I should check my voicemail more often. As it is, I only dial in once or twice a week. It's impossible for friends to reach me unless they know to call me at work or on my cell phone.

My friend Roger had been trying to contact me since Thursday night. Lesley, since Friday morning. I wouldn't have known anything at all had happened if I hadn't checked my email Sunday morning. When I did, I got the startling news--in paraphrase, "Frank passed away on Thursday. The funeral is today at 3:00."

I was stunned. I didn't even know Frank had been sick, much less on the brink of death. I was also confused, not really sure how to react to his passing. We hadn't been very close the past few years, and I think he'd become a very different Frank during that time--not that that's bad, it just means I didn't really know him anymore.

After graduation, we lost touch with one another. I moved to New Orleans, he continued his education in Starkville. Eventually he moved here, too, but by that time he had a lover, and you know how things can be. For the past six or seven years, he and his partner have lived just around the corner, but apart from walking our dogs together, we never spent much quality time with one another. Still, I knew I should feel something.

On the way to the funeral home, I tried to tap into my feelings. I threw in the most melancholy cd I had on hand, and that helped some. Seeing everyone at the church--quite a few people I hadn't seen since college--was moving, too. The service, however, made me angry: clumsily written, inadequate, and hollow.

I've probably thought more about Frank in the past 24 hours than I have in years. I've been trying to remember him, remember what our friendship was like. I wanted to write my thoughts down, just so I could one day look back and remember what I felt today. This isn't necessarily for everyone's consumption--I know I usually stop reading other people's journal entries when they get too personal--but I've put it here anyway. I don't really know why. Were I you, I'd probably turn back now.

My freshman year at Millsaps College wasn't terribly pleasant. I was a closeted queer boy. I was a theatre geek pledge in a fraternity full of meatheads. And my roommate that first semester...I mean, I knew preachers' kids were bad, but I thought at least they bathed.

Before long, however, I began to notice there were a few others slinking around in the corners, fellow oddballs (not that it takes much to stick out in Jackson, Mississippi). And one night, as I walked home after rehearsing a really horrendous play, I heard familiar strains of music floating across the campus from the freshman boys' dorm. It was a track from a fairly hard-to-find album, and I thought I was the only person who'd ever given it a second glance in the record store.... By the time I got inside, though, the album had finished. It was almost a full year before I encountered my fellow music enthusiast face to face.

When Frank and I finally met, it was over a gallon of vanilla ice cream and a rather large bong. For the next three years, we were more-or-less inseparable, and I can truthfully say that Frank is responsible for some of the fondest memories of my life. He was one of the most amusing, intelligent, and creative people I've ever known. He was also a fantastic instigator; without him, who knows what kind of tedious existence I'd be living now?

What follows is an excerpt from one of my favorite Frank stories. I wrote it years ago as part of a series of memoirs for my college pals--a way to write down everything, get it all on paper, so we could put it behind us. Like much of our time spent at Millsaps, the tale centers around drug usage, so if you've never put anything more toxic than coffee into your veins, you're probably going to feel left out. Sorry. It was great fun.

Goodbye, Frank. You're already missed.

The weather was dreary, but I was determined to enjoy myself that Mardi Gras weekend. I had driven down from Jackson to stay the weekend with Frank at his parents' house in River Ridge. Something was wrong with my car at the time--goddess only know what--so I made the trek in my father's decidedly unglamorous, 1985 beige Ford F-150. But of course, that's not important.

Frank and I left for the Quarter under cover of night, chauffeured by the charming Ms. Marion, who was also in town for the festivities. After she had corralled us into the getaway mobile, we learned that times were hard that year, supplies were scarce, and there was no ecstasy to be had. Only acid. Double-dipped acid.... Bourgeois, yes, but whaddaya gonna do?

At the Shell station around the corner from Marion's house, we put some gas in the car and a quarter-hit of double-strength acid on our tongues, and by the time we reached the Bourbon Pub, the world was a prettier--if not better--place to be. Our spirits, initially downtrodden at the inconceivable dearth of ecstasy on Mardi Gras, began to rise in direct proportion to the amount of fluid leaking from our spines. We decided that acid wasn't so bad after all, and we all agreed to take another quarter hit. If we were going to do it, we were going to do it right.

We'd just begun to reach that lovely point where focusing on single objects for more than two-and-a-half seconds becomes impossible when Alan (Sally-Jessy-Raphael- bleeding-from-the-corners-of-his-eyes- because-he's-done-so-many-drugs- Alan) popped up beside us. With the aforementioned acid still on our tongues, he asked, "Did you guys want ecstasy?" We were middle-class white kids from the suburbs in the middle of the French Quarter on Mardi Gras weekend. Did he even have to ask?

