Requiem for a Friend

In 1995 I finished my doctorate in English from Florida State University, but I didn’t have much in the way of job prospects, so I cobbled together a meager living doing freelance work and adjunct teaching, and my family and I stayed in Tallahassee. It was through my varied pursuits that I met Freedan Wakoa. He came to me at the recommendation of a friend. He needed someone to help him turn his award-winning screenplay into a novel because an agent had told him that he might find a producer for his film that way. Seemed like a convoluted method to me, but I was willing to try and Freedan was willing to pay me a few bucks. (My fees were pretty much rock bottom.)

The story that Freedan had written involved a little girl who lived on a planet called Lumin. Everyone on the planet was born with wings, but they had forgotten how to fly. It was up to the young girl to help people learn how to fly again, but the mighty “wingless” class did all they could to prevent her.

I liked the story a lot, but there were also a few places where I found it read a bit too much like 19th Century Americana. When Freedan explained to me that the story had been inspired by a young girl who was part white and part African-American, I countered that people on other planets would not have the same racial backgrounds that we had, and another planet might operate by very different rules than ours. But, of course, in our minds, the heroine was a mixed race child with golden wings.

One of the the first things I did was change the spelling of each character’s name. The girl, Alexandra, became Alixandra. Thatcher (the insipid school teacher) became Thatchin, and so on. I decided that grass might grow down as well as up depending on the season, and I added a couple of moons. Otherwise, I kept the story intact, fleshing it out as prose.

As I transformed Freedan’s screenplay into a novel, I took a chapter every day to the small “hands-on” learning school my daughter attended and read it to the children -- about 50 kids from kindergarten thru fifth grade. It was such a hit that for the Halloween party that year, many of the children and faculty dressed as different characters from the book.

I finished the book, and in the meantime became close friends with Freedan. Although he was in his fifties, he had the boyish enthusiasm of a 20 year old. Quite fit with (Paul) Newmanesque blue eyes, he had a surplus of women in his life, and he had recently fallen in love with a gorgeous black woman in her 20s. She was calm, almost ethereal, while he bubbled over with joy.

Freedan told me once that he could “see.” Actually, he told me this several times. What he meant was that he could perceive the universal field. I believed him. There was something extraordinary about the man. He felt it was his mission in life to teach other people to see. That’s what he was doing with “Alixandra’s Wings.” It was an allegory, of course, but he had also created an exciting adventure story.

While we shopped that book around, Freedan lit onto another project. The light of his life was his beautiful teenage daughter. She’d been in some student films, and Freedan wanted to produce a movie that would feature her, as well as a student director from the film school at Florida State. I would write the script based on an idea that he and I came up with. I was thrilled with the idea. We rented some office space, we had long meetings, we traveled in search of locations, and I wrote and rewrote. We even managed to get a few investors.

In March of 1998, Freedan flew out to Los Angeles, where his girlfriend had recently moved, to try to find a “name” actress to help us make the film more enticing for investors. One day he called me from his girlfriend’s apartment. He said he couldn’t move half of his body, and his speech was slurred.

“You’ve probably had a stroke,” I said. “Get to the hospital. Now.”

But it wasn’t a stroke. It was a brain tumor, a particularly nasty kind called a glioblastoma. The next three months were dreadful. He came home, and we watched this vibrant, energetic man waste away. His daughter was devastated. Money was an issue because we had made certain commitments, most notably to our director who was afraid of being sent back to Belarus where she was from. Freedan’s ex-wife was understandably upset when Freedan gave me money to help keep her here. That was money his daughter would need. Looking back I realize I should have done things differently.

But the one thing I’m glad I did was to create an audio-book version of “Alixandra’s Wings” before Freedan died. I made two hundred and sold almost all of them. The money paid off some of the debts we had incurred in our movie-making venture. Freedan was pleased. He wanted Alixandra’s Wings to be like a virus. I learned years later that some kids listened to that book over and over for years. I know my daughter did. Adult friends told me they listened on long trips and didn’t want to get out of the car.

Freedan died in June, and the book became a file on my computer. I had my own books to write and sell. I had my child to raise. The book didn’t fit with what publishers wanted, and I didn’t have the technical expertise to publish the book myself. I also didn’t have illustrations for it. So I let it sit.

It took me 12 years to come back to it. A college friend of my daughter’s, who is a brilliant artist, jumped at the opportunity to make the illustrations. Someone else offered to help me with the technical aspects of publishing the book, and he did a beautiful job. His 11-year-old son, Jack, was the first to read it. “Awesome,” Jack reported.

Now Alixandra’s Wings is available as a print book, an e-book and an audio book on Itunes. I hope I’ve honored my friend’s vision at last.

Alixandra's Wings