by William Lobb
The silhouettes in the window looked down at them. It was a cool, moonlit night, and it was easy to see everything on the ground. Frankie was angry and humiliated, never a good place for him and one he found himself in a little too often.
Frankie crawled across the ground to Billy’s car, a brand new Corvette. Frankie hated the car almost as much as he hated Billy. He grabbed a few big rocks and started smashing the hot, red and white, shiny ‘Vette, while screaming to Billy, calling him all sort of unfriendly names and body parts.
The front door of the house flew open. Billy came charging at Frankie, exactly as Frankie had hoped he would. Frankie got up, dove into Billy’s gut, and they both flew to the ground. This wasn’t a pretty fight: Billy was wasted, and Frankie was a little insane. In seconds, Frankie was kneeling on Billy’s chest and pummeling his face with hard, well-placed punches. Blood began to flow. Frankie tasted Billy’s blood as it spattered on his face. As each punch landed on Billy’s face, a deep satisfaction in Frankie only made him want to hit harder and deeper. With his last punch, Frankie felt like he broke a bone in his hand.
Frankie heard another gunshot. He swears to this day he felt the bullet fly past his face. Billy lay underneath him, motionless, looking quite dead. Frankie looked to his right and saw Pam, his friend, the girl he had come to rescue, holding the gun by her waist, a finger on the trigger.
Frankie stood to approach her. She raised the rifle to her eye and was about to shoot him when Tyson came screaming out of the bushes and launched between them, himself scared to death and realizing this act of heroism was totally out of character and a complete mistake. Tyson stood there, arms extended, like a cop stopping traffic in both directions. He started shaking and pissing himself.
Like a statue, Frankie stood, paralyzed with confusion.
Pam dropped the gun and ran over to Billy.
Tyson grabbed Frankie and dragged him back to the Dodge, shoved him inside, and ran around to the driver’s side. He started the car before he was in the seat and took off out of there, gravel and dirt flying.
In the distance, they could hear a siren but could not tell if it was a cop or an ambulance. As they drove away, it dawned on Tyson that he was now, in fact, quite possibly an accessory to murder. All Frankie would say was, “He’s not dead. He was still breathing. Just drive, please; just drive.” The rest of the drive back to the bar was in silence, except for Tyson’s heavy breathing.
They stopped at a gas station for beer and cigarettes. The guy at the register knew Tyson and commented on the blood on Frankie’s face. He joined them outside, and Frankie passed around beers.
As they stood there in the chilly air, Frankie took a long drag off his smoke, coughed so hard he thought was about to pass out, and took a longer drink of his beer. He looked up at the moon and thought about Pam. Finally, he said, “I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe she wants to be with that asshole.”
At this second, Tyson completely lost his mind. “You are probably an hour away from being arrested for murder—me with you—and all you can fucking worry about is who is fucking Pam?”
Frankie rolled his fingers into the palm of his hand, evaluating if that hand could, in fact, be broken again. He said he was really just pissed off about Pam, but part of him was broken.
I’ve wondered at times how long a person can survive with a constantly broken heart, with a pulverized spirit and an empty soul, or perhaps no soul. Pam could do that without intent, simply by being Pam. She was the party-waiting-to-happen. She was everyone’s friend, including Frankie’s. Frankie never saw it that way.
The guys finished their beers and drove back to the bar. For a second, Tyson thought he heard Frankie crying. When he asked him if he was okay, Frankie’s response was simply “Shut up, Kevin.”
They drove down the nearly abandoned avenue in silence and pulled into The Lovely. Jack, the bartender, was out back with a couple of girls smoking a joint. Jack and Frankie were not close friends, but they kind of understood each other. They shared the same code. Jack followed Frankie into the bar, leaving the girls with Kevin. Then he walked behind the bar. Frankie silently sat there staring at the dark, stained, ancient oak bar top. He held his hands on the raised edge like he was holding on to keep from falling.
