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Not counting the 4 or 5 people who arrived with him, I was probably the only person to show up at Frank Lima's poetry reading specifically to hear him. The rest of the audience either happened to be in the bar or came for 'the poetry reading.' Frank seemed unhappy with this non-crowd, and Marguerite Harris, the woman who arranges the readings, finally began the introduction about 45 minutes late. I was sitting at the bar watching the Michigan-Ohio State game, hoping the reading would begin because it was obvious Michigan, an old alma mater, was going to lose. Suddenly Marguerite grabbed my arm and said I'd have to come sit in the part of the bar set up for the poetry reading - she assumed I was there for the drinks and football.Marguerite was at the podium huddling with Frank as to what to say in her introduction, while he would now and then wisecrack to his group of friends sitting at a big round table in front, mainly to a sharp blonde girl who replied enthusiatically like a head coach to a fatherless orphan player who, to everyone's great surprise, turns out to be the star of the movie. I figured the girl was his wife and I was more than a little envious, not so much because of her looks - her face sort of an out-of-focus version of Lauren Bacall, lit by golden hair - as her concern for this man's health and sanity.
Frank looked pretty healthy and dressed in good-looking clothes, sharp woolen jacket, neatly shaped Afro hairstyle, Brazilian lightweight glasses frames, and continental ankle half-boots.
Frank's girlfriend appeared very proud of his book, Underground with the Oriole, and when he would say a title she would often say something like, 'This is really a good one,' as if to assure the other four at her table, particularly the other two girls, that their attention was important. Marguerite Harris went up to the little stage and with the nervousness and pomp of a Nobel Prize Announcement in a Mack Sennet comedy, began a hysterical 'can you hear me' routine, inadvertently turning off the sound switch, and when the audience of 2 or 3 got the message across to her, she was unable to find the right switch and totally destroyed the sound system. Her actual introduction consisted of cojoling the poet's friend, Paul Pines, to come up and do the introduction.
Paul, fitted out in leather vest and shades, made his way to the stage, bubbling over with self-affacing enthusiasm - but then could find nothing to say about his friend except that Frank had written Underground with the Oriole, published by Dutton. Frank came onto the stage and sat down behind the desk and microphone in the pinkish glow of 2 stage lights. Frank took off his sports jacket, looked up at the lights and said, 'This place makes me feel like a hamburger.' He noted there wasn't a single Puerto Rican in the house. Then he said 'shit' under his breath and began to read.
After a few poems the conversation among the drinkers in the rear got on Frank's nerves and he told them to 'shut your asses up.' A guy yelled back, 'Fuck you, Charlie!" Frank bent down into the 'phone (now fitfully working) and said, 'Come up here and say that, you nigger.' (This was really a black dude.) Things were starting to get hot.
The two waiters interposed themselves between the stage and the drinkers at the rear table, who by now were getting up out of their seats. 'Kiss my ass!' one of them shouted. 'You call that scumbag an ass?' came back Frank over the microphone, really laying into it now. Frank's girlfriend was trying to calm him down, calling, 'Read another poem, Frank' or 'Don't listen to those motherfuckers, Frank.' But it was obvious Frank was really pissed off with the way this reading was set up, with him having to play the part of the poet opening himself up to an almost invisible, disinterested and even hostile audience.
When Frank got out of his seat and threatened not to read any more, a guy asked if he could read, got no response, and walked right up onto the stage. After stating a name like 'Wade Gilmour', he started to read his poem titled 'Tiger, tiger, burning like a Light' - only there wasn't any mind paid to the humour of this vague poetic-sounding verse. Nevertheless, Wade became the perfect foil for Frank, in this Beckett-like play about an old man giving a poetry reading for himself. Frank, breaking thru the Beckett veneer, bounded back onstage and told Wade to get off - 'I thought you meant you were going to read my poems. You can read your own poems at your mother's reading.' At this point, Wade, visibly insulted, calls out, after shrinking back offstage, 'Why should I want to read your poems?', to which Frank replied, 'Yeah, you can read them on the toilet by yourself sometime, all alone to yourself.'