Being Frank (9 page)

I don't think Frank had anticipated how intensely I'd respond. I hadn't, either. I had been uncomfortable enough initially, but I rapidly became unbent: This mutant universe was becoming more exhilarating
than I'd ever thought possible. Emotions were unrecognizable, thrills were much more intense because of their unfamiliarity, no longer did things resemble the monochromatic ‘reality' I'd always taken for granted.

“Is there a word for ‘love' in your universe?” I asked. By the time we left the motel for the show that night, I had an exciting new addition to my vocabulary — can you say
“polymorphous”
, boys and girls?

I began learning a few other things too. After a couple of days of engaging in
optional recreational activities
, as he called them, I realized that Frank's sexual philosophy was as original and as faintly disturbing as was everything else about him. He went after things that were important to him with a Zenlike absoluteness — and sex was only a little less important to him than his music was. Sexuality — “
those glands down there
” — unconsciously permeated everything he did, from his voice to his gestures to his guitar playing. He was serious-minded, even solemn, and yet at the same time, I distinctly sensed that there was an element of madness in his refusal to accept any boundaries whatsoever, sexually or otherwise, He could find erotic possibilities in the least likely situations — the more absurd, the better; the further he could push the envelope, the better he liked it. And all the while he was pushing it, he was laughing... not too loud, but very deeply.

As the tour progressed I was pleasantly surprised to find that Frank was a model roommate. But it made perfect sense. He was a practiced ‘road rat'; during the years he'd spent touring he had acquired the hard-won art of graceful, efficient living in a vacuum. Well organized and orderly to a fault, he was forever going around picking up my odds and ends and sorting and arranging them for me. I had never been looked after with such determination, and I found it confusing: On the one hand, I wished he'd ask me first before he took charge of my stuff, but on the other hand, I had to admit I enjoyed the novelty of opening my guitar case and not finding dirty underwear in it, (My slovenly habits must have driven Frank to distraction, but beyond the occasional harrumph, he showed admirable restraint.)

To revive the freshness of your dainty garments

I soon found I had a problem with him making me laugh, although there wasn't much I could do about it. When he wasn't around a group of people, or onstage, he was far from garrulous, but when he
did make an observation about something, it was likely to be droll, and all too often his comments had me nearly choking to death, trying not to crack up. One night some no-budget sci-fi opus was showing on the local channel's Red Eye Theater, and Frank sat up in bed improvising cheesy dialogue with the sound off until I finally couldn't stand another second. I begged him to stop, tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Can't take it, huh?” he said, raising a stagily contemptuous eyebrow. But it was too late. I laughed so hard that I literally wound up wetting the sheets. Frank immediately ceased tormenting me and made a wild dash for the other bed, which made me laugh even harder.

Frank's sense of humor extended into areas where others didn't even dare to chuckle: he was the only guy I ever met who could laugh in the throes of the sexual act. Seriously.
“It's all the same muscles relaxing”
(this pronounced with true pseudo-scientific gravity --
ask Mr. Wizard!
). For him, reproductive organs weren't merely
plumbing
, but
sublime inboard recreational equipment.
“What could you possibly do out there that could be half as entertaining as what we could do in here?” I doubt whether I'll ever be able to wipe from my mind the picture of him standing in shag carpeting up to his knees in some Holiday Inn, not exactly a candidate for the best-dressed list,
right hand from the heart-a
, solemnly reciting the lyrics to an old hokum blues number: “Your balls hang down like a damn bell clapper, your dick stands up like a steeple, your asshole's just like two church doors, and the crabs walk in like people.”

Yes -- there was a definite madness in Dr. Zurkon's method, methought.

Even though Frank could be warm and genial in public and considerate and affectionate in private, he made no attempt to dissemble when he was in a bad mood; to him, dishonesty was a far worse sin than possibly offending somebody with a baldly stated or irate comment. The way I figured it, he appeared to be less than genial between a quarter and a third of the time. His emotional barometer would change without warning, and I soon became entirely too familiar with the lowered brows, the sour, confrontational glare, the clipped, sarcastic rejoinders. This state could be brought on by anything — no coffee, not enough sleep, malfunctioning equipment, an interviewer asking the ‘wrong' questions — or, seemingly, by nothing at all. It was just his way of handling emotional overload. I rarely felt that Frank's ill humor was directed specifically
towards me, but it was still extremely unpleasant. You could feel it building up and hanging in the air like electrostatically charged ozone before a thunderstorm. The minute I saw it coming, I'd get the hell out of the area and watch from a safe distance while some less knowledgeable fool got the downpour; only when I was sure the disturbance had passed did I venture up close again.

