Being Frank (21 page)

I initially had a problem with Frank's proclivity for working when I would have ordinarily been asleep. I didn't want to complain, so the first couple of nights I tried curling up on the sofa in my sleeping bag with wads of kleenex in my ears, but my sleep was fractured by disturbing dreams, especially when he was playing the same piece of tape over and over. (“
Who's been making those new brown clouds, who's been making those clouds today?
” try listening to
that
for five or six hours while you're trying to drift off.) Starting about the third night, I found other occupations (working through his copy of Piston's
Harmony
, relieved now and then with a dip into the racier parts of Boccaccio's
Decameron
) when Frank was toiling, and finally fell asleep in the morning, when he went back upstairs and peace reigned once again in the Purple Empire.

There always seemed to be food and drink down there. Frank was hospitably generous about sharing whatever he himself happened to be eating. Some of the things he consumed admittedly belonged more in Pathology Quarterly than “The Silver Palate Cookbook” — like the night he graciously extended half of a
signature sandwich
constructed of white bread spread with mayo and peanut butter, this covered with squashed fried bananas, and (I'm afraid remember this all too clearly) topped off with
sardines
. I politely told him I preferred to take my chances with the pepperoni pizza that had been sitting around down there for the past couple of weeks, gradually acquiring
patina
and
complexity
.

If I had a care in the world during this time (beyond wondering whether I could manage to get by for the rest of my life on the $176 remaining from the insurance check), it wasn't that there were rapists, Republicans, and songs like the Joy of Cooking's version of “Goin' to Brownsville” in the World Outside — it was that one of these days somebody from the World Upstairs was going to come downstairs, find me huddled under the piano, and throw me out on my ear. The purple sanctum seemed to be off limits to everybody but Frank; there was a door at the top of the stairs which connected the basement to the rest of the house, but I never saw it opened from the upstairs side by anyone but Frank in the nearly four weeks I was there. I wondered if I should say something to my host about my concerns — “gee, Frank, did you ask your folks if I could stay here?” — but a plangent little inner voice warned me that some muddy depths are distinctly better left unplumbed.

Then, after I'd finally begun to be lulled into a sense of security by the comfortable if eccentric routine in the basement, one afternoon the murky currents upstairs were apparently disturbed, and the mud shark was roused at last. I was playing my L5 acoustically, my preferred method, writing a song called “Jupiter's Basement” in honor of my stay in this metaphysical Holiday Inn, when my ears caught something I'd never heard before — the muffled sound of an argument upstairs. It was only about l:30 p.m., a little too early in the ‘morning' for Frank to be up, but I could distinctly make out the sound of his voice, and he wasn't singing, neither I'd been with him in a variety of circumstances during the past year, and I'd never once known him to raise his voice — he didn't need to, not with those death-ray eyes and his
psi
-ballistic ability to zero in for the kill on people's deepest, darkest secrets. Now he was practically shouting; this must be extremely serious business. Only his half of the contretemps was audible; he'd bellow for a number of bars, then there'd be a rest, like Music Minus One, after which he'd resume again, louder. After about ten minutes of cowering, I put down the guitar and quietly went over to where I'd stashed my belongings as neatly as possible behind the sofa. I kept most of my stuff in the trunk of my car anyway, so there wasn't much to collect, just a damp towel and toothbrush from the bathroom, and various underwear and things.

I had everything bundled up and waiting a few minutes later, when the upstairs door slammed hard and Frank came bumping down the stairs. I shuddered, wondering if somebody might not come bumping down after him with a .357 Magnum in their hand, but he was alone, and no one followed him. He was wearing just his jeans, no shirt, no shoes, and his face was an absolute thunderstorm, with green lightning bolts shooting out
of his smoldering, almost black, eyes. No wonder nobody dared to challenge him: he didn't appear human, but a force of nature. His anger was so violent that he couldn't speak, although it was plain he was on fire with resentment because his old hobgoblin had attacked: his liberty had been challenged.

He sat down heavily in his work chair, unconsciously favoring his bad leg, and glared. I had worked up to telling him that I was going to leave, but when I got a close look at his face, my resolve evaporated. His resentment didn't seem to be directed at me, nor, curiously, toward his wife, but at the situation in general. Before I could say anything, he told me bluntly that I could stay on if I wanted to, that it was all right for me to be there regardless of what I might think.

In a state of emotional turmoil, I sat down next to him. On his work table was the layout for a forthcoming album cover (
The Grand Wazoo
). He'd been typing out the liner notes on his IBM Selectwriter, using only his right index finger (I don't know how he managed to do it, but he never made typos). I cleared my throat. “Frank, I don't feel good about what just happened. I appreciate your letting me stay here, but I think I should leave!'

