My Friend Frank ---(Warning: Explicit Lyrics)

One of the best compliments I’ve ever received came in a conversation on a flawless spring day, the kind that empties dorms onto the lawns. After a long winter, a hot sun warmed our skin, and a breeze the temperature of the crisp blue sky sauntered through. My friend Frank told me, “Luke, there are two kinds of people in this world: Those who are full of shit; and those who aren’t. You are not full of shit.”

I do not understand my friend Frank. I tell him this regularly, and he agrees. It was high school that sent us in different directions—perhaps it was junior high—but I left high school polished, socially confident, with an air of popularity. Meanwhile, Frank uncovered himself through music and friends, turned his back on popularity and high school, on the hierarchy of smiles and manicured faces that I had silently lusted after. My friends and I had discovered the joys of being beautiful and being nice. Frank and his friends discovered—created—a loophole, living far from the bright lights of popular society, discovered how to love more and care less.
I entered college with the skills to survive a world of painted Plexiglas—the real world. Talking at people and smiling keeps the world running, and I was learning the steps, finding the cadence. Frank entered on the train of counter-culture, the wind of music, the pride of making it.
We met during our sophomore year; he sat with his friends in the corner of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, talked infrequently and laughed discreetly. Naturally I assumed they were laughing at me, at my clothes and face and inane comments, as this is always the most plausible explanation of laughter among friends.

It took most of that first year for us to become friends. I had heard that all people are basically the same, but I doubted it with Frank. Philosophy had shifted my faith off its moorings and onto nothing, and I needed someone else who was basically the same. My friends did not talk about, nor care about philosophy. But Frank did. Even before he joined the major, Frank read the French philosophers because he believes people should read the French philosophers. We started a philosophy club. I talked to Frank and his friends whenever I could, mostly about philosophy, because that is all we had to talk about.

I recently told Frank my first impression of him and his friends, using my fingers to illustrate three points—
First Finger: They knew something I didn’t, something intrinsic about philosophy and being important. Second Finger: They were all inherently smarter than me. Thumb: Whatever they knew, they weren’t going to tell me.
He used his own fingers to respond—
First Finger: In a philosophy class, everyone thinks they are the dumbest person. Second Finger: —with a shrug—Who knows? Thumb: Well, that’s true.
Frank has never liked my friends, and though he has grown nicer since I met him, he has always been easily offended. Frank swears and has friends who say God is a dickhead. My friends, the ones who are going to be pastors, offend him. He is offended at how easily they are offended. Conformity offends him. Pat Robertson provokes Frank to cursing and tears. The Mormons he invited to lunch last semester were wrong—or at least crazy, and Frank wants people to know Jesus.

Frank and I are very different. I am tall; he is average. I have long hair and wear a baseball cap; my clothes can be seen on the plastic mannequins in stores. Frank has always worn really torn pants—tight jeans from a long time ago. When it is cold, he layers flannel shirts and zippered hoodies, and he carries coffee. His hair is short, and he has one baseball cap, a blue one, which sits flat on his head; it reminds me of a milkman. I don’t know why it reminds of that, except that it may be from a dairy farm. More often, he wears stocking caps—knit black ones—they remind me that he is in a band. And bands, much more than clothes, make Frank go.

Frank believes in music, lives in it, until it pours from him. I’ve had a lot of friends who play music, even love music, but not like Frank. The music scene at my high school consisted of cover bands and awful bands, and Frank would’ve been offended by them all. They played for audiences, and we cheered because they played songs from the radio. They smoked pot and got jobs at hardware stores after high school. Frank used to smoke cigarettes, but he sucks in music like a sponge trying to drink down the ocean, like a huge, inhaled breath. And every time he moves, it pours out. It pours into his friends’ art, into his new CD; it explains his copies of Heidegger, Sartre, and Baudrillard. I’ve known Frank for three years now, and I’m still trying to find out what he knows and I don’t. He still baffles me, most of the time. We have both changed a lot since then; he loves people better, especially people that aren’t like him. He still has trouble with my friends—with people like me—and I am beginning to wonder if I gave him too much credit—if he ever knew anything I didn’t. I’m beginning to think that he gave me too much credit—that we all, in different varieties—that we all are full of shit.