Crimes and the People Who Commit Them

A Canticle for Frank-1

A Canticle for Frank

Most of my peers have engaged in a wholesale slaughter of their brain cells from an early age. These guys live hard lives, develop serious health issues in their forties and die young. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, the effects of violence in all its many and varied forms, and just hedonism in general take a toll. You don’t run into a lot of rocket scientists on the yard. There are guys who are into physical fitness, but most of them love to get high as much anyone else. They might get healthier, but they don’t get much smarter.

I know Frank from way back. I always thought of him as an intellectual, although in a more normal environment he might just be a regular guy. (I honestly don’t know. It has been so long since I was anywhere normal.) I always liked Frank because I could get a conversation that wasn’t profanity laced, and had to do with matters outside of the small number of topics that dominate conversation in this corner of paradise. Frank has an impressive vocabulary, but he wasn’t all show-offy about it. The man read voraciously and over the years has absorbed a lot.

Frank was fascinated with the world, and couldn’t wait to travel and see it all. Not as a tourist, but one of those guys you see in documentaries. He had a subscription to National Geographic magazine and devoured every issue. Frank wanted to paddle a canoe along the sss River, start to finish, and could tell you what such a trip would entail, the distance of the river, the kind of fish you could catch along the way, the different people you would meet. He didn’t just fantasize about things he hoped to do, he did serious research and absorbed as much information as he could garner. He wrote letters to college professors and people he had read about, asking them questions about their travels, and looking for advice about moving around in dangerous parts of the world. He was fascinated with different cultures and the way people lived in other places, and hoped to visit each continent and see the most obscure places on each.

When Frank was finally paroled a few years ago, I wished him well and thought of him as one of those rare individuals I would never see again. I was surprised and disappointed to hear that he was back, slightly more than four years after I watched him walk out that gate. Not only that, but that he was now a bug (psychiatric head case) and generally not doing well at all. When I tracked him down, he was sitting on a ledge behind the kitchen. It was a hot August day, but Frank was dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, with a jacket over that. He was sitting with his arms wrapped around himself and sort of rocking forward and back, hunched over like he was freezing, and obviously lost in his thoughts. I spoke from a distance of several feet, to announce my approach. It is never a good idea of startle one of these guys.

“Oh, hey Dude,” he said distractedly. “I don’t know how many people I killed.” He continued, “My conscience is clear, but sometimes I wonder.” He continued rocking. “It was just so cold. You don’t even know, man. You never been cold like that.”

As a conversation opener, that was somewhat different, and I admit to being caught a little short. I decided to be nonchalant and pulled up a milk crate to sit on. “Never thought of you as the homicidal maniac type,” I ventured in a casual manner.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said quietly. “My toes mostly. I never knew the human body could register than kind of pain. From the cold. My feet didn’t go numb, they just hurt. From the cold. Each toe was an individual agony. Like someone went down the line with a ball-peen hammer. Then all that running. You don’t know, man.”

“So tell me, Frank. Start at the beginning. I’m all ears.”

“Is that what you think, Dude?” he hissed, suddenly furious. “I’m just some freaking i***t on the yard, and you’re going to sweet-talk me into telling you something about the Taliban? I got news for you, Man, I ain’t the one.” Frank was suddenly standing over me, fists bunched. I was at what you could call an extreme tactical disadvantage.

Frank was on the verge of throwing a serious punch and from our vantage points, I reckoned I couldn’t avoid catching it just above my left ear. Neither of us needed that. “Easy Frank. This is me. Remember how we used to walk this yard and talk about those places you were going to visit? You told me about those people in the South Pacific who built a wooden replica of an old airplane to lure other planes in, like you do with duck decoys or whatever. “

“The cargo cults,” Frank said, suddenly relaxed and sitting back down. “The best thing that ever happened to them was World War II. American planes stopped over a couple times on their island and they went bananas over the stuff the Americans gave them. Canned food, candy, metal tools; they were blown away that such wonderful things existed. They were still living in a stone age culture and thought those guys flying in with all those extraordinary things were gods. After the planes were gone, they built a replica so the gods flying over would be attracted. They put in landing strips and built a reproduction of the compound Americans had established there. The one English word they all knew was cargo.”

Frank went quiet and continued rocking. I remained silent and after a couple minutes, he picked it back up. “Never made it to the Pacific, Dude. Went the other way. Where it is cold.” I asked him where that was and he said, “Up in the mountains, where people kill each other, man. Just because it is so freaking cold. Dude, it was so cold.” Frank shook his head and rocked. We sat quietly for a while, and the announcement came that yard was over. I helped Frank to his feet, and asked him if he needed anything. He looked at me as though sur prised to find me there, and was obviously annoyed by my presence. “The f**k would I need?” he asked belligerently and turned away. I watched Frank walk, and it was obvious that his feet pained him. It was sad to see the state he was in. There was obviously a story here, though, and I knew I wouldn’t rest until I had heard it.

