Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal.
This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws."
-Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
I don’t now recall exactly when I met Frank, but it must have been around 1977 when I was in the 9th grade. Frank didn’t live in my neighborhood and wasn’t a member of “the Ward” so I must have met him at school or through mutual friends. When we first connected, he lived a couple of miles away with his divorcee mom in a small condominium at the corner of Murray Holiday Road and Wander Lane.
I wasn’t very worldly at the time and neither were most of my pals. In large part, that was a result of my conservative upbringing. My parents were both good and obedient members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and they were grooming me and my siblings to be the same. Consequently, my friends were all Mormon kids from the neighborhood. My social life was dominated by church-related activities – Primary when I was younger, Mutual when I was a bit older, and scouting throughout the entirety of my youth. I went to church services twice every Sunday – Sunday School in the morning and then Sacrament Meeting in the afternoon for good measure. Tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, cursing, fornication, masterbation, and failing to hand over ten percent of your money to the church were all strictly verboten.
My immersion in the Mormon faith was so complete that I didn’t even realize that non-Mormons were a thing until I met Trent Jensen in Ms. Houser’s 4th grade class. Trent was a stocky kid with yellow hair, googly blue eyes, and thick red lips. One day after school, I went to his house to play. While I was there, Trent told that he wasn’t a Mormon. That stopped me cold. “What do you mean you’re not Mormon?" I demanded. “If you’re not a Mormon, what are you?” Trent told me that he was a Southern Baptist. I heard what Trent said, but it didn’t compute. I couldn’t make any sense of it because up until that very moment, I didn’t know that there were anything but Mormons. I hadn’t even considered that possibility. The world as I knew it collapsed that day and Trent Jensen was its destroyer. At the age of 9, I was thrown into existential crises.
Like Trent, Frank wasn’t a Mormon kid either. I don’t know what he was. What I do know is that he knew about and dabbled in things that I didn’t. Dangerous things that were antithetical to the values being instilled in me by the various adults charged with ensuring that my path was both straight and narrow. My parents might have called Frank a bad influence. That’s a descriptor that parents always apply to anyone that exposes their little darlings to ideas and practices they would prefer to suppress. From that perspective, I suppose my parents would have been right about Frank. He was a bad influence but I didn’t care. I was already primed for Frank to be Dean Moriarty to my Sal Paradise.
It started with music. I wasn’t a big audiophile at the time and my exposure to music was fairly limited. My tastes, courtesy of my dad, tended toward Elton John and James Taylor. Then Frank told me about a band that had a flamboyantly gay front-man with protruding teeth, a porn stache, and a three-octave vocal range. Queen had just released Day at the Races and Frank had the album. He also had Queen’s Night at the Opera, Fragile by Yes, and I Robot by the Alan Parsons Project. He played them all for me. It was a revelation that opened my impressionable ears and mind to the world of music. I’m quite confident that my elders would not have approved of a reprobate like Freddie Mercury, but I fell hard for him and his beautiful voice because of Frank’s bad influence.
Then there were the cigarettes. Camel cigarettes in a cool-looking package that resembled the cover of Tom Robbin’s future novel Still Life with Woodpecker. And sweet clove cigarettes that I imagined smelled like an exotic North African café. Frank had them both and we’d smoke them when his mom wasn’t home which was most of the time.
I wasn’t really that interested in cigarettes. They were more of a curiosity than anything else because they were taboo. When I was young, we’d steal candy cigarettes from the nearby 7-11 and then walk back home, a candy stick between our fingers, pretending to smoke and hoping the Ward members would see us. We’d also find cigarette butts in the gutter that had been discarded by my next door neighbor’s dad, light them up, and hope the Ward members didn’t see us. But now cigarettes were cool and rebellious so I starting carrying them around with me. Back then, you could buy them from a cigarette machine in Dee’s Restaurant, Cory’s Kitchen, or any number of other places. No one policed it and no one cared. You could just slip into the restaurant, drop coins into the machine, pull the lever, and walk out before anyone even noticed. I did that until I finally came to the realization that smoking is a decidedly nasty and disgusting pastime.
The real revelation, however, was when Frank showed me his mom’s vibrator. It wasn’t a phallic-shaped gadget. It was more of a buzzing, glue-gun looking contraption with a number of interchangeable attachments all neatly organized in a black carrying case. Frank told me that he once used it on himself with the accessory that resembled a suction cup. I was shocked. Not necessarily that Frank pleasured himself. I was shocked that his mom did. I’m pretty certain that my mom didn’t have a vibrator hidden in her dresser drawer beneath her socks and garments. She couldn’t even use anatomically-correct language in front of us to describe our naughty parts. That was a result of the repressive culture in which she had been steeped her entire life which taught that sex, and everything related to it, was dirty and shameful and sinful. The exact same culture in which I was being raised.
The epiphany brought on by seeing Frank’s mom’s play thing was that sexuality wasn’t what I thought it was. People, including “old people” like Frank’s mom, actually engaged in sexual conduct for reasons beyond merely procreation. Even if that reason was self-gratification. And it wasn’t deviant or disgraceful. They didn’t go cross-eyed or grow hair on the palms of their hands. It was all very natural and normal. In A Bug’s Life, Hopper tells the ants that “ideas are very dangerous things.” This was the very dangerous idea I learned from Frank’s mom’s sex toy.
Ultimately, Frank and I drifted away from one another when his mom remarried and he transferred to a different high school. I heard later that he was gay and had moved to New York, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I replaced Frank with other bad influencers much to the consternation and dismay of my poor mother. But Frank was the original bad influencer. The OG of all bad influencers in my life. Despite the fact that I haven’t heard from Frank in decades, some of his bad influences are still with me to this day.
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