todd tells a long story, part ii

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, July 12, 2001 6:59pm

Frank was weird in lots of ways. His middle name (I'll let you guess what it was) started with an "x", and he became somewhat fascinated with that fact. He went by the nickname "X", he had a piece of paper in our window on which he had printed a large "x", and the background on his Mac Classic featured an "x". Which isn't to say that Frank was egotistical - he was a very nice guy - so much as, um, focused.

One time, Frank decided that he wanted a chair from each of Rice's residential colleges' cafeterias. In our room. This not only made walking around a bit tricky, it was less comfortable than his idea of "borrowing" a leather couch and easy chair from just one neighboring college.

Frank had all sorts of ideas. One Thanksgiving, his idea was to be homeless for a day. He would empty his pockets of everything and walk towards downtown and, well, be homeless. Except for that whole part where he came back to his nice dorm room. But then, we were all a bit naive in college.

So while I sat there in our room, doubtless worrying about how to sustain a civilization of Elvises, Einsteins, and farmers, Frank was walking around, I guess.

He came back the next day with a bunch of movie posters. Hoffa. Milk Money. Embrace of the Vampire. All your favorites from the early nineties.

"Frank," I said to him, "you just spent 24 hours being homeless. Why, then, do you bring back many movie posters with you?"

He explained that on the way back from being homeless, he passed a video store that was giving them away. He did not care that these were apparently awful films, because, hey, free poster.

In fact, I hadn't heard of any of these films, but the poster for Embrace of the Vampire intrigued me because it had Alyssa Milano on it. ("Finally," the audience thinks, "there is the connection I've been looking for. Now this story makes so much sense!") I mean, here Alyssa Milano had made a vampire flick, and I hadn't heard of it? How did that happen?

Frank didn't care, because he had a crush on Alyssa Milano. So the poster went up.