You can see Matt Gone coming from a mile off. With a 98 per cent coverage bodysuit – including a striking black-and-white chequerboard pattern cascading over his face, neck, chest and shoulders – it’s hard to blend into the crowd.
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But then Matt’s never really felt like ‘one of the gang’ and, although the designs on his skin are visible for all to see, the motivation behind his ink journey goes deeper than you could imagine.
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Matt was born in New York City in 1970 with Poland Syndrome, a rare condition that often results in an absence or under-development of the chest muscles on one side of the body, along with many other external and internal physical abnormalities.
Incredibly, it took 37 years for Matt to be correctly diagnosed and understand the full extent of the health problems that had plagued him throughout his life.
“My mum was a haemophiliac,” explains Matt, now 39. “She could burp wrong and she’d get a blood clot. If someone shook her hand too hard she’d get a bruise.
While she was pregnant with me, a complication affected the blood flow to her womb, which meant that parts of me didn’t develop properly – mainly my right kidneys, my major pectoral, my arm muscle – and my left leg is shorter, too.”
When Matt was diagnosed with Poland Syndrome, he also found out he was born with only one kidney. “Missing a kidney means you tend to get giant adrenal glands,” he says. “So as a child I had this weird, werewolf-like physical advantage over other people because of the insane amount of adrenaline in my system. For most of my childhood, though, I was fighting through a lot of physical problems. My spine was twisted so I walked funny, and I was always in pain. I’d even get other kids making jokes about me being a stroke victim.”
But it wasn’t until Matt hit his late teens that he really felt like an outsider. “I became truly aware of my birth defect around my 18th birthday,” he explains. “I’d begun working out and noticed my muscles weren’t developing. I was maturing, but I was the shortest guy in the room and physically different to everyone else. I felt broken.”
Matt first got inked in his teens. “I did my first tattoo on myself aged 14,” he recalls. “It was a badly-drawn skull, and I got it covered up soon after. My first big piece, though, was done when I was 16 – a large skin-rip design on one side of my ribs done by badass tattooist Royboy Cooper, who’s been a big inspiration in my life.”
But this was just an appetiser to the lifestyle Matt would embrace when he hit 19, and headed off to art college in Arizona. It was here that he found his spiritual home and developed his strong obsession with tattoos.
“Very few people are as hardcore as the people I mixed with during my college years,” he remembers. “I was a nice little Jewish boy from Manhattan, and suddenly I was hanging out with the biggest, black biker gang in the world. Suddenly, there was freedom to express myself and I realised I was an individual with a choice.”
In the five years Matt studied in Arizona, he went under the needle a total of 127 times. After university, he moved to New Orleans for work, spending an estimated 10 months a year (at least) healing from his barrage of new body art. The result was a near-finished bodysuit consisting of hundreds of individual tattoos, surrealist art and, of course, his beloved chequerboard designs. Matt describes it as “giving a bad car a good paint job.”
But, just as he was about to embark on his facial tattoo, tragedy struck. Hurricane Katrina swept through the city and completely destroyed his home. Matt gathered his savings and jumped on a jet to the UK to attend the London Tattoo Convention so he could get started there instead. But, as with so many things in Matt’s life, not everything went to plan.
“I loved London, but I didn’t feel the artist did what I wanted,” he says. “The session to do the checkerboard outline hurt so much that I was sick. Since I was first worked on in London, I’ve had 17 tattoo sessions to make my face look the way I’d imagined it.”
On the upside, Matt’s artistic background has come in handy and enabled him to design the intricate dimensions of his signature checkerboard inkings.
“I love the mathematical pattern of the checkerboard,” says Matt. “Its symmetry makes up for my asymmetry. You think you’re prepared when you go to get your face inked, but you’re never prepared. I’ve had my face tattooed for four years now, and it took two of them to get used to it. I get more positive than negative comments because it’s a great gimmick. Nobody has a tattoo like mine!”
In conversation about his body art, Matt namechecks the likes of The Enigma, Katzen, Catman and Lucky Diamond Rich in his list of well-known, heavily-inked freaks. “We’re a human wallpaper selection!” he laughs. “But I have the best pattern out of everyone because chequers are the coolest. I like Lucky Diamond Rich, but now he looks like a chalkboard!”
Matt’s unusual among the other inked wonders because he doesn’t perform in a freak show or jet around the world living off his ink. Instead he works as a full-time chef in Portland, Oregon, to pay his mounting medical bills.
Now taking nine different types of medication – including three types of steroids – Matt recalls the moment doctors finally diagnosed him with Poland Syndrome.
“I hadn’t urinated for over two days, which was how they discovered that I only had one kidney,” he explains. “Then they found I had a severe kidney disease too, so needed to have my bladder reconstructed.”
They tried to fit Matt with a permanent catheter, but his bladder swelled up so much it almost killed him. “For 10 months after that I had to push a catheter into my urethra six times a day,” says Matt. “During that period, I couldn’t be in a relationship, I couldn’t have sex, I couldn’t even masturbate – that’s how much it affected me.”
By the end of his ordeal, Matt was in extreme pain and suicidal. He even started meeting with a euthanasia doctor after being told the devastating news that he was terminally ill.
“My ticket’s been punched and every day is a gift,” Matt says. “I’m basically waiting for the kidney disease to eventually make my life unbearable. I’ve already sampled unbearable pain and I’m scared of feeling that way again. Even if I have 10 years left, the last five are likely to be a nightmare.”
After his bladder reconstruction, Matt needed to have a crash course in toilet training, and now has to do sit-ups to urinate in lieu of working bladder muscles. Yet despite this massive blow to his future, Matt hasn’t been deterred from finishing his bodysuit and is now the proud owner of a tattooed anus – thanks to his own steady hand, numbing cream, and a mirror.
“I could only do small amounts at a time, so I just kept the tattoo gun buzzing on my ass for as long as possible,” laughs Matt. “I wanted to do a proper job, so I used all the breath in my body to push my ass out and tattoo the little donut inside the hole. The ink actually reaches up about a quarter-inch inside.”
Not content with a green rectum, Matt also adorned his penis and testicles with his trademark chequerboard design, only to narrowly escape another brush with death. “I accidentally sat in cat faeces in my flat and it got into the healing tattoo wound on my testicle,” he says. “It got so infected that both my nuts were pushed up into my body, and they had to admit me to hospital, drain my sack and get me on medication quickly. It was touch-and-go for a little while.”
Despite his terminal illness, Matt’s focusing on the future and his adult modelling work. “I’m planning my own path in the erotic world and I want to show what it looks like for a man with a full body tattoo to have sex on camera,” he states matter-of-factly. “It’s something the world hasn’t seen, and I’ll be posting up new pictures onto my website on a regular basis.”
Surviving a birth defect, escaping the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, and coping with severe kidney disease and a seriously infected bollock, this cat’s philosophical about the fact that he’s running out of lives. “I just want to model with lots of hot alternative women, so at least I’ll go out looking good!” he says, honestly.
And you really can’t blame him because, after all he’s been through, Matt Gone’s got nothing to lose.
To see more, visit Mattgone.com
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