Being Frank (19 page)

“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 exhalation 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
!”

I was rather surprised by the abject nondescriptness of 150 North La Brea. The two-storefront-wide, windowless rehearsal facility, on the east side of the street, north of Wilshire Boulevard, was wedged between a synagogue ladies' auxiliary second-hand shop and a liquor store. From the sidewalk, it could have been anything — a temple of Gnosticism or a sweatshop, take your pick. On the other side of La Brea was an Orthodox Jewish synagogue and religious school. There was a furniture upholsterer up the block, and a Cadillac dealer on the corner. Not a very likely place to go looking for a thrill, I mused as I parked the Mazda right out front and fruitlessly probed my person for parking change.

After half an hour or so, musicians began pulling up in the tiny (two spaces) parking area in the rear. They'd unload their gear from their cars, drag it into the rehearsal hall through the rear door, then rush back out to move their cars. There were lots of musicians — this seemed to be an enormous band. Dozens of guys were hauling in what looked like saxes and brass instruments, including a French horn, a euphonium, and a tuba, and there was one woman schlepping a
bassoon case
. For a second I wondered if I'd gotten the address wrong and was about to crash a Philharmonic rehearsal.

Then I saw one of the guys from the road band unloading his equipment. He acknowledged me with a sociable leer and we exchanged a few pleasantries. When he reached into an anvil case for some hardware, I spotted a fading Polaroid photo that had been taken at one of the shows on the tour — Frank, with a dementedly didactic expression, holding the microphone toward me while I used it to demonstrate
obscure Tibetan marital arts
to the audience. Seeing it conjured up a flood — actually a puddle — of memories.

When the cars started to pile up more than two or three deep in the back, the musicians had to resort to the curb out front, which was a No Stopping zone, and bring their equipment in the front way. The problem was the enterprising meter maid lurking just out of sight, waiting for each hapless blower or strummer to stumble into her web. I never saw so many parking tickets handed out in such a short time. If it
had been Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles, that meter maid would have probably been the next mayor or something.

Apprehensively, I drifted in through the back door, stood toward the rear, out of harm's way, and “sussed it out". It was plain where Frank had acquired his “awreet” jive from — the small room was crammed full of
jazz-looking guys
in metal chairs — guys with goatees, guys in berets, guys sucking on their reeds, blowing saliva out of their spit valves, and sliding their pistons back and forth. It looked like he'd conducted his auditions at the Old Beboppers' Home.

The noise level was worse than earsplitting. Suddenly, without warning, I felt almost dizzy, and my ears began to ring.
“Hey!
” Virtually compelled to turn around, I felt rather than saw Frank looking at me from across the room, and I slowly walked over to him.

He was sitting awkwardly, his left leg stuck out stiffly and painfully. The minute I got up close to him I could feel that his energy level was low. Everything about him seemed out of synch, stunned, diminished. As he looked up at me, I saw that there were deep, blue-black shadows under his eyes, and his expression radiated a sort of cosmic incredulity. He was still trying to come to terms with a world where somebody could
do
that to him; the brutal fact of
assault
, of violation, had left him devastated and bewildered.

Not entirely voluntarily, I half knelt down and put my arms around him. He hugged me back, even hung on to me for a moment, and suddenly I caught a flash of his old energy again. With a wicked grin he thrust forward his broken leg, showing me that it was held together with a mean-looking steel brace and pins, and the foot encased in a prosthetic shoe. “How's
that
for a shoe? “he smirked — a private joke which brought back all-too-vivid memories of the tour. “Thank you for the floral tribute, “he added, indicating his uninjured right foot, which was shod in a more conventional manner. He was wearing the purple sock I'd wrapped around his bouquet.

He leaned over slowly and opened his briefcase, took out a business size envelope, and handed it over to me. “It's all there, but if you wanna count it, go ahead.” I unstuck the flap and drew out another ‘wad' — four stiff, new-smelling C-notes — and tucked them into my wallet.

