Interview with Andy Frank

Andy’s retelling of The Handless Maiden (11:44)

I wonder if you could tell me how you were drawn into the story of The Handless Maiden to begin with. What were the circumstances?

I was drawn in because I was in the middle of a self-discovery phase in my early 40s, and through various attempts at therapy and other things, I finally came to realize that somehow I was going to access what was bothering me, through art. So I tried every form of art. I basically threw every possible art at the wall to see what would stick. And eventually, I came to writing and I met you. When we got together in a group for your Storytelling Journey workshop, you asked us to select a card from a whole series of cards that you laid out around the room. They were pieces of art that depicted various different fairy tales, and the piece of art that drew me in was the drawing of a young woman whose hands were missing. The look on her face and the fact that she had these stumps immediately drew me in. I guess I felt an empathy—I didn’t know why at the time.

The picture of The Handless Maiden was drawn by Alexis Gurst. So you hadn’t read the story before you encountered the card?

No, not at all. I had read very few of the fairy tales, frankly. I knew the Disney version of various different stories, but I had certainly never heard of this one, no. Then I recall that you recommended a book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I remember reading it on the subway while going back and forth to various different arts classes, and just having all kinds of little moments of illumination. Yet the book was written for woman about women. It didn’t have anything to do with men at all.

What did you relate to in the story?

Again, as I was reading the Estes version, I was struggling a little bit to understand where I fit in. I did not relate to the father immediately, that is to say, the maiden’s father. I did not at all relate to the maiden. I zeroed in on the King, because my focus at the time was that I had been that King in my working world. I had been a workaholic since the age of about 17 years old.

Where had you been you working?

I was working mostly in the restaurant business in some form or another—as an employee in a restaurant, as a manager of a restaurant, eventually as an owner of a restaurant … I had been a district manager of various different franchises where I basically was a cop. I would slap franchise operators on their hands and tell them what they were doing wrong. I’d fill out long, complicated reports and sometimes repossess businesses and make peoples’ lives utterly miserable. I was good at that, and became the director of operations for three such franchise organizations. In other words, I was the guy who now decided which ones were going to “get the axe.” And I could become as merciless as needed. It surprised me how cold I was able to become. I was trained to be a working, productive machine. And because I was good at it, because I looked the part and sounded the part, and I was young, and had a fairly good grasp on things, I was often seen as the guy to fast-track into an executive position. I was that guy.

I remember you striding into the workshop that first day looking like the Corporate Man and I thought, “Oh how are we going to get this guy interested in fairy tales!”

I don’t deny that the Corporate Guy is an aspect of my personality, but at the time, it was completely dominant and almost the only aspect of personality, other than my married personality. I was not ever that way with my wife at home, but I certainly was that way with my work.

And so I first began to identify with the King. He couldn’t resist a challenge. He had a marriage, albeit with a handless maiden, but still the marriage was good, he had a beautiful plot of land, and presumably he could have lived happily ever after right then and there, but no, the war was calling and that was his duty. So he went off and fought the war. And that would have been something I would have done. Whatever challenge any employer ever offered me, it didn’t matter how difficult, I was the first one to put my hand up. Because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do.

So you would go riding off on campaigns …

Oh, absolutely. Some would end well and some would not. But at the same time I had a conscience that was niggling at me. When I quit the last job I had, unexpectedly in November 2003, I found myself confined in a one bedroom condo with no email, no phone calls, no job applications, nothing being acknowledged for months—for months, nothing! There was nowhere to turn. And I felt a little like the King who was lost in the forest, thinking that he was going to be able, after he won yet another war, to win the next challenge which was to find his wife and child—and feeling lost, utterly lost. I completely related—absolutely related to where that guy was.

So at that time in your life, you were in the forest, seeking your wife. That’s very interesting. What did that mean to you?

