“Jay Francis Turco”
“Present”
We all laughed….it was 10:13 in the morning and obvious that Mrs. Davis
wasn’t taking attendance.
Frank hated it when someone called him “Jay”. He would always say, “Jays are
blue and loud. Do I look blue? Am I loud?” He wasn’t. His voice was quiet and
airy, but you could always hear him. It wasn’t the volume, or the words he
used, but the intensity with which he spoke.
He hated it even more when someone called him Francis. He would say, “Francis?
Is that a chick’s name or a dude’s name? What were my parents thinking?” His
parents named him that because they loved St. Francis. St. Francis’ parents
called him that because they loved France. Frank hated France.
Nothing would bring his biting, caustic wit to bear like someone calling him
“Jay Francis”.
“Not very funny, Mr. Turco. Do you have your homework?”
“Mr. Turco is my dad. Did you give him homework too?”
So it started. I’d liked Frank Turco from the day I’d met him, but from day
three of sixth grade I felt responsible to live with the integrity that he
lived with. Anyone who would talk to Mrs. Davis like that was a friend of mine.
And he didn’t martyr himself—he got away with it. She glared at him with the
stern look of a drill sergeant examining the recruits on day one but did not
press the issue further, other than to say, “Please come up to the board and
show us what you got for number seven, Frank.” She called him Frank.
We’d heard rumors of Mrs. Davis’ exploits in the battlefield of the math
classroom from the time we were in third grade, and Frank Turco had defeated
her, or at least stalemated her, on day three.
Frank had red hair. He was tall and thin and had brilliant green eyes that
seemed like they were looking through you—he looked like an adult, like a
miniature dentist, or pilot, or banker or park ranger even at age 10. Every
day, Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass of
lemonade, showered, and then sat down to shine his shoes. He shined his shoes
for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got dressed. He dressed
better than most kids, but not unreasonably for playground games.
Frank was unusually wise for a sixth grader. I don’t mean smart—he was very
smart, but I knew many people in sixth grade who were smart. He was wise.
People would often come to him to solve playground disputes.
Frank carried himself like a head of state or a captain of industry, even
when we were kids. He commanded awareness, more than attention or respect, when
he was in the room. It was that intensity. His intensity was a quiet strength
of will more than an unbridled force.
He knew more than the rest of us. The courage, guile, and wit of the boy
would revolutionize the world some day. We knew it. He knew it. Even Mrs. Davis
knew it. Otherwise, why would she have backed down that day in math class?
A few years earlier, in 3rd grade, school started on Wednesday, August 17,
1977, the day after Elvis died. We were all shocked that Elvis had died and
Frank said, “Did you all think he would live forever? His fifteen minutes was
up.” We didn’t know what that meant, so Frank shared with us the theory of
everyone getting fifteen minutes of fame. He said, “Not everyone wants fifteen
minutes of fame, but everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame—for that fifteen
minutes might be you doing the perp walk on the news or you might be doing
something truly great that no one but the person you help notices. For most of
us, it will be somewhere in between those two extremes.”
The next day, he started what would later become known as the Fifteen
Minutes club. Basically, it was seven boys who watched each other, and if
someone was screwing up, someone else would come up and say, “Do you want that
to be your 15 minutes of fame?”
We all thought that his success, at nearly everything he did, was due to his
intensity. We would find out later in life that it had more to do with the
depth of his character than the strength of his will. His character had
developed at an unusually fast pace.
Frank was a natural leader—not better than the rest of us but just easier to
follow than the rest of us. And he mostly did right, so if you followed him,
you were probably going to be ok. There were exceptions to that rule, of
course. But all in all, he was good. It irritated him that more of the world
was not focused on good. “How can people visit here and not try to leave things
better? Do you visit someone’s house and wreck the place and start fights while
you are there? So why would you visit planet earth and wreck things and start
fights?”
Three years later, back in sixth grade, back in Mrs. Davis’ class, on
Tuesday, December 9, 1980, we were talking about the news of John Lennon’s
death. Frank shook his head sadly and said, “Fifteen minutes of fame”. We all
looked at him confused—he’d introduced the concept when Elvis had died, but
neither of these men had only fifteen minutes of fame—they both were famous for
a significant portion of their lives. It was almost as if Frank was reading our
minds. He said, “Guys, fifteen minutes, or fifty years—it doesn’t matter. When
the jig is up it what will be remembered is what you did with your life, not
with your fifteen minutes of fame. The fifteen minutes is merely a symptom,
good or bad, of how you live your life. That means life before, during, and
after your ‘fifteen minutes’.” Somehow we understood.
