Wednesday afternoon Frankie called and canceled our Thursday Central Park plans. Thursday morning, the phone on my desk rang again.
“This is the Police Department. Do you know a Frank Stewart, Ma’am?”
Yes. I did. I do. Why are police calling me?
“He overdosed on drugs, Ma’am.”
No. That’s not right, I say into the phone. A thousand tiny feet of hysteria starting to dance inside me. Funny sounds come out of me. I know that only because 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 office has stopped working. They’re staring. I am desperate to find a pen. To be writing down a 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 that has swallowed me whole, hurling the phone across the room. We hit the wall at the same time, each shattering into a million sharp 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 might never have met his family.
Todays question for my readers: Somedays it hurts too much to be alive, but what about the people you leave behind, the people you lock out? Or tell me about your first heartbreak, what was that all about?? Are you over it yet? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 22, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, drugs, suicide, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
