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What a long, strange trip its been

Frank Ferrante allowed a film crew to record his transformation from obese drug addict to clean, serene grad student. Now he’s coming soon to a theatre near you.

Pictured: Frank Ferrante. “The food was good,” Ferrante recalls. “But there were things like the wheat grass that I despised with a passion.”

Photo: Nucci Studio

Ferrante started to shed weight, eventually losing more than 40 pounds. He began to listen; he became willing and open and guidable. And they started to realize it wasn’t just Ferrante who was changing—it was everyone involved. Originally, Engelhart, joined by his friend Conor Gaffney, who’d attended film school, and his stepbrother Cary Mosier, wanted to be Ferrante’s heroes and transform him overnight. Life, however, doesn’t work that way. For all three guys, it was an exercise in surrender, as they were forced to relinquish their ­expectations, as well as to give up their own desires to serve Ferrante.

Ferrante weaned himself from the antidepressants he’d taken for 10 years, and quit his 10-espressos-a-day habit. During filming he got a call from his doctor: his hepatitis C was gone. “I was healed,” Ferrante says, crediting his new healthy diet. The crew mediated conversations between Ferrante and his ex-girlfriend, and helped him work through old wounds caused by strained relationships with his brother, his ­ex-wife and his daughter. Then the 42 days came to an end, and, exhausted by the intense process, they put the film on hold.

A year later, hooked again on pills and close to death, Ferrante went into drug treatment. “I had forgotten about the film and everything,” he admits. It started when, toward the end of the 42 days, Ferrante was prescribed Vicodin to combat some of the painful side effects of his hepatitis C medications. Afraid of getting hooked, he’d flushed the pills down the toilet. But later convinced by a nurse that he should take them, Ferrante gave in. What started out as a doctor-prescribed pain treatment plan escalated (after filming stopped) into a full-blown addiction. Within a year, Ferrante found himself hustling doctors for prescriptions that included morphine sulfate, oxycodone and Valium. He describes that year as “terribly lonely and isolated,” and his drug abuse as “misery maintenance”—he wasn’t partying. He had some intermittent contact with Engelhart, but didn’t reveal what he was going through. Attending his grad school classes was the only thing that kept him alive. “I became a recluse,” Ferrante explains. “I tend to be a social person and I was the exact opposite.”

During treatment for addiction this time, Ferrante wondered to one of his counsellors why he wasn’t dead yet. The counsellor—a greying hippie and recovering addict himself—responded, “The real question isn’t why aren’t you dead, it’s why are you alive?” This was Ferrante’s epiphany. “I only really now feel the effects of what happened then. What happened in those 42 days remained with me, but I still had to go someplace else—wherever that place was.” The seeds of self-respect and spiritual practise had been planted and this time, in treatment, Ferrante was ready for real change.

Once again clean, Ferrante returned to Café Gratitude. The movie was resurrected as planned—this time, with a professional ­filmmaker (Gregg Marks) to edit the raw footage and shoot some more. May I Be Frank? is an intimate portrait of Ferrante’s life, health and struggles. A heartwarming moment occurs when Frank reads us a letter he’s composed to his ex-wife, apologizing for his past alcoholic behaviour and asking her to visit him in San Francisco.

These days, Ferrante, 55, is still working on his master’s degree in humanities at San Francisco State, does volunteer work and has been clean of all “mind-altering substances” for more than a year. He looks healthy and his eyes sparkle beneath a full head of thick salt-and-pepper hair. “My life is good,” he says, smiling warmly. “It’s free of drama.” He adds, leaning in, “Probably because it’s free of a girlfriend too. I’m still looking for her.”

He describes his diet as “60 percent raw”—mostly salads, with chicken and fish on occasion. Spiritually, he practises a 12-step lifestyle, which involves going to meetings every day and turning his will and life over to a higher power. He’s also interested in yoga. “Addiction is similar to spirituality,” Ferrante muses. “If you’re an alcoholic, you have to drink every day to achieve that level of numbness you’re looking for. I have to rejuvenate my spiritual connection every day—you don’t just arrive, it’s a daily practise. You can’t win today’s game on yesterday’s pitches.”

Josey Duncan wrote about yoga for minorities in the May 2008 issue.

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