The man who saved Sammy Davis Jr from being sucked out of a train has himself been sucked out of the giant 5:46 to Kidderminster via Clapham Junction that is life. He was a buxom man who wore blue suits and sweated a lot, so it's of little surprise he finally died of a heart attack at the shock that he was choking to death on a piece of chicken in London's finest chicken-based eatery. He leaves behind a wife and two children, and takes with him his youngest daughter whom he managed to grab and throttle whilst he was dying. Slim 'Quick' Drying, who died today.
He was not a man for whom words can adequately describe his je ne sais quoi-iness, so I guess we'd better leave it at that and get on to the abnormal events that shaped and moulded his obese frame into a sort of shaped and moulded fat person. Back in 1962 - the Summer of Love, for him at least - he was thrown off the set of Rollerball for bodychecking another extra a little too hard. Blood was drawn, costumes needed to be washed, sets needed to be hosed down. All in all his moment of overactive rollerskating cost the producers an estimated $16, and this was back in the day when $16 was really worth something. A stand needed to be taken, and they were the ones with the legs; he was kicked off the set repeatedly.
Of course they wanted their money back - which red-blooded American male wouldn't? He'd paid back $14 of it when an old friend got out of prison and said he needed Quick's help for just one more bank job, so that his wife and child might be allowed to afford oxygen. Faced with their rapidly blueing little faces, Quick did what any red-blooded American male would do: he said yes, then reneged on the deal and paid back the film company their $2. They died, his friend went back to prison for miscellaneous chair offences, he assuaged his guilt by repeatedly penetrating a nurse's uniform.
Attractive women in uniform are no substitute for Sammy Davis Jr on a train, unless we analyse the Freudian imagery (Freud himself always took taxis, big black ones from London). Quick did what so many have done before him and made sure his life was a series of unrelated, boring incidents; he took to following the great one around in the hope that he might see him aboard a train. Years passed and Sammy Davis Jr rode hundreds of trains, but Quick kept going back to the unrelated, boring nurse incident, missing Sammy every single time. She died, he scraped off the mouldy bits until he could scrape no more, and then he finally got to see what he was aiming to see. Cool huh?
And Sammy almost got sucked out, but he saved him. And now Quick's dead. And that hurts, man.