A Suicide Deterred and A Dean Martin Bromide
My Song of the Week: “Somebody Loves You (Like Dino Said)”
One bright and gorgeous day in San Francisco, I helped to stop a man from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. His nickname was Froggie, but his real name was John. I knew him as a co-worker at a bike messenger company in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, bike messengers are couriers who traverse major city streets to deliver packages and anything else you can carry, from food to fur coats to legal filings.
There are many stories I could tell, zipping around the enigmatic streets of this city.
(This is my messenger ID photo in 1982). When I wasn’t playing music, the messenger world was my “day job” from 1978 to 1990, and it was the perfect pick-up job for misfits, world travelers, disenchanted scholars, and anyone hiding in plain sight.
Froggie was yet another character in this colorful cast of souls. He painted flowers on his face, based on his own unique numerological equation inspired by copious LSD intake. It could be said he was “a little lost lamb” in “the heart of the city,” to quote Nick Lowe’s song with that title.
This episode began in morning of Memorial Day 1987. I was the first one to check into the messenger base and, as I was walking past a bulletin board, I found a note that Froggie had pinned up; he knew I’d be the first to find it. He’d scrawled a cryptic message on a torn-out magazine ad for Marlboro cigarettes that depicted a happy gang of guys on the Golden Gate Bridge.
The day before, Froggie had been fired for assorted infractions (hitting on female co-workers, annoying and flaky behavior, and weirdness beyond urban liberal allowances for weirdness). In 90 seconds, a voice in my brain said, “He’s gonna jump!” The Golden Gate Bridge is a world-famous stop for suicides, and Froggie’s commute would be very short. I called the Golden Gate Bridge Police and got Sgt. Lacotti (God bless her) on the line. It was broad daylight, and the Bridge was loaded with people on holiday. Froggie was spotted throwing his clothes over the side and trying to talk a woman into jumping with him (they’d just met). Sure enough, The GGP nabbed him before his theatrics could go any further.
A year after the Bridge incident, Froggie/John turned up, sane and sober, and he thanked me for intervening in his suicidal episode. I don’t remember what we talked about but I do recall praying with him and giving thanks to a merciful God. It’s now a story of love coming through when no one could see it, except in the spiritual realm.
Little did Froggie/John know he’d end up in verse 3 of a song I wrote...my funk-soul ramble musically inspired by Joni Mitchell and The Staple Singers. The title is a refraction on the Dean Martin song “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”
Out in cyberspace there are clips of this song in the studio, live solo acoustic, and live w/band, recorded around the USA; here’s a 2024 live take:
Someday I aim to properly record it with a full band. Till then, the best take of it is the original acoustic version, produced by Mark Doyon for Wampus Multimedia….and remember, somebody somewhere loves you even when you can’t see it.
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