“It’s gotta suck to be Matt Frackelton,” I think reviewing my notes on his “character building” incidents of the last few years. But to Matt it would suck to be anything else.
“Frack,” as Matt is called by his many friends and admirers, has been foolhardy and fearless since he was just a tyke growing up Skaneateles, New York. In this upstate New York town people ride snowmobiles and motorcycles to school. It is a place where high school physics teachers skip school to go duck hunting with former students home on winter break. It is a place where the majority of the two thousand sixteen residents own at least one gun and at least one animal that isn’t supposed to be a pet, and a class haircut is the mullet. In Skaneateles everyone knows how to pluck a goose and everyone knows everyone else within the 1.4 square mile town.
“I was lucky enough to be raised white trash,” he says.
In the Frackelton household the traditional birth names have always been disregarded in favor of nicknames like his, Woodchuck, Roadhead, Mammy and Beast. Beast is Frack’s little brother. Not until he started kindergarten this year was Beast called by his given name, Ian. Beast is a miniature Frack-in-training, though Frack claims Beast is going to be even more bad-ass than he is. Beast caught his first fish when he was one, beating Frack by a year. Beast tackled and threw a chokehold on a doe when he was two. Frack has yet to wrestle a deer and when he does he will be in full camouflage when he sees the deer’s backside peeking out from behind a tree. Resisting the urge to shoot it, he will shimmy through the mud on his belly, get behind the deer, grab its legs and watch it tumble to the ground in a helpless heap. The mission will leave him with ripped pants, skinned knees and a bump on his head from the deer’s flailing hooves. How is this fun? To Frack, how is it not?
Tackling deer, fishing and snowmobiling are just filler for the nine months of the year Frack spends waiting for the three months when he can put to use his thousands of decoys and duck calls and hunt ducks. He lives for duck season. Frack estimates that about sixty percent of his income from working as a student athletic trainer at Connecticut College (plus whatever loose change he finds buried in people’s couches) supports his duck hunting exploits. The other thirty percent of his income goes to Chinese food and beer.
Last winter break he got his former high school physics teacher to play hooky so they could go duck hunting at 4 a.m. on a –14 degrees day. The ducks were flying that morning, and their calls and decoys were working so well getting the geese to circle close to them, they each had good targets. 3-2-1, pow pow, and two ducks plopped into the icy waters. The wind changed quickly pushing their duck decoys and kill to the center of the lake. With no dog or boat to go pick them up, Frack decided, naturally, that he should swim for them. The water was so cold the second his body touched it his muscles seized up. His lungs began to freeze and he gasped for air. He knew he had better get out of the lake fast and had to abandon a few of the decoys. When he got out he tried to do a handstand to drain the water from his boots but he couldn’t use his hands.
“They were kind of like claws,” Frack recalls. “And the outer layer of my clothes froze solid, but I didn’t want to quit. The ducks were flying.”
The ducks always fly for Frack. He has stopped playing in the middle of a soccer game to mimic the calls of a flock of low flying geese overhead. When his teammates yelled at him to chase after a ball that whizzed by his oblivious head Frack ignored them. Another day he spent from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. in an ice-filled lake, dressed in white snow camouflage submerged to his chest. So frost bitten were his hands, they bled.
“That was a great day,” he recalls. “Let’s see, there was bufflehead, gadwall, widgeon…” he says listing the different types of ducks he shot that day. “I’ve never gotten any of those before in my life. It was awesome.”
Connecticut College seems like the last place you that would ever find Matt Frackelton. He has separated himself somewhat from the hunter, working class norm in Skaneateles by venturing to a small prestigious liberal arts college. During his college search his high school guidance counselor had recommended he look at Conn because of its quality environmental studies program. In high school Frack competed in the Envirathon, a competition that tested students on current environmental issues, soils, wildlife, aquatics and forestry, and in four years led his team to two state and three regional championships. He also won a $3,000 scholarship at the New York State Environmental Challenge, a televised individual environmental jeopardy-like competition. But ultimately Frack decided Conn was the place when he discovered he could fish within 200 yards of his dorm room.
