Little Franklin                   

4,773 wds

    "Good God, how he scowls!" said Chuck, of the two guests the only one with rosy cheeks.

"Franklin always scowled when he had fun."

"But Red, why have you invited him to Thanksgiving dinner?" asked Red’s spouse, Lindy. 

Red paused; his next statement would be legendary, maybe. 

“We are all he has now, we must keep his memory fresh!”  he said  and with these words splashed his glass of wine in Little Franklin’s face. 

“Red!”

Little Franklin did nothing, the wine soaking in and dripping off his motionless face, but as his face was plaster and unpainted, the crimson wine stained his face the color of anger.  The three other guests stood looking down at Little Franklin seated at the table in the fourth chair.  He didn't look at them or the steaming, succulent vittles crowding the table in front of him. His giant plaster head was propped up with a stick and pointed straight ahead. His body was a collection of children’s clothes stuffed with rags. The original Franklin had made this small copy of himself and was himself beyond eating and talking and breathing, having recently died through a misadventure, leaving only this pale, helpless looking relic to fill his place. 

“Do we have to feed him? “ asked Chuck. 

“He gives me the creeps with his scowl, Red, let’s get him out of here.”

Red turned to Chuck and winked. “Lindy here can’t stand Little Franklin. He was her old sweetie and this plaster dummy brings back memories of making it with him, scowling the whole humping time!”

“He did not, you pig!”

“Wait, it’s turkey, “ Red shouted, dodging a roll Lindy threw at his head.

They sat down to eat. Red had set Little Franklin in a chair with his back to the wall. Seated thus, no one would have to walk around him. Lindy found it difficult not to look at him. He was accurately rendered, hair glued on, uncombed, and the lips feminine in fullness but so harshly turned down as to refute all tender love. He had recently died in a fall down some parking lot stairs, drunk of course, and he left a few works of art and this doll, which had kept him company in his studio. A letter was found in the shirt pocket stating that “In case of my premature demise I request that this guy find a home with Red and Lindy, true friends, almost.” 

“That’s just like Franklin,” said Lindy, “to leave us this thing to creep us out.”

“Franklin’s problem,“ Chuck said, conducting the music of his words with a half-shredded turkey leg, “was he hated himself. He wasn’t nice -- sorry, Red, I know you hate that word, nice, but I have to use it. He wasn’t nice to himself. He went to the graveyard and waited in line.”

“Ah, but aren’t we all doing that?” said Red. “Just waiting to croak!” 

“He needs a cigarette. He’s not the same without his constant cigarette!”

“Cigarette and a bottle, that’s our boy!”

“Well, he had some sort of seizures, you know, “ said Lindy, “and booze and dope helped him.”

“Sure it helped, “ Red laughed, “Look at the great art he left us!”

At this time they all looked at their silent companion through the lens of art, remembering his contribution to culture. 

“He’s so creepy, Red, I want to move him.”

“You’re not touching him, he stays where he is!” Red shouted. Except for the presence of color in his face, his scowl was every bit as complete and deadly as Little Franklin’s.

Normally Chuck was a get-along-kind-of-guy, so he tried to freshen the conversation and get it back on the fun track. He believed that as long as people were joking about art, or bickering about it, they would forget  about their pointless existence. He cracked wise about the newest exhibit at the only gallery in this town (of almost a million citizens) that would show, as Chuck had written in a newspaper article, "art not approved by the upper and middle classes who first strain it through corporate cheesecloth.”

This image of corporate cheesecloth appealed to Red and Lindy, who habitually flattered Chuck and believed their own art failed to sell or even to be appreciated not because it was ugly or unrefined or lacked investment potential but because certain interests were operating in service to a vacant ideal, the ideal of good taste, by setting up barriers to public access to it.  

Chuck was a reporter who often reviewed shows at the Gulch, the aforementioned gallery, and other exhibition spaces and could tell a few stories about these people intent on obstructing artistic progress in the name of sanitation. Chuck cultivated a garden of stories for his own purposes. he also told tales to gallery owners about the inane asses calling themselves artists producing remarkably pure garbage. "Their crap is pure, at least,“ he said, “So one might credit them for having some refinement!"  These artists, Chuck continued, thought gallery owners should exhaust themselves and their resources promoting such crap, all for the sake of art, a towering, fleshy mass, spurting ego. 

But the fun track was not for Red and Lindy. They both scowled as much as Franklin.  

