Being Frank (5 page)

I had never had such a good time talking to anyone before. Zappa was a marvelous storyteller, but he was also a good listener. When I or my boyfriend said something, he listened gravely, as if what we had to say was important. He never mentioned himself or his work unless we asked him a specific question — he seemed to prefer listening to us talk about ourselves.

It came as a shock and a letdown when he finally looked out of the window — the towering neon Mutual of Omaha sign was just blinking on behind him like an ornament on top of his green feathered hat — and, clearing his throat, gently let us know that he had other things to get to. More than two hours had passed in what seemed like ten minutes. As we stood up he gave me one last steady look and said, “When your stuff is ready, you'll be able to sell it anywhere, not just here.” Seeing my glum expression, he added quickly, “But I'd like to hear it again when it's finished.” He gravely picked up my tape box from the desk and handed it back to me. Then he reached down with his thumb and forefinger and gently twiddled the tip of my nose, where it turned up. Now his eyes were twinkling with wry affection. In a flustered blur, I stretched a couple of inches and kissed him on the cheek.

As I descended to the lobby in the elevator, it seemed as if every floor down was one step closer to mundane ‘reality' — whatever
that
was. I felt as if I'd been struck broadside by an entire galaxy hurtling directly at me. Certainly nothing on the Miracle Mile was as intense and vivid as Frank Zappa and his strange universe in which we had been immersed for two hours, or maybe two million light years.

I had every intention of going back to work on the tape and resubmitting it to Zappa. I also restrung my guitar, bought some advanced chord and arpeggio studies, and vowed to spend every waking hour learning to play “honestly”, if I could figure out what that was. But before I had a chance to start putting off all this work, other things intervened. The sporadic troubles I had always had with the authorities at Our Lady of Guacamole became chronic, then acute.

The campus dress code was rigid — when they made you kneel on the ground, the hem of your skirt had to reach all the way to the black-top,
or you were sent home to change into “more appropriate attire”. Evidently the chiefly Catholic administration was convinced that miniskirts were the Devil's workshop. I thought the whole concept was absurd, and after ransacking the Goodwill store for a 1950s-vintage Catholic-schoolgirl plaid pleated skirt, I wore it to school with a pair of lug-soled Cub Scout hiking boots outgrown by my boyfriend's younger brother. For a blouse, I hunted up an old army-surplus fatigue shirt and stenciled my student ID number over the pocket. Result:
American Icon Hash
. At first I thought, much to my disappointment, that this attire was attracting no particular notice from the authorities. I hastened to add my boyfriend's Oshkosh B'Gosh overalls underneath the skirt, just in case my fashion statement was too subtle. That very day, as I was serenely puffing on a Camel non-filter behind the girls' gym, Miss Rissé happened to stalk by on a patrol. Like Anton Webern, who was shot to death by American Occupation soldiers when he went out on his porch after curfew one night to sneak a smoke, my career also ended brutally. I was duly apprehended and marched to the principal's office, where my father was called at work and I was summarily executed. And this wasn't Occupied Austria at the end of World War II, but Manhattan Beach, California in the good old USA, A.D. 1970. Imagine!

My parents obviously felt furious, cheated, and more than a little embarrassed that I'd been permanently excused from
learning to be a valuable member of society
, but they didn't say anything. No mention was made of my going on to continuation school, junior college, or any other institution. I had always imagined I would be a musician or at least a songwriter. Now it looked like I might have to settle for being a dishwasher — if I was lucky.

Then my grandmother, with whom I was very close, became ill, and I took the family's Dodge van (which had been bought on a whim in case my mother ever repented and allowed us to go on a camping trip) and went to Arizona to be with her in her last days. In the process I became involved first in riding and then in rodeo, and I put the idea -of a music career on the back burner, although I continued to write songs whenever I was sitting in the van on a balmy, star-filled night with a fracture or a contusion. I still listened to Zappa's music as much as ever, too, and I sometimes thought about the things he had said during our meeting, and the way he had said them. I had begun to read books on Zen and Taoism, and I was trying to live in the moment as much as I could, but I suspected that somehow, in the inexplicable chaos of the universe, I'd run into Frank Zappa again.

C
oming back to Los Angeles from Arizona was a
decompression experience
. My grandmother had died, and I felt as if a big chunk of the past was gone. I was a few months shy of my 17th birthday, and all I wanted to do was hide in a small mahogany-paneled and velvet-wallpapered room, draw the velvet drapes over the bay window, and listen to Blue Amberol cylinders on an Edison reproducer. Probably I should have gone to San Francisco. Instead, lacking any wherewithal whatsoever, I sheepishly checked back in at the Parental Hotel in good old quotidian Manhattan Beach. I had some vague notion of trying to study musicology or medicine; my mother felt that I should get a job and contribute to my upkeep.

