Frankie had shot someone in high school. It was an infamous shootout between high school kids in the late 90s. Youngstown had a lot of infamous shootouts. There was the story of Flip Williams who executed four people. There was a murder over a video game. There was a race war in the junior high. There was a car chase and a shootout that led to an old Mexican woman being shot while watching a rerun of Mash in her living room. And last year there was a fire lit by a mentally retarded person that killed six people, the result of a dispute over a cell phone.
Frankie had participated in the shootout at a Youngstown high school. What it was about, no one even remembered. It didn't matter. It wasn't over oil or conquest. It was high school kids who grew up poor, badly rationalizing that shooting guns would lead to happiness. Frankie was caught in the crossfire. Someone dropped a gun on the cement. Other people were shooting at him and his friends. He picked up the gun. He did not say but one could assume that he cried and wet his pants in fear when he shot at the people who were shooting at him. He never had the land to practice shooting a target so he fired in the general direction of the shooters out of fear and hit one of them in the leg. Frankie was arrested. The principal of the school testified that Frankie was shooting in self-defense. Frankie got one year in a juvenile detention center. When he got out, his mother sent him to Dallas to live with relatives. Frankie lived down there staying out of trouble for several years. He graduated high school, went to parties, got jobs, and talked about the Cowboys. He came back. He was out with his cousin at a bar on the south side of Youngstown. A fight broke out and his cousin was shot in front of him. He said he was close to his cousin. They grew up together, playing on the same streets, going through the same tribulations. Then a year later he went into a bar and the man who he shot when he was in high school; he saw him and followed him home back to his mom's small house on the south side of Youngstown. Frankie laughing, still drunk from the drinks at the bar, still happy from dancing, got of his car. A man yelled. Frankie looked and three bullets hit him: one in his stomach, one in his arm, and one in his leg. He said he couldn't feel it at first. But soon enough he knew he had been shot. He got in his car because he realized he had not died. He saw his cousin die of bullets; he knew that bullets could kill a man. He drove to the hospital bleeding from three holes in his body. He dragged his wounded body into Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. They asked him if he had health care; he said no but they took him anyway. They saved Frankie to keep him living, to keep him washing dishes.
Frankie didn't snitch on the man who shot him. He didn't seek revenge. He knew that the man who shot had meant it. He wanted Frankie dead. To snitch would ensure his death.
Frankie lived in Warren in a small apartment with a short little girl who comforted him in the night and made him laugh. He had two kids with women he wasn't with. He had a lot of moments that would break most people, but he kept going.
I walked by him and Frankie said, “Look at this, look at this,” holding his cell phone.
I looked at him with a curious expression.
He held up his cell phone and said, “Look.”
I looked down and it was a sumo wrestler's ass.
“What the fuck is that Frankie?”
He laughed hysterically and said, “That's a man's ass.” He laughed like a madman.
“That sure is.”
He turned serious and said, “This white girl says she had my baby. She said they ran the DNA and used one of my past DNA tests and they say its mine.”
“That's three babies, isn't it?”
“Yeah, I got too many babies as it is.”
“Have you tried pulling out?”
He didn't recognize that comment and said, “It's my first white baby.”
“I almost had a black baby.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, but the umbilical cord killed it.”
“Oh, I have three babies now. But I gotta talk to a lawyer about this DNA test.”
“That sounds good. Bring in the lawyers.”
I walked away and realized that he didn't tell me the child's sex or name.
I was outside smoking in a small shack where the potatoes and cleaning chemicals were stored. I sat on a box of potatoes. It was chilly and lightly snowing. Beth came out, sat on a box of potatoes and began to cry. Beth was always crying. She cried every day. She was from Geneva, up by Cleveland and was a poor white girl that never had anything. She never confessed what her childhood was like. She wasn't into sharing her life. She got pregnant when she was 17 and got married to the father because she was told it was the right thing to do. Her husband refused to do anything. He would sit on the couch everyday instead of changing diapers and doing the dishes. In the last nine years of marriage he had worked for a total two years. He went to trucking school, graduated, got a job and then quit in less than two months. Beth once said, “I never had a life.” We were all talking about the bar and how much fun we had. How we were in college, learning, not caring about things, like kids. How our lives were less hard than hers. And she said, “I never had a life.”
We asked her why she won't go out drinking. She said she wasn't allowed because she became a whore when she got drunk. We told her that was normal for a woman to become a whore when they got drunk just like it was normal for a man's penis to not work when he got drunk.
She didn't respond to that. She kept scorning her life and her choices in her head, silently in despair over how things turned out.
I said to Beth, “What's wrong.”
She looked at her feet with tears flowing from her eyes and said, “I asked for a divorce today.”
“That's good.”
“But we're supposed to stay together for the kids.”
I considered a response and said, “My parents didn't love each other. It sucks in its own way knowing that your parents are living in the same building even though they hate each other. You'll end up teaching your kids that maintaining a failed relationship is a good thing.”
“I'll have to pay for a lawyer and have a custody battle. It'll be so hard.”
“Yeah, but imagine how hard it'll be if you have to live like that for the next 40 years.”
She didn't want to consider either of those fates and said, “He won't do anything but sit on that couch and watch television. We've argued so many times. I've begged him to get up, I've cried so many times to get him to help me. But he won't. He won't help me.”
She stood up, threw her cigarette at the cement and went in the building.
The servers of America are a pitiful bunch. Some were in college and it wasn't bad. They were just passing through. But a lot were trying to live off of tips. It was a degrading job.
It was the end of the night and I was mopping the floor. I had mopped many floors. I mopped floors at Wendy's, Taco Bell, a nursing home, and several other restaurants. I was 28 and still mopping floors. The world looks down on people that mop floors. I would be going to New York City the next week to a world full of people that didn't mop floors. It never bothered me to mop floors though. I kind of liked it. I would look down at the floor before I would start and say to myself, 'Wow, what a dirty floor.” Then I would mop it with industrial strength de-greaser and bleach. Then spray it off with a hose so it would look beautiful.