Chuck had a fresh and illuminating idea, that Red was competing with this plaster headed dummy. Lindy was pushing him to the edge. He knew Red and his artistic type. Red was an artist who’s true talent was in getting attention paid to his lousy art. Public displays of outrage and bad taste were his specialty.  It was an absurd idea and carried the feel of real danger. 

So he started talking to Little Franklin. Lindy noticed and began to flirt with the silent miniature. This lightened their mood. they glanced at each other, played the game leaving Red out and suddenly a spoonful of 

mashed potato landed on Franklin’s forehead.

“Hey, are you going to start a food fight with Franklin?” cried Lindy.

“I always, always had more to say than that little shit.”

“Excuse me, Red, but Franklin was a lot better at intelligent conversation than most people.”

“True, very true, “ said Chuck. “We must speak of Franklin the man and Franklin the artist as very separate categories.”

“What a bunch of . . . “

“He could be, at times, quite expansive, “ said Chuck.

“Expansive my ass,” replied Red.

“No dear, not that expansive.”

Red then heaped on Lindy insults well beyond the limits of what a man should say to a woman he loves, so these comments must remain unreported, so as not to embarrass Red. 

The second half of their dinner sunk deeper and deeper into Red’s sour mood.   

"Got more wine?" asked Chuck. His glass was empty again. Red wanted to suggest Chuck go easy on the vintage but it was such a cheap vintage, how could he? Lindy hoisted the half gallon jug and filled their glasses all around. Chuck ate and talked as he drank and as he drank more he talked more and ate less. Then he started to smoke. 

Red disliked the show up now at Gulch, said it was malarkey-- being less obscene than he usually was -- and seeing it merely as neo-post-modernist-pre-contemporary shock effects. Chuck’s jokes about the show were harsh and he told them only to please Red and Lindy. In truth, he liked the show and slithered around the subject without giving his real opinion.                                                             Above the table where they sat hung one of Red’s masterworks, a canvass Chuck enjoyed and Lindy delighted in at first but quickly grew to dislike. The painting was a vivid frontal portrait of a naked woman on her hand and knees engaged in sex with a man behind her, her eyes squeezed shut in pain or ecstasy, her teeth clinched on a set of car keys.  

Another of Red’s works, a personal favorite for Chuck that had started out that way for Lindy also, was the enormous self-portrait hanging above their bed. Here was Red smiling with a can of beer in his hand while leaning out of an enormous vagina. Who the vagina is attached to is not in evidence. Only Red’s head, shoulders and the one arm and hand holding the beer showed. “Blossoming forth from this friendly interior, “ Chuck had written,” the disturbing aspect of this portrait is that Red’s hair is not mussed, nor is his polyester suit and power tie in disarray.”  Red called this work ‘Caught in the Act.’  He had wanted to call the piece ‘Runt in a Cunt,’ but the gallery refused to hang it with that title. 

The fine point noted in Chuck’s review, the detail about the neatness of Red’s hair and clothing, was not an effect intended by Red, but since he thought it useful and worthy of his talent and it delivered a positive message, so Red adopted it as part of his original conception. 

These were the favorites among Red's works, a sum not as numerous as one would expect for twenty years of labor.

Moreover, Red's favorite t-shirt, produced during a brief spell of work in a silk screen shop and therefore considered a minor or lesser work, was a torment to Lindy and pained her from the moment she first saw it. This was a vertical rectangle centered on the front and back, identical and in design an inwardly swooping collection of blue, shimmering bands bent to a common core or apex slightly off centered  and no larger than a dime. The word along the top edge of the composition was STEEL and along the bottom edge, CUNT. 

Red wore this shirt to gallery openings he wanted to get kicked out of. Red and Lindy agreed not to fight each other if Lindy wanted to stay and see the show, but she paid for her preferences in art, it Red disliked them. It was also puzzling  how Red knew he would dislike a show before seeing it, a question Lindy never asked. His dedication to this work of art which he showed on his torso was admirable, so Lindy waited a year before losing the shirt in the laundry. Soon after, another showed up on Red’s broad torso. She determined that she would get rid of that one too,  but gave up after she found a box in the closet containing twenty more of them. 

Chuck was a serious writer and his rate of literary success was almost as slow as Red’s artistic advancement. He had written many unfinished novels and plays and  much ‘theoretical nonfiction,’ his very own and brightest concept, based on complete disbelief in anything publicly acknowledged as ‘fact.’  He believed the foundations of everything must be doubted. His list of published works was short unless his reviews were counted, but he didn’t acknowledge these as serious work; they paid little and served mostly to keep him in artistic society; on mailing lists for openings at galleries where complimentary wine and cheese were served. Red and Lindy cooked and served an excellent meal, they were very domestic in some ways, but no level of culinary excellence could survive the depletion of the wine. When this became clear to Chuck he was not content to ’push back the chairs and talk,’ as the poet said. Soon he stood up to leave. 

