Beanie (Bernard Frank)

Okay… so one day in 1969, flush with money and likely stoned (still working at the New York Times), I decided to take a week’s vacation to Florida. I was engaged at the time but that’s a whole other digression and Cheri didn’t come with me so I’ll just say Cheri ended up becoming collateral damage from this trip. I stayed at the Doral Beach Hotel and the first day there, I wound up at the pool, sitting next to this freak from Philadelphia named Beanie who had hair to his waist and a guru-type grin that he perpetually wore on his face. In the course of the week, I spent a lot of time with Beanie, discussing so many things in so many obtuse ways that my head was spinning at ridiculous speeds. Between sharing joints and opinions, Beanie ripped away any remaining objections I had to leaving my life and starting again. We talked about everything from the war to the cost of pot. He also happened to have a fifth booze bottle that was filled with coconut oil that he had brought back from Jamaica (along with a whole bunch of other ‘stuff’). Beanie showed me the virtues of coconut oil as a sun-tanning device and how to roll a huge spliff and by the time the week ended, I knew I wasn’t long for the New York Times. I wanted to ‘Be What I Could’ and not ‘Be What I Was’. And thus began a long journey that was unimaginable at the time but, looking back, was probably inevitable.