I didn’t know at the time—I truly didn’t know at the time. I had just come away from a therapist who was convinced that my issue was that I had difficulty dealing with authoritative male figures. I had had my encounters with them in my corporate life, and, ostensibly, that was the reason I was unemployed at the time. So when I found myself in the inn, looking for my “wife,” or the “maiden,” I found that to be an awkward step. What did she have to offer me, really?

What did these women in the inn have to offer me? What did all you women in the Storytelling Journey have to offer me? Yet there was a common theme as I went through this artistic exploration—I was surrounded by women. And I was loving it—not their attention so much, although I obviously like attention like everybody else—but I was loving the feeling I was getting, the types of conversations we were having, the nurturing and all those things. But intellectually, I wasn’t understanding this at all. Not at first.

A couple of weeks further into the Storytelling Journey, the penny finally dropped, and I realized that what had happened to the Handless Maiden earlier in the story, was something that had happened to me.

When I finally made that connection—that the loss of innocence by an aggressive act was something that I shared in with her character—a whole bunch of other things began to open up. I had answers to questions I had not been able to answer until that time. And I understood that I had a reason to reconcile with the maiden, to understand the maiden, and to reconnect with the maiden.

And who was the maiden?

For me, she symbolized my youth and my innocence. When I was that person’s age, when I was in my late teens, I wanted nothing but to be involved in the arts. And in my case, the arts were radio. And radio remains to this day what my true art is.

And at that time, I found myself almost obsessed with the whole notion of radio, and needing to become a radio personality. That was the only destiny I could ever foresee for myself on a professional level—on any level, frankly, I wasn’t even contemplating such things as marriage or family, or anything else. I became enamored with various different voices on the air. Radio personalities were heroes to me. Every artist has heroes … for some it’s rock stars, and for some it’s authors, and for some it’s painters, but for me, it was these wonderful voices that spoke to me, literally, in the middle of the night, especially overnight. They were voices that were warm, and seemingly sane, and clever, funny, smart. I was raised in a family of people who barely spoke any English, and spoke it badly. They spoke to me in German, in very hard German, and there was no love evident, no guidance, and no plan for any future, just discipline and awkwardness—really the two words that come to mind when I think of my childhood. The voices on the radio offered me hope. A future. All those things.

Furthermore, I was blessed, because by the time I was in grade 10 or grade 9 I was already being told that I had a voice for radio. That just kept reinforcing that radio was what I should be doing.

So I kept in touch with a number of these characters by telephone. The only luxury I really had was a black dial phone in my bedroom. I would skip the early classes at school so that I could stay up all night and listen to the programs. I’d get involved in requesting songs, and speaking with other people on the hotline. And one of these people, I’ll call him Josh, was perhaps the best at this. I was always calling into him and getting involved in his discussions. I heard my voice on radio many times, and recorded it feverishly whenever it came on with my little cassette deck. Anyhow. Josh one night invited me to the studio. He wanted to meet me. And what do you think, I was thrilled to bits. Went up to the studio and I was over the moon. Couldn’t believe it. I was allowed to press the buttons, to fire the turntable, and press the carts to fire the commercials, and I came this close to whispering in the microphone. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. This happened for, I don’t know, three or four nights over a period of about a month’s time in May of 1976. I could not believe my luck. I was that close, that close in my mind, the mind of a young boy, to realizing my dream.

Then Josh started to talk about inviting me over to his place to have some breakfast and to meet his girlfriend, and sure enough, one day, he did so. It was June 24, 1976. The reason I remember is that it was St. Jean de Baptiste Day in Quebec, and that’s a holiday. So I certainly had nothing going on. And he took me out to his house which was a beautiful house located in Hudson, Quebec, and he drove me out there in a Porsche and showed me the house, and two Rottweiler dogs that were in a cage, rather evil-looking Rottweilers. The house was secluded, the middle of nowhere, just a beautiful house, waterbed, rock gear everywhere because he was also a musician, at least that’s what he said he was. Then he produced some hash and we smoked our brains out. We both fell asleep because it was eight, nine o’clock in the morning. We woke up, had some breakfast, and then he started to seduce me. I didn’t really know what to think of that. What I mean by that is he just started to get physically affectionate … but very gradual, and very gradual, and very gradual. And he kept saying, “My girlfriend’s coming home soon, and she’s really gonna like you, she’s really gonna like you.”

