Departures: Matthew Farrell

The murder of a friend.

This winter at Blame Cannon I’m rotating posts about global warming in prehistoric times, stories of coal, and memorable departures.

Farrell, The Altamont

In July 1991 I found a fancy cardstock note slipped under my door. In scratchy fountain pen writing were written congratulations on some plays just staged in my apartment signed with a indecipherable first name, or just an initial—I couldn’t tell—followed by Farrell, the Altamont.

My apartment was a room in the pink building on South Street next to the brewpub where Offstage Theater had staged three short comedies I’d written. I was proud of the production—only disappointed that the show hadn’t immediately gotten me a girlfriend—and I would have welcomed a note with ordinary flattery, but the note from Farrell, the Altamont was so effusive and affected I thought it was making fun of me, so I threw it away.

Some days later another note appeared, also signed Farrell, the Altamont, asking me to participate in creating an encyclopedia of the Charlottesville art scene. The writer declared our town the next Lost Generation Paris, the next Haight-Ashbury. I tossed that note too.

Finally, one day I came home to my answering machine flashing:

Hello. Have I reached the playwright Joel Jones? This is Matthew Farrell. I have to tell you that your work is outstanding. I wonder if you would consider a commission. Dammit, you’re the only one who can do it! You have to phone me…

He left a number and I called and we arranged a time to meet at the mysterious “Altamont” which turned out to be an art-deco apartment building at the top of Altamont Circle where High Street passes the Episcopal Church. I knocked on a third-floor door. A man, tan and grinning, answered in a white shirt, dark pants with sharp pleats and pegged legs, a mismatched suit coat, and a bowtie. An unfiltered Camel dangled from his grinning mouth.

”Hi? Matthew Farrell?”

“Farrell—just Farrell.”

Farrell-just Farrell gripped my hand and bowed repeatedly.

Then he stood back and swept open the door like a concierge. He ushered me into a dusty, cluttered apartment. I sat on a frayed antique couch in front of a coffee table improvised from a peeling black-lacquered board on cinderblocks. The walls surrounding us were sandbagged waist-high with book-packed shelves—not as many books as my apartment, but he owned his. Space not taken with books was dotted with silver art nouveau ashtrays and cigarette lighters, statuettes and bric-a-brac, pre-war framed posters, and weapons.

Farrell bounded in bringing homemade absinthe, which tasted even worse than real absinthe, coffee from an electric percolator, which was delicious, and chilled water from repurposed glass bottles corked in his otherwise empty fridge. He showed off his weapons, a thirty-eight revolver allegedly once carried by Evelyn Waugh, a bayonet from his own stint in the Marines, and a long camouflage blowgun with darts that looked like fishing lures. He dabbed rubber cement on the head of a cement Buddha statue and lit it on fire.

After these opening acts Farrell sank into a worn leather chair, leaned forward with his brow furrowed, and told me he wanted to commission me to write a play about him—about his breakup with his last girlfriend. How tragic it was, how much he suffered, what a mistake she had made—particularly since the girl’s father liked Farrell more than the new guy. From a cubby in one of the cinderblocks he pulled a wad of crumbled cash and thrust it at me.

“Is this sufficient? I don’t know what your rates are. You’re the finest writer in Charlottesville and it’s a story that must be told. Dammit, you’re the only one who can do it!”

I wasn’t too principled to take a crazy person’s money and write a play about him—if I had a good idea for the play—but no ideas sprung to mind. So I said I’d think about it, refused the deposit, and promised to let him know if I came up with anything.

The Good Years

I never wrote the play, but gradually Farrell and I became friends.¹ We both lived in downtown Charlottesville, were involved in the same budding art scene, and so ran into one another again and again. I helped out on the first episode of his cable access show, Let’s Get Lost. We dashed off a movie treatment one night after he met a producer at Film Festival gala. (Nothing came of it.) Eventually we wrote and photocopied anonymous satirical broadsides to tape up around town.

