The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

by Mitch Albom

  Frankie felt a choking in his throat. He had not known, when he stepped off the boat, what life would be there for him. Or any life at all. But Aurora’s love had waited for him, as he had once waited for it. Save the last dance. He thought about that song. He looked at the cliffs. He looked at the small boats. He looked at Aurora, as beautiful as she ever was.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  “Do you want to see your daughter?”

  “Desperately,” he said.

  She bit her lip. Then she grabbed and kissed him, as he grabbed and kissed her. Had you returned an hour later, you would have found them still there, locked in that embrace, refusing to let go.

  The mystery of Alberto the conga player I can only partly explain. Frankie had not killed him. That is true. He had lifted the gun, and as Alberto charged him, Frankie contemplated the worst thing he might ever do. But in the end, he’d fired into the air, three times, wanting only for Alberto to halt. When the old man went down, Frankie thought he’d fallen.

  As it turned out, Alberto had been shot—­but someone else had pulled a trigger, the bullet’s noise melding with the sound of Frankie’s shooting.

  After forty years of inner torture, Alberto got his mortal peace.

  By someone else’s hand.

  The police held Frankie for two days. Then they let him go. They said the real killer had come forth, that the bullets matched, and that Frankie’s story about warning shots proved true. He demanded to know who the assassin was, but they would not tell him. Only that the person had surrendered voluntarily and was locked away. And it might be wise if Frankie left Villareal for a while.

  He departed on foot that afternoon, lost in a swirl of disbelief: a man died in front of him, a gun was in his grip, the last witness to his childhood was gone, El Maestro had been dead all this time. Who killed Alberto? Had Frankie really been ready to take a man’s life? He stumbled along the main road out of town and past the Mijares River, where a sardine maker and a hairless dog had once saved him. After days of walking and exhausting himself in thought, he came upon the monastery. He climbed the steps and asked if he could stay. The monks saw his guitar and inquired as to his church.

  “Santuario de San Pascual Baylón,” he answered.

  They nodded with approval. Pascual Baylón had practiced the guitar himself, they noted, as a shepherd, more than four hundred years ago. They didn’t know he had died in the same room where Frankie was born.

  56

  THERE IS ONE MORE MOMENT I MUST DETAIL FROM THE ISLAND YEARS.

  Shortly after Frankie returned, he was able to attend his daughter’s twelfth birthday celebration. A table with a cake was set up on the beach, and a group of children joined Kai for the party. Reunited with her father, she was all but skipping on air.

  As the sun went down, Frankie called Kai to the table and told her he had a gift for her. He fetched his battered guitar case.

  “Papa, I don’t want your guitar,” she said.

  “I know,” he answered. “But maybe you want your own.”

  He opened the case to reveal a most unusual-­looking instrument, a red guitar with white tuning pegs, its body colorfully painted with the image of a Spanish horseman and a beautiful young woman.

  “Oh, Papa, is it for me?”

  “All yours.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Another country.”

  “Look at the horse!”

  “And the señorita.”

  “So pretty.”

  “Like you.”

  “Will you teach me to play it?”

  “If you want.”

  “Yes!”

  She grabbed it and ran off with her friends. Aurora watched until they were out of earshot, then leaned over and touched Frankie’s shoulder. “Where is your guitar?”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I left it behind.”

  “But the strings. Their power—­”

  “That’s why I left it behind.”

  “It did good, Francisco.”

  “And bad. A string turned blue when Alberto died.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “He’d be alive if I hadn’t gone there.”

  “That just means you affect ­people.”

  “I don’t want to affect ­people.”

  “You can’t help it.”

  “I can try.”

  “It was a gift—­”

  “I know—­”

  “From your teacher—­”

  “So is my playing—­”

  “And what your playing does to others.”

  “I am done with it, all right?”

  They sat in silence. The tide splashed against the rocks.

  “Francisco?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if something . . . happens?”

  “Happens?”

  “What if you need to affect someone else? What if you need to save a life?”

  “Yours?”

  “Hers.”

  She nodded toward their daughter, up the beach, shaking the guitar for her laughing friends.

  “I’ll have to do it myself,” Frankie said.

  And that was the last they spoke of it. In life, as in music, there are measures to play and measures to rest. For the first time since he was nine years old, Frankie Presto was without his precious guitar, which remained halfway around the world, under a bed inside a Spanish monastery.

  With one blue string to go.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes, Kai?”

  “My fingers hurt.”

  “Music is pain.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s something my teacher told me.”

  “What are these things?”

  “Those are calluses.”

  “Why am I getting them?”

  “Because you’re learning. The more you play, the harder they will get.”

  “Yesterday they were bleeding.”

  “Yesterday you tried a lot of songs.”

  “I was terrible.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “I’ll be better today.”

  “You will.”

  “Can I get as good as you?”

  “Maybe better. Are your nails cut short?”

  “Yes . . . What’s this chord?”

  “That’s a G.”

  “I like it. It’s easy.”

  “Play your scales.”

  “The do-­re-­mis?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Papa?”

  “Yes, Kai?”

  “Did you always want to play guitar?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe, at first, I just wanted to make my father happy.”

  Kai smiled. Her teeth had come in straight.

  “Me, too.”

  “Back to your scales.”

  “These calluses are ugly.”

  “They will go away.”

  “And they’ll stop hurting?”

  “Soon.”

  “So music isn’t pain?”

  Frankie looked at his daughter, holding her first guitar. He felt a welling in his heart.

  “Not always, no,” he said.

  Ingrid Michaelson

  Recording artist, singer, songwriter

  ALL RIGHT, BUT IT HAS TO BE QUICK . . . I’M SO LATE. They haven’t started, right? I just landed this morning and it took a long time to get a car. . . .

  Yes . . . uh-­huh . . . my name is Ingrid Michaelson, I’m from the States. I knew Frankie . . . well, when I knew him, I didn’t call him Frankie. He was Mr. Rubio. That’s what everyone called him. We didn’t even know he was the same guy.

  A te
acher . . . He taught guitar. There was this music store where I grew up in Staten Island . . . It’s a borough in New York City . . . Yes, technically, it’s an island, but so is Manhattan . . . Anyhow, this music store was like every music store, I guess. Big, cramped, amplifiers lining the walls, a room for drum sets, a room for keyboards, and always a few teenage guys in the corner banging electric guitar riffs.

  It was like its own little theater, and I was into theater when I was a kid—­and music, since my parents made me take piano lessons—­so I’d wander around the store, kind of watching the characters and listening to what everyone was playing. And they had these lesson rooms in the back, four or five rooms down a hallway, and you’d see kids lugging in instruments that were too big for them, oboes, violas—­if they were lucky, they played the flute, because that didn’t weigh much.

  So one day I’m in the store, and this tall kid with a Mohawk is trying out a big Marshall amp, and he hits a guitar chord so loud my head almost explodes. I move to the rear to get away from the noise, and down the hall, in one of those lesson rooms, a door is open and I hear someone playing guitar. Classical. And then the Mohawk hits another E seventh or something—­whaammm!—­and I go deaf for a second, and then I pick up the classical playing, and a few seconds later, another explosion from rocker boy, and then the classical again. It was so weird, juxtaposing those two sounds. But also kind of cool.

  I was curious about who was playing classical music—­especially in that store. So I walk down the hall, pretending like I’m going for a lesson, and I peek in the door. There’s this older guy with long hair just playing away, not minding all the noise. I come back the other way, another peek, he’s still going, I turn, come back again. This time, he’s playing these Spanish-­sounding passages that were so fast but so melodic, like two hands playing at once, that I just stop dead in the middle of the doorway, hypnotized. And he looks up—­I’m busted—­and he says, “Barrios.”

  And I say, “Huh?”

  “The composer is Barrios,” he says. “It’s called ‘La Catedral.’ You should always know whose work you are playing.”

  I just nod my head. I mean, I’m fourteen years old. He smiles, puts down the classical guitar and picks up an electric that’s plugged into a little Fender amp—­he’s got, like, ten guitars in this room—­and he starts playing some crazy wild rock. And he says, “Hendrix.”

  And I kind of shrug, because I didn’t know Jimi Hendrix music back then. So he switches to something else. “Stevie Ray Vaughan?” he says. Again, I don’t know it. Then he plays a lick from “Walk This Way” and says “Aerosmith?” and I’m like, yeah, I heard of that one!

  And then I just blurt out, “Do you know any show tunes?”

  Looking back, that was really lame, even if I was into theater. I mean, “Do you know any show tunes?” It’s like something your grandmother would say. But he didn’t mind. He picked up another guitar and played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” so beautifully, it gave me chills. I loved Judy Garland anyhow, and I always loved that song, but I’d never heard it so melodic. When he finished, I said, “Can you teach me how to do that?” The way he played, you just wanted to experience it, to know what it felt like to have that kind of music come off your fingers.

  He said I’d have to sign up for lessons, that was the store’s policy. When I went home and asked my parents, they said I was already studying voice and piano and doing theater. That was plenty. Plus, a guy working in the back of a music shop wasn’t what they had in mind. My father is a classical composer.

  “But, Dad,” I said, “he played Barrios.” And my father was surprised. He said, “Agustín Barrios?” and of course, I couldn’t remember the guy’s first name, so that ended that little boast.

  Anyhow, I went back to the store, like, a week later, and he was there again, in his room, and when he saw me he said, “Hey-­hey, Miss Show Tunes,” and he played a song from Finnian’s Rainbow and sang a little. I asked him how he knew all this stuff and he said when he was a kid in Spain, he listened to the same records over and over again until he memorized them. I asked why he was living in New York if he was from Spain, and he said his daughter was also a guitar player, and she had gotten into Juilliard, so he and his wife moved up here to be with her.

  I thought that was cool, that a whole family would move so their daughter could study music. I kept coming by, and eventually he said I could bring my guitar on Thursdays because some kid had paid for a whole year of lessons then disappeared, so he was free for that hour—­as long as the kid didn’t change his mind. He taught me some amazing things. He could play anything with strings. Bass. Banjo. He was the first person to show me the ukulele and later I ended up using it a lot in my recordings.

  But like I said, I had no idea that he was Frankie Presto. He said his name was Mr. Rubio, and that’s how everyone referred to him. I only knew his first name because one day in the winter his wife brought him a sweater. She had an English accent and she said, “Layers, Francisco, layers. That’s how you stay warm.” Lay-­uhs, Francisco, lay-­uhs. I loved that.

  Anyhow, they were the coolest old ­couple to me. She was really beautiful and British, he’d grown up in Spain, they’d lived on an island—­a New Zealand island, not Staten Island—­and they were supporting their daughter and he knew all these songs and he was still kind of cute, even at whatever he was, fifty-­five or sixty years old.

  I went there on Thursdays on and off for a ­couple of years. Sometimes we just talked about school or boys or having a career in music or theater. He mostly listened. He never told me that he’d been a rock star. Not once. The only advice he gave me, over and over, was, “Don’t let your music get out of your hands.”

  It didn’t mean much then, but years later, when I started making records, it did. It was one of the reasons I kept the rights to my material, even when industry ­people were advising me differently.

  I’ll say this about Mr. Rubio. He kept a good secret. Looking back on it, I did notice some unusual “students” start to come into the store after he’d been there for a while. Older guys. Jazz musicians. One night I dropped by and I swear I saw Jon Bon Jovi going down that same hallway and ducking into Mr. Rubio’s room. And Lyle Lovett—­I mean it had to be him, he’s pretty unique-­looking. But I was still a teenager and was kind of clueless about the whole thing.

  I went off to college at SUNY Binghamton, and one summer I came back and he was gone. The room was cleared out. When I asked what happened to Mr. Rubio, they said he and his wife had moved away, somewhere down South.

  I never had a chance to say thank you or good-­bye. I only found out who he really was when Rolling Stone did a story a ­couple of years ago about that bootleg album, The Magic Strings one? Crazy, huh? There’s actually a few lines in my songs that were inspired by Mr. Rubio, like the line about sharing a sweater in “The Way I Am” or the line about moving to an island in a song called “Far Away.” Over time, I guess all your teachers find their way into your music, right?

  When I heard about how he died, I thought I should be at his funeral. For years, I’d been meaning to find him, to tell him how impressed I was that he never used his past to brag or to feel above teaching some awkward teenage girl how to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I mean, how many ­people are really like that? Not many.

  Oh . . . you hear that singing? I’ve got to get inside. . . .

  57

  FASTER NOW. THE SER­VICE IS BEGINNING. LET US USE PASSING TONES—­notes in the melody that are not of the chords but connectors between them, like ­people you twirl during a square dance before returning to your partner. I will sum up the passing tones of Frankie Presto’s remaining years—­and detail only the major pillars—­then bring us to his final days. Double time. A 2/2 signature.

  Passing tones. In the calendar year of 1994, Frankie’s family left the island of Waiheke (as you just learned). His daughter, Kai,
was accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City (thanks to daily guitar lessons with her father.) Aurora and Frankie rented a row house on Staten Island. He was using the name Francisco Rubio now. The bootleg recording of The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto had grown legendary in guitar-­playing circles and there were ­many people searching for the mysterious, missing guitarist—­young musicians, opportunistic journalists, even a documentary filmmaker. Frankie had no interest. The past was the past. How strange, he thought, that the more he ran from the limelight, the more it pursued him.

  But for a blissful stretch, it did not find him, and in his seven years on Staten Island, he lived a happily ordinary existence: he gained twelve pounds, purchased prescription sunglasses, saw his hair turn silver-­gray, hurt his foot running, visited the coast of Maine, learned to make penne pasta with eggplant (Aurora’s favorite), taught himself every solo by guitarist Charlie Chris­tian, practiced yoga, fixed up vintage amplifiers, and purchased stacks of used CDs at a store in lower Manhattan, playing them for Aurora as she cooked late breakfasts.

  He brought home a different guitar each week from a local music shop, where he’d taken a part-­time teaching job, always returning the instrument after a few days’ use.

  “You will never be happy with any other guitar,” Aurora would say.

  “I’m happy right now,” he would answer, disarming her by taking her hand.

  Waters calm in even the stormiest seas, and Frankie and Aurora enjoyed these restful years with quiet gratitude, like climbers exhaling upon reaching a summit. They shopped each day at a local food market. They made friends with their neighbors and a woman who owned a Greek bakery. They discovered a park with a carousel for children, which Aurora would sometimes gaze at as if entranced. Frankie worried that she was thinking about the baby she’d lost, being back in the city where it happened, so he would take her hand and say, “Let’s get a root beer,” which had become her favorite beverage.