Everyone turned up & tricked out for the funeral. Cindy and her man BamBam from the Bronx Savage Lords, Geronimo, Candy, Cowboy, Sharon, Fat Phyllis, Terry the Moose and all the pretty boys. It was the first time I’d seen any of them in the daylight. There’s something to be said for the kindness of moonlight and mirrored balls. I’m sure they were thinking the same about me.
One of Candy’s johns, a little Truman Capote looking thing, drove us out to the funeral home. Frankie’s mother and sisters introduced me to two or three other people who were also engaged to him, and another couple he’d already married. I met the jealous ex-girlfriend who was always banging on the apartment door because, she said, it was her apartment and she wasn’t his ex-anything. We’d shared the same lover and the same vaginal infection. Both were over for us now. She introduced me to more people who were engaged to him and others he’d married, some he only lived with. Half of them were younger women, the men were mostly older.
Standing graveside as they lowered the coffin into what would remain an unmarked grave, an aging blonde drag queen named Sunshine in a tasteful black lace dress & veil handed me a plain white envelope and offered me a ride home. She drove a big convertible with soft white leather seats, and a blazing cherry red paint job that matched her lipstick exactly.
I crawled into the back seat, tucked myself into a corner. Horse Faced Linda climbed in next to me and started to cry. Linda was neither engaged nor married to Dead Frankie, but had the dubious horror of being the woman whose bed he chose to kill himself in. She was the only one there I hated & I was the only one she spoke to. She wept and babbled into my ear the entire drive home.
I caught the blonde’s eye in the rear view mirror. Her veil lifted, the wind sent her Nice n’ Easy Honey hair flying around her head, catching in the fine stubble on her chin. She watched as I opened the envelope. I thumbed through the nude Polaroids inside. Two front view and one rear view. With matching wallet sized copies. They’re the only pictures I’ve ever had of Frankie. She smiled into the mirror, lipstick smears on her crooked teeth. I leaned back, opened a small vial of butyl nitrate, amyl’s cheap & easy sister, and watched the sun pulse as it slid out of view. The sounds of the road, of blood rushing through my veins, through my head, to my heart, drowned out Linda’s equine weeping next to me. The wind caught the tangles of my hair now, and beat me into oblivion as I inhaled a little more of the butyl.
He’d been about to turn twenty. I was seventeen. Overwhelmed by lonely, with fears and shames we couldn’t name–we hunted for somewhere safe, dark and distant.
It was a good day to die.
Todays question for my readers: What do you do in your life today to ease stress, how do you deal with sadness or loneliness? Do you have someone to talk to, do you meditate, go running, drink till oblivion? How do you handle that?
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Posted June 25, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, hustlers, johns, love, The Chalice. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
