I immediately compliment the acoustic cutie on his décor. He says most of it is from his girlfriend, Maria Athanasselis; she is an artist as well.
“So,” I say as I unload my stuff on Matthew’s dining room table. “What are you making me?”
I expect this to be the only prompt I’ll have to use all afternoon, as my prior interviewees talked so much, they barely paused to breathe in my presence. In my last interview with Grant Dawson, my hand couldn’t even keep up with the note-taking. This is not the case with Matthew.
“Breakfast food,” he says, leading me into the kitchen. I take a seat at the table. Insert extended twiddling of thumbs here. For such a hottie, Matthew is awfully slow to warm up.
“You seem shy,” I say. “Do I intimidate you?”
“No,” Matthew says, his gaze glued to the floor. “I’ve just never done this before.”
“Done what?”
“An interview.”
OMG! This man’s got a lotta balls to let Man Eater pop his publicity cherry!
“Why don’t with start with your music?” I say. “Give me your spiel.”
“I’d been sort of half-assing the music thing,” he sighs, leaning up against the stove. “Then I lost my job of eight years and decided to dedicate myself to becoming a ‘respectable artist’. That was two years ago. Now I’m getting very used to being broke.”
Our conversation comes to a halt. Again. Just when I think my flirtation and friendly teasing will be wasted on deaf ears, I’m saved by the bell. The doorbell.
Did I forget to mention this interview is going to be a threesome? And that we’re videotaping it? Yup. Man Eater can’t help but up the ante on these interviews. The Third Musketeer today is a guy I used to date. Hello! For discretions’ sake, I won’t give away his pseudonym. His real name is Chris, and today, he is my cameraman.
I introduce the dudes.
“Chris, this Matthew. It’s his first interview. Matthew, this is Chris. It’s his first time video-taping.”
For a moment, I bask in the fact that I am the most experienced person in the room! (And, yes, I assume that applies sexually, too.)
We return to the kitchen and Chris sets up. While Matthew prepares fair-trade coffee, I ask him about his guilty pleasures. Matthew reveals that he is a self-proclaimed chip addict, a frozen burrito fanatic, a peanut butter & cheese sandwich eater, a Thai food aficionado, a black licorice lover, and a banana flip doughnut fiend.
Now we’re talkin’! I ask for elaboration on that last indulgence.
“They’re doughnuts filled with banana crème and dusted with powdered sugar,” Matthew explains. “But you can only buy those at the Super Valu in Crystal.” (The suburb where he grew up.)
“How do you stay so skinny eating all that junk food?” I ask, eyeing his long and lean frame.
“I’m very…um…active,” Matthew responds.
I’ll bet you are, I muse silently to myself. It’s all I can do not to reach out and touch Matthew’s tight torso, thinly veiled beneath a screen print T. When Matthew tells me that his younger brother Eric designed the shirt, I consider using the purple squiggles spreading across his abs as pretext to get an up-close view and, possibly, to grope a feel. Ahh, but Chris is watching from the corner (hell, he’s going to have this for all eternity on tape!), so I keep my hands to myself.
“I have a pull-up bar,” Matthew continues, stoking my fantasy. He points to a doorway around the corner. “Every time I go by, I do a couple.”
Matthew has more than bad ass biceps up his sleeve; in addition to his traditional acoustic music, he also raps with a man named Lemon Sour.
“We have songs called ‘Food Porn’ and ‘Fatties At The Food Table’,” he says.
“F-A-T or P-H-A-T?” I ask. (No, it is not a stupid question when you’re talking hip-hop.)
“F-A-T,” he says, cueing up a tune titled 25 Cent Bling on his iPod. For a white boy from suburban Minnesota, Matthew’s rapping style is, well, P-H-A-T. I wonder aloud how Matthew hasn’t taken advantage of his brother’s connection to the local rap record label Rhymesayers.
“I want to be taken seriously,” he says. Matthew explains that he wants his music to put the listener “in a space”. A previous album (a.k.a. The Breakup Album) included recorded storms; the current album (a.k.a. The In Love Album) features birds.