Meanwhile, some of the musicians were eyeing us curiously. Frank promptly added to their prurient interest. “I have here something that oughta curl up
your
toes a little bit,” he told me, and went groping in the briefcase amidst the music paper and finished charts. “Aha!” he declared, and triumphantly hauled out a
lollipop in the shape of a bare
foot
. It had a little card hanging off it with a poem about
sucking on toes
and
feet taking their licks
. Jeez, I hoped I wasn't blushing in front of all these jaded jazzbos; my face was burning. Frank presented this demented trophy to me with a flourish and a little bow — not an easy gesture for somebody who basically can't move from the waist down. Maybe you couldn't murder a case-hardened absurdist that easily after all.

I thanked him, squatted down in front of him, and read the card out loud. He guffawed with me, raised that old eyebrow, and —
here we go again, boys and girls, from the top: one, two, three
. What could he still want with me, after all we'd been through? Shit — what was left? Worse, why had my own judgment and will power just fizzled out and delivered me right back into his clutches without even a whimper of doubt or warning, when I knew that the minute I started seeing him again there was
no way
I could stand back on the sidelines and maintain my cool? Didn't I remember all the pain and suffering I'd been undergoing these last few months? Did I,
hell
— at that precise moment, when I should have been heading straight home, do not pass Go, do not forget your four hundred dollars — can you guess what I was thinking?

Oh gosh, I wonder if his
wedding tackle
was affected by the accident!
(It wasn't.)

He showed me the music he'd been writing for this new group. It was fully scored, not merely chord charts to songs but full-blown chamber orchestra parts, horn transpositions and all.

“When did you write these?” I wanted to know.

“I finished this one this morning,” he said, rolling his eyes heavenward. “I haven't had a chance to copy the parts yet,”

This struck me as heroic work, under the circumstances. He would have earned the right, after nearly being killed by some lunatic, just to lie around and groan, but instead he'd forced himself back to work, had composed this mutant chamber music, and now was going to forge ahead and play it. That put a new spin on the word “character,” I reflected.

I took a seat near him so I could peer over his shoulder at the scores. As usual, he was being very serious about the appurtenances of the
job — the completed parts had all been ozalid-reproduced at Cameo Music, and were tucked inside an imposing black folder with THE GRAND WAZOO, the name of the group, on the front in gold lettering. Frank had even obtained a regulation baton. It looked like he was about to break it in, although in my experience, I had never heard of anybody but me who had actually worn one out.

When all the musicians were warmed up, Frank (seated by necessity, but stalwartly leading nonetheless raised an authoritative hand and asked them to play an A. Some of the players raised wry eyebrows, but
hey, they were drawing scale...
so out it came, that familiar 440 pitch in all those different timbres. It sounded remarkably like an orchestra. I got the goosepimply feeling I'd first experienced as a four-year-old when my parents had taken me to a Leonard Bernstein “Young People's Guide to the Orchestra” concert at the Hollywood Bowl; when the entire massed strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion had frenziedly thrown themselves into a
huge writhing pile
on the
first triple
forte section in Stravinsky's
Firebird
, I had gotten up and stood there frozen, with my eyes and tongue hanging out, until my mortified mother finally dragged me back to my seat. An orchestra was, I'd just realized in my kiddie way, a wonderfully dangerous machine.
You could blow things to kingdom come with it
.

Frank seemed satisfied that the parts of his machine were all in working order, so he raised his baton, counted off a couple of bars for nothing, gave the downbeat, and there it was: that old feeling of exhilarated hyper-consciousness I remembered so well. I looked down at the master score he was conducting from. It was all right there on paper in the form of all those familiar little dots and crossbars, no mystery about it, so how could it make me I feel like every barricade in my mind had just been exploded clear into the Great Beyond? I glanced toward the musicians, all huffing and puffing and moving the air molecules around like longshoremen. They were too busy trying to nail the pesky notes and tricky rhythms to care about metaphysics.
This was really interesting.
I was going to have to ask Frank some very deep questions sooner or later.

I
began spending every waking hour at Grand Wazoo rehearsals. I felt that I had vast lessons to learn; all I wanted to do was stand next to Frank, reading over his shoulder while he conducted or played his guitar, and watching how the score was transformed from notes on paper into audio by the musicians. Until now my exposure to the creation and production of orchestral music had been minimal; I knew from my embryonic studies that music was written by composers in the form of notes on paper and that when the notes were played by musicians, they were transformed into
very dense air
, but this was my first opportunity to watch the whole process from little dots-on-paper all the way through audible molecules.