Almost instantly we found ourselves looking at some small green tablets. "Look how tiny, they can't be that strong." In three gulps, the pills were gone....

When next I regained consciousness, Frank, Marion, and I were on a bench in Jackson Square, holding hands and making the "kuh-kuh" noise*. It was well below freezing. There was precipitation--something between mist, sleet, and snow--accumulating on the flagstones of the Square, and the fluorescent streetlamps had the distinct halo that one only sees when (a) experiencing hypothermia, or (b) completely freaked out on drugs. We were somewhere in-between. Our breath was making little clouds before our very clouded eyes. We were holding hands very tightly and sweating like pigs. We made an odd picture, I'm sure.

The next thing I knew, we were sitting upstairs at Good Friends trying to have a coherent conversation. I don't know if it was my drug induced paranoia or if it really happened, but I could have sworn the bartender was smirking at my attempt to pretend I wasn't fucked up. The world may never know.

Frank and I eventually returned chez lui around the time that rosy-fingered dawn was trying unsuccessfully to pierce the dome of icy stormclouds covering the city. We stumbled into Frank's twin-bedded boudoir, and he proceeded to open a trunk at the foot of his bed. For a brief, shining moment, I thought it was a hope chest and that he might pull out some old high school yearbook over which we could reminisce.

Instead, Frank dug to the bottom of the container and removed a small aerosol can with a hose attached to it--yet another item Frank had procured from his father's collection of manly household implements.

"What's that, Frank?" I gurgled, sounding strange even to myself.

"Freon," he responded coolly. I didn't know exactly what he planned to do with the stuff, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he intended to knock off a few more brain cells before calling it a night--er, morning.

"Like what you put in your refrigerator and your car to keep it cool? That can't be good for you, can it?"

With the hose, he sprayed some freon onto a cloth. "I don't know Richard," he responded, taking the cloth to his mouth and sucking on it as if it were the last sexual organ he might ever see. When he spoke again, it was about 22 octaves deeper than before. He sounded like nothing so much as the voice of Tim Curry playing Satan in Legend. "Does it sound good for me?"

Driving back to Jackson, I battled increasing cold and rain. By the time I reached my apartment on dear Jefferson Street, the bottoms of my truck doors, part of my hood, and the backs of my side-view mirrors were covered in ice. What was going on?

Come to find out there was an ice storm with an extremely poor disposition headed directly for us. Evidently the drug-induced stupor in which I'd been living for the past few days precluded the possibility of listening to the evening news; the few brain cells I had functioning at the time didn't think the weather important enough to waste their minimal and shrinking energies on it. And it's a good thing, too: I'm such a wimp that if I'd known about the impending storm, I might have skipped Mardi Gras altogether. My spinal column would never have forgiven me.

By the next morning, things had gotten worse in the Faubourg Belhaven. Frank and I emerged from the front door of our cold and dingy lifeboat of an apartment into a winter wonderland that looked very Nightmare on Elm Street meets Ice Castles. Even from the breezeway, I could tell my truck was useless: the ice on the windshield was at least an inch thick. If we wanted to get anywhere today, we were going to have to hoof it. Classes, we felt certain, would be sparsely attended, if at all. Only the most foolhardy of folk would make it to school….

As we stood there, stupefied by the surrealness of it all, Frank and I were overcome with a sense of adventure--odd, since we tended to feel that way only when imbibing new combinations of drugs and alcohol. The thing was, you see, getting to class had suddenly become a challenge, and Frank and I liked few things better than being told "no." The two of us made a pact: we would prove our conviction to academic and intellectual pursuit, and vowed to walk the whole five blocks to campus, crossing slippery streets, sidewalks strewn with icy branches, and squirrels cryogenically suspended in frozen puddles. If we were lucky, we might even see a downed, live powerwire and live to tell the tale. Besides, we reasoned, it'll score us brownie points with the profs....

* Kuh-kuh: The sound made during the chorus of the song "Desire" by Gene Loves Jezebel ("What you get is what you see [kuh-kuh], De-si-re..."). Somehow or other, this became a leitmotif for the moment at which ecstasy kicked in. Whether it represented the feeling of "Hold on tight, we're revving up to fifth gear" or just the sound of our brain cells exploding, I don't know. I do remember, however, that Marion and Frank came up with an elaborate piece of gestural dance/semaphore to go with the sound, but it was a little complex--especially when we were in the throes of a really intense tab--and I don't think we were able to pull it off more than a couple of times.