Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  It wasn’t a one-way cosmos; Dr. Zurkon seemed to be delighted to have me around the lab. As a kid, he told me, his favorite form of recreation had been blowing things up, and he hadn’t changed a bit in the intervening twenty or so years -- he’d just expanded his experiments into the human area. And here, suddenly, I was -- just in time to have my molecules thoroughly rearranged.

  That afternoon, we had time to kill between the sound check and the gig. Once we had our suitcases stashed in our room, Frank, in a playful mood, asked me what I felt like doing. “Got a pair of trunks? “I inquired straightfacedly, looking out of the window at the chilly turquoise surface of the pool rippling in the stiff breeze two stories below.

  “Nope,” said my degenerate roommate with finality. To him, strolling from the car to the motel lobby was the equivalent of a backpack expedition to the summit of Mt. Whitney.

  Forced to invent other amusements, I flushed and mumbled, unable to specify what I had in mind, so the Grand Inquisitor commenced on me, Under his seemingly indifferent but actually concerted questioning, I finally confessed something that I’d first observed during our first encounter at Bizarre Records — the fact that I found the timbre of his voice almost painfully erotic. This seemed to delight him, and he immediately set about attempting, in his droll way, to quantify my physical responses to his vocal apparatus. Clipboard. Pen. Lab coat. Now, then: Did his voice by itself elicit an intense reaction? What if he changed the pitch? Well, how about changing the pitch and applying this much manual stimulation? OK, what happened when he increased the manual stimulation? Now let’s introduce that sock I apparently was so fond of the other day...had it right there in the suitcase, hadn’t rinsed it off yet, figured he’d need it again before too long. Vaseline? Nope, I was obviously a purist. So what happened when he pressed his face against my solar plexus ? ... Hmm — would it damage the beauty of this experience if he asked me to attenuate the volume just a little, by any chance, say five or ten db? Security had their office on this floor.

  I don’t think Frank had anticipated how intensely I’d respond. I hadn’t, either. I had been uncomfortable enough initially, but I rapidly became unbent: This mutant universe was becoming more exhilarating than I’d ever thought possible. Emotions were unrecognizable, thrills were much more intense because of their unfamiliarity, no longer did things resemble the monochromatic ‘reality’ I’d always taken for granted.

  “Is there a word for ‘love’ in your universe?” I asked. By the time we left the motel for the show that night, I had an exciting new addition to my vocabulary — can you say “polymorphous”, boys and girls?

  I began learning a few other things too. After a couple of days of engaging in optional recreational activities, as he called them, I realized that Frank’s sexual philosophy was as original and as faintly disturbing as was everything else about him. He went after things that were important to him with a Zenlike absoluteness — and sex was only a little less important to him than his music was. Sexuality — “those glands down there” — unconsciously permeated everything he did, from his voice to his gestures to his guitar playing. He was serious-minded, even solemn, and yet at the same time, I distinctly sensed that there was an element of madness in his refusal to accept any boundaries whatsoever, sexually or otherwise, He could find erotic possibilities in the least likely situations — the more absurd, the better; the further he could push the envelope, the better he liked it. And all the while he was pushing it, he was laughing... not too loud, but very deeply.

  As the tour progressed I was pleasantly surprised to find that Frank was a model roommate. But it made perfect sense. He was a practiced ‘road rat’; during the years he’d spent touring he had acquired the hard-won art of graceful, efficient living in a vacuum. Well organized and orderly to a fault, he was forever going around picking up my odds and ends and sorting and arranging them for me. I had never been looked after with such determination, and I found it confusing: On the one hand, I wished he’d ask me first before he took charge of my stuff, but on the other hand, I had to admit I enjoyed the novelty of opening my guitar case and not finding dirty underwear in it, (My slovenly habits must have driven Frank to distraction, but beyond the occasional harrumph, he showed admirable restraint.)

