Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  My favorite class, though, was Conducting. As Frank had discovered, I couldn’t sight read music worth a damn, but being the victim of a pathologically retentive memory, I could memorize whole scores easily. Toscanini probably wasn’t rolling over in his grave with anxiety, though, because when the buffer in my resident memory got too full, I experienced data-reduction amnesia and started to transpose previously memorized scores on top of the current one. This caused a spectacular moment when I was being tested on a movement of Mahler’s Song of the Earth. I suddenly drew a total blank and thought it was something out of the Ring Cycle. (Late 19th-centrry repertory all sounded pretty similar to me anyway.) I started feverishly cueing entrances that could never exist in any piece, and flipping the pages of the master score after maybe twenty seconds away from the fact that I was rapidly approaching pan-tonal, polyrhythmic meltdown, I began flailing around with the baton like I was fending off. an attack of bats. The students in the orchestra probably thought somebody had slipped LSD into the drinking fountain. It was a hell of a performance, but I still got a D. After that Mr. Hamilton suggested I leave the baton on his desk and conduct with my bare hands. “It’ll be safer that way,” he pleaded.

  It wasn’t long before the pleasures and challenges of higher education, while engrossing, began to be sabotaged by increasingly frequent lapses of judgment regarding “that ugly Italian boyfriend of yours” (my mother’s description). As time went by and I gradually forgot how bad I’d felt that last night on West 57th Street, I stopped being furious and angry, and started thinking about my Gibson 335. I’d left it with Frank because by the time he’d finished fooling with it I could barely play it, but I still wanted it back. From Canada, the tour had continued on to Europe, with a return date scheduled for late December. If I didn’t hear from our boy when he got back to L.A., maybe I’d just have to head up to Laurel Canyon and repossess my property.

  One Saturday night when I’d been back from the tour for almost two months, I got called to fill in for the regular guitar player at a bar gig in El Porto. I’d gone to Our Lady of Guac with the guys in the band; they’d been working this particular two-niter at this particular watering hole for a long while. I was far from their first call, but that weekend every other guitar player who lived in the South Bay was out of town — I think there was a big outdoor rock festival down near San Diego someplace: Lee Michaels! I didn’t look forward to jamming on “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Satin Doll,” not after my recent triumph with the fanfare from Agon, but better to earn $20 honestly than spend another night sitting in my miserable little room at my folks’ house, fetishing that increasingly biologically active sock and blubbering.

  I never subjected my L5 to bar gigs, so tonight I had a borrowed Stratocaster which belonged to some idiot guy I barely knew. He lived in Portuguese Bend and didn’t even play the guitar, but he was loaning it to me in the hopes he could weasel an oral rental payment out of me. Jeezuz Kee-reist!! I was feeling positively truculent; maybe I’d whip out the 3/8 Sears Craftsman socket I used as a slide when I played country and blues material, and give him some oral payment all right — but not quite the way he was hoping, the swine.

  I pulled up a bar stool in front of the pathetic old Fender Champ the joint used as its house amp. Some drunk had kicked a big hole in the speaker grille, back in 1962 or so. I plugged in and started to tune, trying to ignore the obviously well- lubricated, fortyish fellow who had dragged hrs stool up next to mine and was asking dumb, opening-gambit type questions. “Gee, how long have you been a musician? You live around here?” As late as I was, I was still the first of the musicians to show up at the gig. Everything here ran on South Bay Time, which was sort of like bar time; when you combined these two temporal concepts, South Bay Time and bar time, you wound up in the Manana Triangle, wasting away in Harvey Wallbangerville, like most of the locals did. I definitely could have used a beer myself at the moment, but the owner was too cheap (or too wise) to let the musicians run up a tab.