And Chuck took proper leave of little Franklin also, expressing his desire to see him again on his next visit.

“Oh, he’s not staying,” Lindy said. “He’s going to Philadelphia to live with his sister. We’re taking him tomorrow morning.”

“Of course, the city of brotherly love. I almost got mugged there once.”

Red laughed. “You know about that sister, don’t you, Chuck?”            

“The one he complained about so much, who abused him because he had so much talent and she had none?”

“That’s the one. Now she can abuse him til she drops dead.”

“Have a good time, Franklin,” said Chuck and picked up the doll’s right hand, a stuffed child’s glove, and shook it. Immediately he dropped it and cried out in pain.

“He cut me!”

“Cut you? Let me see!” said Lindy.

There was blood and a deep cut on Chuck’s middle finger. Red, normally squeamish about blood, also examined the wound. 

“There must be something of metal or glass in that glove, “ he said, “And isn’t that just like Franklin, to leave you something to remember him by?  You’ll probably have AIDS by next month.”

Lindy gave Chuck a band-aid.

Red and Lindy declined Chuck’s invitation to get another bottle or go to a bar. They had spent all their money on the  wine and meal Chuck had been kind enough to help them devour. Now he was gone and they were left to entertain each other.

Red laughed. “How about pulling out that next bottle of wine?”

Lindy looked at him, confused and fearful. 

“Bottle of wine? Oh, let’s save that for later.”

“Save it, hell, I bought it to drink it. I never saved a damn thing for later. Get it out!”

“We already drank it.”

“What?”

“We drank it. Everything was going so well, I mean, we were having such a good time . . . “

“You let Chuck the human sponge drink up all our wine!”

“You invited him, he’s your friend!”

“He was your friend first!”                                                                         

The argument got hotter and in a circumfluent way comprehensible only to those involved resulted in Red forcing himself on Lindy on the kitchen table, all before the scowling lips and plaster eyes of Little Franklin, her ex-lover.  He scowled as they bucked and heaved and continued looking grim as Lindy cleaned up afterwards, working to the melody of red snoring in the next room. 

When she had finished she took a bath and wrapped herself in an old blanket on the couch in the living room as much to avoid the gluttering rumble of snoring Red as to avoid seeing in her gloomy mood that despicable vagina (not a depiction of her own, she was happy to note and then wondered who it did belong to) with Red looking out of it above the bed. She lay on the couch with the miserable feeling that he was, by all outward indications, a man in control of his world. 

Why was she so lacking in such control? Why at a time like this, tired, feeling used, lonely and afraid, could she not descend into a sweet, soothing sleep instead of staring wide awake at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking of Red? And Franklin. Franklin was a tormented man who tried to rise above his pain, but eventually it swallowed him. She didn’t want to think about Franklin or Red or Chuck and especially not the little Franklin still sitting in the kitchen with a napkin over his head. Still, she lay awake pondering them, all current or previous lovers. 

At last she decided she was still with Red, had stuck with him so long because he was honest; unpleasant but honest. All the flim-flam phony trash society erected daily and now, on the internet, hourly or by the minute, is heaped up on our souls.  One can get filled with it and be moved, sized and counted more cheaply. It was all garbage in, garbage out and Red, at least, was honest enough to say so and renounce it without fear. How sweet life would be if he did not also renounce good manners!

                                     II                                                                    The next morning Red hurried Lindy to dress and get in the car so they could leave for Philadelphia. 

“Why the hurry? I haven‘t had breakfast yet!”

“We’ll get it on the way. I just want to get there, damn it. I’m all keyed up. I want to get rid of this thing, “ said Red.

Lindy looked behind him at little Franklin scowling in the back seat. 

“Nice of you to buckle him in,” Lindy said. 

Red grunted. 

“He’ll be safe,” said Lindy, “ but I’m going to feel his eyes drilling me in the back of the head all the way there.” 

Stopped at a  stoplight, Red turned in his seat and looked at the doll in the back seat. “I didn’t buckle his seat belt,” he said.

“Oh sure, the dummy buckled himself in,” she said and eyed him coldly. “He buckled himself in.”

The light changed and Red stomped on the accelerator. “Okay, okay,’ he said, “play your silly game.” 

Each suspected the other of lying. Based on her experience with Red, Lindy thought the best thing to do was keep her mouth shut. If Red wanted to play spooky games he would have to play them alone. At that moment, Red was thinking the same thing about Lindy. 

