vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 30

  Believing is seeing. The phrase lingered in various recesses of Frank’s mental state as he rode the taxi, sat on the plane, rode a second taxi to a hotel in Miami—Holiday Inn: bustling middle-management clientele, “Doing America’s Business”

  What do I believe?

  In the morning he woke to an emptiness within his stomach, within his mind, within his soul...rose into this emptiness: the walls were simply walls, the room just a room, the view outside, just sunlight. “It must be America.”

  At breakfast, spooning into his emptiness, sensing himself as a dark hole, a bottomless pit…wan laughter at a crushed echo of mirth from somewhere, “No longer empty?”

  A sense of stepping-out-of...images of mud dripping boots, sloshing through sleeted slush into and around a revolving door...poop into the potty...footnotes falling out of a book as he picks it up...slumping beside a woman, no longer “inside”….

  Brad had the tickets waiting. The Hollywood manila envelope with a thousand in it: ten C-notes. At the check-in, another envelope: another several thousand. “Where am I going?” to himself, thanking the Bell Captain: tipping him a ten...“Big Shot!” silently chuckles his ears. Today?

  On cue, the phone rings. “Mr. Frakes. Frank Frakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your car is waiting.” Sure. Okay. Right. My chauffeur!

  Thoughts of meeting his dad—Alive! Again!—over-rode his conscious desire to learn the details of his “secret life.” Frank wasn’t sure that he believed Campbell’s tale—after all, his dad simply told him to “Come.” Like my old man, sparse of tongue. Which fact had been another chill witness.

  Who wouldn’t want to think that the worst day, the most miserable, rejected, lonely, abandoning day of one’s life actually didn’t happen?

  Orphan. Frank could never accept applying that word to himself. Its finality made him wish that he had been as spiritual as his father often said his mother had been. “Afterlife. That’s what’s real, Francis, the afterlife.” This he does remember—actually was his most poignant memory now that he confronts her memory in this new light.

  “She’s dead. But she’s here. When we pray, she’s here.” He never fully believed that his father believed this...it accounted for why Frank rarely prayed.

  As they drove towards the ocean the possibility had not dawned on Frank. Not until the driver passed through several gates and drove within a hundred yards of Pier 37.

  Christ! A boat!

  Of course he had told them, so he checks his past dialogue. Must’ve told them? Dad would surely know.

  It was the boat which made him really stop: hard-pressing the brakes, not minding that the tires might blow. “Master Swimmer.” “Red Cross Certificate.” But only because I’m scared shitless of the goddam fucking water. Didn’t I tell the fucking Major, that?

  Frank didn’t want to get out of the car, but how could he stay? What would he say to the driver? Was he a driver or what? Spy, agent, kidnapper?

  Stepping out and looking for Brad—Look where?

  “Hell, they’re looking at me!” All of a sudden he knew...it wasn’t for him to see them but for them to see him.

  He casually walks over to a wharf-side vendor...buys a cup of coffee. Paces slowly, self-consciously, back and across to a bench,, sits.

  “Headaches? Back ache? Shoot morphine! Naw! His mind erases the ad copy on the bench’s back: Bayer Aspirin Comforts and Relaxes!” Sits, waits, sips. It’s a wharf with tourists, Whatever.

  Pop the pill. His inner doctor. Who gives a fuck? Them?

  Brad had said, hand clutching a small bottle, “Thought you might need these.”

  So, he had listened!

  But Frank felt that he better not. Not risk not being at his peak. After all, he didn’t know the details. Things could change quickly and he didn’t want to be doped or fuzzy brained. Tired. Yeah, he could deal with tired. But right now he greatly feared loss of control.

  The boat at the wharf was not for him: no deep sea fishing, today!

  Within this first hour Brad arrives, waving like a long lost friend from the prow of an elegant yacht. Frank wants to wave and shout back, with a sophisticated lilt and hail: Party time?!

  But he knew from their first meeting that Brad defined “no-nonsense” guy. “Not a party animal,” heard by no one.

  After an hour-plus out from land—a landlessness which Frank refused to accept...forced himself to imagine that, if he wanted, that he could step off the yacht and onto a small island—where or how this small island got there was not a concern...he believed it would be there. Believing is seeing. So it would be there… after this second hour passes Brad comes, throwing like a knife, “Debriefing. Time for your debriefing.”

