Buck Thor Emberg and Joan Dehle Emberg
Picture: SB
Synopsis to an every-Monday publication of Buck and Joan’s creativity. Chapter 1 next Monday …
Fred Fridley is the assistant manager for the International insurance and investment corporation, ICU. He is forty-nine years old and very successful. He will be elevated to the lead manager’s position in a year or so. The time is the middle 60’s during the initial American angers towards the Viet Nam War and the loosening of the moral codes caused by the growing hippie movement.
Fred, and his wife Beverley, live in Canterbury Estates in Bellevue, Washington, a keyed and gated upper class community overlooking Lake Washington. The house is palatial. Beverley is fed up with the domestic life of leisure and cocktails she has been leading for the past twenty years. Her role has been to look pretty, act not-too-smart and enjoy her life of numbing success through her husband’s wealth. She leaves Fred. He discovers ‘the letter’ one Friday after late cocktails at work.
Fred arrives home and reads the letter from Beverley which is a vitriolic attack upon him. Fred is only momentarily shattered. He discovers that he likes being alone and Beverley quickly becomes a memory…or so he thinks. He begins to examine himself as he never has in his life. He decides he hates his job and his semi-fleshy corporate body as well as his corporate life style. He decides he is going to do something about all of his problems.
Feeling strangely high because of the break-up Fred goes to play golf the next day. He shatters the club record! Fred appears on the front page of the sport section in the Seattle Times. He achieves immediate notoriety and discovers he likes being number one. He also later discovers he is a failure at getting women to his bed.
Beverley returns when Fred is not home and leaves another nasty letter. We never see Beverley in the story and have to depend upon Fred’s stylized memory of her. The letters continue by mail and move from the extremes of nastiness and bitterness to a more philosophical tone. She gets involved in starting her own business and an aggressive women’s movement. She too gets noticed: by the police, as she invades the Bangor Submarine Trident Base on Hood Canal and for possession of pot. She is arrested and Fred refuses to get her bail.
Fred, caught in the growing maelstrom of the 60s, has decided to give up his job…in style. The corporation does not want him to quit. He knows too much about what ICU was doing with the corporation’s money; investing in questionable but lucrative secret warfare initiatives with the military/industrial groups. It also rankles him because of the corporation’s misuse of its people. He is offered double salary and stock options of undreamed generosity. He still insists on leaving. At least, they tell him that if he is going for an early retirement they should be able to bring in the media to show the world how advanced they were in their thinking. They want their last squeeze and they have large portfolios in all the media of the Puget Sound. Hence, they wish to make an event of the ‘retirement’. Fred says ‘ok’ and by a matter of chance there has been a dearth of news taking place as summer has begun. Even Vietnam has gone silent. Fred becomes the summer story.
Meanwhile, Fred has met a lady whose name is ALSO Beverley. He calls her by her middle name, ‘Martha’. She responds by calling him ‘Leo’, Fred’s middle name. The name change suits him and he likes the idea of Leo the Lion. The full name change to Leo Freedman comes later.
At the media presentation of his early retirement, Fred plans for and punches the hated corporation manager full on the nose. It was Fred’s farewell gift to his work mates. The act is captured FULLY by the camera men with the result that the picture goes viral over the country and on to Canada, Australia and the UK. When he hit Brian he shouted that he had struck a blow for anyone who was being squeezed and sucked dry by their corporation. He announces to the assembly that Fred Fridley is dead and ‘Leo Freedman’ was born.
The result of ‘The Punch’, as it came to be known, is instant celebrity status throughout the country. ‘The Punch’ picture is featured on almost all newspapers with Fred’s uttered cry, ‘I am now a Leo Freedman! I am free!’
A very sharp and clever entrepreneur from New York, hooks onto Leo immediately and within thirty-six hours T-shirts appear with blood spattering, the picture of Brian and Leo’s fist. The monogram shouts: “I AM A LEO FREED MAN!” Leo’s media exposure immediately doubles and sales of the t-shirts make Leo an immediately rich man. Leo skyrockets onto radio, newspapers and morning talk shows. Leo discovers he is a bit of a ham and the “Leo Freedman Phenomenon”, becomes a movement. There is a rash of boss punchings around the USA and Canada as Leo symbolizes the people who are fed up with their boss and their work situation. Women libbers, including Beverley, consider the punching as more chauvinism, giving even more media exposure to Leo Freedman.
Wilbur brings Leo to New York City to see how he will hold up to the searing heat of instant stardom. Leo causes a sensation. Yet, through it all; the money, the accolades and the media exposure, Leo feels strangely alone, badly used and caught in a happening he could not control.
The letters to and from Beverley continue. The divorce is finalized and he is truly alone. His jogging and exercise programme has produced a sort-of-athlete’s body. The pain of jogging seems to make him feel better. It is almost forgiveness for his desultory life.
Through it all he is looking for his ‘bone’…his irreducible minimum…which was first mentioned to him by a friend on a sail boat. Leo’s boat, the 32 foot Hedonic is the symbol of escape. He never escapes. He is always just ‘escaping’.
Finally, Leo buys his super caravan. It even contains a wine cellar. His stint of national fame has collapsed. There is now another media darling, a sixty year old man who is running non-stop from San Francisco to New York City bare foot. Of course Cliff, the runner, is in Wilbur’s stable.
Leo drives through the Cascades and stops at an empty camp site…it is September…the winds blow down from Mt. Ranier…where he had been with his family years before. He is now truly alone. He writes another letter to Beverley.
Does Leo Freedman finally escape? Is he a Freed Man?
