It took very little effort, but I exhumed my Guy Code column on "Grandpa Scurv," which ran in the June 5, 2001, issue of the online mag:


Grandpa Scurv passed on two years ago last month, and I find myself thinking about him more and more. He died shortly after his 72nd birthday, a milestone he was barely cogent enough to observe. We had his birthday party mostly without him; he stayed awake long enough to open a few presents–slow and methodically this year–then marched to bed with apologies. He was tired. So tired. All he wanted or needed was rest, rest. A tall glass of chocolate milk and his day was over. The man who once railed for hours against the modern world with lust and fire was now of few words. Then silence, as the light began to fade.

We were there, at his home, the day he died. The minutes passed wordlessly among us all, the medicinal air of his bedroom was iron in our lungs. We could barely breathe or speak; all we could do was watch, hold his hand, pep-talk him into the Great Beyond, where other family members waited with lemonade on a spectral porch with the grandest view of all. He finally joined them shortly after 9 p.m., May 3, 1999, as the Oregon rain smashed against the window like nails.

The things I miss most
But Grandpa can speak now. I know this for a fact. Oh, how he can talk. After being liberated from the mortal coil, I can imagine a pounding rush of verbiage swelling from his mouth, beginning with his timeless opener: "DO YOUUUU MEAN TO TELL MEEEE?" as he bemoaned to his fellow spirits the decline of public schools and government. I can hear him now: "Frank, I humored you with this whole ‘writer’ nonsense, but here you got something called The Guy Code and all this jazz about being ‘guys,’ but where’s the ultimate guy–The Grandpa?" And, as always (even when he predicted that "bag of crap" superintendent wouldn’t last another term), he’s right. There’s no relationship like a boy and his grandpa. Dads are the epitome of boyhood fantasy, but grandpa-hood seems like the toppermost, almost divine, privilege. Here was a guy older than your dad (if you could fathom such a thing), who spanked your dad, who taught your dad what he knows, which is everything. And grandpas know even more–they were bred someplace special and came into existence with pepper hair and wrinkles and all the time in the world to go fishing. It’s not until later when you discover the awful truth: They were once children, just like you.

A man's man from the old school
Grandpa Scurv was hardscrabble and stoic–so old fashioned he was literally monochrome, but sturdy. They definitely don’t build men like that generation anymore. He survived polio when no vaccine existed. He fathered three children. He escaped the Watts riots in one piece (one of his favorite stories). He was a milkman, a laundry man, a workingman who worked and worked until the only power that could take him finally did. Modern contraptions and blinking doohickeys weren’t his style; he was content with his perfectly running outdated automobiles and his stories about everything you could buy for a quarter at a West Covina corner store in 1936. He didn’t fret too much about finances or social stature; his philosophy was simple: FAMILY–they made you happy. And men, men were sired to WORK. And that’s WORK with the largest, hardest all-caps you got, with maybe some bold italic underlined punctuation: WORK!@#*. Well, maybe if you thrashed the keys hard enough to lose blood, or rocketed your fingers through the desk entirely and cut a huge chunk out of your feet below–or better yet, just whacked both suckers off entirely, sutured your own stumps, and continued the column without shedding a tear WORK!@#* was not candy asses on plum office chairs. It was sucking pollution and flames and metal into your system while transporting something heavier than your heart

Writing isn't work
I remember telling Grandpa I wanted to be a writer. At first he thought I meant the rodeo, and he looked at me like I’d handed my mind to a bloodhound. When I clarified it for him, he looked at me like the bloodhound had handed it back. I watched his face kick into a grin as a laugh crawled up his gullet. "Sheeeyit," he exhaled. "A writer?" He clamped a hand to my shoulder, seared holes into my eyes and asked, "Frank, do you like girls?" "Of course, Grandpa," I replied. "I’m the most heterosexual man alive." Satisfied, he patted he on the back and said, "Good luck. But remember: there’s lots of good jobs in factories, boy." Then he walked off in an amused daze, probably to see if he could trade me for the bloodhound.