At which point I just remember feeling confused, really confused, and wondering, Where can I go, shall I run? Shall I wait for the girlfriend? Where shall I run to? I felt that there was something going on, but I wasn’t really sure, to be honest. I really wasn’t sure what he was doing. But I was thinking, I don’t know where this is really going. And then, finally, he proceeded to the next levels of this seduction. At this point I thought, What should I do? Should I just sit here quietly and let him do whatever he wants to do and not get hurt? I wasn’t a brutally strong guy and neither was he, but I felt paralyzed. So I just decided, No, I’m not going to do anything. I won’t resist. I’ll just let him do what he needs to do and then make a decision as to whether or not I want to pursue this relationship afterwards. So I did. He drove me to a bus station later on and to be honest I don’t remember if that was the last time I saw him, or if I continued speaking with him or not after that.

What you’re speaking about is such a terrible experience of dismemberment. You disconnected. You basically said, “Well whatever happens, happens. I’ll deal with it later.”

And you know what I think is so amazing about rape, or sexual abuse, or whatever term you want to apply to it—is how subtle the effects are. They are incredibly subtle. There was very little physical pain involved in all this. It wasn’t comfortable. He did bugger me. That wasn’t pleasant. But it wasn’t horrible. He wasn’t a seven foot eight basketball player, thank God! But the psychological impact was pretty immediate.

Did it affect your decision to continue in radio?

That was the first casualty. In those days a radio star was a bigger deal than it is today. My parents in particular, who were raised in the 30s and the 40s, viewed a radio personality as almost bigger than a movie star. So to them the notion of their own humble immigrant-born son being one of these people was ridiculous. There was no support there, and there was very little support among other peers. I wasn’t a good student at school, so to have the confidence to pursue radio on a strictly business or an artistic level was shaky to begin with. After this happened, I started to look around at all the other radio characters and think, Well they’re just a bunch of fags, aren’t they? Why would I want to be one of them?

And so I bottled it up and called it a day. There were times, years later, and I’m talking three, four, five, six, seven, ten years later, that the dream would come back. It would always come back to say, You know you should try it anyway, try it anyway, try it anyway. I would try it in a half-hearted way. I would take the odd course, or call the odd talk show, just to hear my voice again, and that kind of thing. But it was pretty much a buried thing.

It’s astounding to me that years after your radio dream went under, you encountered a fairy tale that graphically depicted all the subtleties you’re talking about. Her hands were severed and she was driven into the wilderness just like you were driven into the food industry.

And very quickly. Despite her claims to her father about not deserving a life of opulence, the maiden finds herself with a King on a fabulous farm. It didn’t take long for her to go from one kind of comfort scenario which was her home, to the next one which was the farm. I did the same thing. I went from a relatively comfortable home and went directly into the life of the “man-made man,” the man who works hard, the workaholic. That was my farm. My safety was there.

That’s an interesting term, the “man-made man.” What do you mean by that?

I don’t believe that men in our society, even now, in early 21st century society, are the animals that they’re trained to be. I believe that we have that side in us, but I just don’t believe that we are by nature, dominated, or meant to be dominated, by such ruthlessness. And such a calculating, hard, mathematical, logical, black and white, right and wrong, way of seeing life.

When you think of most initiation rites, no matter what type of initiation rites, and no matter what age … these are things that have been long accepted by men amongst men. You know, if you’re trying out for a hockey team at the age of 8, you’ll probably find a piece of shit stuck in your helmet one day from somebody that brought in a dog turd and stuck it in your helmet. You put the helmet on and everybody laughs, right? These are rites of passage, initiation, har har, chummy-chummy, now you’re part of the team, welcome, you know. And then the next day you find yourself picking up the piece of shit for the next guy. It’s that kind of cycle, and that kind of thinking—that this is brotherhood, that I find disturbing. It leads to creating this “man-made man,” this machine.

