That Time Frank Sinatra Told Me The Secret To Life
There are many people who have decided it would be best to never hear from me again. I don’t mean that wicked glee of my high school math teachers when they watched me leave their classrooms for the last time. I mean people I wanted in my life, and whom, at one time, wanted me in theirs. Doesn’t matter if it’s an ex-lover or a friend, when someone goes ghost the surprise can shock and confuse you. Left with handfuls of emptiness, you wonder what happened. Perhaps you know, or suspect, but often, like a comatose mountain biker who wakes up in the hospital, you don’t exactly know what went wrong. You just know it hurts.
What do you do when the question — what happened — isn’t one you can answer on your own?
You might talk it out in therapy. You may go it alone and turn the remembered events over in your mind, over-analyzing them until everything is imbued with meaning like the weather in bad poetry. I learned, and forgot, and had to relearn how to stomach the feeling of not knowing. Never knowing. It was Frank Sinatra who taught me to deal with that hollow-bellied ache of absence. Didn’t find answers in the lyrics of his songs, though. It was something he told me.
A friend stopped speaking to me. A man I’ve known since I was seventeen, someone I called a brother, he decided he prefers a life without me. This happens in friendships. Things change. Influences shift. Distance distorts perspective. And old wounds can grow septic.
It was possible my friend’s silence has nothing to do with me — perhaps a tragedy had befallen him — so I asked a pair of mutual friends what was going on with him. I also asked if they’d heard that I’d done something I’m unaware of, if I somehow wronged our mutual friend. They couldn’t think of anything. Nor had they heard him say anything about it. In fact, they hadn’t really heard from him either. It just wasn’t bothering them. Of course, they hadn’t lived with him for years. They asked what I did to piss him off. I confessed that I had no idea. And at the same time, it could have been so many things.
One friend said something that helped. “Dude, you remember when Frank Sinatra told you the secret of life?”
Of course. How could I forget that?
I once shared a bed with my friend who no longer speaks to me. Straight men don’t typically sleep together. But it happens. When my friend brought up the idea of sleeping together, I told him it was cool, I’d just sleep on the floor. His house was full. There was nowhere else to sleep but his bedroom. So I picked the floor. He looked at me like I said I’d curl up with his Labrador in the doghouse.
“Z, I’m not gonna fuck you …if that’s what you’re worried about. Grow up. It’s not gay for us to sleep together,” he said.
“Dude, I know you don’t want any part of my narrow ass.” I said. And I did believe him. I wasn’t imagining him going all Brokeback Mountain. My concern was wholly different.
I first shared a bed with my sister when I was a kid. Since then, I’d only ever shared a bed with women. They expected me to spoon with them, and I never shy from a cuddle. But sleeping with a man, a guy has to worry what might happen when the morning comes, and the sun is up, and so is he, erect and ready for the day. As a semi-notorious cuddler, I didn’t trust myself. I was terribly worried my friend would wake up with a boner in his back. Way more than some anal sex, this was my big worry. How do you explain morning erection awkwardness lying in bed with your homie?
Quick to picture what the morning might be like for me and my bed-sharing friend, I explained my reasoning. He laughed and told me we could sleep head to toe. It was unlikely I’d try to spoon his feet. I joked that his chicken legs wouldn’t make a rooster horny. Finally, I agreed to sleep with him.
It was in Chicago that Frank Sinatra told me the secret to life. We were both at a Cubs game. If you’ve ever been to Wrigley Field, imagine an impossibly beautiful day in May, one that’s perfect for a ball game. The sort of day when the breeze is just right, soft like a kiss against your cheek, and the clouds sit just so, floating above you like someone painted the sky in watercolors. Everything feels like a moment that could stretch on forever. You know, just like the movie franchise Fast and Furious. Only, this afternoon was the opposite, it was slow and relaxed.
Frank Sinatra and I were behind home plate. Good seats. We squeezed into the old school, wooden chairs covered in generations of green paint, seats that are easily older than your grandparents. Our shoulders sorta pressed together as we watched baseball, slightly obscured from the sun, in a soft afternoon shadow created by the overhang.
The crowd left us alone. Mostly, because there were people paid to keep them at away. The hum of the ballpark hit a lull; that’s when Frank told me what he loved about the game. It was all the emotion in the numbers. Stat lines were stories. Of course Frank would appreciate the emotions more than the athletics. I agreed with him. It was the stories that I loved as a boy. Baseball is the most emotional sport. Neither football with its violent heroics, or basketball with its muscled grace, come anywhere close to the long history and intricate narratives of baseball.