Frank was one time was harassed by kids in our class for holding the door
open for a girl. They teased him and said she was his girlfriend. He said, “How
many of you let your dog or cat out at night? Is your dog or your cat your
girlfriend?” The rest of us were pretty good guys, but once in a while had a
member of the Fifteen Minutes club remind of us of the difference between good
and bad, or even the difference between good and better. Frank was rarely
stopped by anyone in the club for a bad act. It happened on occasion—he was a
kid, after all, but it just did not happen that often.
Frank progressed farther and faster than the rest of us. We all grew up, but
it always seemed as though Frank had already been where we were.
He routinely came to the defense of people, acted with chivalry, held his
tongue when others would have blown up, and actively pursued right rather than
just trying to avoid wrong—or like some trying to avoid being caught when doing
wrong.
In high school, Frank elevated his game, and was asked to run for class
president. He politely declined, after thanking those who wanted him to run.
His reason was that he needed to focus on his grades. At the school convocation
where the speeches were given, the students heard what all the candidates had
to say, didn’t like what they heard and started chanting “Tur-co, Tur-co”.
Frank sheepishly stood, walked up to the podium, made a brief speech explaining
why he was endorsing Holly Springer, and went back to his seat. Holly, who had
appeared to have been trailing, won an election in a landslide against six
other opponents and took nearly 73% of the vote.
Frank would have had his fifteen minutes over and over and over had he not
been so quiet and so aloof in his manner.
On senior “skip day”, Frank called the school’s administration office like
the rest of us. Only instead of feigning a flu bug, Frank told the office that
he’d decided to take the day off to hang out with some friends. Somehow he got
away with it.
Later in high school, Frank was a “management trainee” at a local Pizza Hut
and lobbied for the management to hire me as a prep cook. They did, and on my
second day I ignored my training and threw five large onions into the vegetable
chopper. The fumes were enough to run everyone out of the restaurant and the
police were called by one patron who claimed that someone had launched a tear
gas bomb in the restaurant. I was fired later that day and Frank did not come
to my defense. He only came to me and said, “Do you want THAT to be your
fifteen minutes of fame?” I held no grudge—I’d broken the rules and justice had
been served.
Every day, Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass
of lemonade, showered, and then sat down to shine his shoes. He shined his
shoes for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got dressed, wore his
Pizza Hut uniform to school and reported to work immediately following school.
His grades never slipped because of his job.
In college, we went our separate ways. Four of the seven of us were going to
go to Purdue and we tried to get him to come to Purdue, but he had other plans.
Frank went to a small community college in Alamogordo, NM.
His explanation was that he’d always wanted to see the site of the Atari Video
Game Burial (go look it up—we didn’t believe it either!) and he wanted to be
near the site of the Trinity nuclear test.
Frank had always been outspokenly against nuclear weapons, saying that their
only purpose was to kill civilians while sparing the armies and their
leaders—the armies who were not near the major cities and were engaged too
closely with friendly forces to be attacked in such a way and the leaders who
would be hiding underground “when the stuff hit the fan”. He said that even
though he was solidly against nukes, he needed to prepare for his “one day at
ground zero”. We didn’t know what he meant.
So on July 16, 1987, 42 years to the date after the Trinity test, Frank
moved to Alamogordo
and started working at an IGA grocery as a bag boy. It caused a problem in the
grocery because whichever cashier he was bagging for always had a line even if
there were other cashier’s with no lines. When asked about this Frank said,
“It’s not rocket science—you don’t put a watermelon on top of a loaf of bread.
You don’t put bleach in a bag with ground beef. How hard can it be? I’m not
smarter than the other bag boys…I just try harder.”
Frank started a new chapter of the Fifteen Minutes club at his college,
while the rest of us let it go by the wayside and could have easily earned the
wrong kind of fifteen minutes with some of our antics in college.
Every day, Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass
of lemonade, showered, and then sat down to shine his shoes. He shined his
shoes for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got dressed. He wore
his IGA uniform to his college classes, and reported to the grocery immediately
after his last class.
