Frankel
by Francis Levy
It was November, the weekend before Thanksgiving. Sunset came earlier each day so when the soccer team got back from the playing fields above the reservoir at 100th street, it was already dark.
“Kennedy got shot.”
Frankel, a fat sixteen-year-old, who suffered from pimples and freckles both, was always being reprimanded for making tasteless jokes especially about tits and ass. He was also notoriously a Nixon supporter.
“Cut it, Teddy. That’s not funny.” I didn’t look back to see who was doing the censoring.
“Shuddup,” another voice warned.
Frankel had no pride. He was the one who’d stood on a metal folding chair, claiming to have successfully found a peephole into the girls’ locker room. He was also the team’s feckless goalie whose constant fumbles had cost the loss to Collegiate that afternoon.
The women’s swim team would be climbing out of their bathing suits just when the boys were coming in. I’d have done anything to see Arlene Chandler naked. Her satin bra straps were always hanging off her shoulders. I once had a pretty decent view of a lacey white cup when she’d bent over to pick up a paper clip which had fallen by my foot.
She had a penchant for Bass Weejuns, Tartans and Brooks Brothers blue button-down collar shirts which were both revealing and forbidding, like the topiaries that protect mansions.
Frankel was a sleaze ball, but we had a history which started in elementary school. He lived in that horrible white brick building with the circular driveway around the block from Cooper Union. He once served me tuna with no Mayo when I went over to his house to watch horror films. He always wanted to get together in early September when it was still hot and the dread of the school year hung over our heads.
Actually Arlene, me, Frankel and this other girl Nancy Levy had once gone out on a prepubescent double-date on one of those depressing early September days. The girls had ended up talking to each other after we ran out of things to say.
Frankel and I were pranksters. We called anonymous numbers in the telephone book and told strangers the 20 pizzas they’d ordered were coming. We heaved balloons filled with water out the living room window. We had the idea of pissing in a jar and pouring the result into someone apple juice. We once even told some woman her husband was dying in the street. We were caught off guard by her response which was chipper and merry—as if she’d been given good news.
I kept my distance after his face really started to break out in llth grade. His greasy chin was the site of the worst of it. He brazenly popped zits in class. Later in life, I would have advised him to go to Dr. Zizmor, the dermatologist with the big jowls who advertised on the subway, but you can’t change the past.
I loved Arlene then but who knew? Who knew that she was going to turn into an overweight Secaucus bitch with manicured nails? Even then I was beginning to get the idea that the playing field was always changing. The most beautiful flowers ultimately wilted and died.
The Unearthly was the film Frankel and I had seen together one Saturday afternoon in sixth grade. It was the main reason I avoided him after that.
A mad scientist imprisoned beautiful mental patients in his basement. They were guinea pigs who received a special gland guaranteeing eternal life. I couldn’t stop thinking of the poor creatures, turned into crones, writhing in agony as they hung from hooks, their faces covered with rope like black veins. If only I’d followed my instincts and told Frankel I couldn’t get together because of my guitar class at the 92nd Street “Y,” I wouldn’t have been haunted by images I couldn’t get out of my mind.
There was this introductory scene in the movie, where the innocent young woman named Grace, suffering from depression, is deposited at the institution presided over by Dr. Charles Conway (John Carradine). She looks pleadingly at the evil Dr. Wright who’s recruits the subjects for Conway’s experiments. She’s the child who doesn’t want to be left off on the first day of kindergarten.
What if there’d been Prozac and Paxil? Would Conway still have been able to populate his house of horrors?
As much as I wanted to see Arlene’s big tits, I wasn’t going to climb on that chair. The nightmare images of Conway’s patients no longer haunted me. However, I was a magical thinker. By associating myself with Frankel, I would find myself daydreaming about Arlene hanging from a hook in the mad doctor’s basement.
In my fantasy, she didn’t care if I saw her nude, if only I got there in time to prevent the procedure which would turn her into an ugly gargoyle.
Only the shower scene in Psycho, which I saw from the balcony of the Trans-Lux 85th two years later, in eight-grade, did anything to cure me of the fear created by The Unearthly. I nearly had a heart attack when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) stabbed Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and you saw the blood going down the drain.
The lesson I learned is, if something bothers you, it will go away when something worse happens.
“That’s the ticket,” Frankel would have said, if he’d known what I was thinking. “That’s the ticket” was his favorite expression.
The same year I saw The Unearthly, I watched The Blob. Kids were starting to have night time parties that ended at 10 o’clock. The parents were either clueless or impervious to what was going on in their luxury high-rise apartments. There were darkened rooms where the “ins” made out. Someone always seemed to be shutting the door in my face.
What were the chances of me and Arlene Chandler French kissing on a couch or even on the floor?
My father, a salesman by trade, was always talking about “getting in the front door.” In that respect, I was failing.
*******
My mother insisted I shake the dirt of the cleats of my soccer shoes before I walked in the house. I lingered at the front door, rubbing my soles back and forth on the bristly matt, afraid to come home to find out that, as usual there were no messages for me.
I could hear the vacuuming behind the door of my sister’s room.
Life was simpler back in sixth grade when I first saw The Unearthly with Frankel. There was only the dread from which I sought protection. Dread was doable.
Longing had yet to introduce itself.
I was convinced my imagination was chronically infected with an image that would damage me for life—like one of those flesh-eating bacteria that people talk about or the human form bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Creuzefeldt-Jakob Disease.
Sixth grade was my blue period. There was this one kid who Frankel and his friend Small liked to torture, Kenny. They pulled his ear and wouldn’t let it go, even as he screamed in pain. Once, they even locked him in a closet.
