The Three Wise Men of Dope - This Ain't no Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 - page 105

On the one hand, I could see his point. He said, “Look, I've had a long life,
andI'mreallysick.Idon'thavetheenergyorthedesiretogothroughwhatever's
going to cure me, if it's even going to work. I'd rather just die.”
Then9/11happened,andBobby'splace,downonGrandandEssex,hadater-
race that looked south. And Marty was there, watching the towers coming down.
Afterwards, he said, “This is it. After this attack, the government's going to go
totally berserk, and this is going to become a country that I don't really want to
be around in.”
It didn't take too much longer after that before he died. But it wasn't fast
enoughforMarty.Soinhisveryself-indulgentway,heannounced,“I'mgoingto
killmyself.”Ofcourseit'snotthatsimplewithMarty!WewenttotheCedarTav-
ern, 65 which Marty loved, in the middle of the afternoon one day. Marty was go-
ing to talk to me about his suicide plans. He said, “Yeah, I need some money, be-
cause I'm going to have a party in a room at the Chelsea. I'll have all my friends
there, and I'll get the best booze and food from the Second Avenue Deli. Then
I'm going to have a really good bottle of cognac and a bag of heroin. People are
going to leave the party, and then I'm going to take my combination of cognac
and heroin, and that's going to be the end.”
Hepoppedthisideaonme,andIwas,youknow, ambivalent! Thenheinvited
everyone at the Cedar, “You've got to come to my suicide party!” He became
very into this idea. He went back to Bobby's apartment—he was obsessed with
the idea.
At first I said, “I'll give you some money.” But then I thought about it and
toldhim,“Youknow,Idon'twanttogiveyoumoneyforthat.That'sgoingtolay
a trip on me, and I don't even know if it's legal. If you want to kill yourself, just
jump out the window! Why do you have to involve everybody in your trip? It's
kind of sucking everybody into something that should be just your own thing.”
I think some people did agree to give him money for it, but I think he just
spent it on whatever he spent it on. So it never happened. He did want to go out
in this grand flourish at the Chelsea, but he ended up just dying in a hospice.
It was October 28, 2001 when Marty Matz died at the Cabrini hospital hospice. He was
sixty-seven. 66
DIMITRI MUGIANIS
TherewasatimewhenMartyhelpedmeoutbigtime.IrememberIwaswiththis
guy Jerry Agony, who played with James White and the Blacks. I have no idea
what happened to Jerry. He and I went out to cop dope. Jerry spoke Spanish—he