  To revive the freshness of your dainty garments

  I soon found I had a problem with him making me laugh, although there wasn’t much I could do about it. When he wasn’t around a group of people, or onstage, he was far from garrulous, but when he did make an observation about something, it was likely to be droll, and all too often his comments had me nearly choking to death, trying not to crack up. One night some no-budget sci-fi opus was showing on the local channel’s Red Eye Theater, and Frank sat up in bed improvising cheesy dialogue with the sound off until I finally couldn’t stand another second. I begged him to stop, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “Can’t take it, huh?” he said, raising a stagily contemptuous eyebrow. But it was too late. I laughed so hard that I literally wound up wetting the sheets. Frank immediately ceased tormenting me and made a wild dash for the other bed, which made me laugh even harder.

  Frank’s sense of humor extended into areas where others didn’t even dare to chuckle: he was the only guy I ever met who could laugh in the throes of the sexual act. Seriously. “It’s all the same muscles relaxing” (this pronounced with true pseudo-scientific gravity -- ask Mr. Wizard!). For him, reproductive organs weren’t merely plumbing, but sublime inboard recreational equipment. “What could you possibly do out there that could be half as entertaining as what we could do in here?” I doubt whether I’ll ever be able to wipe from my mind the picture of him standing in shag carpeting up to his knees in some Holiday Inn, not exactly a candidate for the best-dressed list, right hand from the heart-a, solemnly reciting the lyrics to an old hokum blues number: “Your balls hang down like a damn bell clapper, your dick stands up like a steeple, your asshole’s just like two church doors, and the crabs walk in like people.”

  Yes -- there was a definite madness in Dr. Zurkon’s method, methought.

  Even though Frank could be warm and genial in public and considerate and affectionate in private, he made no attempt to dissemble when he was in a bad mood; to him, dishonesty was a far worse sin than possibly offending somebody with a baldly stated or irate comment. The way I figured it, he appeared to be less than genial between a quarter and a third of the time. His emotional barometer would change without warning, and I soon became entirely too familiar with the lowered brows, the sour, confrontational glare, the clipped, sarcastic rejoinders. This state could be brought on by anything — no coffee, not enough sleep, malfunctioning equipment, an interviewer asking the ‘wrong’ questions — or, seemingly, by nothing at all. It was just his way of handling emotional overload. I rarely felt that Frank’s ill humor was directed specifically towards me, but it was still extremely unpleasant. You could feel it building up and hanging in the air like electrostatically charged ozone before a thunderstorm. The minute I saw it coming, I’d get the hell out of the area and watch from a safe distance while some less knowledgeable fool got the downpour; only when I was sure the disturbance had passed did I venture up close again.

  I liked him much better when he grinned, slapped his knee in delight at some absurdity, made up ridiculous nicknames for various portions of my anatomy, affectionately twiddled the tip of my nose, suddenly appeared out of nowhere with an unidentified bulbous object in his hand and that look in his eye.

  One night, after an especially tiring day, I got back to the motel aching in every muscle. As I stiffly changed out of my clothes, Frank noticed my condition, made me lie down, and proceeded to administer a back rub. Just a few minutes earlier, in the car on the way to the motel, he had been chewing out one of the band members for showing up fifteen minutes late at the sound check that afternoon. Being there while he gave the guy hell had made me extremely uncomfortable; I spent the ride looking studiously out of the window and wi
shing I’d gone in the other car. Even now, as Frank worked on my back, I was still feeling ill at ease, and he could tell. “You thought I was being an asshole, razzing _____ like that, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.

  “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “Well, that’s just what you have to do when you’re running a band. Next time he would have been half an hour late for the show, and then the other guys would’ve seen him getting away with it and gone, ‘Hey, if he can be late, we can too,’ and there you go...”

  “Why didn’t you just explain that to him quietly, then?”

  “I’d already given him a couple of friendly warnings. _____’s not a bad sort of guy, he’s just not always that great at paying attention. That’s why I had to remind him about it in a way he’d remember. Now roll over...”