Two and a half years later, despite working full time, Frank finished his
four year degree in business administration and went to the manager of the IGA,
Wayne Lawrence, and asked if he could begin training in management. Mr.
Lawrence was thrilled. He’d been thinking that Frank would be leaving him after
graduation. Frank became an assistant manager, and three years later, when Mr.
Lawrence retired, Frank became the manager.
Every day, Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass
of lemonade, showered, and then sat down to shine his shoes. He shined his
shoes for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got dressed. He wore
his IGA uniform with pride.
I’d lost all contact with him and was stunned in January of 2010, when one
of our old Fifteen Minutes club members e-mailed me and told me that Frank was
running for the US Congress in New
Mexico, District 2. I immediately went to look it up
and saw that Frank would be running against Harry Teague for congress. I
couldn’t believe my eyes! I had no doubt he’d win if he ran and knew Frank was
getting ready for his fifteen minutes of fame.
Throughout the primary run, Frank had no competition—he was the sole
Libertarian in the race. When he was asked why he was running as a Libertarian,
Frank simply said, “Libertarians and Greens are the only parties left who
believe in personal responsibility. It’s funny that the furthest right and
furthest left would be so much in lock-step on what is really the central issue
of the election.” He made a name for himself despite the lack of competition
and soft spoken nature, not by laying out logical arguments or by laying a
consistent governing philosophy over the issues, but by only ever really saying
one thing—“We’ve got to do better than this.” Sure, he’d point out what issue
he was talking about before saying it, but he must have said that line 10,000
times between the announcement that he was running and the November 2nd
election.
His strategy worked beautifully! Congressional approval ratings were at the
lowest point in history at 11%. The media needed a story in the worst way.
There was a looming depression, and one congressional scandal and
constitutional overreach after another. They needed a champion, not for right
and wrong, but for their ratings—someone who would shake things up, but not
actually win. A Greek Comedy to go along with the Greek tragedy that was on the
news nightly with the collapse of Greece’s economy. Frank was their
meal ticket. They didn’t want, and didn’t need, Frank to win. They just needed
him to keep running, and more than anything they needed him to stick to his
crazy strategy and not to actually engage in what they called “a legitimate
debate”. Those who knew Frank knew that he was already engaged in a legitimate
debate. We knew that we had to do better than this. They were thrilled with him
saying “We’ve got to do better than this” over and over and over and didn’t
even know that thanks to their efforts on his behalf he would eventually say
what no one else had the courage to say.
NM District 2, with Frank’s strategy that the news anchors called “antics”,
was taking over the national spotlight. He was going to win this seat and they
didn’t even know it. Everyone but the press knew it, and no one could do
anything about it. Harry Teague ran ads asking, “Do you really want a grocery
store manager who went to community college managing your healthcare and social
security?” Frank countered with ads featuring him in his IGA uniform bagging
groceries with no message. He knew that to everyone except for Washington insiders
local grocery store managers were far more important, and far more trustworthy,
than some lawyer with an unseen underbelly.
Every day of the “campaign” Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin
Bran and a glass of lemonade, showered, and then sat down to shine his shoes.
He shined his shoes for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got
dressed. He kept working at the IGA during the campaign, and only talked to
press after hours.
On November 2, 2010, ABC’s lifeline ran out, or so they thought—Frank won
and they were worried the party was over. He’d get down to legislating now and
there would be no more of the golden sound bite. They had no idea they’d been
mining for copper and were going to hit gold, for just fifteen minutes.
On January 3, 2011, Frank was sworn into congress. He was there alone—no
friends, no family. He was obviously a man on a mission, and we had no doubt he
was deadly serious about the task at hand and was solemn regarding the duty
he’d signed up for. His fifteen minutes was about to start.
In the middle of the night on January 3rd, Frank called ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN,
Fox News, The Washington Times, the New York Times and everyone else who is
someone in political reporting. He told them that he had a “bomb to drop”, and
asked for an 11:00 a.m. press conference.
On January 4, Frank awoke at 6:00 a.m. He had a bowl of Raisin Bran and a
glass of lemonade, showered, shaved, sat down to shine his shoes. He shined his
shoes for exactly 75 brush strokes on each side and then got dressed.
