No kidding, Kirk.
***
When I meet Franklin at the five-star Ritz-Carlton in downtown Manhattan the morning after, he’s back to normality. It’s 11 o’clock, and he gives the impression of having just woken up: He’s swathed in a plush robe and matching white slippers, courtesy of the house. He’s much more at ease now—nothing like the distressed Franklin post-106 & Park. I cut straight to the chase and I ask him what in the world happened to him the day before.
“Yesterday was just this really deep lesson for me,” Franklin says, “because getting there late and everything having to change really messed with my flesh. It really made me deal with some stuff that I’ve been praying about. And God…he answers prayers. He’ll sometimes get at the core of that stuff.”
Just as I’m about to ask him what “that” is, he continues: “Vanity and pride and celebrity and self-glory and how I look and image and all that matter too much to me. Yesterday God allowed it to not go the way I wanted it to go so he could deal with that issue. Things could’ve happened a lot different last night, but because I wanted to get dressed and change clothes and look the part and all that, I got stuck in traffic.”
An answered prayer, indeed, and suddenly everything comes into focus: the lateness, the moodiness, the massive boots, the quick glance in the mirror. “I could’ve gone with what I had on [before],” says Franklin with a smile. “I just didn’t think about it until I was too late. It really upset me that how I looked was so important to me that it made me show up late.
“The night before, I’m here at the hotel praying, Lord, I’m getting too consumed in stuff that ain’t you,” he says. “I’m serious. What’s I’m learning is that God don’t have me over here trying to be like them. God don’t want me trying to be like them and adapting all of their ways of thinking.”
Franklin says narcissism is something that’s been with him since childhood. “I’ve always struggled with it since I was little kid because I always was the little short ugly one,” he says. “I had big lips, big nose. I needed braces, couldn’t afford them…I’ve always felt inadequate as far as my looks.”
Now Franklin is not a bad-looking dude. He’s short, sure, but there’s a certain bohemian charm to his 5’4” frame. Plus, he compensates in other ways. When he unveiled the music video for The Fight of My Life’s first single, “Declaration (This Is It!),” the day before, viewers also had a chance to see another side of him: his fit, muscular physique. The brother is diesel. The video itself—a Cinderella Man-styled period piece where Franklin boxes himself—is empowering, if not entirely demoralizing if you’re anything like me in the leanness department.