  “Hmm, I dunno — do I want to be intimate with Mussolini? How do I know I’m not going to be the next one to get it?”

  “You’re definitely going to be the next one to get it. C’mon, roll over.”

  Frank was an astute psychologist. He understood the personality and peccadilloes of each of the musicians and most of the time he was easily able to motivate them without their being more than dimly aware of it. He knew when to push and when to back off; if I had been in his position, I would have been driven crazy by the swirling crosscurrents of band politics, conflicts, neuroses, and high school-level road shenanigans, but Frank had an incredible ability to shrug off the nonsense and effectively deal with what remained. It all fit in with my initial impression when he’d showed me the prospectus for 200 Motels: he may not have looked the part, but he was a born executive. Although he tried to listen to the band members’ complaints and suggestions, he basically didn’t give a fig what anybody thought of him, and he never took it personally if a musician decided he hated him and wanted to quit. This, however, was not a regular occurrence; despite the musical discipline he insisted upon, most of his personnel liked and respected him and were willing to give 100 percent, whether or not they alwaysunderstood exactly what they were doing, or why he wanted them to do it.

  My troubles with the other band members had commenced almost immediately. The guys, most of them pretty typical rock musicians, were a bunch of pathological socializers, and I wasn’t. Worse, my presence as understudy made the dissolute among them, knowing why I was there, regard me with hostility as a prig and a scab. Besides, I was a girl trying to infiltrate their male ranks. Their stage shtick revolved around road humor and groupie jokes — so where did I fit in?

  I noticed that the atmosphere of constant partying, both on- and offstage, tended to make Frank more outgoing. He’d hang out with the guys after a show the way somebody else might attend the office cocktail party — although when the action got hot and heavy (as it inevitably did), he rarely took an active role, preferring to leave that to the others. It wasn’t that he was beyond arousal — in fact, he walked around in a perpetual state of multi-dimensional sexual awareness that was actually far more dangerous than even the most incorrigible cocksman in the band could conceive of — but he had his own distinct way of viewing things, and in his mind these semi-public orgies were part of his supra-musical megastructure, the ‘conceptual continuity’ he’d mentioned to me. I think, too, that although he never admitted it, he kept a clear distinction in his mind between himself and his employees. He was their boss and then leader; tactically, there could be no question of him really mingling with them. Abandoning himself to an indiscriminate hot time with a bunch of band members and groupies one night might make it difficult if not impossible for him to maintain his position of control over ‘the troops’ the next day.

  Opportunities for optional recreational activities arose constantly in that pre-AIDS epoch, although the typical ‘tourist’ tended to resemble the young woman in her early 20s, dressed all in rusty black and with raccoon-like black circles painted around each eye, who showed up at a sound check one afternoon and ambushed Frank backstage. “I’ve been saving all my bodily secretions for you for a month,” she crooned to him.

  “That right?.” said Frank, giving me a quizzical look over her shoulder. “Is there any particular reason you’ve singled me out for this honor?”

  “I just knew you’d be able to appreciate them,” she gushed. Before she could offer a free sample, Dick Barber was summoned and she was escorted out the fire exit. All that afternoon and evening, Frank kept repeating disgustedly, “She was saving all her bodily secretions for me — for a month! Oh, maaaan!...” He was suddenly no longer Dr. Zurkon, recording psychosexual and anthropological abnormalities for future reference; he was just a seriously nauseated guy; a couple of times he actually retched. Frank absolutely despised dirt. He tried to keep his clothes as clean as possible (not always an easy task on the road), and he practically lived in the shower. Even the concept of filth (physically, that is) was abhorrent to him. I later heard stories from seemingly reliable sources, alleging that during his early days in the music business, he’d been a veritable Welcome Wagon of venereal afflictions. That was in distinct contradiction to my experience, although, knowing him, anything could have been possible.

