We stepped out of the coffee shop and began strolling along Wickenden Street - our old stomping grounds. Normally, being there gives me a warm and homey feeling, but as we walked a cold chill chiseled up my spine. My coffee inexplicably dripped on my hand through the lid. I glanced across the street and did an involuntary double take. There was Matty B. stapling a flyer to a telephone pole.

Matt was one of this town's unforgettable personalities. He had ideas that were so crazy that they were probably genius. Like the restaurant he was going to start from his third floor apartment. You would walk up, order, place your money in a basket which would be hoisted up to the window. A few minutes later a grilled cheese sandwich and soda would be lowered down and you could continue on your way.

Then there was the summer camp for troubled punk rockers out in the woods. There would be the usual events of a summer camp but with a punk twist. Black Flag songs around the campfire instead of Kumbaya. Tattoos and peircings instead of face painting and crafts.

Matt's band (he was a phenomenal guitar player) was called Fall River Overdrive. When they opened for ALL Matt was walking around before the show chomping on a loaf of sweet bread. When they took the stage you realized he wasn't just eating the sweet bread, he was making a hat out of it. The joke being that Matt was Potuguese and the Providence, RI - Fall River, MA area has a famously large Protuguese population. Maybe you have to be from here to truly understand why that is hilarious and brilliant.

I'm sure people who knew him better than me have even better stories.

Matt lived on or around Wickenden for most of the time I knew him, but it was very unusual to see him there now since he died a few years ago. I blinked again and saw that the face of the kid with the staple gun was in fact not Matt's, but I could swear somehow it was him for a split second. Maybe he's there somewhere hanging out, sucking down beers in a dark corner of Babe's, sitting outside Fellini's eating slices, forever "Doing the Wick" as he called it.