met Rich Frady in 1971, my first year at Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In those days, the university was the domain of hectic cockroaches and narcotized freshman that sat in dormitory lounges glued to afternoon reruns of “Superman,” the black-and-white 1950s version starring George Reeves. Frady did his share of “Superman” gazing until one day he crawled out on a 10th-floor window ledge and sat there mute and resistant to coaxing. The school expelled him. Its quota of suicides exceeded, it disowned his destructive potential. He never did explain himself. He instead returned hometown, near Seattle, Washington, and I didn’t hear from him for a decade.
He visited Rome in the autumn of 1981. I barely recognized his voice when he called. “It’s Rich,” he said “You know, from the ledge.” Rich, the taciturn gargoyle. I greeted him and we met for coffee near the Pantheon. It was just after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Cairo. He’d left the United States, he said, because the sinister repetition of the taped images of the attacks made him feel vulnerable and weak. Newborn CNN aired the footage relentlessly to assert its nonstop presence. “You can’t do that to people without getting consequences over time,” he told me. The worst such consequence, he suggested, would be to put dread-peddling ahead of all else, exhausting the range of imagination. Eliot’s suspension of disbelief would become redundant. There would be nothing to suspend.
To Rome, Frady brought a sheaf of poems. He said the writing kept him occupied at the worst of times, unemployed in Seattle and Chicago. He had married but was estranged from his wife. He called his poems “lines,” a term used by Stephen Crane. Since he knew I’d once dabbled in verse he asked me to read them. “Let me know,” he said. I fully intended to when I called the Albergo Sole on a Friday after the rainy Wednesday we’d met. But he’d checked out. “Quello lì non c’è più,” a desk clerk explained laconically. Since the Sole was budget hotel with a reputation (then) as a dive, comings and goings meant nothing.
Two weeks ago, sifting through the Internet’s daily clutter, I decided to look for him, though I can’t say why. I found many references to Frady (mostly to the fine southern biographer Marshall Frady, who died in 2004). But Rich was nowhere obvious. Only when I honed my search to include first Seattle and later the state of Washington did I learn of his death, in 1994, and under gruesome circumstances, at the age of 39. He had joined the lumber industry, a trade whose raw physical side rarely forgives error.
I found his typed “lines” from 1981 in a notebook glued to a folder with long-forgotten love letters and brittle sheets of carbon paper. They turned my palms black. Here are 10 of Frady’s poems, his “lines,” which deserve the light of day, because they themselves do without it.
•
”Lost girlfriend”
You made a boyfriend
from vowels alone and
I dream
his pregnant face.
•
”Salesman”
Have you spoken to those lovers about
Tomorrow?
Burnt coals on the lam
They deserve to know
You won’t be coming back.
•
”Feud”
Don’t touch that headline.
Leave me this fight.
My tongue’s meaty cleavage
Is dumb with adventure.
To protect the motherland
You’d break a tooth
On foreign ceramics
Evidence it wasn’t you
Who started the pain.
•
”Vivisection”
One story from our marriage concerns the cat
the day you swam and it followed —
Unusual for a cat to tread water
To make a fuss before the last
Party of its life —
Under lifeless, broken armpits
Is the next story
Which was trapped
inside th• animal itself.
•
”Negotiator (to a woman on a ledge)”
A tall surge of
Ladders; I overturn all
That’s common to get to
You —
•
”God’s excuses”
I had myself to blame for the
Way Christ left enraged.
He told the dead to rise
Said he’d ask just once.
But I thought to myself, “Here is a man with
No allies” —
And he took to me
Weaned me on disciples,
Fed me snakes,
Wanted me to rule the Earth.
Sick with confidence
I went fishing —
then came faith.
•
”Lymphoma”
By the bed
Lay the armor
A syringe and
A history of brave knights
How they stared down pain —
So when it doesn’t hurt
Don’t tell us how it could:
We have not died.
•
”His cancer ward”
Go ahead, start with the spirit world
Wring some ache from the mumble
Be where gravity won’t look —
It’s not death you fear
Or so you say
And such words keep me busy.
•
”Combat fatigue”
A great delusion, that the human spirit
Is capacious, made full to hold.
Not so —
You fall asleep on a lozenge
Giddy dirt that gets to ticking.
Now rise.
•
”Richter scale”
The earth is hungry to subtract —
Bones go first, then women and
Children, a wild fissure is what
The world can make of itself on
A shaky day, sum up the planet’s
Aging gluttony and you reap this
Quaking — down beckoning a
Token from above, no denying
Such rock logic, broken — and
The scale’s mean number is the
Menu for tonight, the flatlands
Mere appetizers, when the city
Thins out only dinosaurs will
Return the favor.
