St. Frank

Frank’s ex-wife had just remarried, and now all that Frank did was sit on his porch surrounded by bottles. Like an icon he sat in a shrine of whisky and beer, ragged sweaty hair a halo, old cigarette butts still burning like candles or incense to himself.

I knew Frank’s pain. A year ago, about the time of his divorce, someone stole my smartphone. I didn’t take it as hard as Frank took his struggles.

I visited Frank once a week. I knew him in college and was his only friend still around, so I felt obliged. Frank was a very sensitive person and took difficult times very hard.

He never left his porch. I don’t know where he got new bottles of booze from, but he collected the old bottles around himself like they were the only things he had left in this life.

Sometimes he’d ask me to bring him cigarettes, so I know where he got those. “Hey,” he’d say, the only words spoken for the entire duration of my visits, “next time maybe bring me some more cigarettes.”

Frank had a son. Not anymore, really. Now his ex-wife and her new husband were raising him, while across town Frank was in pretty tough shape.

“Some other man is raising my child,” Frank said one day, not to me or himself but to no one in particular. So what, I thought, some other man is raising my smartphone, teaching it to walk and talk, programming it, taking it to ball games.

In September I started to worry about Frank. Would he stay out on the porch through the fall? Maybe I should check him into a hospital, I even thought. Three whole months of sitting enshrined on the porch with whisky and beer and cigarettes.

Meanwhile, I had found my smartphone at a pawn store—I was sure it was mine, like you’d be sure what child was your own—but the clerk wouldn’t give it to me.

“You have to buy it,” he said.

“Great,” I said, “how much?”

“Two-fifty,” he said.

“Screw you,” I said.

I looked around briefly for Frank’s son in there too, but I didn’t see him.

The next time I went to see Frank I asked him, “Frank, do you have any money? I found my smartphone at a pawn shop and need to borrow some money to buy it again.”

Frank shook his head. Frank could be a jerk sometimes. Here I am, visiting once a week for three months straight. How else could he afford all that booze if he didn’t have any money?

I was glad Frank’s kid wasn’t in the pawn shop after all. I would have bought it for him and then still wouldn’t have any smartphone. With friends like these, I thought at the time.

By October it took me a while to find Frank on the porch. He had started in on boxed wine and built himself a little fort with the empty boxes. Between those and the bottles he could hide anywhere.

The snow started in November. I wasn’t worried anymore about Frank being out in the cold. He didn’t seem to mind it. Plus, his fort had turned into a sort of apartment, with multiple rooms, right there on his front porch.

“You sure you don’t have any money, Frank?” I asked him again.

He shook his head.

“It’s just, I want my smartphone back, is all,” I said.

Frank looked at me. He lifted up a box of Merlot and drank straight from the nozzle.

On one of my December visits a cop was standing in Frank’s front yard, staring with a confused expression at the condominium of boxes and bottles.

“Help you, officer?” I asked.

“I got a complaint from one of the neighbors about all this garbage,” the cop said. He shook his head, dumbfounded. “I mean,” he said, scratching his forehead, “what the hell?”

I thought about filing a report with him about my smartphone, but it seemed more trouble than it was worth. I’d probably still have to pay for it.

It took the cop and me twenty minutes to find Frank inside of his shrine. It was bigger inside than it looked from the front yard. He had a bedroom, kitchenette, a living room. We found him in the bathroom just finishing off a box of Shiraz. His eyes were very red, red like the wine itself. Evidently he’d been crying.

The cop asked a few questions and then left. He probably felt pretty sorry for Saint Frank and didn’t want to ticket him.

“Merry Christmas,” I told Frank.

I went over New Year’s Eve to keep the holiday vigil with Saint Frank. “Through suffering we are purified,” he told me when my wristwatch struck midnight.

We both got pretty drunk and fell asleep. When I woke up – January now – Frank was gone. I searched all over the house on his porch and didn’t find him. His car was still parked out front. In his yard was a little snowman, about three feet tall. Next to it was an old wine box that had my name written on it in crayon in Frank’s handwriting. I opened the box.

Inside was a little rectangle, perfectly sculpted out of white snow. I said a prayer in my heart to Saint Frank then, because my new smartphone was already starting to melt.