But mostly we just hung out at the Altamont drinking his coffee and smoking his cigarettes and scheming about ways to get more people downtown, or talking about some book or music. These were my favorite times with Farrell. Eating takeout while watching a movie or an old TV show rented from Sneak Reviews or Blockbuster and trying to figure out how the comedy worked or how the characters worked or why it was written the way it was. Farrell was brilliant, funny and witty, self-deprecating and sly. He could analyze anything and tie anything to anything and he was much better educated and could pull half a dozen books from his shelf that related somehow to anything we were talking about. But the feeling of the Virginia summer is what I miss most, the endless free time of youth, an old-fashioned non-air-conditioned room with a dinky fan perched in an opened window doing its best, the light outside falling, and no cellphones or internet. At those times Farrell’s bowties and affected manner, which usually irritated me, seemed spot on.

Whether it was Blockbuster or Sneak Reviews or to a diner, a pond for fishing (He loved fishing; I never did but would go to humor him), or to a junk store or antique store Farrell always insisted on driving. Back then he owned a succession of tiny British sports cars that he loved to be seen in. Especially with tall friends like me who didn’t fit very well. He was skilled enough as a mechanic to keep British engineering running, but unskilled and conflict-averse enough in business that he bought every car for more than it was worth and sold it for less. In general he was always struggling financially because of his reckless spending. (I wasn’t the only person he shoved wads of cash at for dramatic effect and most people didn’t turn it down.)

Over the years our little downtown art scene chugged along. Farrell churned out two—maybe three?—seasons of Let’s Get Lost with dadaesque collage covers of his own design, two bad novels, some fun found-object sculptures, and eventually a very funny and biting doggerel epic poem about a restaurant called Fandango.

Farrell loved music and seemed to know every band since the year that punk broke. He constantly listened to everything—especially anything local. He endlessly acquired and traded guitars, tenor banjos, and ukuleles (losing money on every transaction just as with his cars), and even started up a weekly Wednesday-evening open jam session on the mall called Sevens and kept it going until the Deadheads gradually ran everyone else off. But he never learned more than about three songs himself and those all sounded alike.

Farrell founded an underground press, Hypocrite Press, to publish his works and the works of his friends with staples and medical tape bindings. Calling Hypocrite Press unprofitable is almost an insult to the concept of profit. Farrell couldn’t conceive of anything worthwhile being profitable; not because he was too principled to take money but just because his brain was too busy to count. Fandango probably got a second draft, but everything else he wrote and everything else he did was accomplished during frenzied bursts of energy. He couldn’t be idle.² By mid-morning Saturdays when I had barely woken up and walked three blocks to his house, I’d find Farrell had already washed, dried, and folded his laundry, tuned up and washed his car, and cleaned his apartment bathroom (but he never dusted the rest of it).

In public Farrell knew everyone and—in those early years—liked everyone and remembered names and respected efforts. He was generous with his time—again, in those early years—let people sleep on his couch forever, handed out endless cigarettes and fat tips, gushing notes and lent books. There was always the schtick with the bowing and bowties too.

(While today people seem to want to be accepted as normal no matter how statistically unusual they are, back in 90s downtown Charlottesville there was a social cachet to being considered unusual no matter how statistically normal. People wanted to stand out far more than fit in. Farrell was more eccentric than most, but he was not the most eccentric person I knew then. Probably not in the top five. Plus he was handsome and young, so his eccentricities just made him more memorable.)

For me the most irritating part of his schtick was the way he would introduce his friends:

“Do you know Joel Jones, esteemed playwright? This is So-and-so, revered poet.”

I hated it. I’d ask him not to do it, but he would always do it anyway, amused all the more by my discomfort. That’s the thing about Farrell: he was generous and welcoming, but he would never change anything about himself for someone else. He took pride in this.

