The Ride of My Life (2 page)

When Jaci and I were married, I gave her the wedding ring my dad gave my mom in this photo.

When my mom found out she was pregnant with their first child, Dad bought her a diamond ring to celebrate. After Todd was born, they made amends with my mom’s parents. Having proved his good intentions and ability to provide for his family, my dad even smoothed things over with Grandfather. In the next five years my dad and mom had two more children: my sister, Gina, followed by my brother Travis. The Hoffman kids were spaced two years apart… boy, girl, boy… like a beautiful flower arrangement.

Then I showed up. I was an accident, right from the get-go. This time, when my mother announced she was pregnant, there was no diamond ring. She sent my dad out to get a vasectomy. I arrived kicking and screaming on January 9, 1972. My parents wanted to call me Matthew, but rather than make me a “Jr.” they left out a T: Mathew. Easy enough, but they also needed a middle name. Both my brothers’ middle names are Matthew, so each brother thought it was only fair that their first name be my middle name. My mother, being the great mediator, came up with an idea. Instead of calling me Mathew Todd Travis Hoffman, they shortened my middle name to the letter T and told my brothers that it stood for “Travis and Todd.” It sounds a little odd, but I was a product of their environment. My parents were freethinkers, and it was the seventies.

When Todd was born baby bottles were sterilized. He drank out of a cup at six months, walked at ten months, and was potty trained by eighteen months.

But with me, things were a little different. As my father tells it, “When Mathew came along, I was traveling for my business a lot and was gone a lot of nights. I always called home to check on my wife and kids. One night, I asked Joni, Mathew’s mother, what he was doing. Mathew was about eighteen months old. She said, ‘He’s eating dog food in the pantry.’ I started to laugh—we’d gone from trying to be perfect parents with the first child, to a free spirit approach with the fourth child. Joni said, ‘Look, if he likes dog food, let him eat dog food.’”

As I was growing up, to make it easier, I spelled my name the traditional way, M-A-T-T. Then at age twenty-five, I realized if “Mathew” was only spelled with one T, I’d been spelling “Mat” wrong my whole life. So I dropped the extra T. That’s one thing I think my siblings and I picked up from my parents: Life is yours to design and change at will. So M-A-T it is.

My dad’s skills in the medical business had afforded our family a home on twenty acres, populated with farm animals. My father grew up in the middle of nowhere, which he equated as more space to do whatever you pleased, so he wanted his kids to have the same. The combination of fresh air, sunshine, hard work, and gentle creatures were supposed to do us kids some good.

There is a distinctive smell to a barn that’s in use. Part of my job as a kid was to monitor the smell and fix it by cleaning out the stalls when it became unbearable. This was the shittiest job, literally. Travis and I were the barn boys, and we fed the animals. The horses were fed mixed oats, sweet feed, grain, and hay. (In the process of serving them breakfast, I would sneak some of the corn out of the sweet feed and feed myself]

I made up bottles for the baby goats, Floppy and Moppy, and fed those to them until they could join the oats and hay family. I threw out bird feed for the chickens, rooster, peacock, and our three ducks, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

When the animals were hungry, it was a circus. If I fed the smaller animals first, the horses chased me to get their food. If I tried to avoid the horses, the rooster would chase me. I used to throw chicken eggs to keep the rooster away from me. I danced around like a boxer in a ring to avoid his razor-tipped beak and claws made of nightmares. [I think this is where I started developing survival techniques.)

When I was five, our family was really into horses. Todd and Gina both got into rodeo-style racing, riding fast and slaloming barrels and poles. Gina was great at it and was the resident animal queen. She wouldn’ve slept in the barn if my parents had allowed it. I entered a few of these rodeo events, in the “Peanuts” category. I was a reckless rider, but I had my moments when control came easy. Once, one of our horses, Little Britches, told me he was thirsty. (I couldn’t pronounce my R’s yet, so I called him Little Bitches.] So I took him out of the barn and led him into our house to the kitchen sink. My mom, thinking fast, grabbed a Super 8 camera and didn’t intervene, she just documented. I got Little Bitches a drink and led him out the back door.

We all had our list of daily chores, and if we got those finished, my parents would pay us four dollars an hour to do additional chores. They then encouraged us to buy livestock and pets with our Saturday paychecks. In a way, it was genius: We learned to work hard because we got paid well (for kids], and the animals provided us a perpetual supply of entertainment. The more animals we took in meant we had a steady stream of chores just keeping up after them. It instilled a work ethic in us.

