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.
The Wynnes
When Hurricane Frank struck Opel, Alabama, across the country in sunny California, Fredd, his wife Laarmi, and their 18 year old daughter Nicolette Wynne sit down to their first meal together in a month. It is silent. They have not stockpiled suitable dinner conversation. Nicolette wears her red velvet pants that are the same color as the red velvet cake that sits untouched in the kitchen because no one likes red velvet cake, even though Laarmi had brought it home from the family's favorite bakery, and the cake looked perfect, like a hat under the clear glass cake dome. It had cost $45.00.
About the only thing Nicolette could think to talk about was her new habit, chewing betel nut, but she couldn't quite discuss that with her parents. It made her lips a vivid red, and that was good, but it also increased her saliva flow to the point of drooling. It did make her a little jumpy. She'd heard that chewing the nut, popular in Asia , could turn her teeth black, but she didn't believe it.
Fredd isn't worried about making conversation, he focuses on the slightly larger than bite-sized piece of arugula halfway between the plate and his mouth. The phone rings and, at the same moment, the muted TV across the room suddenly cuts to aerial shots of the hurricane's devastation. Fredd knows immediately, glancing at the TV screen, that it is his staff at the Natural Disaster Channel alerting him to the need for his input for a suitable sponsor for coverage of this disaster.
Fredd is head of the Human Interest Division at the NDC, and a producer for We the People , the network's newsmagazine. Whenever there was a storm of any magnitude, his staff couldn't do the slightest thing without contacting him. They had to have someone to blame if something went wrong. The first time there was a disaster that the newsmagazine didn't cover fast enough, or the first time they didn't reach their Survivor Interview Quota, or the sponsor for NDC programming was unhappy or, worse, viewed as controversial, that was it. Fredd would be the one to go.
“So, who do we get? Pet Breakfast? Spliffer?” the NDC Human Interest Division team lead asks Fredd on the conference call.
“This looks serious. How about an insurance company?” someone else suggests.
Fredd slips into that place that he goes when he is on the phone, especially when it is with someone from work: the place that is no place: He stares into space, and sometimes he eats, but mostly he just pays attention to the words and sounds that come out of his headset. If something is going on at the dinner table, say, his daughter starts drooling or his wife slams her knife and fork down and gets up and leaves the room, Fredd completely misses it. He concentrates so hard on what is happening, and what would happen if that first thing happened, and figuring out the conversation at least two sentences ahead, and all of its possibilities, that the space he occupies could have been anywhere or nowhere: a solidly gray room or a moist jungle teeming with frenetic life. Fredd did not like to be surprised. He had gotten to his position at the network because he worked hard to be ready for everything. Nothing amazes or shocks him, nothing is unanticipated. His job was to have an answer for every problem. Sometimes he felt like his skull might simply split open from the effort, and all of his thoughts might drift out like little spores. Fredd says.
“Nah. No insurance. People don't want to be scared any more than they already are. Try Brandywine Wine and Brandy Company. ‘Spirits are lifted,' that's their motto, right?”
The lawyer on the third line breaks in.
“Could be a problem, Fredd. Might be considered tasteless, considering the likelihood of fatalities.”
“Huh?”
”Spirits? Dead people?”
There were murmurs of ascent, but Fredd lets them go. He doesn't make the connection between spirits and dead people at all. To Fredd, a spirit is a ghost that hangs out behind a curtain, or twists a limb and smacks it in your face in a Halloween play. Still, he understands that, on television, only the broadest strokes could be drawn. He wonders, in that instant, if he had faxed that fax back that he was supposed to fax.
Then someone breaks in, someone whose voice sounds familiar and important. “You have to give them something neutral, but maybe a little nasty. But nastily appropriate, tasteful.” There is a pause.
“Well?” Fredd asks.
The important-sounding voice says: “How about Strap-it-on-Avon, that Shakespeare dildo thing?”
“ What?” The lawyers, the human interest division staff, and Fredd say simultaneously. Then Fredd hears the snicker and sees his daughter Nicolette across the room on the cordless. She hangs up and leaves the room, smirking and drooling. For a wicked instant, Fredd is catapulted back to the now empty dinner table. The matching place settings, the plates full of heaping helpings of cold food lay before him like a battleground that he had to survey. He could only guess whether his side had won.