Frank Lawler

There was a bunk behind Greg Lynch’s house. It sat about a third of the way up from the ground in a giant maple, like the mythical beanstalk. I was forever in search of mischievous yet benevolent giants. I was always in search of lifelong friends.

Greg lived on Tunnel Street in Pittston, the next street over from Broad Street, where I grew up. Directly in between Greg’s house and ours stands the Lawler homestead.

Frank Lawler was my brother’s best friend when they were kids, and maybe forever. That’s what I’d like to think. But who fucking knows what forever is and where it takes place.

I was about seven years younger than my brother, and Frank was a year younger than him. I think they regarded me as a pest. When I invaded their space, I was received like an ant at a picnic. A single ant isn’t that invasive, and in my mind, neither was I. But I didn’t belong. Some days, they’d whisk me away.

When I was finally able to cross Broad Street and make my way to Greg’s tree bunk, I wasted no time. The bunk overlooked a scraggly field we called the GI field, where Frank, my brother and their friends played sandlot baseball. There wasn’t always a game going on. But there was a joke book hidden somewhere in that bunk. In the wall, in the floor, I really can’t remember. The jokes were off-color I guess. Nothing that offensive but certainly nothing I’d repeat at the dinner table. I silently climbed the tree one afternoon to find some little-kid solace and isolation— and that book.

I crawled through the doorway of the bunk and froze when I saw Frank and another neighbor kicking back against the wall. Frank bit back on the filter of his Kool for a second until he realized it was me.

“Tommy Twang, you scared the shit out of me, you little prick.”

Why disguise it. This is how he talked to me, and this is how I’d eventually talk to a select set of others. This is how all those guys talked. And I would never desire to talk any different, among the right crowd. I mean… some words are merely a combination of sounds that some people are offended by and some people aren’t.

I immediately thought I’d get kicked out of the bunk when Frank saw me slink through the entrance. I guess he really couldn’t kick me out, because like I said, I never belonged in the first place.

He stood up and flicked his Kool filter out of the space that served as a window. A small out-of-square opening that let some light in on the shadowy secrecy of the tree-bunk. He stepped toward me, and I stepped back. He tossed that joke book at me—his greengold eyes transitioning from mock anger to the crazy kindness I’d come to know from that day to a couple months ago when I saw him for the last time.

When we’d meet through the years here and there and not often enough, it brought me back. Back to the time in the bunk and the days when he’d visit my childhood home across the street. We’d do a lot of other shit as the years passed but why dilute those early memories, some of the better ones.

Frank was the one friend of my brother’s who never knocked before he walked through our door. I never batted an eye at the back of his head following somewhere behind the back and forth of that beak of his sniffing out some food on the shelves of our avocado-green refrigerator.

Frank was the first guy I remember calling my mom and dad Mike and Anne before any of our other friends ever would. Honestly, I don’t think any of my friends ever did call my parents by their first names.

Shit goes haywire in life, man. Times change. Life sometimes clubs you and some other people over the head. I think some blows are the norm, and others— well… they’re just too difficult to relegate to the norm. Frank’s death is one of the difficult ones. But maybe when the time comes, he’ll let me in that bunk again. There might be some other familiar people there. And I should fear not, because it might really be glorious.