Frank is Troubled

Frank is trouble, troubled.

What do we mean by this? Well, let’s take that sentence in two parts.

First, our friend Frank is trouble.

How do we analyze this statement? Let’s start with the superficial.

Frank has tattoos up and down both arms, around his neck, shoulder blades, and chest. Also, adorning both calves as well as his knuckles. The usual, requisite stuff: barbed wires, pierced hearts, flowery aqua blurred paens to old girlfriends and mothers-of-his-children. A gun bleeding black tear drops. Satanic stuff minus the authentic satanic. Skulls and roses.

He also is a piercing enthusiast. In Frank’s case, this involves metal through his: ear lobes, ear cartilage, nostril, eyelid, upper right cheek, scrotum. He’s toying with the idea of putting a quarter-sized black ivory stone through the skin below his lower lip, because his friend Eddie got one ten days ago.

Frank’s hair is spiky, but that’s only because he shaves it periodically. Strangely, every time he does shave his head (thus exposing a black tattooed cross) he seems to get into more fights. But right now it’s about a half-inch, gelled upright. Scruff decorates around his mouth and cheeks. Not a goatee, because he does use an electric razor every three or five days. But short, sharp black stubs.

He has a unibrow, but if you mention it, even in a light-hearted, joking manner, Frank will throw a fist at you. Still, he doesn’t shave it, because that would be effeminate.

His clothes are always well-worn. And they are always denim jeans matched with a faded, grimy t-shirt or a torn flannel shirt, depending on the weather out-of-doors. A black leather belt with an aged bronze-colored buckle depicting two crossed rifles. Work-boots which always look six-months used.

Next, let’s move on to actions and activities. Remember, we’re trying to prove the hypothesis that Frank Is Trouble.

As you may have surmised from a previous paragraph, Frank has fathered children out-of-wedlock. Not indicative of trouble, per se, but Frank is a serial bastard-generator. He almost never sees his children, unless they happen to be on the street when he’s driving shotgun in Eddie’s truck. The mothers of his children would have to get the state after him for child support, since Frank doesn’t work, and one did, though she dropped her efforts after a terrifying encounter with some of Frank’s friends.

He’s had a somewhat fractious relationship with the law since, oh, about age eight or so. He’s now twenty-four and has spent two years incarcerated as an adult, and six in low-security reformatories as a minor. Most of the time it’s because of fighting, though he spent eighteen months out-of-state for breaking-and-entering.

Frank smokes a pack of Marlboros a day, and smokes heavier herb to be social, with his friends. He prefers Miller Genuine Draft for his liquid needs. He’s done all the hard stuff at least once (no need to catalogue it all here) but he feels no great attachment to any of it; again, he does such substances to be social.

Not having a car or a truck, Frank doesn’t drive. He had a license, once, at age sixteen, but it got taken away eight months later for DUI. He’s never bothered to renew it. There’s plenty of rides he can get when he needs, which he does, from friends like Del and Neal and Grillo and Eddie.

Occasionally Frank works odd-jobs at construction sites, mainly because his sister’s husband (they’re divorced) kinda likes him and owns his own paving company. But Frank always messes up, sooner rather than later. It starts with tardiness, develops into unpaid absences, and graduates to on-site theft, usually of something stupid like chicken wire or a red traffic cone or two.

Can we agree that Frank is trouble?

I think so.

Now: Frank is troubled.

What makes me say so?

Like so many of us, especially so many of us young folk, Frank is dissatisfied with his life. Sometimes he wakes up and, even when not hungover, feels that this isn’t the life he should be living. It’s a vague, shadowy feeling, a finger of doubt and uncertainty, always on the perimeter of his consciousness, never fully exposed but never completely hidden, either. Something’s not right. It’s not just than the fact that he never has any money, or the fact that he still lives in that condemned single-story shed with his mother, or that he’s turned his body into a carnival side show. No, it’s something deeper. Existential, he would say, if he knew what the word existential meant and implied.

This feeling’s been with him for a long, long time, so long that he can’t actually pinpoint a start date to it. Still in his teens he thought it meant that he should enlist. Serve, like his cousin Walt, who served in Iraq in the first war. Walt stayed throughout the duration of the conflict, then re-enlisted a couple of times (Frank is sketchy on details since that side of the family lives a couple of states away). But his mother is always chatting Walt up. It used to annoy him, since most everything his mother says annoys him, but part of him realizes that Walt and what he did doesn’t disgust him.

Odd that a part of him would go about systematically doing everything possible to make him an unfit candidate for Uncle Sam’s army.

Day after day, however, more and more, Frank thinks he knows the answer. But no – it can’t be that! Anything but that. What would his friends think? What would the anonymous sheep on the street think? Frank himself has never audibly spoke of it, not once, not in his bed in the dark, not out in the fields, by himself, feet against a fire and a sixpack of MGD nestled between his legs. No, he hardly even allows himself the opportunity to even think about it, to explore it, to examine it from different angles, to imagine it into being.

Since I know everything, I know Frank’s innermost desire. You see, Frank wants to be on TV. So does half of America, you might say, and I might agree with you. But Frank doesn’t want to be a reality teevee star. No, he does not want to go on Survivor, or Big Brother, or Bus of Love, whatever it’s called, even though dozens of talent scouts and producers are salivating for freaks like him to come forward. No, Frank – or the part of Frank that’s really Frank, not the outer bundle of insecurities and pains and trivialities and rage, the part of him that was brought out of nothing and into existence a little over twenty-four years ago – Frank wants to be a children’s television show host, like Captain Kangaroo or Mister Rogers.

Though he never sees his children – that’s the outer bundle you see as Frank – more than anything else he wants to make children smile. Make them happy and make them laugh. And something is drawing him towards this inexplicable career choice, this out-of-the-blue vocation.

That is why Frank is troubled.