Gradually, this aspect of him seemed to take a dark turn when it came to dating. The notes and bowing, the generous gifts, and the performative manners grew tenfold when he was hitting on girls. For pick-ups, one-night stands, and brief flings it all seemed fun and seemed to work out fine, but the moment he and someone were officially in a relationship or that he was in love—which is what he was always claimed he wanted—he became paranoid. He wouldn’t want his male friends to interact with his girlfriends; when the girlfriend wasn’t around he would complain about her being crazy; and whenever he and a girlfriend broke up he would grow despondent—sometimes suicidal.

I had two suicide watches with him after breakups, and his other friends had more. Often he would end up getting back together with the same ex he had complained incessantly about. This wasn’t a pattern with women generally or even women he had flings with, but as soon as Farrell was with someone his sanity seemed to crack.

The Exile

I never got to know any of the women he dated well enough to get a picture of what was going on. Maybe the nicer girls were waiting for the real Farrell underneath all the histrionics—as I guess most of us were to some extent or another. (Maybe Farrell was waiting for this too.) But as years went by his peers went on to marriage and children or moved away to other places, Farrell’s dating life seemed to get more brittle and strained. At least it looked that way to me. Or maybe it was the rest of his life that was impacting his dating. He began to suffer from tinnitus and struggled finding employment.

I moved to New York in 2004 and was coming back to visit less often. It seemed like he didn’t like people as much, lost interest in what others were doing, and didn’t like Charlottesville anymore, especially not the downtown. Maybe he was just sick of me, so he was sullen when I was around. I don’t know.

Farrell bought a shack on Stony Point Road with a slanted porch and a graveyard in back. He moved his public life to daily hangouts at a coffeeshop in Barracks Road where he held court like old days. This he seemed to enjoy.

He would go down to Farmington to visit his mom or over to the Valley to visit his dad, but he wouldn’t come to New York even when begged by his best friend, Gabriel. Gabe and I and my friend James took Farrell to a music festival in North Carolina in 2008 and he seemed to enjoy the music and fishing with Gabe along the way.

When Jen and I came to Charlottesville in 2011 to get married at the courthouse we had a party afterwards upstairs at Fellini’s. Farrell organized a slew of friends to give us matching cheap toasters. Returning to the Omni we found he had arranged for the hotel to have waiting by our door a giant silver tray with stacked slices of white bread.

Crossing Paths

A year and half later Jen and I moved back to Cville permanently with our new daughter Ellie. Once driving up 20 North I stopped to visit Farrell. He’d added an entire addition to his shack and trails and sheds in the back. The place looked great. He was no longer wearing a bowtie and he had a jeep rather than a British sportscar. He seemed happy enough and talked enthusiastically about an on-again-off-again girlfriend who was making crafts they sold on Etsy, but I couldn’t tell if she was real and whether the crafts were hers and not his. Also he had a lot more guns. And not Evelyn Waugh-owned revolvers but more contemporary gun-culture guns. More stuff with clips and straps and scopes. I invited him to come into town for chicken or a burger sometime, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t consider coming to any of my shows either. He said he didn’t like being in public anymore.

We had a falling out around 2014 when I googled my name and found he’d moved Hypocrite Press online, which included a novel of mine in e-book format. I wasn’t proud of the novel. I liked the story but didn’t think the writing was very good and the pay-to-print setup looked amateurish. Farrell hadn’t told me anything about the e-books. I was teaching writing courses at the time and needed the teaching money and if anyone googled my name Hypocrite Press would come up. It just made me look bad. I asked him to take it off the website. He did but was angry and I don’t think we spoke for a couple years.

In March of 2018 Gabriel called me. The Etsy girlfriend had been real, and she and Farrell had broken up, and Gabe was worried. Farrell hadn’t answered several days of emails and phone calls. Recently he’d cut off his best friend in town, Jeremy, in a pique over something or other, so Gabe didn’t know who else could check on things. I drove by Farrell’s house a couple of times over the next twenty-four hours and the windows that were lit changed, so I reported that someone was alive, if not well. Soon enough Gabriel said that Farrell was communicating again, and for better or worse he and the girlfriend were back together.