“What is really lost on Frack is that not too long ago this was a women’s socialite college,” says Dale, one of his bosses in the training room. “The girls here wore white gloves and had cotillion with the Coast Guard. Don’t you wonder what Mary Harkness would think about Frack? I think she’d roll over in her grave.”
“One night stands out as one of my best, earliest memories of Frack,” his friend Allen recalls. “There was a pizza box lying half open in the trash can outside his dorm room. The box had a crusty-looking week old piece of nasty pizza in it. Frack looked at the box, goes ‘Ahh pizza!” and just went and took a big old bite.”
“That’s nothing,” Frack interjects. “Another time there were two snack packs of pudding next to the trash can. I like pudding. I picked one of them up and it had an off white tinge to it with a sort of hard core in the center. I had to squeeze the cup to get it out and when it did it came out all slowly like a tube of play dough. I tasted the pudding and the bite I took looked like a surfboard does after a shark has gotten to it. It was kinda gross, but I’ve gotten a lot of good food from the trash.”
He considers another encounter with spoiled food one of his proudest moments at Conn. It was late February and he had a box of oranges that someone had been sent as a gift for Christmas rotting away on his floor. The tops were brown and squishy and the sticky bottom ooze had cemented the box to the floor. For the previous few weeks Frack and the boys had been pelting girls in their towels on their way to shower with the rotted fruit until the girls retaliated by smearing banana all over the boys’ doors. One night when they were bored, Frack’s buddies dared him to eat one of the decomposing oranges.
“I will die before I back down from a challenge,” Frack says.
He peeled away the soggy, once orange colored skin to reveal small white pustules on the fruit. It probably won’t hurt me he thought as he bit into it. His buddies couldn’t stomach it as they watched Frack gagging, his body telling him this was not a good idea. They ran to the bathroom and threw up. Frack, deciding not to prolong the ordeal, chucked what was left of the orange up in the air and “T-Rexed it,” catching it with in his teeth and devouring it before his stomach could argue any more with his head. Frack held it down and he smiled.
One warm night last year he and his buddies, dressed nicely, were walking back across campus following a fancy dinner with his friends’ parents. In warm weather skunks are a common site on campus, and on this night Frack and the boys encountered two large skunks searching for food in an open garbage can. Frack had wanted to catch a skunk ever since he read two years before in one of the many hunting magazines to which he subscribes that if you get behind a skunk without its knowledge and grab it by the tail, there is a 90% chance it will not spray you. While his friends watched—shaking their heads, but not surprised as this was Frackelton and this is what he does—Frack quietly climbed on top of the trash can, crouched over the skunk and grabbed its tail jacking it up into the air. He stood upright on the can, skunk in hand as though he were an Olympic medallist standing on a podium waving his medal. His face beamed with pride until he realized he had a skunk in his hand, and shit what was he going to do with it now. The second he puts it down that thing is going to spray like the fire hydrants do when the neighborhood kids pry them open on those hot, steamy summer days in the city. So Frack put the skunk down, and ran like the wind.
Frack is now over the skunk-tormenting phase which is good because he’s not supposed to be running. Since re-inflaming his junk, Frack has been told by the athletic trainers that he can’t play soccer (he’s co-captain of the Conn College club soccer team) or run for two months. He said he’d give it one week. In place of running he has decided to attack the rowing machine in the gym. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings he can be found huffing, puffing, grunting and growling at the unworthy piece of equipment. It won’t allow him to go as fast or as far as he wants. At least three times per week he goes down to the fitness center to do a Navy Seals workout. It consists of doing sets of pull-ups, then doubling that number of reps with push-ups until his arms feel as though someone has tied hundred pound bricks to them. He repeats the circuit two more times because as Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Shirtless with only the upper part of his faded overalls covering his chiseled torso and wearing a green camouflage trucker hat with “I’d rather be hunting” printed in orange cocked to one side, last Saturday night Frack looked he had come to the dance in Cro straight from the trailer park or the demolition derby. He smiled a crooked, buck-toothed smile as he came to say hello. Sucking at his fake teeth so as not to drool down his chin, he said something garbled, I think asking how my night had been so far. His had been great. As a tribute to the “Hick-nic,” a day last fall when he and his boys backed their pick-up trucks into the Fishbowl grassy area between the Hamilton and Marshall dorms on campus, blasted country music with lyrics like “I had a barbecued stain on my white T-shirt,” and deep fried a turkey, Snickers bars and anything else that could be even remotely edible coated in a thick layer of bubbling hot grease, a bunch of them had spent the evening pounding Natty Light beer, shooting back Dubra vodka and reminiscing. Hick night had been an unqualified success. Now if he could only find a girl with whom he could later “exchange massages,” the end of the night might rival the events of the previous four hours. “The hick teeth are hot, right?” he asked. “What girl wouldn’t want to make out?”
