Obama’s relationship with Davis would last from age nine to eighteen and is described in chapters four and five of Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from my Father.” Obama describes gramp’s other black male friends but is not particularly impressed with them.
He then writes:
“There was one exception; a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki….He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the conversation would turn to laments about women.
“‘They’ll drive you to drink, boy,’ Frank would tell me soberly. ‘And if you let ‘em they’ll drive you into your grave.’
“I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t fully understand. The same thing I felt whenever gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars, in Honolulu’s red light district….usually I would sit at the bar, my legs dangling from the high stool, blowing bubbles into my drink and looking at the pornographic art on the walls—the phosphorescent women on animal skins, the Disney characters in compromising positions….”
But while Davis “specialized in sex”, the young Obama’s Smith Street adventures would eventually take a different direction. He writes: “…even then, as young as I was, I had already begun to sense that most of the people in the bar weren’t there out of choice, that what my grandfather sought there was the company of people who could help him forget his own troubles, people who believed would not judge him...
http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Rpt_Davis_Sex.pdf
Pop
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies . . .
But I don’t care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ‘cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.
— Barack Obama
http://usera.imagecave.com/Bessie/davis-frank-writing.jpg
Barack Obama was a ‘nom de plume’ for his writing, not his everyday name to be called by friends and professors. It would be later, when he really bought into the mythos his growing narcissism fabricated that he took the nom de plume as the real. But we have no documentation showing he ever legally ended Barry Soetoro in favor of Barack Obama.