But Grandpa came around, as he always did, when he saw I was serious. He’d clip my articles out of the local paper, and he took great pride that one of his grandsons was a newspaperman. It wasn’t the same as operating heavy, rusting machinery (that’s for the boys in the pressroom), but he fancied me out somewhere, bangin’ a beat and plying sources with scotch in exchange for sordid city-hall scandals. When we’d talk, he’d ask about "my" paper. It wasn’t "his" paper, or "the" paper–somehow it belonged to me. "Your paper didn’t come today," he’d complain in that gruff growl I miss so much. "What the hell’s wrong with it?" "So I hear your paper’s going to Sundays now," he said to me shortly before he disappeared. "Can you get me a deal so they don’t try to gouge me on the bill?" Or "I can’t buh-leeve what your paper ran on the front page on Monday. You tell that reporter that I said he’s full of shit." He was a feisty, foxy, colorful man. But loving. Very loving.

His last gift?
The year before he died, he gathered all his immediate Pacific Northwest-based relatives (except for my great-aunt and uncle, whom my grandmother wasn’t on speaking terms with at the time) and hauled us out to Salem for a family photo. It was the first time we’d been together in one frame since 1986. There was the usual preliminary waiting and posing and hair mussing (with Grandpa amiably agreeing to every suggestion in his usual low, "Alllll right" as he shifted his body into whatever position required), but when the flash went off, everything was perfect. When I look at those shots now, my eye always wanders to Grandpa, his permanent crewcut belying an advancing age, right in the center. The smile on his face is genuine, almost beatific. He is PROUD.

And we wonder if he knew, even then. That maybe on some spiritual level, this was his final material gift. Because he soon began to disappear, piece by piece. First he wasn’t holding his own in conversations anymore, letting other family members dominate them. Then he started acting erratically. He’d get lost while driving but–like every man–refuse to ask for directions: "I know where I’m going. I’ve been driving this route for years." Finally, he had to admit that he didn’t, turn around, go home, and try again another day, when he was feeling better. And those days happened with less and less frequency. We had to go see him. And after he drove his riding lawnmower into a row of bushes, the family dragged him, protesting all the way, to his doctor. The prognosis was ominous: Brain Cancer. It was the one obstacle in his hard-fought life that he couldn’t overcome. We naturally clung to the best of hopes, but the proof was disconcerting. His eyes were bloodshot and sometimes lost. He’d stare at his own furniture with a child’s curiosity. Instead of his usual sing-song "Hellooooo, young man" when I’d enter a room, there was just musty air and a glance upward at me. "Do you recognize him!" Grandma would shout in his ear. Then the vacancy would disappear and he’d shoot her the same look he once gave me when I uttered the word "writer." "Yeah," he’d reply instantly, in shorthand tone for Woman, are you outta your mind?

It was difficult to watch his strength waste away. Death had never hit us so close before. The last major family tragedy came some 11 years before when my great-grandmother–his mother–passed away on Thanksgiving. But she was in her mid-90s by then; it was only a matter of time. Grandpa seemed unstoppable. He’d outlive us all, we said. After Armageddon and all the survivors were whisked off to some distant planet, he’d be our only namesake left. I could see him on the surface of Mars, contemplating a bevy of nubile women. "Well," he’d say, as he slipped into his space gear, "I guess it’s up to me." But something as unforeseen as cancer came. Shut his mouth. Lashed him to a bed. Allowed him to make his reparations. Then took him away and left us to face the sudden hollowness of life.

The lesson, learned
"Nawwww," I can hear Grandpa say. "You just don’t realize how great life is." Right again, old son. I remember his wake, which was more of a celebration, release, and rebirth. Family members we’d been estranged from for years showed up, and old vexations and grudges were buried. I saw my grandmother embrace my great-aunt, who actually spoke at the podium. She’d written her own speech, something my grandma couldn’t have done. Not only that, she injected a copious amount of humor to break the immense weight hanging above the room. Soon we were laughing through our sob-streaked faces. Then I got up and went off the cuff, and the laughter continued. In a way, we brought Grandpa back–we didn’t mourn his loss; we celebrated his memory. And I peered off into this sea and realized that this was his last gift: to reintroduce us to each other, to strengthen a bond once frayed and tearing, to bring us together. As family. Ow! Did someone just thump me on the back of my head?

