The Day My Son Discovered MF DOOM Slept on My Couch Part Two
Mason sat there staring at me, still stunned. “Wait… you’re serious?”
I nodded.
I had just said it out loud for the first time: MF DOOM slept on my couch. And the moment I told Mason that truth, something cracked open inside me. It wasn’t just a story anymore. It was a memory waking up after a thirty-year silence.
I looked down at the floor, and suddenly I wasn’t in his room anymore. I was back on Water Street. I could see the boxes stacked by the door. The old turntables. Cigarette smoke slipping through the kitchen window. My chest tightened.
“Dad?” Mason said.
I didn’t answer right away.
My mind had slipped back to the moment that ended it all.
It was a quiet afternoon. We were moving out after the neighbors had finally had enough of the late-night music and bass-heavy sessions that rattled the walls.
Daniel and I were loading up the car. He brought out his brother’s turntables, Subroc’s turntables, and set them gently behind the car while we went back inside to grab more boxes.
We were gone for maybe a minute.
When we came back, they were gone.
No sound. No struggle. No trace. Just… gone.
I looked at Daniel. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The silence between us said everything. Those turntables weren’t just equipment, they were the last piece of his brother. They carried the weight of grief, of legacy, of memories that had no backup copy. And I had let them disappear.
It crushed me, because when we met, Daniel had sworn off music after Subroc died. But through our late-night sessions on Water Street—freestyle battles, chess matches, movie marathons—I knew what had just started to stir in him again. That spark. That sound. That sacred moment when he found his voice after nearly losing it for good.
I remembered back to months earlier, when Mike Brown and I had driven down to Freeport, NY, to scoop him up and bring him back to Boston. Daniel had packed up his life, including Subroc’s turntables, with the promise of starting over. On the drive back to Boston, that’s when we heard it. Daniel’s first song since deciding he’d never make music again. Back then, he called it “Hell From Day One.” Later, it would become “Gas Drawls.” But in that moment, in that car, it was resurrection.
I’ll never forget how Mike and I looked at each other—eyes wide, jaws dropped, completely floored. “Yo… he’s back!” That track hit like a thunderclap. The beat was raw. The flow was haunting. It was like watching someone take their pain and shape it into something eternal.
And then, just like that, it was gone again.
After the turntables disappeared, the music disappeared too.
Daniel and I didn’t talk much after that.
We finished packing in silence. Then we stayed at my parents’ house for a few days. Daniel barely spoke to me. Not in anger—just… distant. Quiet. The music was gone. No more beats. No Godzilla tapes. No chess. Just the hum of what could’ve been, slowly fading out.
Then he told me he was going back to New York.
We didn’t have a dramatic goodbye. No fight. No final verse.
Just a quiet ride to South Station. Me staring at the road. Him staring out the window.
I bought him a train ticket. He thanked me, nodded once, and disappeared into the crowd.
I stood there for a long time after the train left. Not ready to go home. Not ready to admit it was really over.
I did what I always do with pain I don’t know how to process: I buried it.
And it wasn’t just the music I buried.
That time with Daniel had been chaotic, creative, experimental—like we were trying to reach another dimension. And maybe we were. We were immersed in The Pleiadian Agenda by Barbara Hand Clow, convinced we were channeling messages from the Pleiadians, decoding cosmic frequencies through vinyl samples and chopped loops. We were hungry for light, for elevation, for escape.
We weren’t just making beats. We were chasing transcendence.
But when DOOM left, the signal cut out.
The turntables were gone. The music stopped. And the energy that had once felt electric and alive… vanished.
I needed to clear my head. I needed gravity. I had drifted so far from the faith I grew up with that I felt like a stranger in my own skin, an alien among my peers, floating through a spiritual dimension I no longer understood. I wasn’t grounded. I wasn’t home.
So I walked away from it all.
I stopped listening to rap. Cold turkey.
I tossed out tapes, stashed away notebooks, and gave up freestyling for good. I didn’t just leave music, I left that version of myself. I enlisted in the military not long after. Reinvented everything. Gave myself structure, discipline, a sense of purpose. Something to hold onto when the turntables were no longer there.
I never told anyone the full story. Not really.
Only my close friends Mike Grafton and Mike Santiago knew how much it tore me up inside. I confided in them during those raw days—just enough to let the pain breathe—but even then, I left most of it unsaid.
It stayed locked away for decades, sealed behind guilt and time, until Mason, without even knowing, dug the skeletons out of the closet.
And now, as I sit here telling this story, I’m remembering it all. The silence. The loss. The hurt I buried. The sound I thought I’d never hear again.
I had no idea Daniel went on to become MF DOOM. I didn’t know he followed through on the Monster Island idea we had brainstormed over chessboards and VHS tapes. I didn’t know he built an entire mythology around the very sound we had shaped in that little house.
I didn’t know… until Mason played “Gas Drawls.”
That bassline pulled me back through time. And Mason, he kept pulling me forward.
For Christmas that year, I bought Mason a turntable. Wrapped it carefully, tucked a few records underneath—including some of DOOM’s work and Steely Dan’s Aja—and watched him unwrap something much bigger than just a piece of equipment. I was giving him access to a world I had sealed shut decades earlier.
Then I showed him how to listen.
I taught Mason and Colby how to pick apart a beat the same way Daniel had taught me. We sat by the record player, leaning in close, and I played them the opening bars of “Black Cow.” I showed them how that little ghostly riff between chorus and verse became the foundation for “Gas Drawls.”
We weren’t just listening to music—we were listening to time fold in on itself. Father to sons. Beat to beat. A secret passed from one generation to the next, just like Daniel once passed it to me.
Mason started playing tracks I’d never heard. Eventually, Colby picked up on it too—drawn in by the sound, the mystery, the story that had started to echo through our house. Neither of them knew the full history, but somehow, both found their way to the music.
It felt like Daniel had reached through time, not with blame, but with grace.
Like he was saying, It’s okay, Matt. I forgive you.
I cried the day I found out he died.
Not just because the world lost a legend. But because I always thought we’d reconnect. I thought someday, we’d sit across a chessboard again. Laugh about the Quincy days. Talk about how nobody believed he once slept on my couch.
That day will never come.
But maybe, in some strange and beautiful way, it already has through Mason and Colby finding his music. Through the records spinning again in my home. Through the story I never thought I’d tell, now finally finding its voice.
I lost the music once.
But I found it again—in the crackle of vinyl, in the rhythm of memory, and in the next generation hearing a truth I wasn’t brave enough to share until now.
I’m remembering as we write.
Some stories don’t end. Some just pause… and wait for the needle to drop.