Over the next few days, I asked a couple of the old heads what they knew about Frank’s story and nobody knew much. This guy B-Lo who works in the psych ward told me that Frank had been extradited from Russia “or some damn where over there” and was held in Federal custody for a while. Apparently, people from several different agencies had wrung his story out of him and they weren’t gentle about it. No telling what he went through with them. He had obviously been down a rough road. I gave a lot of thought to how to get him comfortable enough to talk to me about it.

Several days later, I sat down next to Frank on a bench in the west yard and lit a joint. He was quietly rocking, lost in his thoughts. He accepted the joint and took a big hit. “I think this will help my feet,” he said quietly.

“Always been good for mine,” I told him.

Frank was annoyed. “Don’t do that. Don’t get all patronizing and s**t because I am f****d up in the head.” He was smoking the joint, but I had gotten off on to a bad start.

“That’s just me being my smart-ass self, Frank. There is no disrespect in that. You know how I do. We walked down a lot of miles on this yard back in the day. You ever known me to not have a wise crack for any occasion?”

“True that,” he finally said. “It was ugly, Dude. There are some real monsters walking around here,” Frank said, gesturing around us, “but they are light weights. I was up there living with creatures who were pure evil. They didn’t care if they didn’t eat, they didn’t care if they were in pain. They literally lived and breathed for the opportunity to kill and inflict grief. You think the DOC doesn’t give a f**k about you? You have no concept of people who don’t give a f**k about you.” Frank was suddenly trembling and on his feet, rage blazing in his eyes. “You think it’s a joke, Man? You think you could go through all that and be superman or something?” He was shouting now, “You dumbass motherfuckers got no idea.” And then, quietly, “You all think you’re so tough.” Frank jammed his hands into his coat pockets and stormed off. It was obviously an effort on his part to move fast due to the pain in his feet.

That went well, I said to myself, more intrigued than ever.

I kept Frank in my thoughts but life’s little dramas kept coming my way and I had other matters to occupy my attention. One of them had to do with some knucklehead friends of my friend Doc. The long and short of it was that one of these goofballs, call him Jerry, swallowed a bunch of balloons filled with heroin out in the visiting room one day last week. Nothing unusual about that. The problem was that they had been inside him for several days now and he was getting nervous. He hadn’t been able to bring them back up immediately after the visit, and hadn’t been able to pass them out the other way since. Doc asked me to grab a bunch of laxatives from the dispensary, which I didn’t mind doing.

Two days later he told me nothing had happened—and this was a massive laxative dose we’re talking about here—and Jerry was not only worried about the balloons, but was in extreme discomfort from the log jam. Doc asked me for an enema kit, and that I couldn’t do. Way outside the area I can move freely in. Finally he asked about a pair of rubber gloves and a length of that rubber tubing they use to tie off your arm for a blood draw. That was do-able. I didn’t ask any questions.

Meanwhile, I learned from another guy that Jerry’s girlfriend was sweating bullets over this scenario. Should it all end badly, it would not take any real fancy police work to trace the whole magilla back to her. She called the balloon manufacturer and spoke with someone in customer service. Apparently, that person was very matter-of-fact about the whole conversation and was able to anticipate most of her questions. She was far from being the first to call with such inquiries. Turns out, different colored balloons decompose at different rates in the human gut. Yellow ones, for example, will give out in five days. The red ones are tougher and will hold out for a very impressive nine days. Other colors fall within that span. This information surfaced on day four.

Doc cobbled together a short piece of eighth-inch PVC, a large heavy-duty garbage bag and the rubber tube he got from me into a horror show of an enema bag. Posting look outs in strategic locations, he slid into Jerry’s cell and told him to assume the position. Doc mixed a whole bottle of baby oil, a bottle of liquid soap and several mystery ingredients with three gallons of warm water in that bag and plugged it in, as it were. I will spare you the graphic details—you are missing a colorful story, believe me—and just bottom-line this by saying the procedure was a roaring success.

All this was just another day-in-the-life story, really. What was interesting to me was that all of the balloons were actually white at this point, their color having been bleached out by stomach acids and such. Two of them burst open on the way out from the rough and tumble way they came into the world.

Doc scooped up four of the intact ones for his trouble, swished them around in a coffee jar with soapy water and within minutes had them sold for more money than I will see in the next six months. Life in the big house.

Watching this lunacy play out over a period of several days and playing a peripheral role in it kept me occupied and I left the Frank question to simmer for the duration.

B-Lo told me that they were working on adjusting Frank’s meds so he could be more functional and live with his anger issues. The problem was that the feds had pumped an entire pharmacopeia through his system and there were all kinds of complications connected with that. Especially since they wouldn’t release any specifics about it.