As I go on in life, it’s incredible how narrow the rule book is for that “man-made man.” Really, it wouldn’t be as thick as the New Testament. It’s just a tiny little “play-by-play” thing and you can say, well, if you put this line in here, you can expect the answer to be x and then put this line here and y. Especially if any type of macho challenge is being offered up.

The way we tell jokes, the way we enter a boardroom and tell two or three dirty jokes so the boys can relax and then afterwards, you get down to the brass tacks and hammer out the details of the next contract, call it straight and shoot between the eyes and everybody’s on their edge, and then by the end of the meeting, somebody closes with another dirty joke. We all leave and laugh and go out for martinis and tell more jokes. It’s all a very narrow playbook, and it can be applied whether you’re working on a construction site or a boardroom or in a restaurant or anywhere else. That’s what I call the “man-made man,” the man who is constructed to be an effective, net contributor to the society. Whether he’s a soldier, businessman, father, consumer, he’s made to be a net contributor to the financial machine. A functionary.

And is there a loss there?

What is he ignoring? What is he not acknowledging? Where has the rest of him gone? The Handless Maiden tells that story. When I came to understand what the maiden’s role was in that story, then I, as the King, realized what I really needed to do, as opposed to dealing with men in positions of authority, I needed to embrace that woman, that maiden, and welcome her back into my life.

So how did the story—I know this is probably a complex question, but … how did you experience the transformation, the regeneration of the maiden’s hands?

Through the Storytelling Journey in particular, and then, frankly, Michelle, through our correspondence that went on well beyond that, I continued to embrace the artist. Through the exploration of the story and the fictitious twists I took with the King’s journey and so on, I really began connecting to the writer in me. The artist started to make a comeback. I didn’t know I could write. I really didn’t know I could write.

But I had still rejected the notion of going back into radio. Despite the fact that I understood intellectually what this was about. I’d made the connection, but I hadn’t healed it yet—certainly not on a professional level. I did start to involve myself as a volunteer with CIUT radio in December 2004, after the Storytelling Journey was over, but that was once a week, and it was awkward, and not particularly satisfying. I didn’t see radio as my future, really. I didn’t have faith in it yet.

I had also just simultaneously finished a class to become a corporate trainer and that is what I thought I would do. And at the time I thought to myself, Well this is a great marriage of the two. I would be able to tap into the resources within myself that were now awakening, the writing and the presentation skills and all those things, and at the same time not jeopardize my income and my future. I wanted to find a way, a very logical way of blending the skills that I had developed in the man-made man world and the artistic world.

When did radio enter, then, as a real possibility? Because now you’re obviously in radio, so …

I started to do more and more as a volunteer with the radio station. I started recording live music shows, and establishing a connection with an artistic community. I put together a program which they aired every Tuesday night, called It’s Alive. As a radio personality, I was still very stiff. But I loved the people I was meeting. I was surprised by the depth of art and talent that existed in the community, and was encouraged by it. Not a lot of income was being made, and yet I saw example after example after example of people who were remaining faithful to their art, despite everything.

But I didn’t accept radio as my future for quite awhile. For a year or so I did this corporate training thing which was an absolute joke—I didn’t ever truly buy into it, and I felt unengaged. I wasn’t part of the boardroom meetings, I didn’t tell the jokes, I didn’t want to break any balls, I just went about the minimum amount of work. I had never done that with any work—but I found it cold and useless and callous, and very unsatisfying. But the money was good, and we needed the money. Finally, by February of 2006, I made a decision to leave the corporate world, and put everything I had into radio.

