Frankie Got Shot
TRIGGER WARNING: It’s unusual to have a trigger warning that involves an actual trigger, but this one does. This story involves the use of a gun. And a trigger gets pulled. The title tells the story. Also, this story is part of a collection of stories. If you want to understand why kids were called what they were called, you can read those. It was a time a long time ago, and I want to stay true to what was said.
Okay, now that you’ve been warned, here’s the story of how Frankie Got Shot.
When Frankie got shot, I ran.
Not right away. I couldn’t move. Fright before flight. Pinched the tip of my thingy to keep from pissing myself.
Three seconds or so in Frankie’s blood-drenched kitchen. Or a thousand times longer.
ONE ONE-THOUSAND
Frankie’s shirt is so filthy.
“Fels Naptha soap,” my dad used to say. “Cleans everything. Washed our clothes with it . Scrubbed each other with bristle brushes and Fels Naptha after they exploded the A-bombs at Bikini.”
After he spent World War II on a ship it the U.S. Navy, my dad was assigned to a ship that guarded the Bikini Atolls while they tested A-bombs. It’s the only story he’d tell about the war, even after he and all his shipmates got cancer 40 years later from the bomb’s radiation.
Mrs. F__ should wash Frankie’s shirt on a scrub board and feed it through the hand-crank wringer in our basement. Watch you don’t get your hands in there.
“Knew a guy who got his hand caught in a wringer,” my dad said. “Crushed his arm like chicken bones. Never no good after that.”
My dad used both arms — one for smoking Lucky Strikes and the other for drinking coffee. Or punching me in the ear.
There’s a round hole in the front of Frankie’s shirt like it was poked with a pencil. The hole’s not very big.
Is something burning?
Frankie’s not bleeding from that hole. Not in the front. But he’s curling his fingers up under his ribcage. Holding his hand over the hole. He’s kneeling down on one knee.
Is he genuflecting? He’s not even Catholic. He goes to Public. The good kids go to IC.
Frankie looks pale. He’s curling up on the floor. And moaning.
What’s that?
“Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” Paulie says. “Blood. Blood. Blood.”
There’s blood everywhere. It’s oozing out of Frankie’s back. The blood’s getting on Mrs. F__’s kitchen floor.
Who’s gonna clean that up?
TWO ONE-THOUSAND
Paulie looks like he’s gonna cry. Paulie never cries. I saw him get hit square in the face with dirt clods. I saw his dad hit in the back with a monkey wrench. I saw him fall off Lou the Poo’s garage. He didn’t cry. And he’d never cry around the Sinners.
Wait ’til Charlie finds out.
“I’ll kick your ass, you little punk,” Charlie said. And he’d do it. I saw him do it to Paulie more times than I can count. And I saw him do it to different Sinners who hung around at the curb in front of Frankie’s house, drinking beer and smoking. Charlie wore combat boots.
“Stompin boots,” Charlie said. “And I’ll stomp the ever-loving shit outta every one of ya.” Charlie threatened a lot. They weren’t just threats.
Tommy’s squinting. Trying not to laugh like he always does when someone gets hurt. He looks stupid when he laughs.
Tommy laughed when Richard broke his arm and one of the bones was sticking out. He laughed when we wrecked his mom’s only copy of Danny Boy. He laughed when Lou the Poo keeled over on her porch.
Ricky Retardo is banging his twisted arm on the kitchen counter. His leather sling is scattering potato skins all over the floor. Some of the slop’s getting on Frankie.
My dad peeled potatoes in the Navy.
“Hundred-pound sacks of potatoes,” my dad said. “I could lift two of those up with one arm.”
My dad had Popeye forearms and liked to show them off to everyone when he was drinking, which was pretty much all the time.
Is Frankie gonna die?
We should sweep up those peels. Mrs. F__ doesn’t like us to make a mess in her kitchen, even though she doesn’t care about Frankie and Paulie wearing dirty clothes.
My mom washes loads of laundry every day. Hangs them on the clotheslines in the back yard. She always makes me take the laundry down. I hate it because I have to bring in everyone’s underwear and fold it. Then iron.
My mom takes in laundry. It’s embarrassing that she washes other peoples’ clothes. I have to do most of it. When people come to get their laundry, I have to carry the baskets out to their car.
And ask for the money, too.
“Wash those curtains in scalding water,” my mom said. “And use bleach.”
“Don’t leave things on the linoleum,” Mrs. F__ said. “Leaves a stain.”
