Afterword

On March 22, 1999, Frank "Frankie" Jennings died by his own hand. He did make his own book, but he never did make that sail plane. He never made it to Alaska but he did make it to many, many other places, and I'm sure he met thousands of people. He did not jump to his death, instead, he took it quietly, in the night, via careful selection of the appropriate drugs — he knew what he was doing.

As I transcribed his journal I became increasingly amazed at his consistency of thought. It was not the rambling on of discordant feelings and of the trials and tribulations of teenage life that so many so typically portray teens as having. I particularly am amazed by his writings of 12/26-28. His entry on Jimmy Lee is a prime example of the kind of person Frankie really was.

For someone who would later write that he thought he had no writing skill, he wrote fluidly and with seeming ease — there were hardly any crossed out words and few grammatical mistakes. His spelling was not perfect, and most misspellings were due to dyslexia.

I decided to correct all his misspellings, and I added a few commas and a few prepositions where he obviously left them out. I made no other additions, and I made no deletions. All errors are mine.