I reached out to Farrell in January of 2020, and we met up with our friend Cristan at a steakhouse on Pantops. We had a good time and promised to make it a monthly meet, but then we missed a couple months and the pandemic hit.

During the lockdowns and social distancing that spring, I was with my wife and daughter at Barnes and Noble and we ran into Farrell (wearing a bandana instead of a mask, of course) and he invited us to his house just to wander around outside. I was desperate for something to do with my kid so I accepted. (Farrell promised not to have guns visible.) The back of his property was even nicer now with lovely trails, and benches, and small arbors, and some holes being dug for unknown reasons. Farrell walked around with us and we joked with one another, but after he went inside—saying he had a girlfriend in there and he had to check on her—my daughter asked why I was being mean to him. I didn’t realize I had been. I thought we were kidding but in my daughter’s eyes I was teasing him and he wasn’t teasing me, and she’d never seen me like that. It breaks my heart a little that was I was not nice to him the last time I saw him in person.

We emailed sometimes in the years that followed, usually funny links or threads shared with Cristan or Jamie Dyer. The last email I got from him was in July of 2022. He sent me a link to a book he wanted to read about the language of cults, and his led to a back-and-forth about various cults or cult-like groups in Charlottesville. Farrell complained about an alleged sex-cult that had “ruined” several women he was close to.

Three months later in October I learned that Farrell was dead. The TV news first reported a death on Stony Point Road but it wasn’t clear if it was an accident or a suicide. In a flurry of texts and phone calls we hoped that it might not be Farrell, or it might not be death, but it turned out it was Farrell and he was gone. All his friends had had enough suicide scares with Farrell and memories of his younger recklessness that we were not so shocked until it came out that he was murdered. He did have a girlfriend, Shawna-Marie Murphy, and she’d shot him in the back of the head while he was sleeping. She used one of the innumerable guns lying around.

Two years later in November of 2024 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Most Important People

I miss Farrell’s wit—and missed it long before he died—and I will forever be in awe of his boundless energy. I miss his enthusiasm for life too, but he didn’t share much of that with me in the last decade. I sometimes miss smoking, but it’s been twenty years and I’ve gotten used to it.

What I’m most grateful for regarding Matthew Farrell is how he saw the people around him as the most important people in the world.

I’d never met anyone like that. Most of us didn’t talk confidently or respectfully about our little art scene at the beginning of the 90s. I joked we were the Island of Misfit Toys. If a show was good or a band was good I was grateful but I talked about it in a snarky way. It was luck. It couldn’t last. Culture was something that happened in bigger places so if we were doing anything well others had to be doing those things better. The people in bigger cities just knew what they were doing more than we did.

But to Farrell Charlottesville really was Lost Generation Paris and the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love. It was the place where important things happened. We were all geniuses, poets, and philosophers.

I knew others in the 90s who believed ordinary people could do anything, but Farrell believed fundamentally that the people he knew could not be ordinary.

On this Farrell won me over. I will never like people the way he did or dislike them the way he came to, but as to their importance, I came to see through Farrell’s eyes. I don’t always manage to feel that way, but when I don’t I know that I’m in the wrong. I’ll never have the charisma that Farrell had to convince others, but I know the truth.

Dammit Charlottesville, your work is outstanding. You’re the only one who can do it.

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Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! For the next couple of months I’ll circle between a series on global warming in prehistory, a story about coal, and a series of true stories about departures and goodbyes.

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1. It was a short parody of Faust in which a bowtie-wearing character named “Farriel” while contemplating suicide makes a pact with the devil.

2. Possible diagnoses of Farrell include Bipolar, ADHD, ASD, NPD, or ASPD. He had his own copy of the DSM-III BTW. Touched with Fire, a book on manic-depressive illnesses, was one of the few books that I recommeded to him that he read. We discussed it a lot.