Paulie just puked.
THREE ONE-THOUSAND
Richard’s trying to flick the gun off his finger. It looks like it’s glued to him. The more he waves his arm, the tighter he holds the gun.
We played with that gun lots of times. Never went off before.
Tommy laughs at Richard waving his arm.
“Shut up, Tommy. Shut up,” Paulie says. Paulie is definitely crying.
“Ruhrawwwwww,” Ricky Retardo says.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha,” Tommy says. Tommy laughs like Dudley Do-Right.
Paulie wipes his mouth on the hem of his dirty shirt.
Fels Naptha.
Richard snaps his arm above his head and then back down. Fast.
BANG! The gun slams to the floor. Spins around.
Did it shoot again?
It’s laying there by Frankie, mixed in with dirt clod pieces, potato skin peels, puke, and a sticky puddle of blood.
“That’s a lot of blood,” I say.
I let go of my thingy. And run.
Boiled Potatoes For Lunch
We boiled potatoes for lunch at Frankie’s house almost every day in the summer. Frankie’s mom worked in an office downtown. Mrs. F__ went to work in a dress and high heels every morning.
“She works in a law office,” Frankie said when we were walking past where his mom worked on our way to the library.
Mrs. F__ left the house early and didn’t come home until dinnertime. She was the only mom on the street who worked. The moms talked about her. And her husband.
Mr. F__ drank.
We had the Frankie’s house to ourselves most afternoons. Mr. F__ was awake in the morning. He didn’t sleep at night. He’d sit on his porch, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking his breakfast.
“Go outside and don’t come back until you’re called for dinner,” my mom said.
It was seven o’clock in the morning. She’d kick me out of the house and not wonder what I was doing the whole day. Mothers did that in my town in 1967. And if the kids didn’t stay away, they had their little pills, just like Mick Jagger sang about.
“Good morning, Mr. F__,” I said as I walked across the street and up on the porch to Frankie’s house.
“Mrnnin.”
Mr. F__ didn’t talk much. I’m not sure if he couldn’t talk much, or just didn’t want to talk much. I heard him yell a couple of times, but then he’d start coughing and nothing would come of it. The only time I saw him move fast was that time he hit Paulie with the monkey wrench.
Mostly, he’d sit on an aqua-colored shell-back glider on his porch and pick at his twisted toenails. Or clip them with wire cutters. His toenails were thick and yellow and crumbly. Chunks of them littered his porch. His fingernails and teeth — what were left of them — were just as yellow. Especially the fingernails on his thumb and first finger where he pinched his cigarettes down to the nub.
“Frankie home?” I asked.
“Drrr’s op-n.”
Frankie’s house was smaller than mine. But he had 10 times more stuff.
“Grab some floor” is what my dad said when we ran out of space on our one couch and one recliner for seven people. We weren’t allowed to sit in his chair, even when he wasn’t home.
Frankie’s front room was stuffed like an old five-and-dime with couches and chairs and tables and benches and motorcycle parts. Frankie’s brothers, Joe and Charlie, were in a motorcycle gang. They were disassembling an Indian motorcycle in the house.
The front room carpet was layered over with newspapers. On half a dozen tables were a jigsaw puzzle of various school-made clay ashtrays overflowing with the butts of Lucky Strikes, Camels, and Pall Malls. Everyone in Frankie’s family smoked. Frankie was eight. He’d started.
The front room connected to the kitchen. Out back were those kind of cellar doors you saw Dorothy try to open in the Wizard of Oz. Those double doors led to Frankie’s basement. They were locked with a hasp.
Frankie’s mom kept a cellar full of potatoes. Every family on our street had potatoes with their dinner, but the Frankie’s family ate potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We were all poor. The F__s were the poorest on our block.
“Those are government potatoes,” my mom said.
There were rows upon rows of potato sacks in Frankie’s dirt floor cellar. At least a dozen, hundred-pound sacks. Onions, too. Some of the potatoes and onions grew eyes and burrowed through their burlap sacks into the cellar floor. It was like they were anchored there.
I picked my way through the motorcycle parts in the front room and called out.
“Frankie? Hey, Frankie, I’m here.”
I never went upstairs at Frankie’s house. His brother Charlie was scary. He didn’t like to be bothered, which meant breathing his air.
I stood in the door frame between the front room and the kitchen.
I have only one burning desire / let me stand next to your fire.