Every player is involved in their own story. Each pitch is packed with emotion. The pitcher and the batter are at the center of the drama. The games string together to form a season. Seasons provide a franchise with its storyline. Franchises affect the stories of their home cities. Think of the Yankees, Red Sox, or Dodgers, and you get how teams take on the spirit of their city. They express it to the world.
A second strike slapped against the catcher’s glove. Frank said he hears each pitch like a note. A few pitches become a musical phrase. A ball game’s no different than a song. It’s all about the emotions. Far more than logic, emotions make us stay or go.
I looked up at the manually operated scoreboard. My eyes delighted for a moment at the varied greens of the ivy covering the outfield walls of the ballpark. Frank was right. Emotion made everything look so beautiful. Emotions that arose from my senses and mixed with my memories. Frank asked what the count was, he’d apparently lost track.
“It’s 2–2, Frank. Now, he’s gotta give ‘em something to swing at,” I said, careful to avoid any lame jokes about swinging and anything doo-bee-doo-bee-doo.
“I like when there’s no advantage. When a fella is sitting on two strikes. And he knows it’s all on him. And the pitcher is thinking the same thing — it’s all on him. That’s life.” Frank said, and his words somehow sounded musical even when he was just talking. When Frank spoke you listened, but I never expected it to sound so much like his records.
It was the ninth inning. All of the stories were coming to their climax. We all waited on the next pitch. With two outs, the Cubs pitcher was careful to protect the team’s one run lead. Man at first was the tying run. The go-ahead run was at the plate. The drama approached its peak like a butterfly alighting on a blossom. There was no rush. The moment was ripe as the flower just before it falls dead.
Frank turned to me and said, “Zaron, the thing is — listen, you wanna know what my secret to life is?”
I wanted to say yes in all the languages I knew. “I would love to hear the secret to life, Frank.”
The pitcher shook off the catcher. He waited for the right call. He shook him off again.
Frank put his hand over my wrist, “It’s simple. The secret to life is…”
His mouth was open but the sound shifted. It was no longer his sweet baritone.
Instead, I heard the sound of my friend yelling at me from Frank Sinatra’s mouth, “SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU — ”
I snapped awake.
“ — HAVE TO SHUT UP!” My friend was sitting up in his bed, leaned forward over his knees, yelling at me in the loudest voice I’ve ever heard him use.
It took me a long beat to adjust from the violent start. I looked up at him, “Sorry… was I… grinding my teeth?”
His eyes burned into mine. “You need to go to a psychiatrist, man.”
“I woke you up?” I said, still trying to get over the fact Frank was gone, that I was awake, and my friend was screaming at me.
“Woke me up?! You kept waking me up! I’d fall back asleep, and you’d wake me up again. I thought about smothering you with a pillow. I did. I’m not kidding,” he said.
I believed him. “I’m sorry, man,” I said, knowing that no words would make it better.
“You need to get a mouthguard, man! It’s fucking rude!” he said, like I’d punched his mother.
Some people grind their teeth. Not me. I press my teeth together like I have rocks in my mouth and I’m trying to crush them into gravel. It’s a high pitched whine. It’s at the upper limits of human hearing. From what I’ve heard from women over the years, it’s scary in its intensity, they didn’t know a human body could make a sound like that. One woman said it made her teeth hurt to hear it. I’ve never heard it. I’m always asleep.
Lying there, confused, next to his feet, I sat up and told my friend about my dream and how, just as Frank Sinatra was going to share with me the secret to life, I heard his voice. He told me that’s what I deserved.
Now, years later, I’ve been thinking of that same friend whom I once slept with and who no longer answers my emails or return my phone calls. It doesn’t have to be a significant other, sometimes, our friends are just as significant in our lives, and their sudden absence is painful. What I’ve come to trust is simple. It’s like Frank told me: we’re always in our own stories.
They exist congruently, they string together, they overlap and reinforce each other, but they always exist on their own. This means that sometimes, the best thing for you to do is to stop. Stop talking. Stop reaching out. Stop trying to change anything. This sounds defeatist. But it’s not. I may never know why my friend went ghost. I may never hear from him again before one us is in the dirt. Still love him all the same. So, I’ll listen to his silence. I don’t need words to understand when or why someone wants to be left alone.
It’s one of the hardest things we ever have to do — give up, let go, stop talking or arguing — just let a person be. It’s easy to forget how to do this. Even when you hear it from Frank Sinatra. How do you accept not knowing? But there it is. Sometimes, you just need to shut the fuck up.
Read more from Zaron Burnett III:
Love, Sex, and Other Things You Might Find At The Airport
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