Fuck Frankie.
The most fun you can have with your pants on.

Every summer up until high school when I wasn’t in the woods with the family I was on my block playing Fuck Frankie. The core of regular players included myself, three other same aged neighborhood catholic school kids; Keith, Sean, Brent and the Christiansan brothers, Chris and Ryan. They were a little younger. Our day always ended with one of them going home crying and/or bleeding. They always came back though. No one can resist the spectacle that is Fuck Frankie.

Keith was the organizer. He had to be because his yard and the surrounding yards next to and behind his house were the absolute best playing field. His house was fenced and bushed and gated with garages, cars, fences, boats all around, a forking gravel alley frames the area. The neighbours were truly excellent in allowing us kids to tramp and run all over and through their properties. On one side were a bunch of perpetually stoned college kids and a really nice old couple on the other side. “You hear that dear? Keith and his nice friends are playing Fuck Frankie again.” Keith’s three legged collie added a comically hoping and barking X-factor into the game.

So after any combo of the posse showed up at my door (Keith only lived 7 houses down), I would head over to meet up in front of his house at his large concrete steps and porch. This was the home base and location of  many exciting explosive and violent encounters. We chose “Frankie” with that baseball bat hands game and much cheating. Lacking a bat we used dirty circular rhyming ending in “and you are not it”.

So it’s basically a rough and profanity laced version of hide and go seek. All the non-Frankies go and hide and after a few minutes Frankie starts out from the concrete steps to come and seek. Just finding someone isn’t good enough though, Frankie’s got to catch you. As soon as someone spots Frankie from their hiding spot they take a deep breathe and yell with everything they’ve got FUCK FRANKIE!!! (It is so satisfying to yell this as loud as humanly possible, try it sometime.) That signals to everyone to run back to home base. If you can make it back to the steps without Frankie grabbing you, you’ve made it to the next round. If Frankie nabbed you, well congratulations now you are Frankie number two and the first place loser. So it’s all about stealth and cunning followed by frantic bursts of speed and agility, hurdling fences, juking and jiving, taunting and humiliation. The winner is the last non-Frankie. Sometimes the last non-Frankie would go hide and all the Frankies would go to the corner store without you. What a bunch of assholes.

We played other games too. Jailhouse was a good one because it involved locking people in a garage. Street hockey, baseball, water wars, other mischief. Fuck Frankie was the all-time favorite though.