  There was an enormous TV set over the bar. Usually it was tuned to The Game, but tonight the 10 o’clock news was on instead. I was trying to decide whether I had time to put on new strings — these were the ones that had originally come with the Strat, back in 1959 or thereabouts — when I perked up my ears. Damn, I really was obsessing too much over Frank — I’d have sworn I just heard his name mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. I looked up, and there on the vast screen was a watery-looking picture of Frank, a file photo taken about a year ago. Seeing his face, that smile that reminded me of — well, of things I had no business thinking about in this hellhole of a bar — my heart both sank and leaped. I wonder what they’re saying about him... He couldn’t have finally won a Grammy, could he?

  I tried to make out over all the dismal bar noise what the TV newscaster was saying. Something about London. Yep, according to my calculations, the band would be in London now. (I’d been following the itinerary, marking off the stops. L.A., the end of the tour, was getting closer all the time; I was beginning to rehearse my guitar-repo strategy with mounting feverishness.) Then I nearly fell off my bar stool. The newscaster was saying something about Frank being in the hospital — I could just barely make out the words concussion, and broken leg. And the worst of all — serious condition! Oh Lord, please make this just a fucking nightmare. I’ll wake up and it’ll be Monday morning and I’ll have fallen asleep listening to my crappy cassette tapes of the tour on headphones again and missed my pipe organ class. This doesn’t make any sense, hearing on the news that Frank’s been injured in London. What the fuck had happened to put him in the hospital with all those mondo injuries a-go-go??

  I had a phone number in Sherman Oaks for Ruth Underwood, the wife of Ian Underwood, the band’s keyboard player and a longtime Zappa sideman. We had struck up a superficial sort of friendship during the tour, and she’d invited me to stop by and visit. She hadn’t been on the whole tour, and I thought I remembered her saying that she’d be back in L.A. by now.

  I made some brusque, incoherent excuses to the pub owner, stuck the Strat back in its case, and jumped ship. I still didn’t have a car, but my parents’ house was only two miles south of El Porto. At the curb I stuck out my thumb — this was no fucking time to walk, and the buses had stopped running. A station wagon full of stoned blonde guys in their teens and early 20s stopped right away when they saw I was carrying a guitar. They offered me a joint while we were poking along on Highland Avenue, but I demurred. “It’s sensi,” the driver said with faint censure, looking away from the road to wave the reeking spliff in my face. “The primoest of the primo.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said wearily, “but thanks.”

  And then I pulled out my pack of Winstons, said a silent and desperate prayer for that ugly Italian boyfriend of mine, and lit up.

  It was late, but fortunately Ruth was home and still awake, and she was full of details, some of them alarming. Frank had been punched hard, then pushed off the stage and into the orchestra pit by some psycho during the encore at the Rainbow Theater in London. The lunatic claimed his girlfriend had a crush on Frank. He also complained to the press that he hadn’t gotten his money’s worth. Talk about your consumer complaints... He had been hauled off to the Bridewell, or wherever it was they took felons and Labor MP’s.

  “I wonder if Jack the Ripper’s girlfriend was a redhead,” I mused, my knee jerking.

  Frank was — Ruth continued breathlessly — lying in the hospital in London with a severe concussion, a shattered leg, a bunch of smashed-up ribs, and maybe a broken neck. Right now his future looked cloudy; maybe he’d walk again, play the guitar again...maybe not; his arm was paralyzed, and it was too early to tell.

  I thanked her and hung up. It’s got to be the worst feeling in the world to know something dreadful is going on someplace thousands of miles away and you can’t do a single thing about it. I had no money to grab a flight to London and no idea what use I’d be to Frank even if I could somehow get there. I vi
sualized myself valiantly breaking down the hospital door and racing to Frank’s bedside...where I’d probably encounter three or four weeping redheads, no doubt. (As it turned out, my old ex-roommate Miss Moviola was there, along with another young lady, probably also a redhead. Frank’s wife had found them both keeping a bleary round-the-clock watch over the patient when she’d caught the first available red-eye and rushed straight to the intensive care ward to see him. Luckily for Frank, he was unconscious, or he probably would have been dead. What a guy... .)