Because they started their journey badly by having this small fight they forgot to buy the newspaper.  Had they bought a newspaper Lindy would have read the report of a man who fell to his death from the balcony of a building the previous night. Some say he jumped, others that he was so intoxicated he couldn’t walk and slipped off. The police investigation found nothing remarkable about the victim or circumstances and reported it as an accident. The man’s name was Charles something-or-other, called Chuck by those who knew him. The unknown and pitiful part of Chuck’s story was that he resided in a suburb of the city and was the sole support of an invalid family member.                                                                                                      

They drove east, into the sun, and soon Red was screaming about forgetting his sunglasses.

“Here, take mine, “ said Lindy and gave him her sunglasses.

Red reluctantly put them on his face for a few minutes and then ripped them off. “Worthless! Worthless! Why can’t you give me a pair of sunglasses that block out the sun!” He held them under Lindy’s nose and crushed them in his hand. 

"Red, my glasses!"

Red howled. "I'm cut, I'm cut!"

He jerked the car onto the shoulder of the road and slammed on the brakes. Lindy opened the dashboard compartment to get out a tissue or first-aid kit.

"Red, what the hell is this?" 

"What the hell does it look like? Now give me something to stop this bleeding."

She unwrapped the object she had found and gave Red the slightly oily rag, then returned the object, touching it as little as possible, to the compartment. 

"Red, we have to talk about this."  She paused. "Why do you have a pistol in the car?"

"I might have to shoot something, or somebody. You might find this hard to believe, but that pistol actually once belonged to Franklin. Right little fella?" Red turned to the small figure in the back seat. 

"Franklin owned a gun?"

"Yes ma'am, a real gun with real bullets, unlike the one he used on you. He told me his father gave it to him to taunt him. 'If you ever become a man, ' Franklin told me his father had said, 'you'll be smart enough to shoot yourself with this.' "

"The old fool. No wonder Franklin was so depressed, so miserable! He was made to be so full of self-loathing. "                                                             

"Well, you don't need to feel so sorry for him. My father said the same kind of shit to me and I survived."

"Oh, you did, did you?"

The moment she thought to say it she knew she shouldn't say it so she said it. Red's explosion of rage lasted ten minutes. She glanced at her watch several times impatiently and each time he saw her he raged louder and would have struck her across the face had his hand been uncut. Lindy remained calm, knowing the gun was within easy reach. She smirked at him, yawned right in his face, giggled and asked if she could turn on the radio and directed his attention to several interesting and amusing items in view of their passing car. He raged, she loved it. His face went way beyond red into splotchy purple. She thought the veins in his neck and forehead would pop and spew hot blood all over the inside of the car, what a way to go!

Red at last exhausted himself and turned from her, mumbling as he drove. How fantastic it would be, Lindy thought, to be married to someone intelligent, quiet and polite. 

As she pondered this fantasy Red left the turnpike and stopped at a gas station. With a well measured, malicious tone he turned to Lindy and said," I'm going into this gas station and I am going to buy a pack of cigarettes!"

"Red, no!'

"Yes!" Red slammed the door. "Then I will return and smoke them in the car!" 

"No!"

She watched him walk into the gas station, the oily pistol rag dangling from his hand. There was so much anger in his walk, for the first time Lindy was truly afraid. They had had their fights in the past, but never before was he this explosive.

Moments later, shouts burst forth and the glass in the gas station door shattered on the asphalt. Red came out of the door followed by a man in a uniform shirt with a name in an oval patch over one of his shirt pockets. Red shouted, the man shouted and wagged his finger at Red. In one hand Red held the oily rag and in the other a pack of cigarettes. 

"I left my wallet in the car, " Red shouted to Lindy, "and this jerk won't trust me to come back with the price of cigarettes."

"You have to pay for those first!" the man cried, "and you're going to pay for that busted door!"

"Oh, I am, am I?" shouted Red. He reached in Lindy's window and before she could stop him or even shout he took the small automatic pistol from the dashboard compartment.

"Red, stop!"

The man turned back toward the station when he saw the gun, but he was too slow. Red shot in the knee. The pop from the light caliber weapon echoed off the front of the building. 

"How do you like that?" Red said to the man on the ground clutching his knee. He looked up at Red and said, "Please don't shoot me, mister. Take the cigarettes, don't worry about the door. Just don't shoot me."

"Well, how are you going to learn to listen and trust people if I don't teach you?"  He shot him in the other knee.

