#90 The Queen Of Puerto Rico- Joe Frank

#90 The Queen Of Puerto Rico- Joe Frank

Nick travels with his family to St. Thomas for the summer. He’s seventeen, “too old for the other children and too young to feel comfortable with the adults.” Spending most of his time at the hotel bar and the beach, he spies a woman in pink. He falls in lust and follows her around the island never getting his nerve to speak with her.

He meets a man on his last night that tell him that the woman in pink is a washed up prostitute and takes him for a ride in his motor boat. He is taken advantage of by this man and becomes the target of his unwanted affection. While back home, he gets phone calls, letters and free plane tickets back to St. Thomas from this creepy man.

This is a story about longing, and like most longing its skin deep and self-centered. There is no noir here, no dark mystery deep within the characters, there is just  superficiality. The woman sent to him from a mutual friend, the legless woman with too much makeup, probably the pink woman or a surrogate sent by the old man, is a lesson in superficiality.

These Joe Frank stories in this collection have some entertainment value, and I enjoy reading them, just like I would enjoy sitting on the beach with a pina colada staring at the woman in pink, but like Nick’s story, nothing substantial will come of it.

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

This is the second offering from Joe Frank’s The Queen of Puerto Rico.  Like the first, It has a definite pulp quality. You can tell that Frank reads a lot of Charles Bukowski. So the story telling has an engaging quality, enough dirt to keep it interesting, and a level of cheeky cleverness that makes you laugh every once in a while.

Unfortunately, unlike Bukowski I don’t fine much heart in the story, which is fine on the surface. Sometime a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless failure of a man is just a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless, failure of a man. You don’t always need redemption, hope or plot. The narrator seems to have a good handle on who he is:

“You know, when I think about myself and the life I’ve led, I feel self-loathing, shame, disgust. I’m a waste and a failure…but when I imagine myself as a character in a novel…well I think I’m pretty interesting, kind of offbeat, intriguing, entertaining.”

There is value here, but not deep meaning. Reading through this is like watching some nameless cable sitcom: you mindlessly ingest the show, are somewhat entertained, but forget it before the next one starts. All the lines sound vaguely plagiarized from some other pulp novel:

“She smoked camels, wore no make-up, picked her teeth with a toothpick, and drank a lot of coffee.”

“You can see that the subway stations were originally fine examples of innovative architecture. Now they’re filthy and defiled.”

Sometimes Frank hits a winner, like the *Notable Quote below which I found brilliant. And of course there is the very amusing story about Aaron stealing thousands of brownies from dozens of roadside Howards Johnson’s, then quietly returning them one-by-one months later.

Notable Passage: “After all, if one were to remove the turnstiles [in the subway] but make everyone go through the same motion as they passed into the subway, the sight of strangers queuing up to take a strong pelvic thrust at one another from behind would serve as an apt metaphor for the human condition.”

Rating: 7-6-8-6 Total= 27

#53 Tell Me What To Do- Joe Frank

#53 Tell Me What To Do- Joe Frank

Joe Frank has been called the “apostle of radio noir.”  At least that’s according to the dust jacket for his short story collection, The Queen of Puerto Rico. The first tale, Tell Me What To Do, is a dark sad world filled with booze and infidelity. Nobody is happy with what they have or who they’re with and everyone is looking for an escape. I guess it’s in a noir-light style. 

The plot is not really important and the characters are relatively cookie-cutter.  These are some of the themes:

Insecurity:

“He had the feeling if he didn’t stay with her, he’d never see her again.”

Misery:

“She had gotten everything she wanted, and she was miserable.”

Submission:

“Tell me what to do.”

And like every noir tale:

“They drank, they fought, and they fucked.”

That about sums it up!

Rating: 6-5-5-5 Total= 21