Jack asked him how the hand felt. It looked broken. He handed him a shot of vodka and a Rolling Rock and stood there waiting, silently.
“It hurts, Jack, it hurts really fucking bad, motherfucking bitch, what the fuck.” Frankie and Pam had a long and twisted friendship. She worked, occasionally, as a prostitute to pay the bills. Frankie was always telling himself he was okay with it, but he never was. He fell in love with her hard and fast. He thought that maybe it was love-at-first-sight, but he never believed in that crap.
Still, the first time he saw her, he was mesmerized. They were young and she was a cashier in a grocery store. Even a few years later, when he stood outside her apartment, watching as another guy went into her apartment and closed the door, the reality of who she was and what she did for a living—part time, of course—never really sank in with Frankie.
From his first glance of her, he never felt himself worthy of her. That was the day he put her on a pedestal, one she did not want or accept. Pam liked Frankie; in fact, she liked Frankie a lot, and she wished he would calm down a little. He seemed to be way more invested in her than she was in him.
Back at Billy’s house, Frankie had somehow fallen off a cliff tonight, realizing that all those annoying voices in his head, the ones telling him to see her for what she was, had been true. He sank deep. It felt a lot like falling, endlessly, not particularly fast or slow, an endless fall from which he could never return. He might never hit bottom, just fall aimlessly, endlessly through time. Pam had literally pulled the ground out from underneath him, and this night, sitting in The Lovely, inhaling shots of vodka as fast as Jack could pour them, Frankie knew, but could not fully accept, that the woman who was the love of his life, the one he would actually have taken a bullet for, was none of that.
The realization she had been fucking Billy actually upset Frankie more than her gunshot had. He lived every day of his life with this nagging denial, but there were flashes during which he believed that she loved him. He was committed to her totally, which made little or no sense to anyone else who knew the saga, because, well, she was kind of a prostitute.
Deep in his soul, Frankie thought he could fix that. It would only take money and time and a scheme. He was pretty convinced he could fix anything with the right scheme. As he watched Frankie get drunk, Jack told me he actually thought he could see him getting sadder, instead of getting bolder; as if this cloud, this pervasive mist of reality that Frankie could always outrun, keeping it, at times, only inches from his heels, had finally overtaken him. It was not unlike watching someone suffocate, but there was nothing to do or say, simply watch as the man he knew seemed to change.
Jack and a handful of others had waited for this day. Pam was not a bad girl or a bad person, but she was not the woman Frankie had placed so high on the pedestal.
Frankie wrote this about Pam one time:
Find the one who makes you shake just thinking about her.
Find the one you can’t stop thinking about, at all, for a second.
Find the one who makes you feel like a fool, but you don’t care.
Find the one who stops time, the one who, when you are with her, nothing else exists. Find the one who you would crawl over broken glass to be with. Then think about that and realize you’d actually do it.
Find the one who changes you in ways you don’t understand or even like.
Find the one who makes you fight, every day, who makes you try to deny how much you love her every day.
Find the one who makes you hate how much you need her and want her.
Find the one who, when you touch her, it feels like you’ve been pun
ched in the heart, and you lose your breath and a little of your mind.
Find the one who makes you question your sanity, often; the one who makes you worry you may lose her because you know in your heart you are not worthy of her.
After reading that the night Frankie wrote it, sitting alone at a darkened corner of the bar, huddled with a pencil and paper he’d borrowed from Jack, Jack said to him, “Frankie, that is beautiful and touching and total bullshit. Pam is not that girl.”
Frankie glared at Jack for a long time, in silence, sucking on beers and vodka. Jack’s words never left Frankie. That night, I think they may have started to solidify and ring true, to hit home.