Those artists, those musicians, they inspired me. It wasn’t like I had a big dinner discussion with eight of them and they said, “Frank, what are you doin’?” It was subtle. When I started getting better with the program, they would be very gracious in their thanks, and they would say, “You’re excellent at what you’re doing. Why aren’t you doing more of this?”

The other reason, again, Michelle, is you. The memory I have is driving back from Ottawa, through Oshawa with my blackberry, with one hand on the steering wheel of my truck and the other hand typing out a text message to you with my one thumb that was free while driving 140 kilometres an hour. A job had opened up at the radio station for an assistant to the program director. It was a secretarial job and they had never ever ever hired anyone but a young pretty girl in that role. I asked you if I should apply with that text message, and you responded by a message of your own through your email with the word YES in capitals repeated about fifty times YESYESYESYESYES.

I thought, How am I going to be able to justify this poor income? And then I started thinking of all those artists out there. That job didn’t materialize, but a few months later I thought, I don’t care, I’m going to do whatever I have to do. I quit the job and Helen and I sold the real estate that we had at the time to liquidate our financial assets. I put that liquidity into a bank account and said, well this will buy us about two years of insurance that if I absolutely cannot make radio work we can still feed ourselves. I made that decision February 6 and by March and April I was already earning money at the radio station in other capacities.

I learned that complete devotion to one’s art is the only way to test and to measure whether or not this is something that one can do. To half-test the water, put the foot in it, that kind of thing, was never going to add up to Jack squat. I just had to do what I had to do. And now I can’t conceive of another way of making a living.

But it was a slow reconnection, because a long process of destruction, or suppression, wasn’t going to be healed overnight. We live in a world where we think, okay, I’ve made the conscious connection, now everything should just go tickety-boo. But it doesn’t work that way.

That period of time must have been a bit harrowing for your wife Helen. What was it like for her to liquidate your shared assets and “go for broke”?

If I was to associate Helen with any character in the story, it would be with the King's mother. Helen is very connected to the universe’s energy, and wise beyond her years. She rarely casts judgment on people who repeatedly get themselves into trouble. It's as though she's been those people, and understands them on an empathetic level. I have been so blessed by Helen—she’s been my best friend, lover and spouse for nearly 30 years. During this time, though, I really did fear telling her about my decision. I feared she would finally leave me, that this would be the last straw, and actually began to quietly prepare for that.

My desire to do radio once and for all was so powerful that I would have accepted whatever Helen's reaction would have been. Thankfully, she believed in me, and my radio dream. She believed that ultimately, things would work out in the end, and so far, they have.

Now you’re in a position where you’ve not only recovered your own artistic abilities, but you’re also supporting a lot of other artists at the same time. You’re in a role of authority—the same authority that abused you when you were young. So it’s really quite a cycle that you’ve gone through.

It is and it’s one I take with great care. I don’t deal with people quite as young as I was when I was molested but I do deal with young people. The average age being 21, I guess. People who work with me on the radio show often look at me as a father figure. And there are those who are vulnerable—I’m not talking about sexual abuse here, I’m talking about just abusing their goodwill because they’re volunteers. I’m very careful about not doing that, and making damn sure that if they do want to offer something, they know what they’re getting themselves into. And then making sure they’re not overstepping their abilities and heading for a negative experience as opposed to a rewarding one. I take that very seriously.

It seems almost essential and purposeful, the journey that you’ve been on, Andy, in the sense that the Devil is still out there. The Devil is still in the world. And everything you’ve learned has brought you to this place of awareness and responsibility. It’s quite a different King in the end.