Hendrix was playing on a stereo upstairs. Paulie. He loved Jimi. We all did. Music defines a summer, but nothing in my life matched the impact of Hendrix and Are You Experienced? We listened to that album on Frankie’s porch once or twice or three times a day. We debated the lyrics. We whispered about drugs. And girls.
“Goddam hippies,” my dad said. “The only four-letter words that hippies don’t know are w-o-r-k and s-o-a-p.” My dad liked to quote George Wallace. According to my dad, everyone who had hair that touched his ear was a goddam hippie.
I liked Hendrix as much for his music as for how much my dad hated it. My dad never advanced beyond Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. He got seven kinds of angry and punched me in my left ear when Alice Cooper’s Only Women Bleed came on the car radio when I was in high school and he was giving me a ride home.
She cries alone at night too often/He smokes and drinks and don’t come home at all/Only women bleed/Only women bleed/Only women bleed.
SMACK! Right in the ear. He was driving. I was bleeding.
“Turn off that smut,” my dad said. “It’s disgusting.”
“It’s not that kind of bleeding,” I said. “It’s about being beat up.”
“I don’t care. Turn it off,” my dad screamed.
We didn’t say anything else to each other for the rest of the drive.
Frankie Puts on a Pot of Coffee
“Hey, how you doin’?” Frankie said as he bounded down the stairs. Frankie had the energy of a trapped squirrel, constantly twitching and moving and talking.
Frankie drank coffee.
“I’m gonna put on a pot,” Frankie said. He talked like an adult like that.
He dashed by me and grabbed a percolator out of his messy sink and started to fill it.
“Your mom’s such a pig,” I said. “Every time I come over to take a piss in the sink, it’s full of dishes.”
It was a variation on my dad’s favorite joke. He’d say it about my mom when they'd host pinochle parties in our garage on Saturday nights.
Frankie punched me hard in the arm. Right on the bone.
“Want another hurts donut?” Frankie said. That joke went around that year. Never made any sense to me. Hurts, don’t it? Yeah, I got it.
Then he put the percolator on the stove. Charlie’s pistol was on the counter.
After we each had a couple of cups of coffee — we liked ours with milk and two heaping spoons of sugar — we headed out.
“Back later, Pops,” Frankie said to his dad as we leapt off his porch.
“Unh-hnh,” said Mr. F__ as he rocked back in his glider and took another sip.
Frankie and I jumped on our home-made stilts we stored under Frankie’s porch. In 1967, every one of us had stilts. Paulie made his set first. Then Johnny and Tommy. Then Richard. Then me. Ricky Retardo could barely walk with his leg braces, so he didn’t have stilts. Mike the Mexican had store-bought stilts, so that didn’t count.
The first set of stilts that got built on our block had pegs a foot off the ground, just a triangular wood block nailed to a set of two-by-fours. The next set had pegs two feet off the ground. By the time July came around, we were walking around on stilts with pegs four feet off the ground. We pilfered the wood from a construction site.
We started down the street on our stilts toward the park. We fought dirt clod wars there every day.
We stopped at Johnny and Tommy’s house, propping our stilts up against their porch. Once we collected them, we moved up the block to Richard’s house. From Richard’s house it was only a few houses to the ravine that led into the park.
We spent the morning of the day Frankie got shot playing dirt clod wars. When Mike the Mexican, Paulie, and Ricky Retardo turned up, we had enough guys to challenge the Clayton kids to a war. We played for hours. We were dirty and tired and hungry.
“Let’s go get some lunch,” Frankie said.
“Groovy,” we said as a chorus.
Back to Frankie’s House
Mr. F__ wasn’t on the porch when we got back to Frankie’s house. He was passed out upstairs, just like every other day.
We hopped down from our stilts and turned on the spigot for the hose. We took turns spraying each other after we leaned our heads down to get a drink. Then we threw down the hose in the front yard and raced around back.
We piled over each other to be first descend into Frankie’s cellar. After a few hard elbows, we grabbed a couple potatoes each and ran slap dash through the aluminum back door that was missing the screen. That led into Frankie’s kitchen.
I grabbed some newspapers from the front room and spread them on the kitchen counter. Charlie’s gun was still there.
I picked up the revolver, tossed the newspapers on the counter, and spun the cylinder of the gun.
“You shouldn’t mess around with that,” Frankie said.
“I’m just checking out the bullets,” I said as I pointed the gun at the ceiling. I was fascinated with the brass casings and how they contrasted with the black body of the gun.