  When less revolting customers showed up and insisted on demonstrating their special talents, he was charming, genial, a bit perverse — he’d invite them up to our room and let them share their abilities freely, if they were so inclined, but afterward he would politely point out that we had to catch a plane at 6:30 the next morning... He was so forthright about these socio-sexual situations that it was hard for me to feel jealous. I found some comfort in the fact that he never dissembled, and that whatever he did, at least he did it in front of me.

  Despite his characteristic honesty, he was the victim of a strange little double standard matter what he did, he tended to exhibit a proprietary attitude toward me, sort of a cross between an overprotective Italian older brother and a jealous boyfriend. He didn’t make a show of it, but he was always watching me out of the corner of his eye to make sure I wasn’t being too charming to any of the guys in the band. It became readily apparent that the reverse psychology he employed in marketing his persona and music also affected his personal dynamics. If I found his attention wandering elsewhere, all I had to do to refocus it was seem to be interested in somebody — anybody — else. Suddenly Frank would materialize out of nowhere, grumbling and glaring and not going away. Whatever was difficult or impossible for him to obtain was precisely what he wanted the most. I saw this demonstrated very graphically when one of the guys in the band developed a crush on me. He was very sweet, but I only paid attention to him when I needed to get Frank’s. Twice was enough. I should have been ashamed.

  My performing experience (besides the youth orchestra) up to this point had consisted of private parties, small clubs and coffeehouses, and occasionally somewhat larger venues like the Ascot Raceway in Gardena. Until now, for me an enormous audience had been three or four hundred people.

  Thus, when early in the tour I encountered my first hockey rink — an outdoor arena with a capacity of about 10,000 — I was instantly seized with an incapacitating terror. As we pulled up near the rear entrance, the huge spotlights were so bright I couldn’t tell if there was a full house, but when we were back in the dressing area, the vast, rumbling roar of the crowd made it sound as though even the sky boxes were full.

  Frank watched me shaking in my boots, and made a few reassuring comments. Hockey rinks held no fear for him; after all, he’d been touring steadily since 1965. I doubt whether he’d ever felt much stage fright, even at the beginning — the only thing that he disliked about performing (besides malfunctioning equipment or lousy acoustics) was having to sing, and in this group he had plenty of other people to do that for him.

  “Hey, you know when they turn the lights up the audience can’t even see you,” he explained. “And with that crappy PA system they can’t hear you either. Besides which, most of the members of the audience are probably in an advanced state of chemical nirvana anyway. They co
uldn’t care less if you get two notes wrong in that little run there, they’re just here to have a good time. What you got to be nervous about?” I looked at the reflection in the fingerprint-smudged mirror in front of us, there in that makeshift dressing room that reeked of second-hand beer and sour, athletic sweat. I saw myself, white as a sheet, desperately clutching the red SG and beside me Frank, cool and collected with his black Les Paul, a fresh cigarette stuck in the pegboard. The opening band had finished its set, and out in the bleachers the crowd was clapping, stamping, whistling, and shouting for us. I could feel the concrete floor vibrating with their enthusiasm.

  “Come on,” said Frank. “Let’s go entertain them.”

  There was a concrete tunnel linking the dressing area to the stage. Frank went first, with his characteristic purposeful stride; I was behind him, and the rest of the band followed us. As we approached the end of the tunnel the crowd noise became deafening. A short flight of steps led up to the stage. Walking to the front of the stage, the plywood creaked under my boots; my knees were shaking, and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t have spit to save my life. From the rigging overhead, the spots threw huge hot sheets of daylight right down into our faces, making it impossible to see out into the crowd. I felt like I was climbing up to the gallows — how could Frank be so nonchalant? There he was, stealing a puff of his cigarette, adjusting the tuner on his B string, trying the harmonic, clearing his throat -- all the while looking as cozy as if he were in his own living room. “Hello, boys ‘n’ girls,” he greeted the crowd, which responded with a cheer that felt like a 9.6 earthquake. “Could you please turn up the monitor?” he asked the sound reinforcement guys at the mixing board.