The next minute he took me completely by surprise, seizing my arm and pulling me down with him onto the floor. “Take 'em off,” he said, putting his hand on the top button of my jeans. I was overwhelmed with confusion at his uncharacteristic abruptness, and for a moment I wondered if this was going to turn out to be an ugly scene, but I also sensed that he wanted validation from me and that this was his way of getting it. He never had trusted words or other people's emotional constructs, only actions, and in this instance his burning fury seemed to be so basic that it demand physical resolution. In essence, his message was something like,
Look, I just stuck my neck out defending you; show me I did the right thing
.

Eventually, feeling emotionally drained and more than a little guilty that I'd had sex under those circumstances and
enjoyed
it, I fell asleep on the sofa. The last thing I remember before I drifted off was Frank leaning over me and gently pulling my blanket up over my cold bare feet. He squeezed my toes a little as he did it, a very sweet and affectionate little gesture. Then he went back to work.

He's
sure full of surprises
, I mused, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Once, when I'd asked him what he dreamed when he was asleep, he'd answered simply, “I live in my dream.” When I woke up around dawn, he was still hunched over his orchestra pad.

I stayed another two weeks without further outbursts. Although I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible when I was around and he was working, sometimes Frank would light up a smoke, put his feet on the drafting table (his bad leg, which because it had been broken was shorter than the other, was constantly throbbing, and the long hours he spent hunched over his work table gave him lower back pain too), and take a break from his labors. On one occasion he delivered an interesting little oration about Time. His theory was that human beings tried to force time to be linear and consecutive, whereas it was probably closer to a constant — in other words, there was no “now” or “then", but rather an “always.” He said that everything was happening continuously, but that people were unable to grasp that concept, and so had created constructs like calendars that squeezed time into arbitrary little boxes.

When he went back to work, I sat there, half listening to him noodling on a melody line on the guitar, but mostly thinking about our relationship. The whole thing had been so peculiar and unexpected; if somebody had told me back in 1967, for example, that in 1972 I was going to be sitting there in Frank Zappa's basement under those particular circumstances, I wouldn't have believed it possible. It was about as random an occurrence as was likely to happen, or more likely not happen. Yet, Frank loved accidents and incongruities, and — if it wasn't paradoxical — sought them out constantly. In that case, maybe it was no accident that I was there.

Suddenly I sat bolt upright on the sofa and let out a whoop. It all made sense! This had all happened before...or was happening again...or should have been happening already...or something.

“What's up?” asked Frank curiously, looking up from his chart, probably wondering whether to call the paramedics.

“This whole thing — my being here — was supposed to happen,” I blurted out. “I mean — it's happened before — you know what I mean?.”

Frank grinned. “In which case you'd have remembered to pick up a pack of cigarettes when you go to the store” he observed. We both shared a good laugh over that one, but that didn't make it any less true.

One night Frank put on a record of Stravinsky. It was
Les Noces
, which I had never heard before. ("Now here's an entirely different sort of doo-wop,” he observed, referring to the maniacal vocal parts.) I began asking him questions about Stravinsky and was impressed by his comments on the man and his work. I mentioned
L'Histoire du Soldat
, my favorite Stravinsky piece, and it turned out to be his favorite too; in fact he had recently performed the narration for a performance by Lukas Foss at the Hollywood Bowl. Out came the well-worn disc from Frank's collection, and
we went over it bar by bar. I had heard the music hundreds of times before, but never from this perspective. Frank told me stories about Stravinsky — how he'd played pickup softball games with his pals the Marx Brothers when he lived in Beverly Hills, how he'd sometimes sit at the lunch counter in the Thrifty drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, order a hot fudge sundae, and when no one was looking spike it with vodka.

Frank's theories about the music, technically and historically, would have been perspicacious and entertaining enough if he were a conventionally-trained musicologist, but he had figured all this stuff out solely by listening to the music, reading the score, and perusing a few library books. He mentioned that his father had once offered to send him to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, but that he'd refused on the grounds that it “would probably have perverted me.” Either that, I mused, or as a composer he might have wound up making Bartòk or Varèise seem trivial by comparison.

Without making too big a deal out of it, Frank started to play other records from time to time, works by Webern, Varèse, Bartok, and other 20th-century composers he had an affinity with. He would sit beside the stereo in his work chair, sipping coffee and stopping ever so often to comment on something of interest in the music, waving his smoking cigarette like a pointer. He had a curious way of listening to music; he'd sit there with one leg crossed over the other, tapping out the primary rhythm with the motion of his right foot, the accents with his other foot, and counter rhythms with both hands on his knees — all silently. I'd never seen anyone listen to music with such physical and mental concentration. It looked like so much fun that I tried it myself during
L'Histoire,
and I immediately found that it almost hypnotically locked me into the music, from the basic pulse outward. Try it yourself some time, preferably with something that has strong counter-rhythmic interplay, and you'll see what I mean. No wonder Frank had no use for drugs!