Freddy's Dead--Or Is He? A Short Story

By Raanan Geberer

When Freddy McFerrin, the longtime editor and columnist for the Allston-Brighton-Brookline Weekly Journal, died after a stroke and heart attack at the age of 70, everyone was sad—in the newsroom, in legislators’ offices and in the community. Since I’d worked at the paper for 15 years, I, too, was in mourning.

Everybody who’d been active in local public life for the past 25 years knew Freddy. He was tall and thin, and we rarely saw him without his tweed jacket, his tweed cap, his long tan overcoat and his cigar. And who could forget his stock phrase, uttered when he was surprised, shocked or otherwise taken aback: “Well, Madre D’Dee!”

Freddy, who made no secret of his dislike for organized religion, didn’t have a funeral, but he did have a memorial service that was attended by several hundred people. “There were three things Freddy was totally devoted to—the Boston Red Sox, the Massachusetts Democratic Party and Old Log Cabin bourbon, not necessarily in that order,” his wife told the crowd. “And I encourage everyone to drink up, because if there was anything that Freddy hated to see, it was someone with an empty glass.” The crowd laughed.

 Freddy was born on Governors Island in New York Harbor, which was an Army base in 1934. As an Army brat—both his parents were officers—he moved around a lot as a kid. He spent some time in Hammond, Indiana, where the events immortalized in Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story took place, “although Shep and his friends were of course a lot older than me.”

He came to Boston to study journalism at Boston U’s School of Public Communication on Commonwealth Avenue, and also got heavily involved in the early civil rights movement—he wrote letter after letter imploring the Red Sox to sign their first Black player. Afterward, he worked as a reporter for the old Boston Traveler. When the Traveler went out of business, he became a public relations person for Massachusetts Bay Life Insurance. He always told people he left Massachusetts Bay Life because they moved and he didn’t want to commute to Framingham, but some people whispered that the company asked him to leave because of his heavy drinking. He ended up at the Weekly Journal, a community newspaper, soon afterward, and for the last 25 years of his life he called it home.

In his column, “News Notes,” Freddy commented on some of the issues affecting both the local areas we covered and the greater Boston region—with a twist. For example, when the Red Sox won the pennant after almost 100 years in 2004, he wrote about how well the police handled the traffic situation. A decade earlier, he had been a staunch defender of rent control in Brookline, pointing out that if it were repealed, that would make it much harder for students to obtain off-campus housing. Freddy usually called upon me to copy-edit his columns. When I cautioned Freddy about misspelled names or sentences that were too long, he didn’t seem interested. “On to the next thing!” he shouted in a mock-flourish.

Increasingly, after George Bush became president, Freddy turned much of his attention to national politics. “The minute he started repealing all of President Clinton’s executive orders, especially about the environment, I knew Bush was part of the radical right!” Freddy fumed, waving his arms. One time, when a particularly nasty thunderstorm was looming, he looked out the window and joked, “It’s so dark outside, it’s blacker than a Republican’s heart!”

Closely related to Freddy’s passion for politics was his being a history buff. The top of his always-messy desk usually had a few copies of U.S. Heritage and History magazine. One day, he walked over to my desk with a huge book that was obviously an antique. “Kid,” he said with a big smile, “This is a Brighton Town Directory from 1873, when Brighton was still a separate town. It lists all the residents, house by house, all the businesses, all the taverns. I brought it to the Brighton Neighborhood Association meeting last night and they went nuts over it!”  That directory provided him with material for several weeks’ worth of columns.

But there was another side to Freddy. Although he disparaged conventional religion, at heart he was not only a person of faith but a mystic. Every morning around 10:30, we’d see him throwing the I Ching at his desk, and we knew to hold any calls for him until he finished. He loved to talk about the time, back in the ‘60s, when he took a three-month leave from the Traveler to study Zen with Alan Watts on the West Coast. His office bookcase contained copies of the Gnostic Gospels and The Tibetan Book of the Dead next to the books on history and politics and the old volumes of U.S. Heritage and History.

