Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  The venues tended to be War Memorial Halls, college auditoriums, municipal theaters, and, of course, hockey rinks. I hadn’t brought along very much of a wardrobe; luckily for me, Frank seemed to have packed every piece of clothing he owned, and so, although I had to roll up the legs of his jeans, I never wanted for raiment. (When during the writing of this book I was looking through old photos of him, I found one in which he was wearing the particular pair of tie-dyed Levi’s I had borrowed the most often. My first thought was, “How the hell could I have ever squeezed into those damn things?”) On some especially cold nights we bickered over which of us got to wear The Ugliest Overcoat in the Universe, a wonderfully stodgy Donegal tweed monstrosity (women’s size 18, according to the faded tag inside) to the gig. Being both more cold-blooded and more dogged than I, he usually won, but then he’d take pity on me, ransack his luggage for a couple of his warmest sweaters, and insist that I put them on. It became quite a joke between us, although it didn’t stay private: After the band members had seen me shuffling around in Frank’s clothes for a few weeks, a couple of them began to make wisecracks, kidding on the square: “Hi, Frank — oh, sorry, Nigey, I didn’t know it was you for a second there.” Frank, ever the old pragmatist, advised me not to pay any attention. “Sticks and stones... just be glad they’re not pouring lukewarm beer over your head.”

  Post-show optional recreation tended to be scanty in the hinterlands, but Frank didn’t seem to mind, because a relatively early evening meant he could catch up on his sleep. Sometimes, victimized by caffeine, he’d read for awhile, lying there with his arm around me and his book propped up on his chest. (Out of a strange reluctance to appear intellectual, he pretended that he never read anything he didn’t absolutely have to read, but one of the first long conversations we had on the tour was about Franz Kafka; Frank seemed to be thoroughly familiar with everything Kafka had ever written, even obscure things like “A Country Doctor".) If I happened to be restless, he’d ignore my flailing about as long as he could and then finally look at me sideways and inquire, “Are you in torment? Well, we certainly can’t have that, now can we?” It was a running gag — him always making it seem like it was my idea.

  One night neither of us could sleep. Nothing helped, not even the old reliable. After thrashing around for awhile we finally gave up and lay there in the dark. Gradually a conversation of sorts evolved, ramblingly and desultorily, lit by the tip of his burning cigarette. I had always wanted to know what his high school days had really been like, and he replied unhesitatingly that adolescence had been the most miserable period of his life. He admitted that when he was 14 or 15 he would have given anything for someone to come along, male or female, who really understood him. “Of course that would have been impossible — I didn’t even understand myself,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.

  Since he seemed to be in an uncharacteristically self-revelatory mood, and since I’d always been curious, I asked him about the circumstances surrounding his loss of virginity. A tone came into his voice that I had never heard before; even though he was talking in his usual precise, slightly derisive manner of speech, all of a sudden it was like listening to a muted cello playing in a minor key. He had been in high school in Lancaster in the Mojave Desert, a gangly kid with a scraggly mustache, the school outcast. His only friend then was Don Van Vliet (later known as Captain Beefheart), even more of an outcast and weirdo than Frank was. The two of them would listen to blues records all night, and when they got really bored, they’d cruise around Lancaster in Van Vliet’s Oldsmobile, looking for girls (this said with a contemptuous little snort, as if it was a deranged notion to think two rejects like them would ever find female companionship by cruising the streets of Lancaster in the 1950s). Still, evidently, Frank finally had some luck. “It was at her house when her parents weren’t home; at my house either my mother or my brothers and my sister were always around. It was really putrid — neither of us had the vaguest notion what to do, of course. I never saw her afterward — for some reason she never wanted to talk to me again.” The outflow of clipped speech stopped suddenly as he laughed, with intense bitterness. I was surprised at the self hatred that laugh revealed. I began to comprehend why he’d been able to understand me so quickly at our first meeting.