Lindy lept from the car and ran up behind Red. "Red, stop this, are you crazy?"

"I'm no crazier than that little creep in the car, " he said, "and besides, the question is moot." He pointed his gun at her. "Get back in the car." He turned back to his victim without another look at his wife, he was so certain she would obey.   

"Please don't sir, I got kids."

"You got kids and you work at a gas station? How can you support kids on wages from this place? Do you work two jobs?"                               

"Yes, sir, please don't shoot me sir."

"You beg too much. Maybe some lead between your lips will help." Red aimed for the man's front teeth and fired but hit him in the neck instead. Blood spluttered from a severed artery and the man silently laid his head on the black top and died. 

When Red arrived at the car Lindy was too scared to speak. He drove out of the gas station toward the highway. Placing the gun in his lap, he drove with one hand while tamping down the cigarettes on the steering wheel with the other hand. After he put a cigarette between his lips he spoke to her, the cigarette bobbing on his words, "That guy had a problem, Lindy, but he got over it. I helped him out."

Lindy didn't look at him or speak.  She clutched a magazine she had been wanting to read for many days but had found no time to open. Now it was twisted and bunched in her fists.

"The man's problem was basically this, Lindy. His spirit needed to soar. His spirit was trapped in the body of a complete asshole, a nobody. I merely released his spirit. "

Sirens began to shriek behind them. Red increased his speed, glancing into the rearview mirror. They were almost back at the interstate highway exit taken to get to the gas station and Red said, "If we can just get back on the turnpike we'll disappear in the crowd."

But now the sirens sounded ahead of them and a mile away red and blue lights flashed, grew closer.  Daring to glance at Red, Lindy noticed his face was strange to her, a mixture of rage and fear. 

"Honey, I'm really really sorry about this, but we've got to lighten the load here." He picked up the pistol from between his legs. "You gotta jump."

"Jump? Where?"

"Out, now!" 

"Red, no!"

He fired the pistol twice into the door, just above her lap. The  window, rolled down in the door,  shattered. Lindy didn't notice.

"Jump or get a bullet!"

Lindy opened the door and looked at the asphalt racing in a blur below.  At that moment Red turned left sharply and as he did he put his foot against her hip and pushed her out.  The door swung wide with the force of Lindy's body hitting it and slammed when Red straightened out. He was now headed for a quiet looking residential area built up to some distant, rolling hills.  

"Don't worry, Little Franklin, little friend, we're headed for the hills. They'll never catch us now! By the way, pal, would you like a smoke?"

When the police car with shrill siren followed Red's car around the corner the officer inside saw Lindy hurled from the passenger's side to collide with the guard rail and a post with what must have been a sickening crunch. The officer relayed this information onto the network. An ambulance was en route. The original report had the occupants of the suspect vehicle as a man, woman and child. Now they need be concerned only for the safety of the child. 

The road to the hills might have been straight for Red and Little Franklin had Red not been so busy looking for a light for their cigarettes. They ran off the road. Fortunately no house was in the path of the car. Red drove through a yard, smashing several lawn ornaments and destroying a newly erected nativity scene. Beyond this was a large oak tree which Red struck  dead center. 

A screaming woman burst from the house and ran toward the car cussing and spitting and when she arrived at the car and looked inside returned screaming to the house. 

The police ran up with pistols drawn, one on each side of the smashed and smoking car. More police vehicles arrived on the road behind them.  

Red did not move. The officer assumed he was dead. He was certainly severely injured.  Blood covered the dashboard, but the officer's main interest was the small, slumped figure in the rear seat. She reached in and pushed Little Franklin upright, then removed her hand and stepped back. 

"Will you look at that!" she said to her partner who had come around the car and stood behind her.

This officer looked in and said, "But it's only a doll!"

"Only a doll, sure, but have you ever seen such a hideous grin?!"

“Never! And that’s what’s wrong with art today. People create junk and make it the most ugly stuff just to get in the news. Why can’t they make good looking stuff, hey? It’s just disgusting.”

And he went on and beyond.

But his partner for the last four months knew he was not the strong silent type she had hoped to meet some day and understood that he would go on and on and beyond.  She stopped listening. 

Epilogue ~ One of Red’s favorite works ~ his only sculpture ~ was called Doll Party, a four by eight foot arrangement of Ken and Barbie dolls involved in an enormous orgy. In addition to the sexual action Red had cut off the heads and limbs of some of the dolls leaving bloody stumps, had pierced the bodies with tiny arrows, knives or spears, painted clown faces on some while others appeared to be urinating or defecating on each other.  

end of “Little Franklin”