Is Frank dying? (June 23, 1982)

June 23, 1982

Jimmy thinks Frank is dying.

“You can’t be as ill as he is as often as he is and not think that,” Jimmy told me in the car after meeting me in Montclair yesterday.

The place is as significant as his statement since Jimmy and I grew close after Ginger moved out of his Pine Street apartment here.

For years prior to that, Frank was always the intermediary between us, as if he didn’t trust us together that we might become closer friends than he and Jimmy were, or even me and Frank.

But Frank haunts us, and I felt his presence as we strolled the streets of Montclair.

“Frank hasn’t been the same since he broke up with Laurie,” Jimmy said, referring to the 1968 to 1971 romance Frank engaged in.

Jimmy blamed Frank’s mother, especially after Frank moved back into the family residence in Haledon after the romance failed.

“Frank should have stayed 20 – no, 30 – miles away from that lady,” Jimmy said.

Later, after Jimmy and I went to West Paterson to conclude some business there, Jimmy said, “sometimes I want to tell that lady to stop shoveling shit on him.”

As angry as Jimmy sometimes got when dealing with Frank it is clear how much Jimmy still loves him.

“I don’t hate her,” Jimmy said. “I just think she ought to let Frank live his own life.”

After that, Jimmy said no more, no doubt thinking he had already said too much.

But we both felt this overriding sense of death in the air.

I didn’t think Frank’s mother as the problem. Frank did as much damage to his own life as his mother had, turning into someone different after the sixties came to an end, less hope, fewer dreams.

Since the early 1970s, Frank has been a creature of habit, locked into a job and a barroom social life. Maybe it was the fact that we never did get that piece of land we all wanted.

Frank didn’t even have many close friends anymore, mostly me, Jimmy, Garrick and the bartenders at bars where he sometimes hung out at night.

And then there was that incident with Ginger and the kiss I still cringe over, thinking I should have kept my mouth shut. Perhaps he and Ginger might have hit it off and he might be happy today.

Jimmy, of course, thinks Ginger is a Goddess, someone mortal men like Frank or even me should not even dream about interacting with, except perhaps to kneel before her and kiss her feet.

Frank for a brief time thought maybe Ginger was really human after all, and maybe just human enough to want someone as human as Frank is.

Maybe he’s too human; maybe he is dying the way Jimmy seems to think he is.