Then, there was the matter of his doppelganger. Several people reported seeing, around the neighborhood, a man who looked and dressed almost identically to Freddy. Katherine, one of our reporters, once caught up with him. “Do you know you look just like Freddy McFerrin?” she asked. “Yeah,” the man answered in a near-whisper, “I know!” He quickly turned a corner, and when Katherine tried to follow him, she couldn’t find him. He had seemingly vanished.

After Freddy died, the doppelganger seemingly died, too. No one saw him again—except once. A young reporter decided to do a feature on the Dugout on Commonwealth Avenue, which had been one of Freddy’s favorite watering holes. Along with the article, he took a few pictures. When Katherine, who was now the editor, saw one of the downloaded photos, she almost fainted. There, at the end of the bar, was the doppelganger—or Freddy—tweed cap, tan coat, cigar and all.

Life went on at the paper without Freddy, but about two years after he died, I had the most vivid dream I’d ever experienced—almost as if it were in 3D. Freddy walked into the office and announced, “I’m Freddy McFerrin and I write columns. Where in blue blazes is my computer?” We’d moved his 1993-vintage, pre-internet desktop to the basement soon after he died. “Never mind,” Freddy said, “I’ll take this one. Let me start typing.” The other reporters and editors stood around him in shock, wondering how this was possible. When I woke up, I felt so overwhelmed that I couldn’t move for at least five minutes.

Two months later I had a similar dream. Freddy came back to the newsroom. Although the dream was just two months later, he appeared older than he had in the previous dream—he had less hair and was more wrinkled. This time, he just sat down at the computer and began typing without announcing himself. “He used to be here and now he’s back,” Katherine explained to two new reporters.

But these dreams, startling as they were, don’t compare to what happened to me a few days ago. After a long day, I took a little walk near the reservoir on the way home. I’d received one message. When I put the phone to my ear, I was terrified. There was Freddy! There was no mistaking his distinctive, gravelly voice. “Kid,” he said, “I know you and your wife have been thinking about where to go on vacation this year. May I recommend the Virginia part of the Blue Ridge. I know you went to the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, but this part is also noteworthy—it has the Peaks of Otter….” He didn’t finish the sentence.

I froze—I’d just had a psychic experience. I hadn’t talked about my vacation plans with anyone except my wife. How could he know? I looked at the phone number and recognized a Chicago area code. What would happen if I called it back? When I did, it was almost comforting to hear the operator’s voice: “The number you have dialed is disconnected or no longer in service.”

I put the phone away and headed for the liquor store on Cleveland Circle. Tonight I was planning to work on one of those tedious freelance articles I sometimes wrote for that electronics magazine. To make things go easier, I often bought a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. But once in the store, my arm, as if it had a will of its own, reached for Old Log Cabin bourbon on the next shelf. Well, I thought, this is interesting.

When I reached home, I heard myself telling my wife, “You know those vacation plans we’ve been talking about? Well, I suddenly thought about Virginia—you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Remember the great time we had when we visited the Blue Ridge in North Carolina? …. Oh, Madre D’Dee! There’s Bonnie on top of the bookcase! What a fascinating cat! I wonder what in blue blazes she’ll do next….”

Down and Out in Indianapolis

By Raanan Geberer

Back in the early ‘80s, when I accepted a one-year job as an editor at a weekly Jewish newspaper in Indianapolis to get much-needed journalism experience, I didn’t have a place to live when I first got into town. So I thought I’d stay at the local YMCA until I got my bearings and found an apartment. I’d briefly stayed at a YMCA in San Francisco three years beforehand, so I knew what to expect.

The place was on the west side of town, on the fringe of the African-American area. In fact, it was near Crispus Attucks High School, the school that had produced “The Big O,” basketball star Oscar Robertson, in the 1950s. The Y itself was surrounded by empty lots, and there just wasn’t much around there.

There were no cooking facilities, and no supermarkets in the area either – not even a small grocery store. However, there was a convenience store attached to a nearby gas station, so I bought stuff like crackers, cheese, soda and canned sardines. Thank God that there were places to eat lunch near my office – especially Wendy’s which hadn’t yet made inroads back in New York, where I came from. Wendy’s was a step up from Burger King and McDonald’s, I thought, pleased. My newspaper was in an old industrial building in the semi-seedy downtown area –an area surrounded by junk shops-- but even that neighborhood was better than the one near the Y.