Yes, very much so. And I don’t profess to be the perfect King! It’s a constant battle. You have tried and true ways of doing things, but you have to step back and think, I must think of another way of approaching this particular situation. Sometimes my old ways have emerged and caused me problems. It always ends up hurting myself. But it’s interesting you mention my good friend the Devil as well. Because he’s such a part of the story—a character in the story that I fell in love with. I found that, as horrific as it all sounds, chopping hands and molesting and all these other things we’re talking about—the Devil to me represented the force of change and randomness. We live in a world that is never the same from one day to the next and the Devil to me represents that character who is the dark side of God … he’s the Mr. Hyde of God’s Dr. Jekyll. I found it important to acknowledge him, and to acknowledge his value. To dismiss the Devil and just revere God is an imbalanced way of looking at nature. The Devil is just part of the same animal, the same force. And maybe you don’t love him and cherish him, maybe you do have a bit of a moment of “f— you, Devil” but at the same time to not acknowledge him is to me part of what would help one bury a certain part of one’s own self.

I found the Devil in this story to be wonderful comic relief as I went through the process, as I told the story. He was a critical character—I could not imagine the story being told without his role in it. I just loved this character.

It’s amazing how the devilish characters are often the funniest ones, which is something you don’t discover until you get into them.

Yes. And also, as I mentioned earlier, he had rules. Which I found ironic, you know. Three times and that’s it, you’re shit out of luck there, Devil, sorry. Then all he can do is sulk. I kept asking myself in that writing process, what did the Devil really want from the Handless Maiden, anyway? What was his motivation? Then I concluded—the Devil can never ever EVER have her innocence. He lives for that purpose, just to set out to taste innocence. In one of my writings I wrote about the Devil encountering the King during his seven year journey. And the first words out of the Devil’s mouth are, “So tell me, King, what does innocence taste like? How does it feel to have those silver hands digging into your back?”

I feel for him. I feel a certain amount of pity. He gets a lot of glory but he sure as heck doesn’t have what he wants or needs. He can’t have it. It’s just not his role, sorry. On the other hand, he’s got all the man-made glory, all that stuff—it’s all there for the Devil’s taking.

I felt for all the characters. I thought about the Handless Maiden’s father. Any rape victim will have some kind of a guilt complex. You know, how did I get myself into this situation where I found myself in this house in Hudson on June 24, 1976? What kind of a dumb silly boy was I to accept this invitation, and how blind and naïve? Why didn’t I run? Why didn’t I fight? All those questions. What was the lure? What did I think I had to gain from my relationship with this evil man? There was a risk that I took for some reason or another. And I think the father, having made the deal with the Devil to sell his apple tree for all the riches in the world, was very much the part of my conscience that was saying, If I play my cards right, I’m a step away from being in radio. And I have to take some responsibility for that. To me that’s what the father represents—he’s a little naïve and a little quick to jump at the first dangling of temptation.

It’s really quite extraordinary that all this started with you picking a card that depicted a maiden without hands.

It was almost miraculous that I picked that thing up, that I was there, that this particular story ended up being what it was to me. No matter what happens, if this whole radio experience dries up tomorrow and I never find another job in that field again, and I have to go back to working in some other capacity, heaven forbid, but if that should happen, nobody could take this experience away now. The experience has happened. And I can say that four years later, or whatever it’s been … three and a half now, I could not imagine another way that I could have healed. There are other ways, obviously, people have these experiences through religious epiphanies or through work with a brilliant therapist, or whatever ways people find themselves coming out and making themselves whole again … but the whole experience has opened me up to the concept of spirituality. I had none when I first met you. None, zero. I didn’t believe in anything beyond what I could see, feel, touch and hear. But I have evidence that this is effective. Truly, truly effective. And for me I can’t see where anything else could have been. No religion would have done it for me. I wouldn’t have approached the religion with any degree of faith.

I feel very privileged to hear your story, Andy. It’s something we hardly ever hear men speak about. I guess that’s a whole other subject, but would you like to comment on why it has been important for you to share this story?

I believe that the only way to defeat a stigma is by exposing it, repeatedly, demystifying it, and slowly taking away its dark powers. I think we need to air more stories like mine for the sake of future generations.

Thank you, Andy. Thank you for your candor.

Thank you.

Home People in Myth Andy Frank

Copyright © 2008 Michelle Tocher