Being Frank (27 page)

Me and Captain Beefheart

One of Captain Beefheart's portraits of me

Frank had been unaware of the nature of my relationship with Don until I ran into Don during a rehearsal and we went across the street to a coffee shop to chat. Evidently I'd stumbled into a very old and convoluted rivalry; when we came back after the break, Frank was glowering at me, bristling the way he had on tour when he thought I was being overly friendly with one of the guys in the band. It amazed me that his radar was still armed and pulling in things like that.

During the time he was rehearsing with Frank for the upcoming tour, Don was staying with his mother Sue in her trailer — uh, prefabricated home — in Lancaster. He apparently got bored one night watching TV, and called me at about two in the morning. The whole situation was made infinitely more complicated by the fact that I was newly married (to Lionel Rolfe, a fellow writer). Don, not knowing I was now a respectable (?) married woman, invited me to come out for a visit. (Logistics was never his forte.) I explained that I had a husband now, and politely asked if I could bring him along. Don griped and grumbled, but finally assented. We agreed to meet at the Denny's (ALWAYS OPEN) at the Sand Canyon offramp of the Antelope Valley Freeway. Back in the ‘50s he and Frank had whiled away the wee small hours at that selfsame Denny's; as Frank once observed, “There wasn't anything else to do in Lancaster.” Some things never change. I personally felt rather honored to be part of this high desert intellectual tradition.

The three of us hit it off splendidly and spent ten hours, to the abject dismay of the management, drinking coffee (?) and chewing the rag. Don had his sketchbook at his elbow the whole time, doodling copiously; he showed us several sketches he had recently made of Frank with his guitar, which were easily the best drawings of Zappa I'd ever seen.

At daybreak, we walked out to the parking lot where Don's new Volvo sedan and our 1965 Citroen ID station wagon were parked side by side, the only vehicles in the enormous Denny's parking lot. Squinting into the dusty Antelope Valley sunrise, we gazed at the forest of bristling
Nike missile spikes on top of the nearest mountain peak. Suddenly, without a word, Don opened the trunk of the Volvo and extracted a pair of plaster-of-Paris wings with harness straps attached. “Frank gave these to me yesterday,” he explained. They were the wings he had worn in
Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People
, the no-budget movie on which he and Frank had collaborated in Cucamonga in 1964.

Somehow word got back to Frank that I'd been out hobnobbing with Don in the desert. The next time I saw him, he gave me a peeved sort of look and razzed me about how I'd been
“blowing Van Vliet's harmonica.”
I wondered just what deep, dark teenage tortures that flippant statement was hiding.

Captain Beefheart and me

I
don't remember actually sitting down and deciding I never wanted to see Frank again. Our relationship had certainly changed over the years, and I no longer entertained any illusions that I would either be involved in playing his music, or that our personal situation would resume on its old scale, but even as the end drew near, I still hadn't reached the point where I felt that I'd be better off not having
anything
to do with him.

I'd known Frank for almost five years, and on
some
level I understood that there was a single fact which could not be overlooked, rationalized, or otherwise swept under the carpet: Nobody owned him, and nobody ever could. In a way, I was glad I wasn't married to him. His life was his work, and vice versa. He never socialized; when he was at home, as I'd seen, he crawled into the basement until such time as he needed to sleep, which he did for ten or twelve hours — then, back to the old workbench. Why, it was almost medieval. Then, after a few months of this creatively edifying but sociopathic
basement-hunkering
, it was Out on the Road, with all that
that
implied. Yessir —
this is your life, Frank Zappa
. In my more cynical moments I wondered how he'd wound up with two (later four) kids on that sort of schedule.

Still, even though I knew the truth, accepting it was another matter entirely. Late one afternoon I stopped by a rehearsal, my first in a long while. Frank seemed glad to see me, and afterward we sat on the stage
talking. The band had packed up and gone home, and as we chatted about this and that, the crew was busy shutting off the lights and sound equipment. Finally the last technician called “Good night", rolled down the door, and locked it behind him, leaving us alone in the empty rehearsal hall with a single worklight glowing dimly overhead.

I began to be vaguely uneasy. Frank wasn't making any move to get going, which wasn't his usual order of business. I wondered if, or when, someone was supposed to pick him up. “Do you need a ride up the hill?” I asked. “Nope” he said, without elaboration. I noticed that his guitar case and briefcase were sitting next to his chair, ready to go.

At this point it had been quite a while since we'd had a physical relationship, but with my guard down a little, I was ashamed to realize I was still an open circuit for his peculiar electricity; just sitting there hearing his voice was enough to make me keyed up and a little dangerous. He gave me a sideways glance, and there was a hint of that old twinkle in his eyes. I shivered a little, although outside the temperature was close to eighty.

He didn't say anything further. There was a bathroom to the right of the stage, in the corner near the front entrance. It took maybe 15 seconds to get down off the stage riser, walk to the bathroom, and lock the door. I think he went first; at least I hope so.

I did stop seeing him not long after that, not because I wanted to, but because of, as they say, circumstances beyond my control.

I had been doing more freelance writing for magazines and newspapers, and almost making a living at it. It was amusing telling people that I'd gotten fed up with being a poverty stricken musician and had decided to go into writing for a living instead.

My livelihood put me in an awkward position with Frank. As he had become more and more well known, his mistrust of journalists had increased exponentially. Even though having the potential to write and
sell articles on
Frank Zappa
was a lot like having money in the bans that I couldn't touch, I didn't want to do it, broke as I was. Nothing I had to say on the subject seemed important enough for me to contradict my indignant self-defense to Frank back in the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street — “
this stuff is private, and it's going to remain that way
!”

Then an editor I knew gave me an assignment to write a magazine piece; I can't even remember what the subject was anymore. I was supposed to get brief humorous quotes from people of my choice about whatever-it-was. Obliviously, not thinking about the ramifications, I called Frank, told him what I was writing, and asked if he d like to comment on whatever-it-was. Maybe I was unconsciously trying to break loose from him. If so, I succeeded.

He was in a foul mood that night. Not only did he insult me for daring to think I had the right to call him up and ask him
a trivial and annoying question
for publication in an
idiotic article
in a
worthless magazine
, but he launched into a rant in which he accused me of
attempting to extort information out of him, put words in his mouth
, and somehow
subvert the American Way of free speech
.

All I could say was, “OK, Frank,” and hang up. I sat there shaking my head and wondering, “
Why am I doing this to myself
?” It felt even worse than it should have, because I suspected I should never have done it in the first place.