  It occurred to me that Frank’s attacker, while a nut case, was probably just a more active individual than his some of his equally wacked-out fellow audience members who’d never tried to injure their hero. Because of its ‘outsider’ subtext, it was only natural that Frank’s music attracted losers and loners of all stripes. A fair number of these people didn’t know and probably couldn’t care less that their icon actually knew when to hang up his bizarreness and go home; they were probably all confusing the medium with the messsage to some extent. Frank did stress responsibility as well as the more ‘outside’ aspects of his personality, but when you were high on that sort of rush, it was easy to bypass the other stuff entirely. In no way had Frank deserved what happened to him, but from another angle, he had written the script for the movie. I wondered if he was lying in his hospital bed trying not to think about that.

  Ruth continued to supply me with medical bulletins every couple of days. The running commentary rather resembled a boxing match: “He’s up. He’s down. They say he may not play the guitar ever again... No, he’s getting feeling back in his hand. He’s up... The leg is in a cast. Hmm — it’s broken in a weird place and won’t set right. They suggested it needed to be broken again and reset, and he cheerfully told them to fuck themselves. He’s down again...”

  I knew what some of those injuries were like. I’d broken this and that myself, in my rodeo days, and I figured at least Frank would at least be pumped full of morphine, anyway. Turned out he wasn’t. He suffered through his recovery essentially without painkillers because he had a head injury, and the doctors didn’t want to run the risk of causing brain damage, or spinal cord problems, or malpractice suits, or some such idiocy.

  I got hold of the phone number of the clinic where Frank was supposed to be stuck for the next few weeks. It was in Harley Street, where upper class Londoners went to ‘enjoy poor health’. I waited until it was about 8 in the morning there and called. The phone had that funny double Euro-ring to it: Bzzt-bzzt. Bzzt-bzzt. When the clinic switch board finally picked up and I said I was calling long distance for Frank Zappa, the lady who answered chuckled like she’d heard that one before. She asked for my name, and I hesitated. “Uh — I’m a member of his band,” I said. There was a pause, and a bunch of clicking on the line, and finally a voice I’d heard before, indirectly, a low alto, against a trans-Atlantic background of white noise. “Hello, who is this?” I declined to state, hung up, and didn’t call again. I felt cowardly, but it somehow didn’t seem like a very good idea.

  Frank finally returned home a month later in a wheelchair, with a cast up to his hip. In the hospital, he’d been visited by a deputation of the band members. They had asked how long his recovery was likely to take, and when they realized they might have to go a while without paying work, they bailed. He had been intending to release an album of material from the tour, but since the band was broken up for good, he had evidently decided to move on to new territory and put the past behind him.

  I debated whether I should pay a little sympathy call to Chez Zappa, the Laurel Canyon rancho, and give Frank a nice bouquet of pansies to try and cheer him up. He definitely needed cheering — not only had he been injured and deserted, but a couple of weeks before his accident, a fire at the Montreux Casino had destroyed all of the band’s equipment. I wondered if the fire had spared my Gibson, and I decided to go ask Frank what had happened to it.

  One afternoon I purloined my parents’ new Mazda station wagon (the same recalled rotary engine model that developed a sticky throttle mechanism after 50,000 miles, causing a number of unwitting Mazda owners to dance themselves to death) and drove to Hollywood. I turned up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and picked my way through the rush hour traffic (back in those days it hardly amounted to a trickle) until I got to the top of the incline. I turned onto Frank’s street and pulled up in a little cul-de-sac across from his house.

  Nothing looked any different. The big Mercedes was still in the driveway. The security fence was as stout and impenetrable as ever. I rolled down my window and listened. Nothing. Just an endless-loop version of John Cage’s 4’33” — silence. No amazing guitar chords. I hesitated, then quietly got out and crossed the street. Next to the gate stood a big metal U.S. Postmaster-Approved mailbox on a post. I opened it slowly so the door wouldn’t squeak. Inside was a thick pile of envelopes, little parcels, and magazines, probably two or three days’ worth of mail. On top was a postcard with an air mail stamp. I didn’t mean to snoop, but I couldn’t help noticing that it was signed, “Miss you! When are you comming (sic) back? Much love — Greta.” Now just why was I receiving this psychic transmission that Greta might possibly have...

