Here is the first part of the story of Hurricane Frank, which grows and shrinks and becomes more and less done the more I pick at it.
Want to read more? There's plenty. Let me know.
Everything on these pages is drummey born and raised.
Frank and Alfie
Hurricane Frank is green and gray, fueled by chaos, producing little other than frenzy and disaster: a one-eyed bully with rain bands that slash the earth. Frank, bloated with water and heat and mischief and ferocity, is most comfortable touching things and destroying them, feeding off of its own fury. In its short life, Frank has not known weariness or disappointment. All it knows is that its power and strength keep growing. Frank feels immortal, has never seen a reversal of fortune, and does not consider the possibility of failure or degeneration.
Frank knows nothing of such moderating forces as patience, diplomacy, or dignity.
The storm sucks, drags, and tosses people, things, and cows all over the land. Frank doesn't discriminate: It is juggling a washing machine from an apartment complex and a millionaire's pollinarium when the signal comes to take a break from the massive destruction in Geeville , Mississippi . Frank is to be interviewed for the Natural Disaster Channel. It is high hurricane season, September 9, in the year of the pig, 2007.
Frank hunkers over the special recording system, set up in a trash-strewn gully, and describes his sole purpose with all the bravado of a wrestler at ringside, "If I can, I'll smash it, spin it, and trash it. I'll tear it a new one, then throw the new one away. I can't be stopped!"
"What's 'it'?" Alfie Thermador asks.
"Everything!"
Alfie, the weathertainment industry's hottest correspondent, conducts this interview from the safety of the LA studio across the country. Alfie is nearly seven feet tall, and uncrosses her perfect, huge legs. As a child, Alfie was an orphan, and she grew up and up, fighting for every single thing she ever had in this life, including this very interview, or so she explains to Frank, the production crew, and the all-seeing eye of the camera. She had fought major, tactical battles of principle, she continues to explain, against men who are even taller than she, and minor scuffles against the Natural Disaster Channel's manicurist, who refuses to fashion custom fingernail fittings for her oversized fingers. She does not, she makes it clear, suffer from gigantism, or acromegaly, an excess in growth hormone. She is simply tall, and she is comfortable with her height, and she wants equal, fair treatment regardless.
As Alfie continues to catalog her daily challenges from the studio across the country, Frank, surrounded by its destructive wake in Geeville , MS , became increasingly perplexed. Her line of questioning is not tempered with pleas for the safety of other members of her race, as Frank had expected. She does not ask Frank to consider the damage it had already caused and, though mercy was not necessarily something a weather system could grasp, to practice it nonetheless. In the face-to-face with Alfie on the monitor, there are very few questions for Frank indeed. It barely gets a word in edgewise.
And who is Hurricane Frank to interrupt? Only the one doing all the destroying and really impressive pounding of things, cutting swaths of chaos through the Deep South . It's weather phenomena like Frank that make the Natural Disaster Channel the successful weathertainment empire that it is, that pay the salary of totem poles like Alfie, that put those huge, hugely expensive shoes (proportionate to her height, Frank has to admit) on her feet.
For the past five minutes, Alfie has been recounting life-changing moments of her own into the camera. When Hurricane Frank tries to interrupt the story of her first thunderstorm in a Mississippi orphanage in 1974, she says,
"I've got to work my way through this, do you mind?" then she drops to the floor in the studio below Frank's line of sight on the monitor and tucks her head between her knees. She speaks intimately into the microphone, as though she were speaking into the ear of one of her co-orphans whom she was trying to calm. Then she goes into the PowerBreathing, which, as she had been warned, obscures the audio track.
The remote team filming Frank onsite in Mississippi senses a break in the proceedings. The cameraman lowers his camera, and the man with the boom mike drops it to gut level and starts taping his own stomach growling. He says, "I'm hungry, let's break for lunch, mmmkay?"
Frank's storm front is building again anyway.
"No problem," Frank says. It is time to return to the slaughter.