It wasn’t the first time the gun was out. And it wasn’t the first time I pointed it. We all did.
Frankie’s brothers fought in Vietnam, and they brought their weapons home. Joe and Charlie had lots of guns and knives mixed in with all their motorcycle parts. They carried weapons. And left them laying around.
We had lots of experience with guns. When we weren’t running dirt clod wars in the park, we’d play BB gun wars. We’d load our BB guns with multiple shots, then stake out a position in the neighborhood. It was our version of paintball, just 30 years too early. The goal of the game was to not get shot. It hurts when you get shot with a BB gun at close range.
And we pointed real guns at each other. When Richard’s dad was gone, we’d get his guns out of the gun case. When Frankie’s brothers left their guns around the house, we’d pick them up and make shooting noises at each other. And when my dad was sleeping, we’d get his police gun out and clean it for him.
We liked the weight. The strength. The power.
“I swear, if those punks from Catalpa jump me once more, I’m gonna shoot ‘em,” Paulie said one time as he waved Joe’s .45 that he brought back from what Paulie called “The Nam.” We all agreed — those Catalpa punks needed a lesson. We were sick of them coming onto our block and jumping us when we were by ourselves.
Preparing Our Potatoes
We were street urchin hungry. Frankie hefted a big pot of water on the stove and set it to boil.
Then he poured a stream of salt into the water. Paulie, Johnny, Tommy, Richard, Mike the Mexican, Ricky Retardo, and I started peeling our potatoes over the newspapers on the counter.
We all had our own pocket knife for whittling. Ricky Retardo didn’t, but he was spastic and would have stabbed someone if he had a knife.
“Who’s gonna peel for Ricky Retardo?” Paulie asked.
“Thay-thay-thay,” Ricky said. In addition to being spastic, he also had a horrible nasal lisp. It was an endless source of comedic material for Tommy.
Tommy laughed.
“Ricky Retardo, Ricky Retardo,” Tommy mocked.
Ricky was clanking his leg braces. You didn’t want to get Ricky mad. Once he started hitting, you had to get his dad to make him stop.
“Leave him alone,” I said, nodding at Ricky. “I’ll do his.”
I learned to quickly peel potatoes from my dad. It was my job for dinner every night. I made an elongated cube out of each potato, then cut it in half so it would cook faster. I didn’t worry about waste while I was peeling — Frankie’s mom had an endless supply.
Each kid had their own technique. Johnny and Tommy peeled theirs in strips. Richard twirled his. Mike the Mexican just scrubbed the outside of his under running water and left the skins on.
“Typical,” my dad said when I told him about how Mike the Mexican made his boiled potatoes. “They eat horse meat in May-he-co.”
I didn’t bother telling my dad that Mike the Mexican was actually Cuban. That his dad had escaped Castro in 1959 and had come to America. That he worked two jobs. And owned his house and his car — unlike my dad.
The Gun Went Off
When the gun went off, seeing was all I could do. I couldn’t hear a thing. The concussion from the gun going off right next to me deafened my right ear and left my other ear ringing.
“Bruh bruhnh bruh brh,” Paulie said. He was pointing at Richard.
It sounded like when we’d talk underwater at the pool. We’d make up phrases. Then we’d go underwater and talk while the other person tried to guess what we were saying. We’d never get it right. It was just bubbles and sounds.
“Gah dghdn gr doo,” Richard said.
He backed out of the kitchen and into Frankie’s front room. He still had the gun in his hand.
The smell kept me still. It was a mixture of gunpowder and blood and boiled potatoes. Acrid and metallic and organic.
And the fear kept me there.
I have to pee.
All the potatoes were in the pot. In 10 minutes, we’d be ready to pull our potatoes out, mash them with our forks, pour on lots of salt, and then add a huge slab of butter. Sometimes we’d put all our potatoes together and make mashed potatoes with the hand masher and milk.
That was lunch.
But not that day.
Richard shot Frankie right through the liver.
I hope my dad doesn’t find out or I’m going to get a beating with the belt.
The right thing to do was to stay. We knew that. To call someone. To wad up a rag and hold it against Frankie’s back where the blood was oozing out of him onto Mrs. F__’s linoleum. To not make a horrible situation a hundred times worse.
Instead, we were chickenshits.
Guns are loud. Kids are stupid. So, we ran.
Frankie laid on his kitchen floor alone, his life spurting out in gooey globs.