  He quickly started asking me questions, turning the tables and trying to regain control. In my high school days, had I ever had sex with a bunch of guys at the same time? How about in public? Had I ever had any mutant lusts — attractions for, say, animals, vegetables, or household appliances? I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I’d practically been a virgin until recently. Besides, nothing I could say was as revelatory as what he’d lust confessed to me.

  I sensed that his childhood and adolescence had been pinched and dreary. He had spent his early childhood in government housing in Maryland; his father was, among other things, a weapons tester for the government arsenal in Edgewood, and had often brought home noxious substances for human testing on his family because the tests meant extra pay, a sorely needed commodity with all those kids to feed. For a long time, said Frank, there had actually been a big bag of DDT stashed in the hall closet. “They said you could eat it if you wanted to — it was only supposed to kill bugs, and, ostensibly, alien armies.”

  The next day Frank wouldn’t look me in the eye, and when he spoke to me at all, it was in icy monosyllables. I don’t think he was ever free of self-consciousness, and by letting his guard down and allowing me a glimpse, however fleeting, of his life in the period when he’d been at the mercy of other people’s perceptions of him, he evidently felt he’d lost control — something that was unthinkable to him, because he equated control with freedom. But I suspect he’d been just plain embarrassed, too, and that embarrassed him even more, hence his savagery toward himself for coming out and admitting that shit in the first place. Although he had a great deal of self-respect, there was some part of himself that he hated. He was, hands down, harder on himself than anyone I’ve ever met.

  Meanwhile, strange scenes were awaiting, me when the tour reached New York. I had never been on the East Coast before, and I found the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Manhattan to be overwhelming. Frank had roots in New York; he had spent some of his most fruitful days in Greenwich Village (his spiritual home in some ways, as it had also been the headquarters for his idol, composer Edgard Varèse), and he had many friends who dated back to the Mothers’ long run at the Garrick Theater during the’60s. It was a milieu in which I had no place whatsoever.

  Frank’s left purple suede shoe, A popular performance routine featured me engaging in simulated erotic acts with it: it later became the ‘thong rind’ in the song ‘’Andy”

  This was brought very forcibly to my attention when I learned that, for the first time since I’d been with Frank, I had to cope with competition. The minute we had checked into the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, the phone rang. Frank was in the living room setting up the stereo he’d rented, so I answered it. There was a pronounced click as the caller hung up. A few minutes later it rang again, and again I answered it. A throaty voice, tinged with laughter, asked to speak to Frank. “Who is this, please?” I asked icily. Right then Frank waltzed in, glared at me, and snatched the phone out of my hand. Not too long afterward, a redheaded avant-garde filmmaker in her mid-20s appeared on the doorstep. She was excruciatingly sophisticated and confident, and Frank was plainly crazy about her. I wasn’t; I moped sullenly about until Frank got fed up and called down to the front desk to inquire if they had another room for me. They didn’t. I had to sleep on the sofa in the living room; there were two beds in the bedroom, but I couldn’t stand being in there, and besides, I hadn’t been invited.

  I think Frank actually felt a little guilty about the situation, but he was also annoyed that I was cramping his New York lifestyle. What bothered me the most was Miss Moviola’s relaxed, comfortable way of dealing with Frank. Watching her made me feel and act a million times klutzier around him. I knew that
this universe had existed before me, and I had the feeling it would be continuing long after I was only a few odd magnetic particles on Frank’s master tape. As it turned out, I didn’t see that much of Frank anyway — he was busy 36 hours a day, introducing the media to 200 Motels, and engaging in vast quantities of glad-handing, premiere-hosting, interview-giving, and assorted publicity stunts. There was a great deal of interest in the movie because it was the first feature-length film to be shot on video for budgetary reasons and then bumped up to film for general release. Frank made a big point of dragging me to the premiere; he may have just been ensuring that I wouldn’t feel left out, but I think he also wanted me to see the film because of its subject — life on the road. Although I didn’t feel like going, I dutifully attended the screening, but I was in such a scattered state mentally that the movie failed to leave much of an impression on me.

