Jimmy called
saying that Frank ``has passed on.''
I'd expected
to hear this for months after having seen Frank during Christmas, and old man
at 45, who could barely hold his head up or pronounce his own name. Seeing him
them had disturbed me, and made me feel as if time had hurried for this man --
he and his life time of habit making him live at an accelerated pace, the
women, the dope, the years of smoking and booze, wearing out his organs so
quickly as to age him overnight.
Yet the words did not seem real over the
telephone. Dead? Frank? The man who had changed my life with his attitude and
his sense of freedom, his vibrant and crazy sense of living saving me from my
world of confusion at age 16. The moment I met him in the theater, I admired
him, and it is to this crazy man my thoughts go whenever his name comes up. How
could that usher who sang Born Free in the middle of Paterson at midnight be
dead?
``He died in his sleep,'' Jimmy said, trying
to comfort me, his voice artificially nonchalant. After years of mocking Frank,
making fun of his deadly habits, Jimmy finally succumbed to the fact there is
no hope for Frank -- Frank lived and died by his habits and would not change.
Then with a rush of other details about the
viewing, he was gone, and I was left with a thousand questions, and this
growing pain, this sense of loss, as if finally, Frank had gone someplace where
I could not. All my life has been a memory of him. When I was younger, I was
constantly running back to him, even in my thoughts, looking for that sense of
joy he exuded when we first met. I feel now the way I felt when I heard John
Lennon was dead: as if there is now no going back to old joys, that life goes
on without Frank or a reunited Beatles, and that if I am to have joy, it must
be of my own manufacture.
Last year, Frank lost a weekend. He literarily
didn't remember what happened between Friday and Sunday -- at which point he
found himself in the hospital. This time, he lost control of his limbs. He
couldn't hold a cardboard box or a spoon. His limbs jerked and the doctors
ordered him into the hospital. No one knows why this happened, or why he had a
lost weekend earlier. It just did. But Garrick called him at the hospital
offering to come see him.
``I'm tired, Rock,'' Frank said. ``This is really
bad.''
When the spasm -- if that's what it was --
ended, the hospital released him. He came home yesterday, feeling very weary.
He needed to hook himself up to his kidney machine, something he'd been on now
for over a year, but was too tired. He sent his nephew away, saying he would
hook himself up in the morning. At 4:30 a.m. he called his mother asking for
his nephew.
``It's four thirty in the morning, Frank,''
his mother said.
``Oh,'' Frank said, then hung up.
Apparently in the night, he attempted to hook
himself up. All the bags were in place, but he seems to have laid down before
making the final connection.
``I think he went in his sleep,'' his mother
told me. ``At least I want to think that.''
I believe it. But it still shocks me. Frank
Quackenbush was one of the pivotal people in my life, and his memory will
remain fixed in me until the day I die, as the person who helped save me.
No comments:
Post a Comment