Frack is the kind of guy who organizes skate-less pond hockey games on the semi-frozen, snow covered Arboretum pond where everyone is welcome. He is the kind of guy that threatens to beat the piss out of any dumb boy that messes with his close female friends. He is the kind of guy who re-injures his groin (for the fourth time) and bruises his elbow sliding into a metal goal post during an intramural broomball game wearing a Duffman costume. He is the kind of guy that every girl would want if they knew what they were looking for.
Beneath the masochistic, hunting-anything-that-moves, no-shame Frack lies the sensitive Matt, a guy who would be happy simply giving the massages. When he started seeing a girl and stayed the night in her room, he intentionally woke up early the next morning to cook her breakfast in bed. In the refrigerator he found nothing but peanut butter and mayonnaise, and though he could surely combine those two ingredients to make a killer post-workout protein shake, that would not do for his new girl. He threw on her flip flops and a squeezed into a pair of her shorts—both a few sizes too small—and ran clopping and constricted to Harris, a few empty plastic bags in hand. There he loaded the bags with bagels and English muffins, scrambled eggs and ham, pancakes and fruit. Back at the house he toasted and re-heated the food, then took it all up to her room with just a few minutes to spare before the alarm went off. On the tray with the food was a cup that held a single wild flower, breakfast in bed a-la-Frack.
There are girls at Conn Frack enjoys spending time with, but he hasn’t found a soul mate. Perhaps, he thinks to himself, he’s not committed because he is only 21 and still in college, or perhaps there are no girls at Conn that could love the unrefined Skaneateles side of Frack. Such a girl would have loved the fifteen year old-Frack, sans license and car. She would have picked him up in her car and let him take her to Kentucky Fried Chicken and then sat good-naturedly in the car and watched Frack press his face up against the glass of the just closed KFC yelling “Nooooooo!” until the night manager came out with a free bucket of dark meat, scraps otherwise destined for the dumpster. A Frack soul mate would then have agreed to a second date to Old Country Buffet. It takes a different breed from the average Conn girl, most likely a special farm girl he’s decided, a girl who will accept Frack consistently putting life and limb on the line and a girl who will let him name their kids Yone, Poder and Torkel.
“Really though,” he says. “I can be happy as long as I’m somewhere with enough water for the ducks.”
But before Frack’s simple plans for settling down, he has graduating, partying and adventure on his agenda. In three months, and hopefully injury free, he will enjoy a full week of senior debauchery. Next is NBC’s reality show Fear Factor. He already has the application. All he needs are his two buddies to be there with him on set, to call him a pussy and tell him he can’t do it. Then there’s no way this guy, who can’t resist a dare, wouldn’t win. Soon Fear Factor will become Frack Factor where Frack will be like the American Gladiators and challengers will try to eat more worms that he can in sixty seconds or jump from a higher cliff into a lagoon than he does. They will all lose.
Tonight Frack sits spread eagle on the floor of the gym watching his club soccer team finish practice without him. To quell the osteitis pubis pain, he holds two big bags of ice on either side of his man hood hoping not to freeze it too small. His stomach aches from downing Harris orange chicken and a meatball sub just before he came to play soccer. The pink sweatband on his forehead is drenched and his face is bright red from having played ten times harder than anyone else this night. His ankle is still sore from being kicked by a drunken girl in stilettos a few weeks back at a TNE dance. It is as if God mistook Frack for a cat and blessed him with nine lives. There is no one who does stupider things and survives.
He laughs when he hears this. “I know,” he says. “How lucky am I?”
