt was a good friend of mine for fear that she would edit
out parts of the story she thought I couldn't handle. I said, "tell
me what you know about this kid that got beat up in Laramie."
"Well," she said, "it looks like two kids took him out,
beat his brains in essentially, and left him tied to a fence on the prairie
out past Walmart."
"How bad is it?" I asked, "is it a broken arm, a broken
leg, is he going to be in the hospital for a while?"
Trish said, "Oh, no. From the reports we're getting up here it looks
like he was beaten with baseball bats. He's in really bad shape. He's
probably going to die."
It was like time stopped and for just a second the shock of the news heightened
my senses; I noticed that my apartment smelled like pizza and that the
white walls in the living room were dirty in spots and needed to be painted.
I think that by then I had been prepared to hear Trish confirm that Matt
had been hurt, badly hurt even, but the possibility of death, that he
was probably going to die hadn't even crossed my mind. I sat dumb struck
on the couch , the phone pressed against my ear, completely unable to
respond to what my sister had just told me.
"Why do you want to know all of this anyway?" she asked.
"Because," I said, "Matt is a good friend of mine."
"Oh," she said, and I could almost hear the click of her edit
function, "Well he's in the hospital in Fort Collins now."
I would find out later that Matt and Trish actually knew each other. He
had come into her store and chatted with her a few times in the three
months that he lived in Laramie, though neither one of them had ever connected
the other back to me.
I got off the phone with Trish a few minutes before the news began. I
remember pacing the living room full of nervous energy and anticipation
and feeling, for the first time since Rolanda left, completely alone.
I kept thinking that it couldn't be real, they couldn't be talking about
my Matt. And then, while the theme music to the 10:00 news played underneath
it, his picture appeared on my TV screen. It was the now famous picture
of him in profile wearing a blue button down shirt.
I still don't know who took it, when it was taken, or where, but I'll
never forget the fact that my first reaction to seeing that picture was
that Matt would have hated it being shown on TV because it made his nose
look big. And then the horror of it, the fact that this was in fact my
Matt we were talking about, hit me. All hope that this had been somebody
else, somebody I didn't know and love, was instantaneously wiped away.
I don't remember certain details of the newscasts that first night, like
who was reporting and where they were reporting from. But I do remember
that they weren't in Laramie and that, though all of local Denver news
shows were reporting on the attack, it hadn't yet become a national news
story. I also remember it being known right from the beginning that Matt
was gay, that he was referred to as 'the gay student from the University
of Wyoming,' and it being alluded to that this was a possible hate crime.
Beyond that, so much of the reporting was speculative. It was stated that
he had sustained a blow behind his right ear that had 'appeared' to have
crushed his brain stem. It was known that he had been beaten with a blunt
object that was 'assumed' to have been a baseball bat.
The news reports also talked about the welts, 'possible burns,' that appeared
to cover his body and the eighteen hours he had spent alone in the cold
tied to the fence. Though different news reports that first night varied
on certain details, they all agreed on the two facts that Matt had been
tortured and was not expected to live.
I imagine now, though I don't remember exactly how I did it, that I must
have somehow numbed myself so that I would be able to watch the news and
find out as much as I could. In the days that followed, the details of
what actually happened that night would become more concrete. It would
become known that the blunt object Matt had been beaten with was actually
the butt of a hand gun, not a baseball bat, and that the welts that covered
his body had not been burns, that in fact, Matt had not been burned at
all. But that night I accepted the misinformation as fact and created
in my head the image that would haunt me later when I tried to sleep.
I turned off the TV when I couldn't take it anymore. The only thing I
could think to do was call everybody I knew who cared about him because
I couldn't bare the thought of anyone else finding out the way I had.
I got in touch with almost everyone I could think of that was close with
him-the few members of the fabulous 8 in Casper, Wyoming that we had kept
in touch with and his friends in Denver. Some of them had seen the story
on the news, but most of them hadn't. I told those who hadn't heard as
much as I could without breaking down. And, of course, they had so many
questions to which all I could say was, "watch the news, you'll get
more information there."
It was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life to call those
people and tell them that somebody they love as much as I love is lying
in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere and because of injuries sustained
is going to die. And that if he didn't die he was going to live the rest
of his life in a vegetative state. But that either way, the Matt we knew
was gone forever. |
NEW!!
The Whole World Was Watching