Being Frank (15 page)

Later, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, having left him straightening up the living room. Frank, as I'd been learning, wasn't just tidy, he was that most dreaded of domestic monsters,
The Obsessive/Compulsive Organizer
: there had better be a place for everything and everything in its place, because if he went to find that particular little
rentoon-frammin
he was looking for and couldn't,
it was your fault
, and you'd never hear the end of
it. I didn't realize why he was like that until he happened to tell an interviewer that when he was growing up his mother had always kept the hardwood floors in their house so highly polished
you could see your reflection in them
. I found this revelation truly frightening.

As I was picking up the bottle of mouthwash, I heard the rattle of flipping pages, then an angry thump, “
Nigey, come here.”
That was an order. I'd never heard him sound like that before. I sashayed into the living room and was confronted with the sight of him, mustache fairly bristling with outrage, my journal clutched in his fist. He had seen my little notebook sticking out of my carry-on flight bag, and I guess the temptation to read about himself was just too much for him to resist.

“'What are you doing with that?” I asked, feeling the same sort of inarticulate rage I'd experienced when I was twelve and my father, snooping around in my room, had found a mildly smutty poem I'd written, which he claimed disgusted him.

“That's not the point,” Frank snapped. “The point is, are you going to run out and sell this stuff to Rolling Stone?”

It was true that I had been keeping detailed notes on the going son during the tour. I'd started my journal about the time I discovered “Freak Out!", and as both entertainment and cheap therapy, it had gotten me through the misery of high school, my grandmother's illness and death, and a lot of other things. Like the old Russian fairy tale about Tsar Trajan having goat's ears, my journal was the only place I could set down the whole truth and nothing but the truth as I saw it, without worrying about what anybody was going to think. Frank should have understood that, and in fact he probably would have, if I hadn't been writing about my life on the road with
him
. For some reason he had developed an absolute paranoia about journalists and being written about in general, grimly envisioning elaborate conspiracies by the press to disinform Middle America about
his life's work. It seemed odd to me that he had apparently forgotten how, on several occasions during the tour, I'd pointedly refused to talk to overly inquisitive rock journalists about him and our relationship. He knew that some of my writing on music (though nothing on
him
or
his
music) had been published, and I guess his paranoia had just taken over from there. When his buttons were pushed, Frank, usual rigorously logical, could take solipsism to unheard-of depths.

The whole situation was highly ludicrous; for once, instead of Frank pointing out an inherent absurdity to me, it was the other way around.
The rancid sock was defnitely on the other foot, boys and girls
. I tried to explain that my journal was
my
business, and guaranteed to stay that way, but he had gotten all lathered up and self-righteous, and it was no use. No matter what I said, I couldn't convince him that my journal entries weren't going to be the lead exposé in the next issue of Rolling Stone. If I'd been older and wiser, I would have realized that this was his way of venting his multitude of frustrations, but as it was I wound up yelling at him and storming out of the Holiday Inn to lay Gotham to waste. It was the only power I had.

Moments after hailing a cab in front of the Holiday Inn, it occurred to me that I ought to look in my wallet. Ordinarily I carried the necessities of life in an old brown tooled-leather pouch on my belt, but it seemed suspiciously light all of a sudden. One quick, desperate glance inside was enough to confirm my worst fears. Sure enough, I'd stormed out and left my money behind in the suite. By this time the cab had pulled away from the curb and was doing about 15 miles per hour as it entered the thick stream of traffic near Broadway. I let out a howl, seized the door handle, and leaped out. The cabbie was yelling something after me, but I didn't stick around to listen.

Feeling like a cretin, I shambled back up Broadway. There was nothing to do but go up to the Holiday Inn and collect my errant billfold. I went around the corner, walked into the lobby, nodded to the doorman in what I hoped was an imperious manner, and took the elevator up to the 17th floor. The door to the suite was locked. I pulled out my key, unlocked it, and
went in. I thought I remembered leaving my wallet on the dresser in the bedroom. As I walked into the living room I noticed that the suite was dark, and imagined Frank going around obsessively making sure all the lights were turned off before he left for Carnegie Hall to putter with the rented sound reinforcement gear. Knowing him, he'd be there scowling, twiddling knobs, and harrumphing until some burly stagehand finally came and dragged him onto the stage for the show.

Still castigating myself for my absent-mindedness, I started to walk into the bedroom. A strong whiff of obviously pricey perfume assailed my nose. There, in the gloom, beneath the sheet on the queen-size bed, was a writhing
entity
, a monster with two backs. I heard muffled moaning, rising in pitch.
Another of Dr. Zurkon's infernal experiments!

Somehow I found myself in Central Park. I sat down dully on a graffiti-scarred bench near the lake, staring out at the waterfowl and the transients. After some undisclosed and irrelevant period of time Herb Cohen, Frank's manager, happened by and asked why I was sitting there like that.

“You don't want to know,” I told him. He agreed; he didn't want to know. He'd been working with Frank for six years, and he'd probably heard it all already.

