Bitter Uncle Frank August 1, 1985
Uncle Frank is approaching the age of 50.
He talks a lot about when he was young, while fingering his
new hearing aid, waiting for it to whistle the way his old one did, a whistle
like a tea kettle but with an electronic edge.
It always announced that he was in a room.
His silence otherwise makes him invisible, despite his being
a hulk of a man, his thick fingers reaching constantly back to his ears.
Maybe that’s the cruelest part, his silence.
He had always been a man of words, loud words, angry words, too
bitter to keep contained, seeing the world as fundamentally unfair, a system
working against him or any working man, telling me all too often how everything
sucks, and how he ought to have become a hippie, only born too soon, to the
wrong kind of parents, in a town far too conservative to put up with him as a
beatnik.
Born five years later, he might have made that choice, but born
and raised in the midst of The Great Depression and later The Good War, he could
not turn into a Jack Kerouac or an Allen Ginsberg, Grandpa needing his massive bulk
for common labor, a strong back to compensate for his own lost dreams.
A huge, bear of a man, Frank could not escape his destiny,
grandpa mocking him for the guitar he kept in the corner of the dinning room,
or the perpetual efforts to sketch me in the kitchen.
Ted mocked him, too, recalling Frank’s rage, and how Ted had
to hit Frank on the back of the head with a baseball bat to keep him from killing
a gnat of a man who had teased him.
For years, Frank loaded trucks or drove them, once even
working as a classic milkman until he tried to kill the editor of local gossip
sheet who had mocked him when he had been accused of rape, running a flippant headline
said, “Milkman found innocent, says he was working.
Cooler heads and the bulk of his four brothers kept Frank
from murder. Although to this day, he still bitterly regrets he hadn’t.
I go to his apartment and find Norman Rockwell prints posted
on every wall, the way my mother has religious icons on hers, though it is an
abode of a workman, not an artist, his dirty shoes lined near the door, his work
clothes hanging on a hook in the corner.
On the table are lessons for a class he’s taking on mechanical
drawing, determined to get a job that doesn’t have him coming home with grease
under his fingernails.
Grandpa always mocked him for this; Ted feels about the
same, saying “He makes good money, why is he complaining all the time?”
Frank still believes he might have been a good artist or musician
if he had been given encouragement, but also believes he might not have made a
success of it.
“You need connections,” he said. “You always need
connections.”
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