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When I think of Marty, my preeminent memory is of his voice—that warm, gentle, rich, husky bass voice, which sort of wrapped itself around you like a childhood blanket, made you feel all warm and fuzzy, and above all, safe. Marty was not only a big man, but he was a protective spirit, who wrapped everyone he met in that big cushiony blanket of love that was as much a part of his mission on earth as the poetry he wrote.
  
   I did not see Marty for at least a decade before he died, but there are other things that stand out in my memory. Of course you couldn’t forget his size 300 pounds of poet flesh on the hoof—the patriarch’s beard, the long, tousled salt and pepper hair, the way he was almost always smiling, and amazingly warm and receptive to everyone. For me, he embodied the true ethos of Beat—totally non commercial, preferring ordinary people and hangouts to celebrity and status, and a tremendous openness and honesty even with strangers. There is a cliché—“he didn’t have a mean bone in his body”—which in truth applies to very few people in this world, but I would say it was completely accurate about this humble and gifted man.

     I remember well when Marty crashed at my friend, poet Neeli Cherkovski’s beatnik pad on Harwood Alley in North Beach. The apartment was never a model of neatness, but Marty brought a new order of slobdom to it. He routinely walked around naked except for a huge robe that most of the time was falling open, and whenever he hit Neeli’s refrigerator (which was often) there was usually food left trailing out the door. Yet the strange thing about Marty was that in social situations he was also a paragon of good manners. You could introduce him to anyone, probably even the Queen of England, and be assured that he would act like an impeccable gentleman.

     One of my sharpest memories of Marty is from our earliest times together—when he had “hit the Beach” for the second time in his life—around 1980 or 1981—and rejoined the poets’ community, to which I myself had recently pilgrimaged from Chicago. I was still working on my biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, and naturally I asked Marty for his his memories of Jack.

     It was one of those magic nights in the summer of 1981 when herds of poets just roamed the streets of North Beach together. Corso was in town, Ira Cohen and Roberto Valenza had just arrived from Kathmandu, Bob Kaufman was in fine form, wearing his “La Boheme” button, even Philip Lamantia was occasionally lured out of his hermit’s apartment. A big group of us had ended up—as we often did—at the Savoy Tivoli on Grant Avenue. Marty was holding forth about how he had translated the Aztec Codices while high on psilocybin in the mountains of Peru. Kaufman, who had been sitting beside me smiling and talking quietly to himself the whole time, suddenly leaned into the conversation and declared that he didn’t want to read poetry with Matz because “his poetry is too wild.” Most of us laughed, knowing how hard it would be to top Bob’s own “wildness.” Then, even more outrageously, Kaufman looked Marty in the eye and asked him if he had a joint!

     Clearly this was the time to coax Marty to recall his Beat days in North Beach, and thats just what I did. Marty said he’d hung out with Kerouac, Boston poet Bob Donlin, disc jockey Pat Donovan, Kaufman, Neal Cassady, a guy named Nick Panopolous, and others at some woman’s apartment up on Telegraph Hill. According to the notes I took, her name was “Viasta,” and her friend, a pianist named Baker, used to stop by and play a lot. Marty said Jack would smoke pot and drink with them—“he’d partake but he wouldn’t participate.” Jack seemed square to Marty, was always putting them and himself down—had a gloomy outlook on what they were doing that Marty found disturbing. Jack didn’t really seem to be enjoying himself, Marty said, and would always read them the Diamond Sutra or his own Scripture of the Golden Eternity when what they really wanted was just to get high. Neal was the only one there Marty was really close to at that time (though later he became quite close to Kaufman). Marty said he appreciated and harmonized with Neal’s spontaneity—the living and digging and having kicks just for their own sake, not for the sake of some future book about them.

     But Marty said something else that night that struck me as a little strange. Maybe with his eye on Kaufman, always the center of everyone’s admiration (if not adulation), Marty remarked: “I’m the only great poet from that period who didn’t get famous—all because I ran off to Mexico in 1957, just as the news media were discovering the Beats.” I detected a little hint of envy and disappointment in Marty’s voice, and I realized his life was not quite as simple as he portrayed it—that he shared a lot of the same conflicts the rest of us who emerged from that Beat scene did. Marty did love and live for the moment, just as his friend Neal Cassady had; but there was also a part of Marty that wanted to be recognized as one of his nation’s major poets. In one final irony, it has taken his own death to bring that recognition, now as his Collected Works will finally see print in New York.