This night, the night he felt the bullet pass, in a way, felt like Frankie’s first defeat in the ring, the first of many. Something just reached inside of him and snuffed out his strength. He sat there feeling completely vacant, not even angry or sad, but empty, hollow. We were sitting next to him. In the silence, we could almost hear the sound of glass breaking, and the moaning sound of a great metal structure as its foundation collapsed and it slowly, agonizingly, crashed onto itself and into the ground. Frankie sat there in total silence, rolling the now-empty Rolling Rock beer bottle in small circles on the wooden bar, staring off into nothingness.
He had always questioned whether his love for her was real and healthy, or an obsession born out of a need never identified. His love, or whatever it was, instantly changed into a feeling of the worst kind of betrayal. There was no tear in his eye as he sat there silently, occasionally shuddering, as if his mind and his body had begun to accept and absorb what had happened in the hour before. Under the stubble of a two-day beard, his skin appeared ashen, ghost like.
I found something years later that Frankie had written about this night. He wrote that this was the night that he realized that the unspoken, but cherished, promise was, in fact, a lie. It would take years for him to realize he didn’t lose the girl. He lost his illusion of who the girl was.
Losing the dream is what took Frankie down that night.
Chapter Three:
Life After Pam—
A Beginning
Frankie, the warrior poet, is now on his way to a place that not many, if any, men dare to go.
For a few fleeting seconds, Jack wanted to reach across the bar and pull his friend back from the edge, but then he realized there was no point: this fall had probably started on the day Frankie and Pam met. This plummet was destined to occur from that first moment. Tonight’s events accelerated Frankie to the final plunge, into a darkness that Jack feared his friend would never, ever emerge from.
Frankie stood up, picked up a Rolling Rock bottle, emptied it, threw it at Jack, missing him completely. The bottle fell harmlessly to the ground. Frankie screamed “Fuck you” and staggered out the door. He stopped outside, as he noticed the first of many State Police cars now patrolling the streets of Middletown.
Jack joined him at the door, smiled and put his arm around Frankie. “You missed,” he laughed. “You’d better get your ass out of here fast. I think they may be looking for you”
Jack half-dragged Frankie out the back door where Kevin was still hanging out with the two girls.
Jack yelled, “Get him out of here, now!” He pushed Frankie toward Kevin and shoved the two of them into the Dodge. Poor Kevin’s night and his dreams of a threesome with the two hot, stoned girls was pretty much ruined now. Truth be known, they were ruined from the start.
Kevin, now obviously really scared, drove them carefully out of town. Frankie had an old family friend who lived on the outskirts of the city. He had to get there as soon as he could, he would know what to do. Kevin suddenly panicked, “Shit, we should not be in this car, my car. I’m as fucked as you are.” They agreed to split.
Actually, Frankie decided they would split. He didn’t really care what Tyson decided to do. Frankie was going to hitchhike to the old woman’s house, then off to his sometime-friend Eddie’s house. Eddie could get him work and move him out of the area. Frankie needed both right now.
It was a long walk to the old lady’s house, and no one was picking him up on that cold October night. Sometimes, he would call the old lady Cora. He’d call her this when he forgot himself and was soon rewarded with a slap to the face.
By the time he got to her house, the sun would be up. At least he would get her to make him breakfast. A cup of coffee on the slanting table sounded really good to him now.
As he walked, he thought about the old woman and his grandfather. His grandfather had quite a reputation in the county, fully earned, by the way. He thought about fighting, how much the old woman hated it. At one time, Frankie actually did try to please her and make his grandmother proud of him. That mission failed early on. Now, until he could get out of the state—and maybe the country—all Frankie could do was simply keep moving forward and try not to get arrested.
When he was younger, back when he gave a shit, Frankie would seriously ponder everything. There were flecks of brilliance and compassion in him. Pam broke something in him that night, something deep within his psyche. It was a subtle change. On the surface, there was never much going on in his mind or in his special little world, but if you got him alone, there was something about him. A sense of humanity, humility.
Before, you could beat Frankie to death, but you could never defeat him. That night, as that bullet grazed his face, I watched him in defeat. It was ugly and disconcerting. I knew, we all knew, it wasn’t the bullet. It was the shooter that defeated him.