There’s a story behind the One Footed Pigeon title of Matthew’s latest release. On his birthday, Matthew was sitting at a coffee shop, contemplating life and admiring pigeons, when he noticed one of them was missing a foot. Despite that defect, however, it could still eat and hop and fly. The moment proved metaphoric.
“Do you feel like a one footed pigeon, Matthew?” I ask with an exaggerated frown and pity in my voice.
“I think we all do at times,” Matthew says.
“And what would your handicap be?”
“That I’m shy and I wish I wasn’t.”
“And yet, you’re a performer,” I say. “Isn’t that an odd career choice?”
“I have no problems performing,” he says. (Insert dirty connotation running through my head here. Heh heh heh.) “But social situations are something I struggle with. I’m working on that.”
“When was the last time you took a risk and stepped out of your comfort zone?” I ask.
“Today,” he says without missing a beat.
I can’t help but smile. I’m flattered to be worth the risk…and at the same time, I feel protective. As Music Mensch told me the other day, “It’s all interpretation”…which could be very different depending on which side of the screen you’re sitting.
“You have read my Man Eater blog, right?” I ask.
Matthew doesn’t seem capable of blushing, but if he could, this is when he would’ve turned beet red.
“I’ve read it,” he says. “And I showed it to my girlfriend, too.”
“And she approved this interview?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, citing Maria’s penchant for all things sexually progressive. “Do you ever go to burlesque shows?”
“I have, yes,” I say.
“Maria and I like to go to them. She designed a bra for the one on Saturday, at the Racktacular event.”
I usually get bad vibes about girlfriends, even when they’re absent, but if Maria’s art is any indication, she is a really cool chick…and, I would guess, a good influence on Matthew…meaning that she encourages him to misbehave. ;-)
But back to the food.
“Do you have a magic trick you can work on these?” Matthew asks as he attempts, and fails, to light the gas burners on the stove. (I love that multiple men think I have some sort of fire-lighting super power!)
I try, but am unable to light the burners, so Matthew reaches for the matches.
“If I burst into flames,” he says, pointing at Chris. “Don’t you dare put that video on YouTube!”
I get my camera ready just in case. The burners ignite and within minutes, Matthew whips up an Egg McMuffin with two exotic twists: pepperjack cheese and ground ginger. After plating the sandwich like a pro in front of me, he says, “Wait. I’m going to try that again. I want to make you a better one.”
While perfecting the second muffin, Matthew forgets about the bacon sizzling on the back burner and it gets scorched. He turns off the burner and gazes woefully into the fry pan, then back at me. You’d think his cat Milo, who was just lured into the kitchen by the aroma, just died by his expression.
“I burnt the bacon,” Matthew says.
“Hell, it’s still bacon!” I say. “I’ll eat it!”
And I do. Guess what? Burnt bacon tastes just as good black; perhaps even better, because it’s crispier. I gobble down two slices, plus the McInkala Muffin. It’s all fantastic, but Matthew has barely nibbled on his breakfast food.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” I ask. “You’re making me feel like a pig over here.”
Matthew squirms in his seat.
“I’ve never eaten on camera before,” he says bashfully, nodding in Chris’s direction.
Neither have I, but somehow I’d completely forgotten that Chris was even here!
“No worries,” I say. “We probably won’t use the video. And if we do, it’ll be seriously cosmetically altered.”
“Yeah,” Chris chimes in. “I’ll make sure to get a slow-mo close-up of Matthew chewing his food with his mouth open.”
My ex and I chuckle. Matthew doesn’t seem completely convinced that we’re on his side here.
“There’s something else I want to show you,” Matthew says. “Is that okay?”
“Of course!” I say. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got!”
There’s a mischievous twinkle in Matthew’s eye…and I am totally excited. He unloads a new set of ingredients onto the table: white bread, mustard, cinnamon, honey and a block of muenster cheese. I watch as he prepares my first ever Muchecinnahon Sandwich.
“I better write that down for you,” Matthew says when he sees me struggling to spell.
I happily hand over my pen and take up eating instead.
