I can't deny my life. But I don't regret it. And I'm aware that I've created a life that is a little bit stranger than fiction.
| | — Job Matusow |
The first time I met Job Matusow was on the set of "Touched By an Angel." I'd expected an old bald man with a Mother Teresa morphology, a guy with Santa Claus hands and a voice like the Taos hum. But the guy who poked his head out of the trailer door marked "Old Fisherman, No. 2," was not like that at all.
This is what I knew about Job: that he'd brought down the McCarthy regime single-handedly by working as a double agent for both the Communist Party and the CIA; that he'd been in Lewisburg prison for lying to Congress; that they'd stuck him in a cell next to Wilhelm Reich's, and had been with Reich the night of his death. I knew Job lived in Glenwood, Utah, managing the local public access TV channel, and producing his own television program, "Magic Mouse Magazine," a kid's show about peace, which had once featured a guest appearance by the Dalai Lama. I also knew he ran the "Ghandi Peace Centre," which sponsored all sorts of projects dedicated to pacifism. For example: he made bells out of melted-down bullets and old munitions shells, combining the mixture with tin cans and other metals to get different tones (his "recipes for bells"). I also knew he had a little dog named Honey, who would jump into his shirt when he whistled to her.
But this Job who poked his fuzzy head out of a trailer didn’t seem to fit all that, although I couldn't put my finger on why. My lucidity was definitely clouded by the fact that I'd already decided he was a psychedelic Ghandi. As such, he just couldn't be leering at me, standing there in my shorty-shorts with a forty-pound tape recorder and a shotgun mike. He was just a nice old man, and whatever I was interpreting as non-saintly behavior was due to the watusi-ing specters of my own suspicious little brain.
So when he told me an hour later that I should get my things and ride with him down to Glenwood and spend the weekend at his house, "really getting a sense of the work we do at the Centre," I got a greenish hiccup of dread in my stomach. I tried to ignore it, write it off as paranoia. After all, he'd just charmed me with stories of Magic Mouse and his plans to take corn to the Hopi reservation. He told me he'd been too broke to buy anything until he'd got down on his knees to pray, and heard the phone ring seconds later. It was the casting director of "Touched By An Angel," calling to tell him he'd just scored the part of "Old Fisherman No. 2" — a gig which would just about pay for that corn.
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