I think every fight took Frankie down a little bit more, and a person could count his broken bones like most people could count coins in a jar. Something was always broken. Never really seemed to matter. He kept doing what he wanted to do, almost as if whatever bone he’d broken that month was only another condition of living. Like catching a cold or having a bad day at work.
He really wasn’t much of a fighter. He was more of a defender. Frankie would stand there in the ring and get pummeled, endlessly, but it was very hard to knock him down. I mentioned this to him once: “It’s like you never win; you just get your ass kicked,” but it didn’t seem to matter. That’s what he did. Someone suggested to him once that possibly the fighting was a form of self-loathing. I think that might’ve been a little too deep, a little too intense, to describe our friend Frankie; he was simply there, a perpetual chip on his shoulder, always looking for a fight.
Tonight, that fight seemed to be gone. He commented that he had to go to the old lady’s house. Perhaps this was another form of self-punishment, of beating himself up.
Chapter Four:
A Visit To Grandma’s
The night was cold and pitch black, lots of stars, no moon. A solid, icy wind blew in from the north. Frankie was successfully drunk. It would be a good night to be outside in the air and be drunk, with maybe a pint of brandy to make the evening pass more smoothly. Some moments Frankie felt perfectly drunk. He’d reach that point where things made sense, where the voices in his head were silenced and satisfied, where he felt he had a purpose, where he fit into this universe.
Unfortunately, tonight was not going to be one of those perfect nights. It was about a fifteen-mile walk to his grandmother Cora’s, and he was freezing. As cars passed, he got more and more pissed off, but at least they weren’t the cops. He really needed to get a car again, but often he was too drunk to drive.
He caught himself stumbling a few times—not good, not good at all. He walked about eight miles in two hours; there was no direct route to her house. If he got back to Goshen, he had a few friends he could hit up for a ride, but it didn’t seem a great idea to go anywhere near Goshen.
On the Sarah Wells Trail, ironically named for an ancient relative, his fifteenth-generation great grandmother, a car finally stopped, a car load of drunken teenage girls. Frankie leaned in the window, evaluating this situation, the pros and cons: If the girls are
under eighteen and he does anything, it could mean jail time. Is the driver too fucked up to drive? He wasn’t interested in a party. He really needed to get to his grandma’s house.
The car was a yellow Dodge Road Runner, about ten years old. Still a hot car. A pretty and very drunk girl opened the door and pulled the seatback forward to let Frankie in. He climbed into the back and sat next to another cute girl. He offered to buy them booze if they would drive him to Washingtonville. Thus, a deal had been struck. He was kind of hoping to get laid, and yet, this night had been eventful enough. He hopped out at the liquor store and walked inside, bought himself a pint of blackberry brandy and purchased four bottles of Boone’s Farm wine for the girls.
Frankie climbed back in the car, and as they started to drive off, he pulled out a baggie and began to roll a joint. It was late, about 11:00 p.m. The old lady would already be asleep. He might as well ride around and party with the girls awhile.
They rode all over Orange County, listening to the radio, talking, joking, and smoking Frankie’s weed. At one point he had his hand in the panties of the girl next to him, the highlight of the night. There were few things Frankie enjoyed more than driving around the back roads of Orange County, getting wasted with friends, and listening to music. It was like being inside a smoky, loud bubble. Dim lights, loud music, sweet-smelling girls, and brandy and wine, a kind of horrible mix. The conversation was broken and unfocused and difficult.
Even though Frankie was only in his early twenties, he suddenly realized he had nothing in common with these teenage girls, other than a mutual desire to get laid, but this was not the night. It was about 3:00 a.m. when the girls dropped him at the old lady’s house. He kissed and hugged his new friends, promised to stay in touch, a lie.
He walked to the front porch of the house and found a place to lie down on the cold concrete floor, where at least he was out of the wind. The old woman was always an early riser. She would be up by five, in just a few hours.