We strolled around the park with the joggers and the muggers, munching on pretzels and hot chestnuts, while he regaled me with anecdotes about his experiences in the golden era of L.A. coffeehouses, the early '60s. At least he didn't mention Frank. I was glad of that.

When he went off again, I was feeling masochistic, so I decided to take a little trip over to Greenwich Village. It was my first look at it, and I was disgusted to realize that I loved it immediately. I loved the cobblestone streets and the little brass plaques honoring the artistic toilers who had formerly occupied the old, narrow brownstones. In L.A. these charming and admittedly useless monuments would have long ago been razed for parking lots.
This is what Europe's supposed to look like, I guess,
I thought. Then I had a sudden vision of that writhing monster back at the Holiday Inn, and I wished I had a reverse phone directory and a flame-thrower.

In Washington Square Park there were squadrons of panhandlers and flocks of pigeons. I saw one guy who looked like a character in a William Kotzwinkle novel, all malodorous rags and matted hair. He was intently luring unsuspecting birds into an ingenious jury-rigged device constructed from what seemed to be a bunch of coathangers and a small rabbit cage. It looked as though the pigeons were his only source of sustenance; he was so thin he seemed about to blow away. I wondered what he used for bait, but not for very long.

After I'd wandered around some more, I too was starving to death, so I found a deli — and was roundly insulted by the counterman during a semantic imbroglio about what constituted a “plain” cheeseburger. Replete, if a bit mystified by the folkways of Gotham, I came out on the street and glanced at my watch. By now the vile Zurkon would have completed his evil experiment and would be duly ensconced at Carnegie Hall. It was time for me to head back to the Holiday Inn and get some sleep. If he thought I was going to show up for the gig tonight, he was going to be very surprised.

On the way back to the Holiday Inn, the cab passed Carnegie Hall. Dusk was falling fast, but I got a good look at the line-up stretching nearly around the block: desperate mortals hoping to snag tickets for the sold-out show.
Boy, the things I could tell them about their idol Frank Zappa.
Every single last one of them, no matter how fanatic they
had
been, would promptly turn on their heel, march to the nearest League of Decency office, and put in a complaint.

At the Holiday Inn, sure enough, there was nobody in the suite — just a faint vestige of old cigarette smoke and odious cologne in the bedroom. I climbed fully dressed into the unused bed and passed out.

I woke up to the ringing of the phone. Squinting over at the little luminous travel alarm clock on the nightstand, I saw the time was past 1 a.m. I didn't want to answer; it probably wasn't for
me
. But it kept ringing and ringing... Maybe it was Frank, checking up on my whereabouts. Finally I picked it up and mumbled, “Yeah.”
Click!

I couldn't get back to sleep after that, so I went into the living room and chain-smoked the remaining cigarettes in a pack of Camels Frank had left lying around. Along with the disputed Anthony Newman album, there were records by Penderecki, Takemitsu, and “Gatemouth” Brown all stacked neatly against the table. Idly I turned on the FM tuner in the stereo. I flipped past a rock station that was playing “Magic Fingers” from the newly released “200 Motels” soundtrack. I'd never heard it on the radio back in L.A.

It wasn't long before I heard a key in the lock. I slid down to one end of the sofa and crushed out the butt I'd been working on. Frank swept in alone, a fast, fluid swirl of gruesome tweed, and set his guitar down. He came right over to me and, taking off his coat, threw it over the armchair.

“Where were you?” he demanded. When he went into
interrogation mode
, he was as intimidating as hell. Torquemada could have learned all
sorts
of things from Frank. I tried to think of him with his clothes off, hoping to reduce him conceptually to a
ludicrous naked male
, but it didn't
work. Towering over me, with those pitiless eyes drilling right through me, he simply refused to be a character in my movie.

“I decided I'd stay here and get some sleep,” I replied. In my stomach that damn cheeseburger was beginning to churn horribly. (Was I about to become the
Spew Queen of West 57th Street?
)

“Well, it was your show. I dedicated it to you. It's going on an album, too.”

“Thanks, I guess.” Actually, I had to stop and think about that. I'd never figured Frank for the sort of sentimental fool who'd get up — in Carnegie Hall, no less — and make an idiot of himself publicly by
mentioning names
. Hadn't he savagely trashed that whole dedicatory syndrome on “Ruben and the Jets"? I finally heard the tape of the show more than a year later. He'd made a rambling, awkward sort of speech, explaining how he never dedicated shows to anyone, but this was
a special circumstance
, ladies and gentlemen... “
This show is dedicated to Nigey Lennon, who hitchhiked out here from California
.”
Phew!
— I'd been getting worried there, but by turning the whole thing into an absurdity at the last minute, he'd just managed to save himself from coming across like the bandleader at the graduation dance at Antelope Valley Joint High School, 1958 (
... “and I'd like to send this slow one out to darlin' Mary Lou from her ever-lovin' Chuy...
”). What he'd really meant, of course, was “
... who rode my face out here from California.
”

Turned out there was a reason for this public spectacle, too. He frowned. “We better talk.”

“About what?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent. I knew I couldn't fool Frank, but I'd be damned if
I
was going to let him see how awful I felt.