Frankel and I were alumnae of the dumb class of l958 at PS 6, the Lillie Devereaux Blake School. You had 6-1, 6-2, 6-3 etc and then I.G, which meant “intellectually gifted.” “IG” was an impossible dream as was “SP” or “Special Progress,” which meant if I attended Wagner Junior high on 76th Street, I would go from seventh directly to ninth grade.
He and I were in 6-2 which was just one step above the special ed kids who couldn’t even read. Our parents tried to convince themselves that we weren’t bad apples. Our problem was motivation rather than intelligence. We weren’t “achievers”—the buzz word used for kids who were on the fast track for Harvard.
Frankel and I went to New Lincoln, a progressive school that had some smart kids even though literally anyone could get in. It was there that I learned it was cool to have a pack of Luckys in your breast pocket. When New Lincoln, on 110th between Fifth and Lennox closed its door, it became the Lincoln Correctional Institution.
*******
I don’t remember how it exactly happened. Nevertheless, I ended up in the park with Arlene Chandler despite all the teachers who were red-eyed from crying, especially Mr. Kagel who was from Dubuque and had these really freaky big ears. Kagel and the other teachers, who still hadn’t gone home for the weekend, were concerned about how upset we stragglers must be. However, we reassured them, snuck out and walked over to the park, across the street, as if we were in some movie, like say David and Lisa (1962) the love story about that schizo girl—made by another couple, a husband-and-wife team named The Perrys.
We were lying next to each other on the grass, even though the dirt underneath was hard and cold. I picked up one of those three-leafed clovers that litter the lawns of Central Park, no matter what the season. I ran it across my lips and then put the stem in my mouth as if I were Warren Beatty and she Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass (1961).
“Birnbaum was in the Lincoln Brigade.” It wasn’t news that the short gruff math teacher with the thick rubber-soled shoes was a socialist who probably taught at New Lincoln because he was blacklisted and couldn’t get a better paying job in a public school.
I stopped myself as I was about to talk about Evelyn Binder who was routinely referred to as “bad news.” A manifestation of her problems was that she told everyone she was seeing a famous child therapist, Dr. Spaniel, because she was a nympho. I correctly feared it would adversely affect the mood. It was what I wasn’t saying that was the problem.
“Don’t you dread Mondays? It’s always those disgusting hotdogs.”
Our lips were so close I could have just leaned over and kissed her. Instead, I started criticizing the new Asian dietician, May Wong. I knew I was acting like a geek and digging my own grave, but what was there to do?
“I hate language lab,” I finally offered, to break up the suffocating silence. In history we’d learned about the Anabaptists talking in tongues.
My golden opportunity was slipping away with each new stupid comment.
I always think what I should have said when I wimp out with some girl or when I’m confronted with someone who’s trying to get over on me.
“I still have to write my book report on Les Miserables,” she said standing up as I remained prostate on the ground. I tried to avert my eyes from looking right up her tartan.
“That sucks!” My attempt to gain points by commiserating about something so obvious fell like a lead balloon.
Was her view of me conditioned by my fear of kissing or would she have pushed me away, saying “let’s be friends,” the euphemism girls used when they didn’t like you, no matter what you did?
Neither you nor they wanted to be friends. It was just a formality like saying “excuse me” when someone was in your way.
While everyone was mourning Kennedy, I simply feared Arlene telling me “I just want to be friends.”
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was a member, had an office in that horrible gray office building, right around the corner from Frankel’s apartment. It hogged the whole block opposite Grace Church.
Later, in my first year at Wisconsin, I’d buy a copy of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (1966) which described how the Warren Commission report lily-coated the truth which included the fact that Tammi True aka Nancy Meyers was the stripper in Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club.
Lane had represented the tenth district in the New York State Assembly.
I was a basket case until I saw Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963) at the Cinema I on Third Avenue. It was Spring and I had a new seersucker suit and Weejuns which I purchased right across the street at Bloomingdale’s.
I got over Arlene, just as the general public was beginning to put the assassination behind them.
It’s tiring pretending you don’t care, but the ribald movie character with a greasy chicken leg in one hand and buxom damsel in the other convinced me I no longer had to just be “friends” with anyone.
It was around that same time that the Marvelettes came out with “Too Many Fish in the Sea” (1964).Then there was James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” (1966) Every diner had a cigarette machine in its entry way and there was always a juke box playing The Temptations’ “My Girl” (1964). You got three songs for a quarter.
I lived in a world of vending machines which ate your change.
Frankel ended up being a big surprise. I thought he was a loser. Yet, I’ve seen pictures of him on Facebook with a knockout redhead, I assume to be his wife, in a place with a big stone fireplace that looks like Aspen. Bill Clinton is ogling the redhead as he puts his arm around Frankel’s shoulder.
The stupid kids who have nothing to lose have all the luck.
Could it be that when I didn’t do anything on the afternoon of the assassination that Arlene thought I didn’t like her? Was she being defensive? Could that have explained her coldness? Was that the reason people didn’t like me? Because they thought I didn’t like them? Could I have gotten it wrong all these years?
Being in a spiritual void is like going the wrong way on a one-way street. It’s also a good way to get into a head-on.
I have this feeling I have a guardian angel like Clarence Odbody in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) (who spares George Bailey from jumping off the bridge).
Is there someone registering my comings and goings, when I feel so invisible and lacking in importance, I could vanish from the stage of life with no one batting an eye?
Francis Levy is the author of the novels, Erotomania, Seven Days in Rio and Tombstone: Not a Western. His collection of stories, The Kafka Studies Department, with illustrations by Hallie Cohen will be appearing in September.
Photo source: Richard Heinen/Unsplash
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