Young Frank

Could be worse.

November 13th would’ve been my Dad’s 69th birthday. In commemoration, I devised a plan so perfect, so ripe for epiphany that I was oddly looking forward to honoring a dead man. 

I orchestrated the day as if I were writing a profile of my Dad, staging events that would lend themselves to meaning-making: a beer at The Library on Avenue A, a warm bowl of pho, perhaps a bookshop after. Nothing extraordinary. Mostly I just wanted to think and write and be alone.

The day didn’t unfold as planned. For one, I was feeling things. It’d been months since he’d passed and I didn’t think about it (him, his absence, my loss) all that often and suddenly that felt like a betrayal. Feelings were expected, invited, under my clinical approach, but only in a controlled setting. 

The day was bright and crisp and work was busy enough to nip my somber feelings in the bud. It was dark and cold when I left the office and I was tempted to abandon my plan and go home, but it felt cowardly to retreat into habit. 

I got to The Library with just enough cash for a single beer, which was perfect because their happy hour is two for one. I found a seat in a back booth where a projector screened clips of a frontman naked except for a spiked collar writhing silently on stage. Heavy rock piped through the blown out sound system. I had forgotten how loud and dark it could be in The Library – hardly optimal conditions for writing and reflection. 

I took a few quick pulls from my beer and sat down to write. Everything felt like a salve – my words, the beer —even though I was trying to cut through to the nerve of things. The whole enterprise started to feel fraudulent but I kept writing: 

We always went for pho in Lincoln and to this day I haven’t found a better spot than the Little Saigon strip on O Street. Sometimes we struggled for conversation and right now I struggle for words. Still, I feel calmer writing now than I did on the subway down from 42nd. I thought I wanted to be alone but now I’m not so sure. I don’t think I could’ve access this depth of feeling in company, wouldn’t have allowed myself. Feel sad so I numb and isolate. I don’t think about it much.

I left the bar feeling defeated and called C. I told her it felt too sad to get pho alone, maybe even masochistic. To what end was I punishing myself? Was I a coward for not going through with it? I was standing outside the well-lit restaurant now and not so subtly seeking permission from her to abandon my plan. She sensed it, granted it.  

I got the pho to go hatched a new plan on the subway ride home. “Young Frankenstein,” I said to the remote and a satellite beamed in one of my Dad’s favorite movies. Here I found the metaphors I needed: the protagonist’s shame around his patrilineal legacy, the desire to reanimate the dead, a secret library unlocking a family truth when I was trying to write an essay about my Dad’s lost library. The wrinkle in my plan worked, and the pho was still warm. 

Looking inward unsupported was too difficult – how do you describe a cosmic storm caged inside you? the grace of warmth? a conversation in solitude? I needed literary crutches and situational devices to help make these raw emotions become more legible. But I haven’t the energy now, nor then, to fully decipher them. 

I was more than content to watch a truly impeccable movie, one I’ve seen enough times to know it by heart. One of my Dad’s favorite lines is when Dr. Frankenstein and hunchbacked Igor are digging up the corpse they want to revive. “Could be worse,” says Igor. “Could be raining.” Thunder. Lightning. Laughter.