  Back in L.A. a few months later, I saw 200 Motels again, by myself, in a regular movie theater, with a box of Milk Duds. Although it was easier to concentrate knowing that the writer-composer-director wasn’t sitting next to me in the dark, reading my mind, I still found the opus disjointed and formless, and wondered if that was because the whole thing was just over my head conceptually. In actuality, the original script had been much more linear, but the usual cinematic bugaboo, budgetary limitations, had made it impossible to film some crucial sections; the whole thing had been shot on a sound stage in London in a matter of weeks.

  Frank was obsessed with the idea of film, but if 200 Motels was any indication, it appeared that his vision was difficult to translate to the cinematic medium. Maybe to be an effective filmmaker he needed more than sociological archetypes, musical contrasts, and documentation. At any rate, the juxtapositions that worked so well on record and in live performance seemed flat and labored, even a little boring, up on the screen. Luckily, I wasn’t a film critic, nor even a film buff, and I never would have expressed my reservations to the auteur. I figured it was safer to stick to music and leave the Fellini bit to Frank’s Greenwich Village cineaste chums. Frank may have envisioned himself as another Bunuel or Eisenstein, but when it came right down to it, in his heart he was still right there with Guitar Slim, and I was there with both of them, eternally prepared to bend some strings. Whatever charms Miss Moviola and her esthetic may have possessed for him, she still couldn’t jam all night on the blues with him like I could.

  To promote 200 Motels, Frank arranged a big bash for the band, the media, and a lot of his cronies at Sardi’s, the famed show biz watering hole. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go, but I went, and, I’m sorry to say, spent the evening trying to make Frank jealous by flirting shamelessly with the unfortunate band member who had the hots for me. Everybody, meanwhile, was engaging in pretty serious drinking. In my romantic affliction, I too yearned mightily for a slug from the cup that cheers, but I didn’t dare order any alcohol. I’d already been “carded” a couple of times during the tour while attempting to obtain a drink in some Podunk Holiday Inn cocktail lounge, and I was concerned that, if I got nailed again, here, in front of all these jaded sophisticates (not to mention her), I’d die of mortification. Little did I know that the legal drinking age in New York state was 18, not 21 the way it had been in California.

  The next day Frank kept erupting into grumpy little explosions whenever I got within a few feet of him; my cheap ruse the night before had evidently been effective. That night was the second of two sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, and I had been looking forward to it, if only because I’d be able to tell people I’d appeared at Carnegie Hall (I wasn’t planning to mention that my climactic moment was having shaving cream sprayed down the inside of my jeans during an especially rowdy number).

  My rival had finally trundled off to her groovy Greenwich abode, and Frank and I had spent the morning consuming room-service bagels and grapefruit juice and listening to a record of an avant-garde work for solo harpsichord by Anthony Newman. Frank thought it was great, while I loudly opined that it was just so much florid poot. This apostasy sent him into a fit of harrumphing and fulminating about my youth, cowboy damage, and general lack of musical savvy. As he sat on the sofa (with that half sardonic, half pedantic expression and his wild black hair sticking out all over the place, he looked like a prisoner in some 16th-century Florentine dungeon, stuck in there for insisting that the moon orbited the sun), I could see that his feelings were hurt, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to feel sorry for him. I sat down next to him and gave him a hug. He kept on harrumphing, but he also started to stick his hand in my shirt. Then the phone rang again.

  Later, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, having left him straightening up the living room. Frank, as I’d been learning, wasn’t just tidy, he was that most dreaded of domestic monsters, The Obsessive/Compulsive Organizer: there had better be a place for everything and everything in its place, because if he went to find that particular little rentoon-frammin he was looking for and couldn’t, it was your fault, and you’d never hear the end of it. I didn’t realize why he was like that until he happened to tell an interviewer that when he was growing up his mother had always kept the hardwood floors in their house so highly polished you could see your reflection in them. I found this revelation truly frightening.

