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From Joe Frank's reading:
"Time is invisible and irresistible. No matter what you do, you can't defend yourself against it. You can't fill a moat with flaming gasoline and stop its forward motion. You can't sit at the top of a ridge with a sniper's rifle and try to pick it off as it drives by on a highway late at night. You can't build a 19-foot concrete reinforced cinder block wall with steel pilings sunk 6 stories into the ground and try to stop time because it will pass right through it and you won't even see it.
The wall will remain standing, people will continue looking off into the horizon where dawn is breaking, scanning the tree tops with their binoculars, their two-way radios crackling, and they won't even know that 2 weeks ago Thursday, time rolled through at 4:00 in the afternoon and they didn't even notice."
"When my mother was depressed, you could feel her mood spreading through the house like a foul mist. Her unhappiness overshadowed everything, crushing you. I remember once, when I was a child, as she held me in her arms crying, my lips brushed her cheek and her tears tasted salty. I thought it was strange that when you were sad, your face would contort and your chest would heave and salt water would stream from your eyes. In the late afternoons, when it got dark, my mother would sit in the living room listening to classical music. The music sounded heavy and serious, and it seemed to make the furniture grow.
When I was five years old, my mother told me my father had died. I asked her, "What is dead?"
"Death is sleep, peace. Your father was tired, he needed rest."
"Were his eyes open or closed when he died?"
"I don't know. The nurse was there. Now she's gone and we can't ask her."
The question haunted me for years.
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UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
June 22, 2004
Joe Frank appeared at the UCLA Hammer Museum on the evening of June 22nd as part of its New American Writing Series. The 300-seat auditorium was filled to capacity with standing room only. Benjamin Weissman, professor of Creative Writing at the Art Center College of Design and author of Headless, introduced the evening.
Joe's selections included stories about his aging mother and step-father, his tempestuous relationship with his ex-girlfriend Kate, a defendant who dooms himself by his own testimony, and the unconvincing apology of a reformed serial philanderer.
During the one-hour reading, the audience was thrust into vivid scenes of the foul body odor and irrational behavior of an elderly couple, illustrations of the inescapable ravages of time and the dubious solace provided by the Bible, a couple's meltdown leading to verbal and physical violence (including the woman's leap from a moving car, a stolen private journal posted online, and a fierce late-night battle for car keys), and reflections on the world's crimes and ills against the background of the Holocaust.
The material was moving, funny and thought-provoking, and when it was over Joe received a standing ovation.
An excerpt from the reading:
"We went to temple during the high holy days. I liked sitting on the cushioned benches watching the service and thinking about my life. Once, when I left the synagogue, I forgot to remove my skullcap. Hours later, walking along a street in Manhattan, I caught my reflection in a store window and, flushed with shame, I grabbed it from my head and stuffed it into my pocket. I didn't want people to know I was Jewish. The Jews had killed Christ. I'd seen paintings of Christ nailed to the cross, blood streaming from his wounds. I imagined Christians looking at crosses on church steeples, rows of crosses in church cemeteries, fingering the crucifixes that hung from their necks, and thinking angrily of what the Jews had done to their God.
"If it weren't for the Jews, Christ would never have been crucified and my people would never have faced centuries of persecution, exile and massacres leading to a systematic attempt on a grand scale to exterminate my entire race as if it were an infestation of vermin. I'd seen pictures of Jews herded onto cattle cars bound for the camps, of emaciated corpses being dumped by derricks into lime pits, of huge piles of shoes, jackets, eyeglasses, briefcases, umbrellas and jewelry-everything to be redistributed to the German people. And nothing was to be wasted. Not even the bodies themselves, which were treated like butchered animals-hair to be used to stuff cushions and pillows, skin for lamp shades, flesh for soap, gold fillings to be melted down for the national treasury. Lying in bed at night, I'd imagine riding to a death camp in a crowded, stinking cattle car, trying to figure out a way to escape, prying floorboards loose and slipping away under the cover of night in a freight yard in eastern Europe. Then traveling through a homicidally hostile country to freedom."
