The Freakers

“The Freakers” takes place on Minnesota’s Iron Range and spans a thirty-six year period (1974-2010). Six characters make their way through their lives, occasionally intersecting, breaking apart and again reuniting via fate and random timing.
Chuck and Barbi (married, they met as teenagers at a pit party in the 1970’s) and their daughter Nadine are one half of the story. Chuck is a ‘rivet man’ and works in one of the mines. Barbi works at the mall and on weekends takes naked self-portraits with her Polaroid. Practical Nadine leaves the area (and her pot-smoking parents) as soon as she can and lands a job on The Great Lakes with the Coast Guard. Chuck develops mental illness and his deterioration is the main contributing factor to he and Barbi’s eventual divorce in 1990. The loss of her husband and daughter leaves Barbi without an identity in her middle age.
Minnow is half Native American and lives with his ‘Granny’. At seventeen he suffers a brutal beating when his from-the-heart letters to a young girl are discovered. Having been bounced around for most of his life, Minnow is on his own to find his way in a seemingly indifferent world when Granny sends him away.
Lisa is dark, complicated and she leaves The Range for the Twin Cities. After a ‘fuckfest’ (as she calls it) that lasts several years she takes up painting and cocaine and boomerangs home to start over at forty plus. She meets Minnow, who has also returned to the area. He is the same age, and like her, single and childless.
BallPark Frank is in his early fifties and has never left his beloved Eveleth. He lives a quiet life above a bar and works for the city, hence the moniker. Though everybody knows him, he is still considered somewhat of the town loser. When a child slips and falls into one of the many water-filled pits, it is he that takes to the air instinctively. BallPark unknowingly brings these people all together: an unexpected martyr/punctual conduit. They all seem to either be searching for something or running away from something or both. Invisible rubber bands and chance. Boing. Sometimes the two things (searching and/or running away) can invert themselves and somewhere in that ever-shifting arena destiny awaits.
I grew up on The Iron Range and lost my best friend to a pit tragedy when I was very young. I graduated high school in 1984 and then left to spend the next twenty years in Minneapolis. While in ‘The Cities’ I drove a taxi for ten years (nights) and was heavily involved in the now legendary music scene.
There are hundreds of regional historical facts intertwined throughout this story and it bounces around in time, methodically, like a pong. The fifty chapters (excluding the last five) can be put into any order.