  ...red hair?

  There went my damn knee again. I stuffed my big bouquet of purple flowers, tied together with a purple sock, into the mailbox orifice. Then I shut the mailbox door, got back in the car, and drove away.

  The Young Person’s Guide to Explosives

  Things began to get very strained at my parents’. I couldn’t really blame them; here I was, looking down the barrel of my 18th birthday, and I was still no closer to charting a sensible course in the straits of Life than I ever had been. I had sold a couple more music reviews to local publications, picked up an odd music-copying job or two, played an actual paying gig leading a band opening for Dave Mason (remember him?) at an arena concert in Long Beach (psychedelic blues jams in E and A), and quietly bowed out of El Camino. When the student loan administration saw my parents’ tax return, they had nixed my application for a loan. I didn’t have the energy to work full time and go to classes, so I bid a reluctant farewell to a potentially fulfilling career as an unemployed music professor making ends meet as a low-paid, part-time teaching assistant in General Semantics with a full-time job as a cocktail waitress in the Marina.

  I was on the verge of being officially evicted from the family domicile, and had been making tentative, grovelsome approaches to various friends about sleeping on their floors and couches, when one night around 10 p.m., the phone rang. My mother, a spectacular panorama in her ratty flannel nightgown and green face cream, grumbled, “Your inconsiderate friends, as usual?” I snatched up the receiver. “Hellor” I said testily.

  “Hey...” The voice was much quieter than it should have been, and sounded muffled and lower in pitch than I remembered.

  I spluttered, regained a semblance of composure, managed to stammer out a greeting of sorts, and asked him how he was doing. I did it in on auto pilot in a fog, my heart thumping so loudly I suspected he could hear it on his end of the phone.

  “I’m awreet,” he said simply. “Listen, we just got the insurance settlement on Montreux. During the fire, your guitar was in the anvil case backstage with a bunch of other equipment we hadn’t been using lately, and when that part of the building went, everything in there all got sort of scorched together. All Dick could find of it afterward was the tailpiece and one of the melted tuners. They figure blue book on it is four hundred. I think that’s kind of a hose job, but hey, what you gonna do? It’s the American Way... You want to pick it up at the office, or do you want it mailed to you?”

  “Uh, well....is there any way I can get it in cash? “Since I had nothing to put in it, I still didn’t have a checking account. Four hundred dollars was a fortune to me; I could live for six months on it. Besides, the Gibson had only cost me $125 originally.

  On the other end of the line I could hear the faint click of a lighter and the old familiar exha
lation of smoke. Suddenly all I wanted was to put my hand on him, on his face or arm or the top of one of his thighs, the skinny devil...anywhere, it didn’t matter. I wanted to touch him and make sure he was still there and still felt the same.

  “I could get the cash if you can wait a couple days. We’re rehearsing Thursday — you can pick it up then.”

  “OK, that’ll be great, Where’s the rehearsal?.”

  “It’s at 150 North La Brea, at one o’clock.”

  I scribbled down the address on a matchbook. “Well — see you then.”

  “Awreet.” What was with all this “awreet” bizness, anyway? Was he hanging around these days with a bunch of doofuses in berets and goatees, or what? It made him sound like he was wearing a zoot suit, for Chrissakes.

  On Thursday I ‘liberated’ the Mazda and roared toward Hollywood, blasting one of my clandestinely-recorded tour tapes on the car cassette as I went careening along the eastbound Santa Monica Freeway. Old ugly, dull monochrome life had suddenly exploded into Technicolor 3-D again, and the only fitting soundtrack was Little Carl the Penguin being flung through the flaming hoop! ... “of course we’ll play Petrouchka!”