What Google Doesn’t Know About Matthew Schramka
Posted by David Duhr in 
(Schrammy, full knuckleball follow-through)
You’ve probably heard the call of the void. It’s what you might feel if you’re standing near the edge of a tall building and have the sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to jump. It’s not necessarily that you want to jump. It’s not a death wish. It’s more a “What would it be like? Feel like?” It’s a what-if.
An alarmingly tempting what-if.
For me, it comes with a dizzying rush. Whenever it happens I grab onto the nearest fastened object, shut my eyes, and squeeze.
In a journal of mine from almost exactly twenty years ago you’ll find this note: “A guy contacts all of his friends and family to meet him at a particular spot in front of a particular building at a particular time. They all arrive to discover each other, but he’s not there. They wonder what’s going on. Then the guy jumps to his death and lands among them.”
The call of the void, answered.
The note ends: “Why?”
Occasionally I hear the calls of other types of voids. Empty space where a memory should be; empty space where a person should be.
Recently I discovered two voids simultaneously while googling the name of an old friend. On my first search I used his short name: “Matt Schramka.” There was exactly one result, a Wisconsin state legislature PDF from November 1994. Buried inside of that random, inexplicable document are dozens of ceremonial entries, including: “A certificate of congratulations by Senator Panzer for Matt Schramka, a member of the Homestead High School football team, on winning the 1994 North Shore Conference Title.”
I have no memory of Schrammy playing football, and no memory of our school winning the conference title our junior year. But I shrugged that off. In my dim recollection, I’d quit the team the previous season and probably didn’t even watch the games from the bleachers in ’94. Why should I remember Schrammy being on a team I wasn’t even part of?
After I found Schrammy in that legislature PDF, I began scrolling the other names of those former classmates of mine. Flashes came to me: Something this guy said in class once; something this guy did at a party. None of those flashes involved football. My football career, such as it was, has left barely a mark on my conscious mind.
But it has left its mark on the internet. While scrolling those names, I hit the following entry: “A certificate of congratulations by Senator Panzer for David Duhr, a member of the Homestead High School football team, on winning the 1994 North Shore Conference Title.”
Full chapters of our lives disappear. Entire seasons of high school football.
Thanks to Sen. Panzer, I’m confronted with the knowledge that I played as a junior, that Schrammy played as a junior, and that we won the conference title together. That he and I must have taken part in a raucous celebration that I have absolutely zero memory of. Probably several celebrations: A post-game, shoulder-pad-thumping mob scene on the field; a pep rally the following week at school. Maybe even a parade.
Gone. All of it gone.
It’s not that I’m sad about that. We retain some, we jettison the rest.
What I find interesting is that at the time, I suspect I felt that this conference title was among the highlights of my life. Something that would be hard to top. And now, while searching my memory’s file cabinet, there’s only a void.
(Schrammy, hat pulled low; me with a pained smile)
But I remember vividly the moment I met Schrammy. This was also 1994, months before the football season I somehow forgot.
Schrammy had transferred a few weeks earlier. I’d seen him around the halls. He looked like a goofball. And then suddenly there he was, at spring baseball tryouts, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled shockingly low over his eyes. It was like when Rick Vaughn shows up at spring training in Major League: “Look at this fuckin’ guy.”
On that first day, Schrammy grouped off with the pitchers, including our staff ace. That was me. (Weeks later, I’d ruin my arm forever and never pitch again. I remember that moment, too.)
As we paired off to throw balls around, I asked Schrammy what pitches he threw, and immediately he said, “All I got’s a buncha joke.” He pulled his hat even lower over his eyes and, with a wide smile I’d eventually come to refer to as The Grin, started throwing ridiculous knuckleballs.
I’ve always fallen instantly in love with anyone who shows no reverence for the things we’re told to revere. I knew I was going to be great friends with this person, and for a very long time.
I was half-right. Sunday, July 26, 2026, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Schrammy’s death. I don’t want to do the writerly gimmick of withholding that information until I can find the most devastating place to drop it. This isn’t about how he’s dead. It’s just about the moments and the voids. “All I got’s a buncha joke,” he said, and my life changed.
But if you’re wondering what happened, the rest of his google results will tell you. That’s if you google his full name: Matthew Schramka. If you google his full name you’ll discover that Schrammy had taken a job with a roofing crew, and that on that July day in 2001 he was five stories up a building in downtown Milwaukee when, according to co-workers, he hit his hand with a slipped hammer and wandered off to treat it with some cold water.
The next people to see Schrammy were some passersby on the sidewalk below. They held his injured hand and talked him through the last breaths of his life.
Google will tell you that there were investigations; that OSHA fined the roofing company $75,000, and that the Wisconsin Committee on Occupational Safety & Health lists his name on their “in memorium” [sic] page for laborers who have died on the job.
