A 1990 Haines High School graduate who spent three years as a homeless drug addict in Fresno, Calif. said recently that he’s hoping his self-published account will be cautionary for young people, enlightening for the public and inspiring to those whose lives have become derailed.
“Anybody can fall down, but everybody can get back up. They have to want it, but they also have to know they can do it,” Matthew Davidson said in a recent interview.
Davidson, 42, last fall wrote “I Am Matthew,” describing his descent from a comfortable life as a union carpenter to a furtive existence raiding dumpsters, running from police and breaking into foreclosed homes.
His 130-page book describes sleeping in abandoned buildings and homeless camps and working as hired muscle at a Fresno brothel and drug den, where he took on an angry gang member with a claw hammer.
“It split his head wide open at the crown… Screaming, and with his arms still over his head, he leapt up and started sprinting about the house. Blood sprayed onto the ceiling and splattered the walls in a grisly pattern. I followed him, striking again and again,” Davidson wrote.
In other scenes he described making a half-dozen Molotov cocktails, intending to burn down a house full of gang members, and punching out a stranger for pay in San Francisco.
Davidson grew up in Haines and Klukwan. He said in an interview last week that he hasn’t used drugs since July 2013, when his mother arrived at a Gospel Rescue Mission in Fresno from Minot, N.D. to take him back to the Midwest and start him on recovery.
Through an Internet search, Davidson’s sister Bethany Krafels had located him at the Fresno County Jail. He’d been out of contact with his family since 2006. “I knew if I hadn’t heard from him in seven years, he was either dead or in jail,” Krafels said in an interview. Her letter containing their mother’s phone number proved to be Davidson’s lifeline.
Last October, Davidson married a fellow Haines High School graduate and began a new life in western Iowa. He also recently reconnected with two teenage daughters from a previous marriage and his father, who lives in Arizona.
He’s back to working construction and says he’s “just trying to be a good man and a husband.”
Davidson is the son of Bonnie Sears and Gary Davidson. As a Haines High School student, he was attractive, well-built and well-liked, according to classmates interviewed recently.
Glorianne Meacock said Davidson had the looks of a model, a winning personality and smarts. “When you talked to him, he’d always make you feel like you were his best friend. He could have been or done anything.”
Davidson also liked to party, though that was not unusual for Haines High School students in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Meacock said. “There was pot, cocaine and alcohol, and that’s just what I saw.”
Jim Horton, another Haines classmate, said he could understand Davidson’s fall. “Something like that could happen to anybody. There’s always been a lot of drugs rolling around in Haines. A person could get caught up in that, especially if you’re away from your family and support structure.”
Davidson’s book documents his decline after moving to Fresno in 2006. But his problems started years earlier. In the recent interview, Davidson acknowledged getting into fights while serving in the U.S. Army and spending three years in Lemon Creek prison for beating up a man in a Sitka bar fight in 1995 while on probation for drunk driving.
Alaska court records show a separate, 1993 DUI conviction, as well as convictions for resisting arrest and misconduct involving a weapon.
After his dad took off when he was 12 years old, Davidson said he started building himself into his image of a man, working out with weights and learning to fight. He went on to compete in mixed martial arts competitions. Inspired by the movie “Gladiator,” he had the words “honor” and “strength” tattooed onto his forearms.
“I was part Conan (the Barbarian), part John Wayne and part Clint Eastwood. I wanted to fight harder and drink harder than anyone else, and never show pain or emotion,” he said.
On his release from Lemon Creek, Davidson went straight. He got married in Juneau and had two daughters, bought a house and found work as a union carpenter. But construction work took him to Anchorage, where he started hanging out in strip joints and “got used to being by myself.”
Although he was drinking and occasionally using cocaine, Davidson said, he still took a lot of pride in being a hard worker. “I had disdain for druggies, as odd as that might sound, as it’s what I became, in an ironic twist.”
By 2006, Davidson’s marriage was over. He followed a woman he calls “Nashelle” from an Anchorage strip club to Fresno. He liked the sunshine and the attractions of city living. He found construction work and he and Nashelle moved into an apartment in the city’s Tower District, which offered plenty of nightlife.
Davidson said he was making as much as $32 per hour, but his pay all went to good times. “I was staying out later and later and going to wilder and wilder parties. I had no sense of consequence or repercussions.”
The 2008 financial crisis and housing bust hit Fresno hard, but Davidson didn’t much notice until construction work started drying up. He started driving long distances to find jobs. Around the same time, he tried meth, and soon became a daily user.
“Once you touch meth, you’re not managing it…I should have been able to have a (financial) buffer, but my drug habit didn’t allow me to do that. The economic situation played some part, but to be totally frank, it was all my bad choices,” Davidson said.
By 2010, Davidson had lost his apartment and truck, and he and Nashelle were on the streets. By then, homelessness in Fresno was a national news story. Unemployment soared. Tent cities and shanty towns sprung up and conflicts with police and city officials were constant.
At first, Davidson approached his condition as a challenge and game. He didn’t take handouts and stayed out of homeless shelters, where guests couldn’t drink or use drugs. He considered himself a “Robin Hood,” and a tough-guy role model for other street people.
But over time, drug use, violence and constant fear took a toll on his psyche. “All my former thoughts and perceptions were tainted horribly by the things I’d seen and done,” he wrote.
Hiding out in foreclosed houses, he could relate to suspicious neighbors who would eye him going through yards, he said. “I remembered being a person, and what it meant to be a member of society. That was the hardest part.”
But even in moments of clarity, he couldn’t change, he said. “My self-loathing and knowing what I had become kind of fed each other. I get it why people don’t bounce back. It’s the way you look at yourself when you’re at the bottom… I told myself I had failed. That I was nothing, a drug addict and a criminal.”
Davidson’s direction started to change when he was sentenced to six months in jail for meth possession and burglary. Though he violated his probation by getting kicked out of a release program for fighting, Davidson’s jailing had netted him an identification card. With it, he was able to complete a three-week detox program in San Francisco through the Veterans Administration. But on returning to Fresno to complete his sentence, he fell back into drugs.
Fortunately, while serving out his jail term, he received a letter from Krafels that included their mother’s phone number. He called her from a pay phone and she arrived two days later.
As part of his rehabilitation counseling, Davidson has started sorting out his life, including by writing down his memories. Krafels, who lives in Kansas, organized the stories of his years on the streets into a timeline, asked questions to flesh out details, and helped put together the book.
“It was a lot of writing, but it was raw emotions. We had to sort it out,” Krafels said. The process has helped them bond. “We didn’t have a relationship like that before, where we talked a lot.”
Davidson said he’s keeping his life simple, working on “getting to the bottom” of his mistakes and doing things he’s never done before, like taking classes on personal finance and thinking ahead. He said he feels lucky to have escaped jams on the streets without more serious consequences.
But his farewell to Nashelle, he said, haunts him. When he last saw her she was living under a freeway overpass. “This girl followed me to hell, and I left her there… but it’s not that black and white. We were always co-dependent. We were enabling each other’s bad behavior.”