Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  Once or twice when I was alone in the basement, I crept over to the vast ebony shape, beside myself with lust, and mashed the soft pedal all the way to the floor while squeezing out a couple of apologetic little ppp arpeggios, just enough to ascertain that nobody had ever played it long and hard enough to break in the action. The rest of the time, I just had to lie there underneath it, panting and drooling as I suffered delirious fantasies about Frank and I playing the infamous four-handed version of. Petrouchka with our clothes off. Hell, I’d even let him take the primo part. Unfortunately, my little scenario was impossible in more ways than one: Frank’s involvement with keyboard instruments was limited to hunt-and-peck note-picking when he was composing and needed to figure out a melody line that wouldn’t fit on the guitar. I couldn’t help wondering what he was doing with a 970,000 artist instrument when a $75 spinet would have been just as good, and was reminded of the story about my favorite cellist, Jacqueline Du Pré — in one of her early concerto appearances, some crusty old conductor had listened to her tone and then took her to task: “You have such a beautiful instrument between your legs, my dear but all you do is scratch, scratch, scratch.”

  The basement was anything but a monk’s austere cell; the walls were festooned with artifacts, including the Fender Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix had burned at the Miami Pop Festival, original storyboards by Cal Schenkel for forthcoming film opuses, sociologically noteworthy correspondence from all over the world, photos and clippings from all phases of Frank’s musical history, a rust-pocked hood from what appeared to be a once-green,’39 Chevy, hanging on the wall like a sculpture — and assorted objects which I presumed had religious significance to Frank, like a whole plethora of motel room keys: dozens of them, scores of them. Looking at them all lined up and glinting diabolically in the purple twilight, I felt my knee start jerking so intensely, I almost keeled over.

  Doggus, the family dog, evidently suffered from both gastric and parasitic afflictions; when it wasn’t farting, it was scratching fleas and farting. It seemed to like me, probably because it mistook me for a small, occasionally mobile extension of the sofa that was our mutual bed. One afternoon on the, on I was having a vivid nightmare in which The Fiend With No Face was suffocating me with a horrible cloud of poison gas. In my dream I was somehow dying in my sleep, until I regained enough consciousness to recognize, just over my head, the posterior quarters of said canine, which was snoring away, using me as its sofa. At that moment I heartily envied Frank his hardcore-smoker’s lack of smell.

  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 m
oment 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!

  I assumed Frank was listening to music for his own entertainment, as a break from his labors, but actually he was playing it for my benefit — I think he felt it was his Christian (or pagan) duty to rescue my soul from honky-tonk hell. He loathed country music — that is, white country music for him, country blues, a black form, was another story entirely — and I think he was under the impression that I didn’t know about any other sort of music. He was not correct; in fact, I’d been listening to what for lack of a better term is known as ‘classical’ (i.e., chiefly the life work of dead males of European extraction) music since I was three or four. I’d even had a stab at performing some of it as a vocalist or percussionist. (I was too modest, or more likely ashamed, to admit these things to Frank.)

  Frank was primarily interested in modern composers. He claimed he found Bach’s structural approach interesting, but added that he couldn’t really listen to much of the music. This made me decide his musical nature tended to be architectural rather than emotional; but just when I thought I had him pegged, he confessed, a little shamefacedly, that he loved some of Wagner’s works. Hmm, I thought, that’s still architectural, but you can’t deny it has plenty of emotion in it, even if it’s sort of on an adolescent level- Whereupon Dr. Zappa threw me yet another curve, and whipped out an album of Ravel’s piano music that was so worn down the needle would barely track it. Impressionism? Good grief! Wisely, I ceased from further conclusion-jumping about Frank’s underlying musical aesthetic. “If it sounds good to you, then it’s good music,” shrugged the perverse Professor. Like some of his other observations, this seemed absurd on the surface, but turned out to be a tough theorem to refute.

  But the most moving moment in the Mad Maestro’s Music Appreciation course came when he played me Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto. “The first time I heard the main melody in the first movement of this thing, I almost (now don’t laugh) cried,” he said with a fierce shyness when he put on the record, just daring me to snicker. It was the farthest thing from my mind; when the theme in question came blasting out through the studio monitors, my throat and chest became so tight with tears — not of grief, but of awe — that I couldn’t breathe. It seemed to me as if Bartok, in the first few minutes of that first movement, had personified humankind’s highest and most exalted potentialities, thrown into noble relief against the shadow of modern horror and disillusionment. There aren’t any words for that sort of thing;
only music can describe it, and for me, the Third Piano Concerto still describes it more eloquently than anything else I’ve heard.

  Looking at Frank, I saw that the main theme — a rapid, fluent cascade of notes in the Hungarian mode, first stated simply, then developed into awesome multi-dimensonality — had entirely taken him over. There was none of the usual droll commentary this time. In a trance, his hand tapping out the rhythms on his knee, he leaned forward into the music, so intent on its every nuance that in the ashtray beside him his untouched cigarette slowly burned down to the filter. As the work progressed, he gradually disappeared into it, finally becoming one with Bartok’s magnanimous universe, leaving behind the suffocating meanness and mediocrity both composers had struggled so much of their lives to escape.

  I hope Frank is floating around somewhere like that now, only with some expanded opportunities for glandular recreation mixed in with the hifalutin stuff.

  Then one night, with studied casualness, he asked me if I’d ever composed any “serious” music. I guess we’d progressed to the point where he figured I was ready to quit “pooting around” and get to work. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t consider myself any sort of “serious” composer. Feeling quite embarrassed, I finally came clean about my experiences at El Camino, and confessed that I’d given up studying composition because it required a stability I seemed to, er, lack at the moment.

  I had a tape of a piano composition, “Opus One,” which had earned me an A in my Composition class at El Camino. The assignment had been to build anoriginal etude from a pre-existing theme, and the theme I had chosen was the opening notes of the piano solo on Frank’s composition “Little House I Used to Live In". By definition “Opus One” was a very derivative piece, and I was no longer sure what I thought of it, but I played it for Frank so that he could at least see I’d been involved in semi-serious musical study. To my surprise, he seemed to like it a lot. I guess it made him realize I wasn’t really an ignorant shitkicker/hillbilly-type person after all, even if I did insist on wearing those poot-stompers. I suspect it also elicited another realization: the fact that his music was a real inspiration for me. That was something I’d never been able to put into words, but he could hear it for himself on the tape of “Opus One", and as much as he tried to hide behind that wry, ironic, Professor Pootmeister facade, I think he was actually touched.