This wasn't a half bad idea, but after three weeks of toting a 30-pound sack of junk mail and rubber-banding circulars onto doorknobs in Watts and Willowbrook, I was relieved when a position opened up in the shipping department of my father's furniture company. My dad had definite opinions about nepotism: His brothers were partners in the business, and their no-good kids had been given roomfuls of furniture by their doting fathers, for free. He expressed some concern about my reliability as an employee, but in the end he agreed to hire me on for $85 a week — fifteen of which I was to pay at home for room and board.

The situation turned out to be less than ideal. During my brief rodeo stint I had been knocked over and then kicked by a horse while
team roping, causing fractures on several of the ribs nearest my lungs. Even now, more than a year later, I could feel it when I took a deep breath. In the process of schlepping bulky boxes across several hundred feet of slick concrete floor to the shipping dock and then loading them onto waiting trucks, I started to get pretty tired of gasping for air all the time. I didn't mind doing a man's work, but at five-eight and 130 pounds, I was built more like an intellectual than a stevedore. It was time for me to get back to more cerebral pursuits before I killed myself.

One day I was perusing the Los Angeles Times and noticed that Frank Zappa and the reconstituted Mothers (the “of Invention” had been quietly dropped when Frank started his own record label) were appearing locally. I had written a couple of record reviews for a local magazine, Coast, and I managed to schnorr a comp ticket to the show. I thought it would be entertaining to see Zappa again and find out if he remembered me after more than a year. The concert was a blast. I privately felt that the musicianship wasn't up to the standards of “Hot Rats” or some of Zappa's efforts with the original Mothers, but the material, as always, was interesting and highly varied — something to offend everyone.

After the show ended, I made my way to the backstage entrance, A meaty specimen in a rent-a-cop uniform thrust up an arm as big as a Virginia ham and blocked my access. “Sorry, dear, you have to have a pass,” he simpered.

I feigned annoyed incredulity. “I just went out in the auditorium to watch the show,” I explained testily. I heard a set of immense, rusty gears give an agonizing jerk and then painfully grind into action somewhere far back in his cranium. Before they could rotate very far, Zappa himself appeared, guitar case in hand. He spotted me and instantly acknowledged me with a “
Hey
,” raising one black eyebrow and his empty hand simultaneously. I fell in step beside him and was drawn along in his wake to the dressing rooms, leaving the rent-a-cop to find some Rustoleum.

“So what's up?” he asked, leaning his guitar case against a chair and putting his foot, in a snazzy caramel-colored Italian oxford, up beside it. He was wearing a blue knit polo shirt with a pattern of ombre stars. Reaching into its skin-tight pocket, he drew out a pack of Winstons, selected one, then offered the pack to me. I'd smoked a couple of cigarettes, chiefly out of nervousness, during our interview at Bizarre Records, and he remembered that fact.
Nice memory!

“Nothing's up,” I grinned, turning down the proffered smoke, “I enjoyed the show.”

“Thank you veddy much,” he said mock-courteously, then turned and began to attend to business, stuffing a sheaf of music paper into a big, serious-looking briefcase and snapping it shut. I could see that his eyes had a devilish gleam in them even though his mouth was poker-straight between his thick mustache and manicured goatee.

“Do you still have a band?” he asked, setting the briefcase beside iris guitar and retrieving a white sheepskin coat that had been flung over a folding chair. “Not now,” I replied. “I've been toiling in the family business — not much time for the good life, I'm afraid.”

Zappa took a puff on his Winston and sat down on the table, facing me, his hawk like features wreathed in smoke. “We're doing a show in Berkeley in a couple of weeks,” he said offhandedly. “If you came up there then, I'd be delighted.”

“What do you have in mind?.” Things around here were getting interesting
fast
. “How's your rhythm guitar playing?” he asked, sidestepping my question. “Fair-to-middling. I'm more of a lead player. Mostly what I've been playing recently is slide.” “Blues?” His eyebrows bumped into each other across the bridge of his nose. “Western swing” I said. “I've been trying to get a lap steel sound in open tunings.”

He grimaced. Evidently the Cowboy Way wasn't very high on his list. “Come up to the house next week and we'll run you through the stuff, see what you can do,” he said, grinding out his cigarette on the floor. “Then we'll see.”

“W-what's the address?” I asked, fumbling in my bag for paper and pen. My rooting around was fruitless; finally Zappa thrust a big black fountain pen at me, the type used to copy musical scores. I noisily scratched down the address he gave me, at the top of Laurel Canyon; how I'd get there was anybody's guess. I couldn't afford a car of my own on $70 a week.

“I've got to kick you out now,” said Zappa matter-of-factly. “See you next week.” He picked up his guitar, briefcase, and coat, then leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek. Somewhere down the cavernous hall I heard echoing voices and the sound of female laughter. Then without being able to remember how I got there, I was outside, behind the auditorium, blinking dumbly in the warm, late-summer night. Something was clenched in my hand. It was Zappa's Speedball.