He called his office at the capital and told them that he'd decided to take
the day off to hang out with some friends, and impatiently waited for 11:00
a.m.
At 11:00 a.m., the press gathered like vultures awaiting their next meal of
rotting meat. Frank showed up wearing his IGA shirt and nametag. He began:
“There will be no questions after my statement. You all do not know how to
ask questions, so I’ll save you the embarrassment. You call yourself reporters,
but you are only ‘reporters’ in the sense that you get paid as such. A reporter
who truly investigates, asks questions, and REPORTS has not been found in the
Washington Bureau of any of your alleged ‘news outlets’ for several years now. The
public would be better served, and you would be fewer in number, if people
wanting to enter your profession had to follow the examples of the greats who
have gone before you and assume the role of the minority opposition before they
were given a job as a ‘reporter’. I’m not asking for press biased toward the
minority party, but for a long, hard look at the majority before signing on as
their unofficial marketing department. Unfortunately you’ve deemed yourself the
duty of defending your views, or the views of one party or another, rather than
defending the truth. Do you think that we have the Freedom of Press in order
for you to parrot the party line of the majority party? Perhaps you should have
taken more journalism AND more history classes while you were in school.”
You’d have to know Frank to know how much of an assault this was—I’d known
him for the better part of 35 years and I’d never heard him raise his voice.
He’d just launched a war against the establishment. The press corps had just
been absolutely shattered and they were guilty only of being in the way of his
intended target. I couldn’t imagine the arrows he would launch at those who
were at the heart of his grievances.
“You know that my campaign standard was ‘We’ve got to do better than this’.
But you never understood what I was talking about. I was talking about doing
better than signing control over to those who have rule not by way of force,
but by way of deception and purchased votes. You think that their delicate
revolution was more painless than an overt coup? Revolutions that are only
about more power, more money, and more privilege for those who lead, whether a
delicate revolution or a coup, all have the same final result—more power for
the persuasive and more pain for the placid.”
“On August 18, 1977 I signed a pact with my fellow travelers in the third
grade. We would watch over each other and strive to make our fifteen minutes of
fame fifteen minutes we could take solace in. Part of that pact included being
careful about the kinds of people we allowed into our circle of influence—a man
is known by his company. That group taught me what society could not—to
understand the difference between friends and acquaintances.”
“It is always said that the American electorate likes a winner—that’s why
the incumbents are always so highly favored. But it is not true. The American
electorate likes a loser, and that’s why we keep sending the same bad actors
back to congress over and over and over. I’ve sent releases to each of your
‘news outlets’ detailing accounts of illegal and unethical actions of 75 house
members and 34 senators.”
“You will spend the next several weeks uncovering more and more, digging
deeper and deeper, and members will lose their seats, lose their fortunes, lose
their families, and lose their freedom in the worst cases. Now that I’ve done
your homework for you, you will, for once in your lives, ‘report’.”
“Congress, as it exists now, only exists for the sake of more power, more
money, and more privilege. They cannot be reformed. They cannot be
rehabilitated. The American electorate likes a loser, and I am not a loser.
Therefore, effective immediately I resign my seat and allow the governor of the
great state of New Mexico
to name my replacement, if he has such courage. I had no intention of winning,
and never had any intention of serving, but was only interested in shining a
spotlight on the problem. I believe I have done so. That you all played your
parts so well made my mission easier. I took an oath to my Fifteen Minutes brothers
and unlike the rest of congress, and maybe even unlike some of my brothers, I
keep my oaths. ”
With that he left. Frank’s fifteen minutes were over.
The press stood there in stunned silence and couldn’t figure out what had
just happened. “The arrangement”, as many politicians and reporters called it,
had been exposed by a grocery store manager who went to Alamogordo Community
College.
Frank boarded a plane and went back to Alamogordo,
and drove straight from the Albuquerque
airport to the IGA. He went into his office to finish up some work, but then he
realized the baggers were behind, so he went out and started bagging. One old
lady insisted that she go down Frank’s line, even though there were other lines
open. She had no idea that he’d started the revolution earlier that morning.
As for me, I realized that my fifteen minutes had not yet happened. If I
wanted to keep my oath, I’d need to start thinking about which fifteen minutes
I wanted, and if I wanted the good fifteen minutes I’d have to start thinking
about how to change the world for the better.