  So, here’s where it all truly became an event of the time...The times they are a changin’ (“Fuck Zimmerman!”). For if Frank had been writing up the episode for a magazine he would have said, “A story, an adventure, an escapade which defines the times. Secrecy. Secret War in Laos. J. Edgar Hoover’s Wire-tapping Secrets. Secret History of Indian Massacres. Secret Files of McCarythism. Secret Spies of the FBI: infiltrating Black Panthers, Black Muslims, Martin Luther King, Jesuit Seminaries, the soul of Thomas Merton, the psyche of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pussies of Lesbians, Anything Anti-War, Anything Non-Violent”…secret eyes, secret tongues, secret cocks: “Nothing Secret Anymore.”

  Welcome to the Secret Sixties!

  Even though it was the Seventies: that’s one of the Sixties’ Secrets—Frank is amusing himself. A reverie trying to escape the fact that he is swallowed inside a submarine. “Nuclear. Take you to the China Sea.” Thanks, Brad!

  Had to board it outside of America’s international waters: Why? I know, It’s a secret! Although Brad has assured and reassured him, “This comes from the top,” not pointing, but Frank could see up the organizational chart from their sub submerged in the tiny print at the bottom all the way up and through Congress, Attorney General, State, The President…not missing the grey areas—those written in invisible ink: NSA, CIA.

  He pops a pill.

  “Your dad’s behind the lines. Up north. In a villa of Hanoi.” Not pausing to explain how all this could be, certainly not why it was.

  “He’s safe.” Does Brad believe this? Calming me down?

  As if he hears Frank’s thoughts, “Your old man, I’m told…” but then he checks his tongue with a hard bite, freezes a flash smile, closes the briefing book—hands a map to Frank...slaps him on the back: real slap—Coach’s slap, Hit that line!

  What am I to make of this? Dad was in the Navy, sure. That’s where he learned electronics. “GI Bill made me who I am,” he was fond of saying, repeatedly, predictably. But who was Frank to quarrel? All he could see were the results. “A successful man,” he remembers his mom once saying—a moment of fond recall. Looking fondly at his dad...he having just given her a diamond ring. Frank remembers the brilliant flash of the cut.

  “Frakes Electronics.” Frank had ignored the photos lining the reception area’s walls until it had become important for him to tell—brag to!—his high school classmates about his dad, hoping, wanting his dad’s success to rub off on him—“Frakes Electronics. My dad started in a garage. After the war. My mom answered the phones. He went to college—the U—on the GI Bill. Like many. Now we’re in every state. Minnesota’s major federal contractor. My dad was Business Man of the Year in 1956.”

  Now, I’m to believe he’s always worked for the government? For the CIA or somebody? “A spook?”

  Pop a pill.

  It was proving too long a trip. Too long for the dope to keep him down. He just became dope-conscious: drugged but “aware,” not awake to many eyes but dope-knowing things, seeing beyond things...not missing that they were all inside this dick, this incredible fuck-the-world atomic dick!

  A passing joy was that the oceans were hot juicy pussies and that this
dick’s truly nuclear: a never-ending eruption of come, a fuck which has a half-life measured in millions of years…as they fucked through ocean and seas...The Great Wet!...his mind was in eternal orgasm, on a level which really blew his mind—feeling as never before a total dick: the hardest cock on the block: god cock…something like that...flitting images of Aaron’s Rod and Moses’ Stick and the pointy Great Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower and Mount Everest, somehow they all came to him and became him and he them...he pushing them up from the Earth, bucking them up from the ocean’s bottom: ramming ‘n rodding ‘n fucking ‘em good...creating the world: seeing himself as a worm, the creating worm, blowing hot sperm out of both ends: endlessly ejaculating…totally fucked, Man!

  Internal moan: Om! Ooooooooommmmmmmm!

  Orphan—I didn’t leave her, Man! I didn’t. Did I? Shit, what a fuck I am—fucking Pig, Man, if anyone’s a pig, it’s me, Man, ditching the broad, humping her and just flicking her ‘way, Man, what’s wrong with me, Man? Did I? Must be the booze, Man. Mean the drugs. It was The Man, Man. What could I do? Shit.

  The fresh air told him. They had arrived. At that spot on the map Brad had marked with a red X. Where?

  Why? Tell me why, dad.