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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.

Frank Ferrante (right) with Café Gratitude manager Ryland Engelhart, the man who convinced him to take part in a sort of reverse Super Size Me.

Photo: Nucci Studio

One cold, rainy evening in 2006, Frank Ferrante wandered into Café Gratitude in San Francisco looking for a cup of coffee. Soon enough, Ferrante learned this place didn’t have coffee, but only served raw food.

“Raw food?!” Ferrante says, recounting that fateful night from the corner table of the restaurant’s San Rafael outpost. (Café Gratitude has four locations in the Bay Area of California, including two in San Francisco.) “I didn’t get it.”

What he did get was way more than he bargained for and includes May I Be Frank?, a compelling documentary (read more about it on mayibefrankmovie.com) starring none other than Ferrante himself undergoing a physical and spiritual transformation.

It all started during one of his first visits, when Ferrante attracted the attention of a server who, after learning about his customer’s situation, asked if he’d like to transform his life—on camera—using the wholesome food and spiritual fare the aspiring filmmaker had been raised on. Ferrante agreed.

Growing up in the 1960s in a working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood had been a challenge for Ferrante, a self-described artistic outsider more interested in literature than sports. When he discovered amphetamines, the rush made him feel “so present” he thought surely this was the secret to getting through life. “I wanted to design new bridges and write operas—all by Friday,” he recalls. Ferrante got into LSD. Then he tried heroin, and the dark times began.

As a junkie, Ferrante was arrested several times, and twice ended up in mental institutions. He tried to clean up with methadone, and ended up dependent on Valium. At one low point, Ferrante swallowed a bottle of pills and jumped in front of a subway train. But confused by the drugs, he hopped onto the wrong tracks. Unscathed, he was pulled back onto the platform, and went into treatment. He never touched a needle again, but for a decade Ferrante abused alcohol and cocaine. Eventually, he got sober for real in a 12-step recovery program.

But Ferrante was still miserable. Diagnosed with hepatitis C, he’d become resigned to a rigorous regimen of pills and injections that left him depressed and exhausted. His interactions with his ex-wife and children were strained. His relationship with his girlfriend had ended. And he weighed in at almost 300 pounds (136 kilos). Not very healthy, in body or mind.

So when he saw how friendly everyone was at Café Gratitude, he made it a habit to go. He’d sit at a shiny silver table behind the picture windows, or on a warm day, in the foliage-filled backyard garden, the smells of quinoa and kale mingling with the low din of voices and squeals of traffic.

Ryland Engelhart—son of cafÉ Gratitude founders Matthew and Terces Engelhart—noticed Ferrante right away, and was drawn to his “big, masculine personality,” which reminded him, Engelhart says, of some of his uncles. “Beneath the bombastic voice, I just saw this huge, loving heart,” says the former server, now the manager of the San Rafael establishment.

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