Frank's Wild Streak

Frank lived in fear of his parents. He was one of the only kids I knew who actually got spankings, and both his parents—but especially his dad--were pretty strict. Frank’s dad was a Navy guy with a machete on the wall of the basement rec room from when he was in the Phillipines. So mostly Frank did what he was told, but he also had a little bit of a wild streak. He had almost a kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going—tame and timid and rule-abiding most of the time, but occasionally subject to strange fits when his behavior was unaccountable. Sometimes when his parents were out of the house and he was there alone he would make Ovaltine malted chocolate milk with an astounding number of huge spoonfuls of chocolate, the milk getting so chocolatey it became a rich sludge. It had never even occurred to me that you could make chocolate milk with more than two heaping spoonfuls, like it said on the side of the container, so I was astonished the first time I saw him do it. When he made one of these concoctions for me we sat in his kitchen slurping them down, getting a little giddy from the sugar rush and the taste of the forbidden. Maybe these Ovaltine elixirs were his “Mr. Hyde” formula. At any rate, I wasn’t all that surprised when he told me one day about how he got locked out of the house and then broke the window of the basement door to get in, telling his parents later that some burglars must have done it. Of course they didn’t believe him and he got in big trouble.

The Zero

If you flew a Zero you were flying for the glory of the Emperor and the Land of the Rising Sun and you had utter disregard for your own life. Your plane was built for attack. Its designers were so intent on lightness and speed that they didn’t even include a parachute. When American pilots first encountered the Zero they were stunned by the agility of the planes and the skill of the Japanese pilots. But through careful probing they eventually discovered the Zero’s weaknesses. For example, the pilots of the 49th Fighter Group learned that their heavier Curtiss P-40 Warhawks could take a lot more battle damage than the Zero, and could dive faster too. You could outturn and outroll the Zero at high speed, and once you got in a fight the Zero couldn’t leave because you were faster. You had .50 caliber machine guns to their .30 calibers, and when you got on their tails you could really tear ‘em to shreds. But in order to get to that point you had to know your machine. You had to be able to ride your plane in the midst of battle like a cowboy rides a bucking bronco.

November Day

November Day

Sun warm on right cheek
& forearm. Bench hard
on my ass. Shadow of my
hand & pen tip moving
across the page, pen tip
a little moving mountain
of shadow. I look at my
watch again: 12:52. Surf
hitting the rocks & sea
wall, and even an almost
ocean-y sound of waves
breaking on the beach.
Lone seagull standing on
a black rock, picking at
his feathers. Tattered
yellow caution tape on
the rusty fence fluttering.
Blinding sun & its bright
sparkling swath on the
water. A churning foam,
good to see. The mail
truck zipping up Harbor
Street and out to the very
tip of the Point. No mail-
boxes here, but can you
blame him? Reading last
night about the studies
on wisdom. Do we get
any as we get older?
By most measures cog-
nitive function just de-
clines. But we do seem
to get some benefits from
“life experience.” People
react better to big crises,
considering fewer options.
Think positive thoughts
more frequently, & absorb
unpleasantness with less
distress. I forget what else.
The old guys in their lawn
chairs are talking about the
war in Iraq. “It’s a meat
grinder,” they say. “It’s
chopping people up.”
The wind rustles dry leaves
still in the trees, just about
to fall.

(11/7/05; 11/7/06)

The Planes

[Back to the story...]

I just did whatever came along for the most part, but Frank was the sort of kid who liked to plan, and the sort who liked to build model airplanes. Under his influence I built a few too, but I was impatient, so mine had missing parts, blobs of hardened glue at the seams, and crooked decals. Frank’s planes were neat and trim, carefully painted, properly insigniaed—these aircraft were ready to represent their countries of origin with pride. Frank did like to sniff the glue a bit, but this never seemed to affect his work.

One day we started early in the morning, finishing off some planes we had started the day before: a Curtis Warhawk, a Messerschmidt, a Zero, and a De Havilland Mosquito. Once the paint was dry we ran four parallel lines from tree to tree in Frank’s backyard and attached pulleys to each of these lines. All the lines were hung on an incline, so that when the planes were attached to the pulleys and let go they would “fly” for a good fifty feet before they got to the ends of their lines. We rigged up a starter cord that would release the planes when yanked, and then we got our BB guns. We spent a lot of time roaming the woods with these BB rifles, shooting up bottles and cans, terrorizing the occasional bird or squirrel. Our guns weren’t all that powerful, though, so I don’t think either of us ever actually killed anything—except insects. Frank had invented an ingenious method for spearing and capturing bees, since it was important not to blow them to smithereens if we wanted to be able to look at them under the microscope later. You tied one end of a string to a needle and the other end to the barrel of your gun. Then you pierced a berry—something about the size and shape of a Holly berry—with the needle and wedged the berry-needle combination into the muzzle of your gun with the point of the needle facing out. You got your gun very close to an unsuspecting bee working away on some blossom, and then you fired. The BB would propel the needle and the berry through the air, the needle would lance the bee, and the string would ensure that your newly acquired bee carcass dangled conveniently from the end of your gun.

But today our targets were planes. Once we pulled the starter cord the planes started flying across the yard and we opened fire. They were actually kind of hard to hit, so we ended up standing pretty close. Even so, the planes were still intact enough after the first run that we were able to have them fly a few more missions and take some more flak. It didn’t matter that one was American, one Japanese, one German, and one British-- they were all the enemy. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! We shattered wings, cracked fuselages, and blasted cockpits. At a certain point we realized something was missing: fire. With the help of a few gasoline-soaked rags, the poignant spectacle of flaming wreckage rounded out our vignette. It was an orgy of destruction.