Rocky & Matta

Following is the story of Rocky Rondon and her friend Matta Kelley, taken from the Chicago Department of Public Health's book of personal essays Faces of AIDS. This story is re-produced here as a tribute to Rocky, who passed away September 24, 2006.

Affectionately known as the "gruesome twosome," Matta Kelley, from Iceland, and Rocky Rondon, from New York, have been case managers with the Community Outreach Intervention Project in Chicago's Uptown since the early '90s. The project hires people who are "indigenous" to the community, and both women are ex, long-time (30-plus years) drug addicts.

When Rocky and Matta became case managers in the early '90s, it was still the "height" of the epidemic.

Matta: Insanity.

Rocky: That's when the shit hit the fan. We wore out two or three of those fax machines by all the applications we were sending in.

Matta: Actually, let's tell the truth, Rocky. See, we are not school educated, neither were we very mechanically inclined at the time. So we had a fax machine, but we didn't know how to fax anything. We used to hand deliver applications.

Rocky: We were too scared to use the fax machine! We'd go all the way to Oak Park.

Matta: Which meant we never kept copies of anything, we didn't even realize. Nobody taught us anything. We used to see about 30 people apiece every day.

Rocky: When everybody was dying, there wasn't the cocktail yet, and they'd be dying like two or three a week. A lot didn't have means for burial, so we would get a public aid burial. Matta and I would do a service. She'd read from The Prophet, I'd say a couple prayers, the "Our Father," "Hail Mary," one of them, and Matta would get candles and incense. We'd put rushing water and music on a tape, something spiritual.

Rocky: We'd fix them up, put on their favorite baseball cap or whatever. We'd get donated flowers, dozens of old roses, just take off the two or three petals and it would be a bud, like a new flower! The people were dying so quick, in succession, we'd keep our things and reuse them. One day I says, 'Do you realize we've got a funeral kit in the car?' She had purple ribbons in the car! So we'd give them a send off. Because a public aid burial is nothing -- bare. No flowers, no service, just a viewing.

Matta: It looks like a cardboard coffin. Rowland's Funeral started telling us that if there's a cremation, then we could use the rental coffin instead, it was gorgeous.

Rocky: One funeral I particularly remember was the lady we buried in the wedding dress. She was very sick, and her last wish was to be married.

Matta: It wasn't a wedding dress, Rocky, it was a nightgown, a white lacy, very lacy nightgown.

Rocky: It looked like a wedding dress, it was so beautiful.

Matta: And we had all yellow roses and peach. Actually my daughter had gotten the bouquet from my son's wedding and I had it dried up in my closet. I wanted this lady to have a bouquet, so I took all the dried flowers out. It was just beautiful, and we had a lot of baby's breath all over her in the bed.

Rocky: She looked gorgeous. She died right after that (the wedding), and was buried in that dress.

Matta: A lot of people came. One of our co-workers, she was his girlfriend of many years, and he married her just before she died. It was very hard for everybody.

Rocky: It was getting to be too much. I actually had a mini-nervous breakdown.

Matta: One day we were driving down the street, just come from a funeral, and all of a sudden Rocky goes -- she beat on the dashboard -- 'Matta, do you realize? The buses are going, the people comes out, the birds are flyin', people are dying, dying, dying, and nothing stops!'

Rocky: It was too much, it was overwhelming. We had been doing this for a couple years, without stop. I'd be making so-and-so's obituary, and the next day I'd be making another person's obituary, and we'd be taking the flowers and reusing them.

Matta: And counseling the family. But we're not counselors.

Rocky: We're not counselors, and we're not supposed to be burying people, that wasn't our job. We just took it on because we couldn't stand the fact that our clients weren't getting a send off. It was too sad to begin with, ya know, with the disease, and then for them not to be getting a send off...