“Oh my God,” I say, relishing the collision of sweet and savory, the softness of the Cottage style bread, the thick wedges of muenster, the mild bite of mustard, and the tingly taste of the cinnamon on my tongue. I hereby retract my "If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it" motto.
“I’m trying to think what this tastes like,” I say, looking out the window as though the answer will flutter down from the sky like a one-footed pigeon. The flavor is a quirky, kinky combination I’ve never experienced before. It’s a mystery. Like Matthew.
“I would’ve made you only this, but I didn’t think it qualified as ‘cooking’,” Matthew says.
“This is exactly the kind of food I like!” I say. “In fact, you should sell these at your shows,” I say. “A sandwich and a CD for one low price!”
Once I’ve eaten more than my fair share, I ask Matthew to treat Chris and me to a couple tunes. We adjourn to the living room and Matthew starts with a song called “Hats Off To Nobody”, a tune dedicated to his social phobia. The lyrics are heartbreakingly raw and honest, like a promise to the songwriter himself that he won’t let fear keep him from enjoying life.
The second tune is “Beautiful and Red”, an upbeat, bouncy love song. While he may be painfully shy in his regular life, when he’s singing, Matthew is bold and eloquent. He’s a poet.
“I can’t wrap my brain around this,” I say as Matthew puts his guitar away. “You’re surrounded by these naked ladies, your rap lyrics are sexually suggestive, you go to burlesque shows…yet you are so shy.”
Matthew sort of shrugs. He doesn’t seem to understand the contradiction, either.
“Do you have any deep, dark secrets you’d like to reveal before we go?” I ask.
Matthew shakes his head.
“You are such a cutie pie!” I say, rubbing his arm reassuringly.
“Just what every guy wants to be called,” Chris scoffs from the other of the room. (If we were still dating, I’d totally take him home and give that boy a spanking!!!)
Chris and I take turns shaking hands with Matthew. The goodbye is rather, well, anti-climactic.
Later that night, I go “om” with New Dude, then we head back to his place. As we discuss the day’s events in the post-coital glow (this is becoming a habit, tee hee), I mention how shy Matthew was.
“You’d have thought I was about to give him his first blow job!” I said.
New Dude chuckles and waits for me to add the punch line that’s simultaneously occurred to both of us. (Dirty minds think alike.)
“Maybe I should have given him a BJ! He would’ve really opened up after that!”
As New Dude and I prepare dinner (all the while, I’m wishing I had the ingredients for that fucking fantastic sandwich on hand!), I put on Matthew’s tunes. I bop around barefoot in the kitchen to “Little Baby Lemon Bun” and “Black Leather Black Hole”. Then “Sun Song” comes on.
New Dude cocks his head and listens.
Bodies breakin' sweat and makin' bed springs sing
The wall becomes a drum as your knee knocks a beat
And we're movin' ever towards the window
Baby let the mattress fall!
Oh, nobody come knockin' cause girl you know we got that covered
Don't nobody come dancin' cause this ain't no dance party
There's only room for two here- me and you girl till the end
“That Matthew may have been soft-spoken in person,” New Dude muses. “But lyrically, he expresses himself just fine!”
To see Matthew express himself oh-so-sexxxily in person, check him out this Saturday, July 31st, at 12:30 at the Red Hot Art Festival in Minneapolis. Visit Matthew’s website at www.matthewinkala.com and download One Footed Pigeon from Amazon.com.
To see the photos from my afternoon with Matthew Inkala, check out the album on Man Eater’s Facebook page.
And here is the very first original Man Eater video, embedded for your viewing pleasure!
Still hungry for more Matthew? Try his sandwich. Just don’t try to pronounce it. :)
MATTHEW INKALA’S MUCHECINNAHON SANDWICH
Ingredients
2 slices Cottage white bread
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
2 large chunks muenster cheese
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Method
• Spread one slice bread with mustard.
• Top other slice of bread with cheese.
• Drizzle honey over cheese.
• Sprinkle cinnamon over honey. Let “crystallize” for one minute.
• Close sandwich. Consider cooking done.
• Eat it up, then burn it off. Most importantly: don’t be shy.
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