There were no laundry facilities near the Y either, so I took to washing my clothes in the sink with powdered detergent, then letting them dry. This gave my clothes a gray, wrinkled appearance. It also made them smell. “Hey, Ron,” Mr. Goldberg, the elderly publisher of the paper, said one day, taking me aside, “people are saying that you stink. You sure you take showers?”Mr. Goldberg, a tough-talking former boxer and Prohibition-era bootlegger, was not known for his sensitivity.

By and by, I got to know the people in the Y’s residence hall. There was a young, blond, long-haired guy who was recovering from meth and alcohol addiction. “You know,” he said in a semi-Midwestern, semi-Southern accent, “I used to sell my blood to get money to get high, but now, I’m really into the Scriptures. I’m really into meditation, too! I just like to sit back and meditate to Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Molly Hatchet!” What ever one thought of those groups, it was very hard to think of them as background music for meditation.

There was also an old guy who would leave the door of his room open and just look straight ahead with a bottle of beer in his hand. “You may think he’s a nice old guy,” Consuela, the middle-aged front-desk clerk said to me one night, “but he used to be a cop! If you met him 20 years ago and he stopped you and asked for your driver’s license, you wouldn’t think he’s so nice!” While there were often allegations of police brutality back in New York, I got the feeling that here in Indianapolis, the cops could get away with doing whatever they wanted – especially if you were Hispanic, like Phyllis, or black.

One day, walking down the hall in the Y, a tall, thin guy with brown hair and a beard who looked like he was about the same age as me introduced himself. “Hi! I’m Vince Grimaldi,” he said. He invited me into his room. It was filled with heavy-duty radical books – Marx, Trotsky, Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Thorsten Veblen. “Right now, I’m organizing for the Citizens Party. It’s a new party, founded by Barry Commoner. We need a party that’s not dominated by conglomorate business."

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Third parties have always come to failure, at least on the national level. Look at the Populist Party in the 1980s, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, the LaFollette party in 1924...” We had a lively discussion, and I started visiting him every night after work.

We talked a lot about Indianapolis and how conservative it was. I remarked on how all the businessmen I saw downtown wore gray suits. “What if one wore a brown or blue suit?” I asked. “They’d think he was from out of town,” Vince answered. We both laughed.

I wondered what Vince was doing here. One night, he wasn’t there. I opened the door and there he was, passed out on the bed, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. Now I knew what he was doing here.
On the weekends, I started looking for apartments. “Just walk up and down Meridian Street,” one of the secretaries at the newspaper said, referring to the main street of the town. “There are vacant apartments in every building!” I expected these buildings to be full of young, single people, but in Indianapolis, most of the young single people either lived with their parents or in one of the newer condos on the edge of town. “Most of our tenants here are elderly,” the manager of a once-elegant 1920s apartment building told me, looking at me with hostility. “We also have some mental patients who are placed here by a social service agency.” I passed.

As the weeks went on, I began to despair of whether I would ever find a place. “You look homesick,” Mr. Goldberg said. “Why don’t I order you some Hebrew National pastrami, corned beef, salami? We get it air-mailed from Chicago....”

On the fourth Saturday, I found an apartment in an Art-Deco-style apartment building a little further to the north, in a more “respectable” area at 39th Street and North Meridian. The owners, a middle-aged couple, were happy to have me as a tenant and rented it to me at half the price it would have gotten in New York, There was a Chinese restaurant a block away, a bar across the street, and best of all a Laundromat in the building. The next Monday, I talked to Mr. Goldberg, who knew a furniture-store owner who helped me rent some furniture. Now, all I needed was a car. On my last day at the Y, I packed my bags and promised Vince that I’d stay in touch.

Next weekend, I went shopping in the nearest supermarket. Walking down the wide aisles, examining the huge variety of food, it occurred to me that the last time I’d even been in a supermarket was a month and a half ago. After the way I’d been living for the past month, Just being there seemed like an untold luxury to me. Welcome back to the world, I thought.