Hillsborough, North Carolina
December 7, 2000

Dear Readers,

We are taking an intermission, today, from the cancer letters of Aliza Pollack, and instead are bringing you another Open Letters conversation, our first since Deirdre Dolan’s interrogation of her niece, Eilis, about the first day of kindergarten.

Readers have been writing, recently, to demand, What happened to the conversations? Where did they go? The answer: here.

Today’s conversation was conducted by Cheryl Wagner, whose last interview for Open Letters was with the legendary Florida death-metal aficionados Sam and Zak on what can be smoked, what should be smoked, and why. Cheryl’s interview today is with her friend Matt Salada, and special for medical week, it’s about diabetes.

Here’s what Cheryl has to say about Matt:

I can’t remember when exactly it was that I met Matt, but in my mind it is dead summer and he’s walking down my old street in New Orleans, sweating and shirtless and scrawny, carrying a grocery bag and wearing these loud science guy glasses and seventies short-shorts. His hair is standing straight up to the humidity, and he doesn’t seem to notice that people stop to stare.

Matt used to make huge, air-brushed spacescape paintings in the rusted shed of the old house he lived in down my street. I don’t know if he wore a chemical mask or not in that closed and tinny place, but the paintings that emerged from the shed were what you’d hope space is like – big, technicolor baby blue, pink bloody and eerie. Some of them had 3-D domes or sugar-cube cities and drinking-straw lunar landings striping the planets.

He lived with Megan, who did beautiful tiny embroiderings of pink telephones and unicorns on fabric canvasses. For a while, they were in a spacerock band together called The Hong Kong, and Matt also moonlighted as “Danny Longpants,” the infamous guitarist of the now-defunct womanizing-fool band, Bobby Redbeet. One time the singer of that band broke his arm bad at a show in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and it freaked everybody out. Matt and Megan were nice, and I was sorry when they moved from New Orleans.

Matt’s living temporarily in Sacramento now, on a break from his usual hectic guitar-driven lifestyle. He’s currently working on animation and is “Flash Director” somewhere (which I can see him being good at) and he recently got semi-commissioned, then threatened, by Mad magazine, which I can also see. He’s also not indestructible, the surprise of which is unraveling for me now, bit by bit.

Tomorrow, Aliza’s letters (which we featured this week on Tuesday andWednesday) will conclude, for now, with an exchange of emails between me and her from the last couple of months, which will get us all up to date at last.

And then next week, Open Letters will have its first-ever guest editor, for the entire week. Please stay tuned.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough