Being Frank (17 page)

Since I had no job, I therefore enrolled on probationary status at El Camino College, hoping I could pull down a student loan. (They were giving them out with a pretty freehand in those days.) I had a little trouble determining my major, since I was only allowed to take a limited number of courses until I had
proved myself worthy of higher education.
My first love was music, of course, but I had always had a fascination with science and language as well. If I learned, say, German, I'd
at least be able to read the writing on the men's room walls in Berlin. The way I was feeling, I might be able to do that
soon
— in fact I'd already checked with the French Foreign Legion about signing on, but unfortunately they didn't accept female recruits.)

Battle fatigue: My sometime musical accomplice David Benoit took this snapshot of me pretending to be dead in my empty guitar case a couple of days after I got back from the tour

In the end I decided to go with a truly inspired program, majoring in music and minoring in General Semantics. I dropped out of premed, my third choice, before a mysterious explosion in the chem lab had a chance to land me on the dean's list. To this day I retain a great fondness for nitroglycerine and potassium permanganate — otherwise I might be a brain surgeon, or worse.

It turned out to be a small world — Wally Bauer, my Music Theory and Composition I professor, said he knew Frank. He claimed Frank had commissioned him to orchestrate the composition “Igor's
Boogie” (a band version of which appeared on Frank's “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” album) in the style of Stravinsky. I wasn't entirely convinced about the verity thereof, but I liked Mr. Bauer's teaching style. He had a snappy bunch of mnemonic devices — for instance, he described the notation of the two notes constituting a minor-second interval as resembling “
a cat's balls
”.

In my Keyboard course, we had to specialize in a particular instrument. Everybody chose the piano because most of the students had pianos at home to practice on. I didn't, so I signed up for pipe organ. There was a brand new three-rank pipe organ in a soundproof booth at the back of the rehearsal bunker. You had to start it with an ignition key, like a car; the key fired up an electric motor which drove the bellows that pumped the air through the pipes, thereby using the miracles of modern science to eliminate the troublesome serf that had been required to hand-pump the bellows back in the
Good Old Days
. Mrs. Hardester was the organ mistress (she also directed the a
cappella
choir, which I sang tenor in), and I imagine she'll never forget the day when she came running back to the organ cubicle, terrified that we were experiencing the seismic Armageddon the pundits had been predicting. I had discovered
the thrill of holding down the two very lowest adjacent pedals, B natural und C natural, at the same time.
There's something soul-satisfying about the low pedal notes on a pipe organ anyway, but in this case the resulting interference tone was causing such a vibration that every window and doorframe in the bunker was threatening to disintegrate. A crack had actually developed in the heavy plate glass of the window that isolated the pipe organ area from the rest of the practice rooms. I guess they replaced the window eventually; I was never invited back there, for some reason, so I never found out.

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.”