The void google leaves: Who he was. How he colored the lives around him. The Grin. How he wore a baseball cap. His buncha joke. His Mission: Impossible move. How his favorite thing to say was “Oh my Christ.”
If Schrammy had lived long enough to ask what kind of fiction I write, I might’ve justly replied, “All I got’s a buncha joke.”
I never wrote the guy-jumping call of the void story, but looking at it now, the protagonist was Schrammy. He appears often in my work; the best of it, the worst of it.
The first is a mock screenplay from a couple years after he died. It was my first-ever independent writing project. I wrote it for an audience of one, a third friend of ours, and it was meant to lampoon pretty much everyone we went to high school with. It’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and also, in all the ways you’d expect from a grieving twentysomething idiot trying to amuse one idiot friend, unshowable to anyone else alive.
Schrammy is the obvious star of the show. The lovable maniac who ties the entire cast together. He grins and jokes and pranks from beginning to end.
He is absolutely in love with life.
Except for one scene, near the end. A bunch of us are gathered at a friend’s pool for a house party. Along the fringes are the spirits of the handful of kids from our class who died (cancer; skiing accident; etc.). Schrammy spots them, approaches, then asks what the afterlife is like. The ghosts tell him they’ve saved him a spot. It’s not solemn or affecting in any way; it’s just what was on my mind at the time. I suppose I didn’t want to write the whole thing without a nod to his future death.
After that, I beat the ever-loving shit out of every version of him I wrote.
First came a short story titled “Apogee, Perigee,” in which Schrammy’s character, “Morgan,” wants to become a professional baseball player. Those dreams are ruined when his throwing hand is disfigured in a car accident.
That happened. In real life. I don’t think Schrammy was pipe-dreaming of being a professional baseball player (that was me; stupid, stupid me), but that car accident the summer between junior and senior year did affect his baseball. Schrammy was riding in the passenger seat with his hand hanging out the window during the collision. Half the ring finger and the tip of the pinkie on his throwing hand — his hammer-holding hand — were sheared off, and despite emergency surgery he lost some dexterity.
I don’t know if this memory is real or if I just want it to be: When I arrived at his hospital room, his first slurry words to me were “Oh my Christ, Duhr.”
One day during our senior year we were in my parents’ kitchen. Schrammy was on the floor playing sweetly with my dog, Lucy, a clinically insane schnauzer who loved him more than she loved me. I asked Schrammy what time we had to be at practice, or wherever we were due to be, and he held up his right hand to indicate five o’clock. I said, “That means four thirty?” It’s one of the most quick-witted and shitty things I’ve ever said to another human being.
At the end of “Apogee, Perigee,” Morgan swallows a bunch of pills and dies.
As a short story it’s terrible and unpublishable, but twenty years have passed and it’s still the most honest piece of fiction I’ve written. Honest in that it was an unfiltered representation of who I was then and how I saw the world.
Then came “Falling Man.” If you guessed that it’s about a baseball player who reflects on his life while falling to his death from a rooftop, you are, to my eternal chagrin, correct. (Twist: But is he really falling?)
I reread “Falling Man” the other day. It’s ugly and it’s hateful, and it’s an utterly, hilariously on-the-nose exploration of all the anger and torment I was fighting with.
So far, that’s Schrammy’s last direct appearance in my fiction. But he shows up in other ways in other pieces. A welder about to pull a prank on a fellow welder during their shift at the factory telegraphs it with Schrammy’s knuckleball grin. Two scenes later he’s wiped off the map by a runaway forklift. A welder in a different story (we know I have a welder/factory obsession) loses the use of a hand but is forced to keep working; before his shifts, his mom must help him button his literal blue-collar shirt.
I’ve worked through a lot of trauma in these projects. Much of it about Schrammy. Some of it my own stuff, with Schrammy’s face and The Grin stamped on it.
For years I told myself I was keeping him alive through fiction. Trying to fill the void. I’m less sure now. Maybe I was only giving my shock somewhere to go, someplace distorted but recognizable. Or maybe I was just clinging hard to memory, its vagaries. How moments that feel life-changing at the time, like a high school athletic title, can fade to black, while an offhand comment about pitching, tossed off on a lazy afternoon under the springtime sun, can stick with you for thirty-two years.
(Schrammy, center, mouth wide)
I hope Schrammy considered me among his desert-island people, but I’ll never know. After three terrible years of college I returned to Milwaukee an entirely different person. I don’t know if I found a different Schrammy or if he was the same but I had changed too much to realize it. We started hanging out again — proximity; nostalgia — but adulthood was pretty fucked up so far, for both of us, and the vibe wasn’t the same. We raised some mostly harmless hell, but we were never again as close as we’d been on those boyhood baseball fields.
That reads like a summary because that’s what it is. Most of my early and mid-twenties are a total blur to me. I have access to no more than a handful of flashes from the weeks’ worth of hours I spent hanging out with Schrammy post-college and pre-fall.
