Franco’s voice confidently booming “Hey Angelo!” daily cut through the tedium of the white mocha hell I was living. In it I could hear some Platonic form of brotherhood, some deep longing for masculine friendship and the American loneliness from which this longing came. Franco never asked for anything. Franco was a proud man; his intense pride overcame the soot on his trench coat, his lack of money or the logistics of his space in this consumerist society. He would strike a polite conversation, lasting one to two minutes. The moment my manager turned away I would sneak him a large coffee. We would then stride over to the sugar station, absent the counter between us, and he would approach me as a fellow man, grabbing my shoulder, talking close enough that I could smell the cheap liquor on his breath.
Franco was whatever man Franco decided to be on that given day. While his story followed a general narrative (Italian man from New York), the specifics oscillated greatly. Franco was a former head chef of a pizza kitchen featuring six world-class wood-burning ovens serving the best pizza in New York; Franco was a roadie for Led Zeppelin who had been thrown off tour for fucking Jimmy Page’s girl; Franco had a wife and a huge mansion upstate guarded by six fiercely loyal Dobermans; Franco was at the top of his game until a doctor had preformed some catastrophic malpractice that all he had to do was sit on his back and collect the millions owed him; Franco was simply waiting for that seven figure settlement he was owed and I would be the general manager at the restaurant he would open soon after.
Franco was floating. Floating from whatever he wanted to be the previous day to the story he was writing in his head at the moment. Floating from city to city, bridge bypass to YMCA, hostile policeman to tenderhearted barista. Floating away from his past, floating away from reality.
I saw Franco floating downtown on a late Saturday night at a bus stop on 6th and Hennepin. He was engaging a middle aged sophisticated couple as they awaited the valet and their BMW. I watched as their apprehension turned to guarded smiles; and as these smiles turned to guilt-tinged laughter. They would have given him anything, just as I would have given him anything, had he asked. But Franco never asked. After they had entrapped themselves into all $45,000 worth of car, Franco looked around.
“Hey Angelo!”
I took Franco out for beers that night. I wanted Franco on the ground with me, on this bar stool, drinking beers, no bullshit.
“Franco, were you in Vietnam?”
Franco’s brown eyes clouded over, he slumped, looked around. His lips moved twice, wavering.
I was the kid who comes to the party and bumps the turntable as it skips and screeches to a halt.
Franco straightened, pulled loose the assortment of dollar bills and change from his pocket and slowly counted it.
“Another round!” Franco gleefully yelled.
Franco began to tell the story of how he had walked into a Macy’s store only to find four Playboy models pleading for him to pleasure them on the sample beds…
I offered Franco a cab ride that night. He declined, and for one brief instant I had Franco no longer floating, on the ground with me and my loneliness:
“Angelo, I was in Nam. Don’t ever let those fuckers take your life like they did mine. I’m leaving for San Francisco tomorrow. Minneapolis is too cold. Us Italians need to stick together. Don’t trust no one to tell you what to do with your life. Just fucking do it.”
It was the last time I saw Franco. I told the cab driver to wait as I watched Franco stroll down Hennepin, thinking that I may have met the greatest man of my life if it hadn’t been for war; wondering how many of my brothers would have to go through life floating because of the decisions of other men.