Yeah, I see you smilin’ up there, you old coot. It took us a while, but we finally got the message. Thanks. For everything.
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Welcome back to 2004.

Memories of the last time I saw Grandpa Frye:

That day I was at the Albany Democrat-Herald office, roosting at a desk I commandeered because, goddammit, it was about time I had a desk of my own. 'Twas a modest slab compared to the ergonomical paradise my arms rest upon at this very moment, but I felt like royalty. The phone even bore my name on its digital screen. The first four paragraphs of my next Video Pit, a semiregular feature I scribed sporadically for The Entertainer, the weekly shits 'n' giggles supplement offered as an afterthought in both the Herald and Corvallis Gazette-Times, sat motionless, museless on a vapid computer screen. I was desperately trying to use the lyrics to Lou Reed's "Satellite Of Love" as an epigraph for a critique of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. Finally I slashed the white with "I watched it for a little while/I love to watch things on TV," dolloped it up top like a cherry on a sundae, and lumbered forward. Little did I know that later today I'd have to muster enough psyche-out in myself to drop the "-30-" on something even slightly amusing.

The phone rang. Dad. Distant. Maybe trapped in the phone itself. "Uh, we're going over to your grandparents'," he said, which usually meant a shit-shooting session and dinner but not anymore--the sentence droned like a fugue. "Your grandpa's, uhhhh, he's not doing well, and I think you should see him."

The ride to Lebanon was excruciating. We might as well have walked for all the rusted moments that thudded along, wheezing exhausted with each revolution. Nobody spoke. You could barely see through the air to the front seat; each molecule was visible and alive. Even the whir of the tires below were hushed in solemnity. With about two miles left I happened to stare down a gravel driveway, where a dog was sunning itself before springing to attention at the sight of passing strangers and going into full protector mode. "Heh," I said to no one in particular. "Looks like the dog's saying 'wussup.'" Somehow this was funny. My brother started laughing, then my dad, then my future stepmother. The tension broke. It was just an incredibly ludicrous observation. Even today the "wussup" dog gets a chuckle, because if there was ever a perfect example of a dog saying, "wussup," the four of us were privileged enough to see it.

I don't really wanna go into the specifics of what happened that night when I was there (or what happened after we all left), but it was dark when I got back to the office to finish my poppy, peppy, friendly joyboy jaunt through the rapier quippery of Tom Servo, Crow, Mike, et al. A pall with the density of cement bore down on my shoulders, then got worse when the phone rang. When a relative is dying and the phone rings at night, you don't have to be psychic to spot-on guess. The receiver came up like a tombstone, and there was my Aunt Nancy. The few moments of silence between "Hello" and "Cory?" were very telling. The news was final. He was gone.

But, Grandpa's not a guy you could keep down for long. Within a week I'd already had my first GP dream, where he surfaced rather suddenly at a family reunion to revive an old argument with my grandma over--get this--cupakes vs. muffins. I swear it's true: those two could never reach a mutual decision on what made a cupcake a cupcake, and a muffin a muffin. It happened during a drive to Utah in the summer of '83. My cousin Lisa and I were their audience. Beginning innocently enough as a innocuous question about lunch, it quickly exploded into Bisqik warfare.

Grandma: It came in the little wrapping. It's a cupcake.

Grandpa: No, that was a muffin if I ever saw one.

Grandma: I know what a muffin looks like; I wasn't born yesterday.

Grandpa: I'll bet you that if we went back there and looked at the menu it'd say muffin.

Grandma: Honey, it was too small to be a muffin!

Grandpa: No, it wasn't. A muffin can be any size.

And honestly, I don't know which one of us even had the muffin/cupcake, or which one it actually was, but every now and then, just to get them riled up, we'd bring it up for discussion again. And it resurfaced in the GP dream, which Grandma finally ended by saying, "Oh, just shut up." But, of course, he didn't. He's still talking somewhere right now. If it rains pastries tomorrow, I'll know for sure.