Foreward written by Erik Lomen

Frankie The Devil was born Kathleen Mary Brennan on December 30th, 1988. The youngest born into an Irish Catholic Rhode Island family, she had 6 older brothers and an even older sister. A family of epic Irish proportions coined “The Idiot Sandwich” by her sister Laura. Kathleen shared a birthday with my other lifelong crush, Patti Smith. I’d tell her this from time to time and she’d say, “You can have that old wandering eye’d hag so long as I can have Edward Norton.” I’d laugh and she’d spit on the ground and spark up a cigarette. After two drags she would just look at me from above her glasses at the tip of her nose and whatever mystical spark lived in her squint would forever remind me of the night that I had proposed to her.

I had found a ring in a little vintage shop in the Old Port, an ornate silver cup holding a small blue gem. The ring seemed perfect at the time, but in reality it was just all I could afford. The same day I proposed, I wrote a poem and then we went out and got nice and drunk at Mama’s Crowbar up on Munjoy Hill. I read the poem aloud to a crowd full of freaks and friends and she knew, she knew it was for her. That same squint set in. The last lines rang out over a crowd full of cash only beer only patrons as I walked forward to her stool, knelt down and asked her to divorce Tom Waits and marry me. The scene exploded and someone put on “Come On Up To The House”. Years earlier I was running a little letterpress shop, hocking broadsides and poetry books at one event or another when this woman walked up to me and said, “Jesus, how in the hell did you come to publish Kathleen Brennan?” I quickly said, “Well, I live with her...” Her eyes said it all, we were NOT talking about the same Kathleen Brennan.

Steve and Dave at Phoenix Cycle Shop in Westbrook, Maine took Kathleen in. We were engaged and she was working on another bike, an old Honda Magna made right for her five foot frame. Dave took to calling Kathleen, Frankie, after coining her new project bike the “Bride of Frankenstein.” She took what was meant to be a nice number 10 shoulder punch and owned it. We all called her Frankie eventually. Years later, we were living in Hallowell. Frankie left early one morning on her bike to attempt to change her name legally. She was committed to the bit, but the judge who was assigned to her hearing was named Kathleen. So Frankie slipped out the back door. 

I met Frankie in college. We were painters, letterpress printers and general troublemakers roving around the Northshore of Boston throughout our heyday. Frankie would have these visual migraines, these odd spells. The first of which goes as far back as our first week of knowing each other. One day a painting teacher of ours, Scott Hatfield, asked “What do you see when you have these migraines? What’s there you can use to make art out of?” While I’m sure he didn’t intend his questions to change Frankie’s life, what he said invoked a late-to-bloom yet extremely inquisitive spirit within her, that same spirit stayed bright and burning for the rest of her days. Throughout college, every time a migraine set in, she’d close her eyes, lay down and harness the visuals while riding it out. Once the storm had passed, she was able to translate and paint her visions onto canvas in incredibly fast fashion. She sold one of these paintings for $4,000 out of her 6’x6’ student studio and blew everyone’s minds. She counted the stack of hundreds, shook her head and laid down to ride out the next high pressure brain system. I have never seen anyone create such an in depth painting so fast.

Once motorcycles were introduced into her life, specifically the complicated array of motors she feigned after, she was hooked harder than any drug addict I have ever encountered. She wanted to get to know these engines, how they sat in their frames, every component and carburetor part, everything in and out. Steve and Dave saw this in her, recognized the hypnotic obsessiveness and after a few months, Frankie was off to Phoenix. The story gets dark from here, so a succinct set of words feels necessary to dial in the autumn and fall of Frankies life without dwelling on those last months. Frankie after all, was far more than the last two years she was alive.

After 4 months in her desert glory, doom set in. Frankie was a rake, as thin as an after-dinner mint. Her brain was being eaten by a foreign growth that ultimately determined her date with death. Her last two long and incredibly precious years welcomed a large influx of people, loved ones and friends that her restless spirit had bucked off unintentionally throughout her salad days. Crowds swarmed into Phoenix and into our home back in Maine on a seemingly constant basis and everyone was there to hold her in an indescribable love and light. Her magnetism was strong and undeniable. She understood and adapted to this final chapter in her life with astounding grace that can’t be accurately explained in words. With all things tidal however, there were quiet days where it was just me and Frank, tired, keto-thin and fighting to keep the daylight bright in one another. 

In the end she took in heavy humid air on an incredibly sunny day at the end of June. Inside our last home together her eyes remained closed as a rolling death rattle ebbed and flowed. Outside motorcycles ran up and down our street, sending wave after wave of burnout creosote smoke into the atmosphere until Frankie The Devil was carried away. What remains is this interview from months before her diagnosis. She was on top of the world, biting at the air like a sure-fire soul destined to do great things in this realm and whatever comes next for us humble humanoids and we hope it inspires everyone to live for today. Long Live FTD.

-Erik Lomen