Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 22 - Cheap Beer

Photo by Marty O’Neill on Unsplash

“That’s all I’ve got in here, eh?” Frankie said to himself as he stared into the mostly empty refrigerator.

He hadn’t had a plain old Miller Lite in what? Thirty years? 

He grabbed a can, popped it open, and swallowed deeply.

“Gah!” he gasped. “Now that ain’t as bad as I remembered.”

He’d all but given up beer years ago, shortly after his earlier professional work was first prominently highlighted in an elaborate three-page spread in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. To celebrate that milestone, Becca bought him a bottle of Macallan and presented it wrapped in a bright green ribbon.

“Scotch? That’s a bit above my breeding, ain’t it?” he’d said when he opened her gift.

“A fitting drink for a professional architect,” Becca had answered.

“Professional, eh?” Frankie said and kissed the woman who would soon be his wife. “I like the sound of that.”

That was the last bottle of Scotch that Becca ever gifted him. After that, Frankie was more than capable of purchasing and downing more Scotch himself than he probably should have. He took pride in amassing an impressive collection of bottles that soon expanded to even more expensive whiskeys from around the world: Yamazaki and Karuizawa Single Malts, Old Rip Van Winkle Straight Bourbon, and more.

He now looked at the half-empty Miller Lite can he was holding and thought of his younger years and those early days of Becca staying late at ENH while he drank himself to sleep. Along with the Scotch, Frankie had incrementally improved his surroundings, moving further and further away from being some country bumpkin who’d grown up feeling captive in a small town — which wasn’t far from the truth — before transforming into a man of prestige and influence in Chicago’s real estate and development circles. He did this as Becca scrambled up her own corporate ladder, amassing more and more control at ENH.

At some point, drinking alone in one of their first upscale apartments downtown, Frankie devoted himself entirely to Scotch, tossing away cheap beer for good, at least until now.

A few years into their marriage, Frankie started seeing a therapist. It was the fashionable thing to do at the time amongst young urban professionals, another benchmark of success and achievement.

“Since you’ve frequently complained about your parents being blue-collar factory workers,” the therapist once suggested, “does perhaps your taste for higher-priced beverages mask your desire to eliminate your past”?

“I suppose,” Frankie said. “But we all have mommy and daddy issues, don’t we? I just like a good drink. Nothing wrong with that.”

“And other nice things.”

“What’s wrong with having nice things?” Frankie pushed back and waved his arms dramatically around his head. “Just look at all of this. You’ve got yourself a downtown view from the 60th floor of a swanky building. Leather couches and a fancy desk.”

“But you’ve admitted you feel guilty for having nice things.”

“I don’t think I’ve said I feel guilty.”

“That you compensate, then.”

“Yeah, well, that I suppose is true,” Frankie admitted. “But don’t we all?”

At dinner parties, he could hardly shut himself up as he’d try to convince anyone within earshot about his flair for the ornate and modernizing aspects of Greek architecture within his designs.  From his Promethean use of bossages with their uncut stones, brown sandstone and grey marble, carved into rustic and decorative moldings on the facades of buildings interspersed yet naturally inserted amidst the slick and shining glass and steel structures prominently lining downtown Chicago like titans, bold and hovering.  Frankie’s designs were modern and sleek while still appearing to have been there from the foundations of the city.  They were as far away from his upbringing as his expensive collection of Scotch was from a six-pack of Miller Lite.

Shortly after the Chicago Sun-Times profile, Architectural Digest plastered his image onto a full-page portrait that simultaneously humbled and filled him to overflowing with pride like a bucket so loaded with water that a single drop more would send waterfalls pouring over the edges.  He never particularly liked looking at his own photograph. But secretively, he couldn’t have been more satisfied with his glossy shining presence in such a prominent periodical.  

He thought the magazine photo of himself was one of the best ever taken of him, handsome with his tightly cropped hair, tapered neatly in the back, long bangs that he combed back in a new wave Pompidou. 

“It seems kind of vain, ain’t it?” he confided to Becca.

“You should be proud,” she’d responded.

All his colleagues saw the articles and made polite comments tinged with jealousy, and passive-aggressive accolades masking envy.  For years, those early profiles were regularly followed by articles in other high-brow trade periodicals and right up to the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, with every new spotlight came a flood of irresistibly entrancing job offers by competing firms aggressively courting him with promises of salaries and perks Frankie once thought nearly inconceivable.

Photo by R ARCHITECTURE on Unsplash

Once, after receiving his first six-figure end-of-the-year bonus, Frankie splurged on a fifty-year-old bottle of Mortlach which set him back more than ten grand.  

“You deserve it,” Becca had said, back on one of the rare occasions when she still joined him for a nightcap.  

She didn’t like Scotch, but he convinced her to take a sip of the Mortlach and watched with pleasure as her eyes widened and a grin stretched across his face.  

“It’s good, yeah?” he said.  

“It’s good,” she agreed.  “But I’ll stick to wine.”

