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.