  As I was picking up the bottle of mouthwash, I heard the rattle of flipping pages, then an angry thump, “Nigey, come here.” That was an order. I’d never heard him sound like that before. I sashayed into the living room and was confronted with the sight of him, mustache fairly bristling with outrage, my journal clutched in his fist. He had seen my little notebook sticking out of my carry-on flight bag, and I guess the temptation to read about himself was just too much for him to resist.

  “’What are you doing with that?” I asked, feeling the same sort of inarticulate rage I’d experienced when I was twelve and my father, snooping around in my room, had found a mildly smutty poem I’d written, which he claimed disgusted him.

  “That’s not the point,” Frank snapped. “The point is, are you going to run out and sell this stuff to Rolling Stone?”

  It was true that I had been keeping detailed notes on the going son during the tour. I’d started my journal about the time I discovered “Freak Out!", and as both entertainment and cheap therapy, it had gotten me through the misery of high school, my grandmother’s illness and death, and a lot of other things. Like the old Russian fairy tale about Tsar Trajan having goat’s ears, my journal was the only place I could set down the whole truth and nothing but the truth as I saw it, without worrying about what anybody was going to think. Frank should have understood that, and in fact he probably would have, if I hadn’t been writing about my life on the road with him. For some reason he had developed an absolute paranoia about journalists and being written about in general, grimly envisioning elaborate conspiracies by the press to disinform Middle America about his life’s work. It seemed odd to me that he had apparently forgotten how, on several occasions during the tour, I’d pointedly refused to talk to overly inquisitive rock journalists about him and our relationship. He knew that some of my writing on music (though nothing on him or his music) had been published, and I guess his paranoia had just taken over from there. When his buttons were pushed, Frank, usual rigorously logical, could take solipsism to unheard-of depths.

  The whole situation was highly ludicrous; for once, instead of Frank pointing out an inherent absurdity to me, it was the other way around. The rancid sock was defnitely on the other foot, boys and girls. I tried to explain that my journal was my business, and guaranteed to stay that way, but he had gotten all lathered up and self-righteous, and it was no use. No matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him that my journal entries weren’t going to be the lead exposé in the next issue of Rolling Stone. If I’d been older and wiser, I would have realized that this was his way of venting his multitude of frustrations, but as it was I wound up yelling at him and storming out of the Holiday Inn to lay Gotham to waste. It was the only power I had.


  Moments after hailing a cab in front of the Holiday Inn, it occurred to me that I ought to look in my wallet. Ordinarily I carried the necessities of life in an old brown tooled-leather pouch on my belt, but it seemed suspiciously light all of a sudden. One quick, desperate glance inside was enough to confirm my worst fears. Sure enough, I’d stormed out and left my money behind in the suite. By this time the cab had pulled away from the curb and was doing about 15 miles per hour as it entered the thick stream of traffic near Broadway. I let out a howl, seized the door handle, and leaped out. The cabbie was yelling something after me, but I didn’t stick around to listen.

  Feeling like a cretin, I shambled back up Broadway. There was nothing to do but go up to the Holiday Inn and collect my errant billfold. I went around the corner, walked into the lobby, nodded to the doorman in what I hoped was an imperious manner, and took the elevator up to the 17th floor. The door to the suite was locked. I pulled out my key, unlocked it, and went in. I thought I remembered leaving my wallet on the dresser in the bedroom. As I walked into the living room I noticed that the suite was dark, and imagined Frank going around obsessively making sure all the lights were turned off before he left for Carnegie Hall to putter with the rented sound reinforcement gear. Knowing him, he’d be there scowling, twiddling knobs, and harrumphing until some burly stagehand finally came and dragged him onto the stage for the show.

  Still castigating myself for my absent-mindedness, I started to walk into the bedroom. A strong whiff of obviously pricey perfume assailed my nose. There, in the gloom, beneath the sheet on the queen-size bed, was a writhing entity, a monster with two backs. I heard muffled moaning, rising in pitch. Another of Dr. Zurkon’s infernal experiments!