Which, unlike the forgotten football season, is a devastating void. Why can’t my entire life be as instantly retrievable as “All I got’s a buncha joke”?
Then again, if it were, “All I got’s a buncha joke” might be lost in the crowd.
In my junior-year yearbook (the year we won a conference football title! yay!), Schrammy’s message to me begins “Oh my Christ, teammate.” I remember that. I say it to myself often. I can see the shape of his handwriting, the look on his face as he wrote it.
The hundreds of hours Schrammy and I spent joking around, laughing hysterically, trying to one-up each other in aggravating our baseball coach — these are moments I can summon as if it were yesterday. Some as if they’re happening right now, as if I’m in them.
I remember how between innings, retaking our positions in the field, if the circumstances were right, he would put his hands together in the shape of a gun, begin humming the Mission: Impossible theme music, stealthily maneuver his way to right field, and then launch into a running roll and come up wielding his weapon at Russians visible only to him. That one always drove our coach up the fence.
When I turned sixteen my mom organized a basement surprise party. When I reached the bottom, all of my friends but one smiled and announced the surprise. Schrammy instead chose to gather a handful of the Hershey kisses my mom had laid out and, wearing The Grin, rear back and fire them at my face.
I don’t remember anything else about that party. But I remember that moment, when the baseball field came to my basement.
Our coach once kept me outside the team bus after a game and told me I was letting down the entire team. It was a common refrain: “Duhr, you’re letting the entire team down with your attitude.” I glanced up at the bus. Schrammy was pressed against a back window, pointing at me and laughing like a hyena, his face alive with joy at catching such a ridiculous spectacle. Schrammy’s joy, like it always did, made me bust out laughing. When our coach whirled around, Schrammy was gone from the window.
During another game, I got into a shoving match with a teammate. The coach decided that the only way for us all to bond was to… stop at a DQ-type place and get ice cream. Before we de-bused, he said that all of us were allowed to go inside and get one small cone, one small scoop, and that he’d pay after we’d ordered. In packs we filed inside, in packs we came back out, holding our little team-bonding ice creams. Except Schrammy, who, hat pulled all the way down, emerged from the shop with… nothing. Back on the bus he passed all the ice-cream eaters and plopped into our shared seat at the very back. For that entire walk up the aisle, he’d managed to hide the greasy bag containing a burger and fries, but even when he wanted to do so, he could not hide The Grin.
Our coach used to make us pray before games. We’d gather in a reluctant little huddle while the coach would close his eyes and prattle on about sportsmanship and teamwork. One day, mid-prayer, a teammate ripped one of the loudest farts I’ve to this day heard. Our coach paused, but didn’t break character. After the amen part, he set us loose. He didn’t even ask who farted.
It was Schrammy. Schrammy farted. I still smell it.
Stashed inside a different yearbook I have a few yellowing newspaper clippings from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel from the days following Schrammy’s death.
Those clippings aren’t internet-retrievable. For now, if you google both versions of Schrammy’s name you find only those four results: The two pieces about the incident; the in memoriam; and Sen. Panzer’s certificate. You’ll learn about Schrammy’s death but almost nothing about his life. The state of Wisconsin remembers Schrammy — Matthew Schramka — as, yes, a player on a team that once accomplished a thing, but mostly as a laborer who fell to his death off a building. That’s not Schrammy.
If you google Schrammy’s name with his middle initial, you’ll see his FindAGrave page, complete with a death notice and an image of his name and birth/death years on a mausoleum wall. “Matt was a 1996 graduate of Homestead High School, where he played on the football and baseball teams,” it reads. No mention of conference titles or knuckleballs or prayer-farts; though it does say “Also survived by other relatives and friends.” I’m in there, somewhere.
Under the “leave a flower” section, someone named Donna posted an image of a baseball on January 8, 2012. That wasn’t his birthday. It wasn’t the anniversary of his death. It was just a random Sunday, eleven and a half years after he died. Donna was thinking about Schrammy, navigated to his FindAGrave page, and left him a baseball.
I googled my own name to see if my Sen. Panzer mention is among the results. I got twelve pages deep before growing too bored with my life to keep looking for it. But no matter how dull my results, at least there are results. They show a life not cut short.
Someday soon, I hope, you’ll be able to google “Matt Schramka” or “Matthew Schramka” and learn a little something about the tiny and all-too-transitory slice of his life that intersected with mine. And maybe that’s the point of this. To leave on the internet something more meaningful than OSHA investigations and a list of football players. To help fill that particular void.
In my fiction, Schrammy is the ghost I keep rewriting. But the Schrammy I want to preserve is the kid on the baseball field, smirking and saying “All I got’s a buncha joke.” And oh my Christ, am I happy to have retained that instead of some football title.
WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer, co-host of the Yak Babies podcast and writes about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others co-founder of WriteByNight.
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