I liked him much better when he grinned, slapped his knee in delight at some absurdity, made up ridiculous nicknames for various portions of my anatomy, affectionately twiddled the tip of my nose, suddenly appeared out of nowhere with an unidentified bulbous object in his hand and that look in his eye.

One night, after an especially tiring day, I got back to the motel aching in every muscle. As I stiffly changed out of my clothes, Frank noticed my condition, made me lie down, and proceeded to administer a back rub. Just a few minutes earlier, in the car on the way to the motel, he had been chewing out one of the band members for showing up fifteen minutes late at the sound check that afternoon. Being there while he gave the guy hell had made me extremely uncomfortable; I spent the ride looking studiously out of the window and wishing I'd gone in the other car. Even now, as Frank worked on my back, I was still feeling ill at ease, and he could tell. “You thought I was being an asshole, razzing _____ like that, didn't you?” he asked quietly.

“Sort of,” I admitted.

“Well, that's just what you have to do when you're running a band. Next time he would have been half an hour late for the
show
, and then the other guys would've seen him getting away with it and gone, ‘Hey, if
he
can be late,
we
can too,' and there you go...”

“Why didn't you just explain that to him quietly, then?”

“I'd already given him a couple of friendly warnings. _____'s not a bad sort of guy, he's just not always that great at paying attention. That's why I had to remind him about it in a way he'd remember. Now roll over...”

“Hmm, I dunno — do I want to be intimate with Mussolini? How do I know I'm not going to be the next one to get it?”

“You're
definitely
going to be the next one to get it. C'mon, roll over.”

Frank was an astute psychologist. He understood the personality
and peccadilloes of each of the musicians and most of the time he was easily able to motivate them without their being more than dimly aware of it. He knew when to push and when to back off; if I had been in his position, I would have been driven crazy by the swirling crosscurrents of band politics, conflicts, neuroses, and high school-level road shenanigans, but Frank had an incredible ability to shrug off the nonsense and effectively deal with what remained. It all fit in with my initial impression when he'd showed me the prospectus for
200 Motels
: he may not have looked the part, but he was a born executive. Although he tried to listen to the band members' complaints and suggestions, he basically didn't give a fig what anybody thought of him, and he never took it personally if a musician decided he hated him and wanted to quit. This, however, was not a regular occurrence; despite the musical discipline he insisted upon, most of his personnel liked and respected him and were willing to give 100 percent, whether or not they alwaysunderstood exactly what they were doing, or why he wanted them to do it.

My troubles with the other band members had commenced almost immediately. The guys, most of them pretty typical rock musicians, were a bunch of pathological socializers, and I wasn't. Worse, my presence as understudy made the dissolute among them, knowing why I was there, regard me with hostility as a prig and a scab. Besides, I was a girl trying to infiltrate their male ranks. Their stage shtick revolved around road humor and groupie jokes — so where did I fit in?

I noticed that the atmosphere of constant partying, both on- and offstage, tended to make Frank more outgoing. He'd hang out with the guys after a show the way somebody else might attend the office cocktail party — although when the action got hot and heavy (as it inevitably did), he rarely took an active role, preferring to leave that to the others. It wasn't that he was beyond arousal — in fact, he walked around in a perpetual state of multi-dimensional sexual awareness that was actually far more dangerous than even the most incorrigible cocksman in the band could conceive of — but he had his own distinct way of viewing things, and in his mind these semi-public orgies were part of his supra-musical megastructure, the ‘conceptual continuity' he'd mentioned to me. I think, too, that although he never admitted it, he kept a clear distinction in his mind between himself and his employees. He was their boss and then leader; tactically, there could be no question of him really mingling with them. Abandoning himself to an indiscriminate hot time with a bunch of band members and groupies one night might make it difficult if not impossible for him to maintain his position of control over ‘the troops' the next day.