Episode 4 ❤️🩹 1975: dead frankie
Darvon, Triavil, Quaaludes. One potato, two potato, three potato, dead potato.
Hit the ❤️ at the top or bottom. Takes a second. Means the world to me.
Not everyone in the Chalice was in the game, just almost everyone. What we had in common was ain’t none of us’d quite fit out in the world, each one a puzzle piece tossed carelessly back in the wrong box, we were never going to fit, not until we found each other.
What would our collective noun be? A bruise of broken toys? A landmine of lost children?
Maybe, we were a darkness of damaged goods.
Sharon was a platinum blonde high-class whore I’m an escort, she’d say, flashing satin pumps and vintage underwear she swore had belonged to Greta Garbo. Real Garbo pussy stains, she said, See? She’d lift her skirt and point, I’m not lying.
Candy, a towering bottle-blonde glamour-puss in red patent leather platforms, she kept her dick tucked discreetly between the cheeks of her perfect apple ass. Candy worked the cars cruising the West Side Highway, her Irish bulldog sidekick, Cindy, kept watch.
Cindy’d been turning Delancey Street1 tricks since her mother turned her out at eight years old; she broke away on her own at eleven. A loyal and vicious watchdog, she made sure big Candy was safe and Candy tried to teach her about makeup and girlie-girl things, but at thirteen, the only little girlie things Cindy cared about were actual little girls.
Cowboy was my boyfriend for a week, or a month. Maybe more, I don’t know. He followed me back to Long Island like a hungry puppy, then followed my mother around our house. The kind of boy that needed a mother, needed taking care of, who you think at least he’s handsome and wonder what happens when that’s gone? Cowboy was epileptic and had the clap more days than he didn’t. I cleaned up the cuts and scrapes from the seizures; we rarely had sex, because, you know, all those days with the clap.
But you pretend none of it happened, the cuts, seizures or the clap—because nobody buys damaged goods.
I’d found my tribe.
It was safe in the dark cavern of the Chalice, like the comfort of the tiny crawlspace of our attic. When I was small enough to fit, I’d curl up in the dust, warm and quiet, next to things they’d stored, then forgotten. Like that, but here there was a bar and invariably someone who thought I was pretty enough to have sex with. We were foursomes and groupies, lost children and runaways, hustlers and whores, trannys and dykes, fags and fag hags. We drifted in and out of the gay bars of New York—the Ninth Circle, Haymarket, Anvil, the Zipper, we invaded Max’s Kansas City and the Piers.
I lived on the margins, heading home most nights to sleep in my childhood bedroom. Other nights, I waited for whoever it was that’d need me to make him feel he was a real man, whoever I’d need to make me feel like a woman.
What breathed freely in those dark bars felt more like family than the anything in my parents’ house.
Frankie lived in that darkness. Tall and slender, his eyes drooped somewhat and his smile was, well crooked. I’m not sure why I loved Frankie—or even if I did, although I was sure of it then—everybody loved Frankie, I thought he was beautiful then. He was always the center of a crowd. A bartender—he gave me drinks and trinkets—and I imagine getting the attention everyone else wanted made me feel special, that it felt good to have something other people wanted.
He lived in a basement apartment on Leroy Street, underneath a dyke bar named Kellys2. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling as women danced above us. A fishnet’d been strung across the ceiling to catch the big chunks; smaller bits of plaster reigned down on our naked bodies—creating a soft focus picture in my memory, a star filter.
Sometimes, a cockroach or two dropped from the ceiling, we flicked them off and tried to ignore them. You can’t pretend with cockroaches. You can maybe turn plaster into stardust, but a roach will never be a butterfly, no matter how many times I rewrite that memory.
I liked to say we used to lay on the rocks in Central Park, cleansing ourselves with sunlight. It sound like it happened regularly, or at least a few times, but I only remember once.
It’s funny what you remember, what you don’t.
I don’t remember a conversation, the sound of his voice, or my name in his mouth. Not a sentence, or even a single word. Not the first kiss or the first moment. What happened to the gifts he gave me, each meaningful enough at the time to mark on my calendar, but not enough to keep? And still, it feels like my world had turned upside down & I was living in a Hallmark card full of cheap poetry and soft focus landscapes.
Someone mentioned marriage. And someone said yes. I bought a ring off a girl I’d gone to high school with, it’d be my wedding band.
Wednesday afternoon Frankie called my office and canceled our Thursday Central Park plans. Thursday morning, the phone on my desk rang again.
“This is the Police Department.”
Why do the police know where I work?
“Do you know Francis Stewart, Ma’am?”
“Francis? Oh, Frankie...yes, but…what? Yes.”
“He overdosed, Ma’am.”
Ma’am? I’m not a... Wait, what? Frankie what?
“No.” Shaking my head as if they can see me through the phone, as if it would change what was being said even if they could. “That’s not right. No.”
A thousand tiny feet of hysteria starting Riverdancing in my skull. Can everyone else hear that too? Heads are turning. Ears are perking.
“He overdosed.”
Where is he? I need to know what hospital he’s at. I need to be there, to fix him, we fix each other when we’re broken. That’s the agreement. No one buys damaged goods. We fix each other.
“Where is he,” I scream into the phone.
Everyone in my office3 has stopped working. They’re staring. I can’t breathe, I need a pen. The name of a hospital. To sit by his side. To stop screaming into the phone. To make sense of what the cop voice is saying.
“He overdosed.”
I tear the phone cord out of the wall, hold the dead receiver close and scream: “STOP. SAYING. THAT.”
I scream again, into the darkness, it swallows me as I hurl the phone across the room. When the phone hits the wall, we both shatter into a hundred sharp, irreparable pieces.
There’s a thin line between here & hell. Sometimes the pain of living is more than you can stand. Frankie swallowed a bottle of Darvon, one of Triavil and one of Quaaludes, washed it down with two quarts of Budweiser, called me, then lay down to sleep in Brooklyn.
He immediately became known as Dead Frankie.
If he hadn’t killed himself, I’d never have met his family.
Tell me about your first heartbreak.
Historical footnote: The West Side Highway and 14th Street were the drag queen strolls—the word transgender didn’t exist in 1975—mostly for the bridge and tunnel crowd; Delancey Street, filled with pool halls and hourly rate hotels, had its own brand of working class street workers.
Historical footnote: Currently known as the Village Tavern, it was an illegal basement apartment with a blue toilet bowl inside a closet.
Historical footnote: My first real job, and the last requiring clothes for almost a decade, the law firm of Sennett & Krumholz at 30 E. 33rd Street employed at least one former criminal client whose probation required a job, as well as many undocumented file clerks who huddled in the womens’ bathroom when immigration came by.
Forty years later, I’m taking care of my true first love! ⬇️
Man this is good