Gina and Todd on top of their second home. Yeeeeha!

However, life on the farm wasn’t all petting the ponies; some rough stuff went down occasionally. My poor mom. Between my brothers, our friends, and me, there was almost always a carpool going to the hospital with various moaning, bleeding, and damaged juveniles in the backseat.

When I was six, I broke my leg playing Frisbee. I was trying to get the disc before the dog, and I stepped in a random hole in the yard. Snap. My first broken bone. Two days after the Frisbee incident I was climbing our fifteen-foot-tall slide with a cast on my leg and fell off, breaking my wrist when I hit the ground.

When I was seven, I was banned from the go-cart after I drove it into Travis (who was on the motorcycle] while playing chicken. I had to get stitches in my wrist, and Travis’s hand went through the motorcycle chain. His palm got gouged up, and I still have the scar to this day. I also got in trouble for trying to jump the work truck over a barrel in our horse arena. I took the keys to the truck and leaned some two by eights up against a barrel with the intention of jumping, but when I hit the ramp it pitched the vehicle sideways. I landed on a barrel, smashing the side of the truck. I had to work random jobs around the house until I paid it off.

There was a trailer park nearby our place, the KOA campgrounds, with lots of transient residents and some permanent ones, too. We’d hang out with the campground kids, and sometimes they would come to our house and start trouble with my brothers or me. Since I was small and naive, I was an easy target to be exploited. One afternoon some of the crew from the trailer park came by and described a new game to me. At first, the object of the game was to stand up and drop a knife into the ground between your feet, getting it as close to your foot as possible, with the closest winning. Then it evolved into, “Let’s see how close to Mathew’s foot we can stick a knife into the ground, closest wins.” They would throw the knife like Vegas magicians, and it was heavy enough to thunk into the dirt and stand up. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists tight, waiting for the next toss, and sure enough felt an incredible pain on the top of my bare foot. I looked down, saw the knife handle sticking up, blade buried in my flesh. My eyes welled up with tears. My “friends” tried to hush me and offered to take me over to our swimming pool to flush out the germs. After dunking my raw laceration into the highly chlorinated pool water, I let out a yell that could have shattered a wineglass. My mother materialized instantly. They weren’t invited over too often after that.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a crisis magnet. Things just seem to go
to hell when I’m around. My family used to draw straws to see who had to sit next to me, because meals usually involved a lap full of water, milk, or the always-devastating Hawaiian Punch.

My first cast. I got it blue to match my bike

I came home one day to find our house in flames. Some things just suck.

There were more serious close calls, too, which made me realize how life can end at any moment—so each day should be lived to the fullest. My dad’s passion was flying, and he had his own plane, a Beachcraft Dutchess. He used it for business travel, but also for joyrides and long-distance family vacations. When I was eight, we had a full load in the cockpit, so Dad put me in back with the luggage. After he landed and went to get me out, he noticed the compartment door latch was broken. If I’d have leaned against it in flight, it would have given way and I’d have had my first and last skydiving experience.

We also had guns around our house, and while target practice was always adult supervised, one time Travis and I found the gun case had been left unlocked. Travis pointed a twelve gauge at me, not knowing it was loaded. It went off. The spray of steel missed me by a foot and blew a hole in the wall the size of a Big Mac. Travis got very grounded for that one, and my dad never left the gun case unlocked again.

Dad surveys the damage from a catastrophic creek flooding. Dealing with disaster was a skill I learned early.

Disciplinary action was occasionally administered to me for the typical kid violations: I had a mean sweet tooth and would hunt down and eat entire caches of candybars. Whatchamacallits were my favorite, and I could find them wherever they were stashed. I also recall sliding down the laundry chute into the basement a few times, causing my parents to get pretty upset. And streaking. I definitely had a problem with streaking.

When I enrolled in grade school, it wasn’t long before I got into a fracas with my teacher. One day during class I was either spazzing out or talking out of turn and my teacher asked me to go outside and bring her a stick. I did as I was told, not knowing her intent was to beat me with it in front of the class. After the first lash of the switch, I took off my moccasin and gave her a dose. We exchanged blows, and an uproar ensued. It ended with my mom going down to the school and the teacher being fired. For the rest of my years in the educational system, things were never the same. I got Bs and Cs in most subjects but never really trusted teachers again.