“Ah!” Frankie said, waving her off.  “It doesn’t get much better than this.”  

He took a sip with closed eyes, his lips pursed tightly together. He clicked his tongue with satisfaction after he swallowed.

“Simply unreal how good that is,” he said.

But now there was no Mortlach.  There were no leather sofas, so soft and padded he’d lose entire Sunday afternoons drifting in and out of lazy naps.

Now it suddenly dawned on him, as he drank that surprisingly tasty Miller Lite, that he was standing in the kitchen of the lower-rent bachelor pad he had for a couple of years before Becca entered his life, and for the first two years of their marriage after that.

“Sam?” he called out, his voice echoing against the bare walls. “Frodo? Come here, boyos!”  

The white Pomeranians didn’t come running into the room. The apartment was filled instead with a silence so deep as to be deafening. Their two dogs weren’t around when they lived in this place, he realized.

“Now how’d I get here?” he said and looked at the can in his hand again.

A memory floated up, then, of not just being in a bar somewhere, but then right after the bar, of sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s car. That redheaded woman. Tabitha. That was her name. And then he and Tabitha were outside of the car watching as it somehow floated away. Inside the car, someone was screaming.

No, not just someone.

That young punk who had a crush on Becca.

He and that other fellow were in the back of the car, screaming.

“Wait…” Frankie said now in the kitchen. “Sam? That boy in the back. He was a Sam, too.”

A chill went through him then as he stood in his kitchen and for the first time he realized he was shirtless, and somehow there was less of him, less of the thin band of fat that he constantly and nearly pointlessly railed against with a hundred sit-ups each morning.  He ran his fingers now across an abdomen that was surprisingly ribbed and flat.

“This ain’t right now, is it?” he said to himself.

Then, turning to the living room with its one window that stared across an alleyway into the window of an adjacent apartment, he called out again.  

“Becca?”

The shag carpet under his bare feet felt foreign and strange.  For years he’d insisted on travertine tile floors, lined edge to edge with intricate patterns, always cool and comforting on the bottom of his feet. 

He walked the small hallway to the lone bedroom.

The bed was disheveled and unmade.  A bundled-up robe draped off the corner of the bed on the side Becca always slept on.  Frankie reached to pick it up and a compulsion came over him to hold it to his nose and inhale deeply. He was caught up in the scent of Calvin Klein’s Obsession, which Becca had worn for years and always sent Frankie into a passionate tizzy.

Then, with sudden awareness, Frankie dropped to his knees and reached under the bed, pulling from it a surprisingly small yet heavy metal fire safe, locked shut.  He hoisted it onto the bed and then shuffled over to where a pair of pants were crumbled upon the floor.  He fished through the pockets and withdrew a set of keys, easily selecting the smallest from among the jangling ring, and popped open the safe. 

Inside was his Glock, which he’d bought after a late-night break-in attempt when someone tried to enter his room from the fire escape while Frankie and Becca were sleeping inside. He’d barely scrambled from his slumber fast enough to scare away the would-be burglar and immediately bought the gun the very next day.

On more than one occasion, he’d thought of getting a permit to carry the gun with him while he toured construction sites in parts of town where massive restructuring was happening as tenement buildings were destroyed to make way for Frankie’s towering monoliths.  He was often met with derisive catcalls from angry locals when he walked those areas and was always looking over his shoulder when he went there alone.   

In the safe next to the Glock was a full magazine with seventeen rounds, which he’d learned and practiced how to slap into the grip in one fluid motion.  Under the Glock were their wills — though there was little yet to bequeath — along with a copy of their marriage certificate and the original folded set of blueprints he’d planned to give Becca on their first anniversary. 

He’d designed the blueprints to the house they promised they’d build once Frankie established himself in the architectural community and Becca made more of a name for herself at ENH.

“We’re both so close,” Becca always reminded him. “So close to each of our dreams.”

Frankie reached his dreams much faster while Becca’s dreams were always a moving — and therefore unreachable — target.

The house was to be a monument to their successes, a towering mansion with four separate balconies pointing in four directions, a wrap-around porch, a massive two-story gathering room for parties, and a master suite bigger than the entirety of this current apartment. 

They were blueprints to the home they eventually lived in for over half of their marriage. They finally realized the dream of those blueprints by their twentieth anniversary. After moving in, Becca sent the tattered series of plans to be permanently set in scratched silver frames, displayed like retired battle flags that were hung with pride in Frankie’s home studio.  

Frankie now lifted the blueprints from the fire safe and unfolded them across the top of the bed. He gazed upon images of what he’d long considered a monument to commemorate their pasts. But now, looking at blueprints that could have been printed that very morning, sitting crisp and new and unused upon the bed, they acted more as headstones of their uncertain futures.

“We had everything, didn’t we Becca?” Frankie said aloud in the room. He had a sudden clarity that was absent just minutes before. “And now you’ve zapped it all away and sent us right back to when we had nothing at all. And just what am I supposed to do about that?”