The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

by Mitch Albom

  ALL TOLD, IT TOOK ONE FULL YEAR BEFORE EL MAESTRO LET THE BOY TOUCH A STRING. “First your ears, then your hands,” he insisted. Meanwhile, he explained music. He explained it in Spanish—­and in English, which, having learned himself when he was younger, he deemed vital for Frankie’s progression, believing the rhythm, syntax, and pitch of languages helped the understanding of such things in music. Week after week, jumping between tongues, he demonstrated my chords, my scales, my voicings, laying them out like fine silverware until Frankie could identify them by sound. He made Frankie memorize the names of each composer and composition. Sometimes they listened to music on the small kitchen radio, and El Maestro squeezed Frankie’s hands at certain parts. “Do you hear? Right there! That is a minor key . . . that is a triplet . . .”

  As far as Frankie could tell, El Maestro had no other students. He was often sleeping on the couch when Frankie arrived, the door unlocked, and Frankie would push him on the shoulder until the man growled and rolled over and Frankie knew he was awake.

  Still, as the months passed, the blind man seemed to grow less angry with his young student and stopped calling him “stupid boy,” which made Frankie happy. Baffa, meanwhile, gave up arguing over the guitar. Instead, he took his laundry with him to Crista Senegal Street and made use of the time, coming home each week with clean socks and underwear, wrapped in string.

  When the big moment came, Frankie was so excited he could barely hold still. El Maestro had him sit in the chair, so he could position the instrument correctly, but the guitar he had chosen was too large. It came up to Frankie’s chin.

  “You are very small for eight,” El Maestro said, reaching around the boy’s frame. “Does your father not feed you?”

  “Yes, Maestro, he feeds me.”

  “Give me your left hand.”

  Frankie did.

  “Your nails are too long. You must cut them.”

  “Cut them?”

  “The left hand. Every day.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “You cannot play the guitar if your nails are not cut.”

  “All right, Maestro.”

  “Do you know why this is?”

  “No, Maestro.”

  “No, you do not. Most ­people think it is because the nails get in the way of pressing on the strings. But I say it is something more.”

  “What is it, Maestro?”

  “The nails protect the fingertips. The fingertips are sensitive. Only by cutting the nails back can you truly be in touch with the music.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “Only then can you feel the pain of every note.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “There is no protection.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “Music hurts. Do you understand me, boy?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “Now show me to the closet.”

  Frankie stood and led his teacher across the flat, taking tiny steps.

  “Walk faster, boy. I am not a cripple.”

  Frankie walked faster.

  “We are at the closet, Maestro.”

  “Open the door.”

  Frankie pulled on the knob, revealing stacks of shoe boxes, some clothes hanging from a bar, and four guitars, each one smaller than the next.

  “Give me the smallest one,” El Maestro said.

  Frankie took the instrument with both hands and lifted it toward his teacher. He looked down and noticed a pair of shoes, but they were for a woman, and on the hangers were several dresses and a handbag.

  “Do you have a wife, Maestro?”

  “Back to the chair,” the teacher said.

  Frankie closed the closet door.

  That guitar, the one that would introduce Frankie Presto to his destiny, was, in fact, not a guitar at all, but a braguinha, an instrument similar to a ukulele. It had just four strings. The neck fit in the cup of Frankie’s small left hand, and the curve of the body fit on his bony left knee, which protruded from the short pants he wore in the hot weather. It was a perfect size, as if molded to his body.

  He would take it everywhere.

  “Bend your right arm and relax your right hand,” El Maestro instructed. “Do not squeeze it in; you are not choking something. And do not push down; you are not drowning something. Your right fingers are talking to the strings. Would you talk to someone by choking or drowning them?”

  “No, Maestro.”

  “No, you would not.”

  “What do I do with my left hand?”

  “The left hand finds the beauty. She makes the notes and chords. You can show off all you want with your right hand, boy, but you are nothing without the left, understand?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “Show your left hand respect. Each time you play, begin by holding it out like this.” He straightened Frankie’s palm. “Like you are asking for something.”

  Frankie thought of ­people in church, on their knees at the pews, hands out before them.

  “Like I am asking God?”

  El Maestro smacked Frankie’s hand.

  “Stupid boy. God gives you nothing. God only takes.”

  At that stage, all Frankie knew about God was that He had a big house and He slept a lot. The big house part he assumed after Baffa told him his mother lived with God—­and all the other good ­people who died—­so it had to be a big place, right?

  The sleeping part Frankie deduced after Baffa showed him the basilica in Villareal, which had been burned and destroyed by bad men. God would never allow such a thing to happen unless He slept through it, Frankie figured, just as Frankie sometimes slept through the hairless dog whining at the door and woke up to see a puddle on the floor. Bad things can happen when you sleep, Frankie reasoned, and bad ­people could get away with evil if they knew when God closed his eyes.

  Or maybe God was sometimes like his guitar teacher, wearing the dark glasses.

  “Did you ever see anything?” Frankie asked El Maestro one day.

  “Will my answer make you a better guitarist?”

  “No, Maestro.”

  “Then why ask the question?”

  “I am sorry, Maestro.”

  “What would I see if I saw you?”

  Frankie smiled at the idea.

  “A boy.”

  “A boy who is not playing his lessons.”

  Frankie’s smile went away. He had been practicing for months now, every day in the garden, with the hairless dog at his feet. He wanted to play songs like the ones El Maestro played. But for now, all he got to play was exercises.

  “My fingers hurt, Maestro.”

  “Music is pain.”

  “But they look funny.”

  “Those are calluses.”

  “What are calluses?”

  “When you start playing, your fingers are not used to pressing strings. You get lines in them, yes?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “And they feel puffy?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “Maybe they bleed?”

  Frankie swallowed. He had not wanted to tell his teacher that. But in the beginning, he played so much, he had to sometimes wipe the blood from his left hand with his shirt.

  “Sometimes they bleed, yes, Maestro.”

  His voice quivered.

  “Are you crying, Francisco?”

  “No, Maestro.”

  “Do not cry over losing blood. Not for something you love.”

  He fumbled with a cabinet by the sink and reached inside to find a small bottle and a bowl.

  “Soak your fingers in that,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Why do you care, boy? If I tell you something will help you, do you need to ask questions?”

  “Lo siento, Maestro.”

/>   “Say it in English. ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  “I’m sor-­ry.”

  El Maestro tapped on the table until he found his bottle of aguardiente. “There is a big war going on, boy. We are all going to be speaking English or German soon. Personally, I prefer English. German sounds like someone is scolding you.”

  He took a swallow and grimaced. “Also, they are murderous criminals. And our country won’t do a thing to stop them.”

  Frankie had heard the word war before. Baffa spoke about it with the men at the factory. It didn’t sound good. And Frankie didn’t want to learn a language that sounded like scolding. The calluses were hard enough. He decided to do as his teacher said, just think about music. He wondered if he should tell El Maestro that he was only six years old.

  Leonard “Tappy” Fishman

  Music agent, record executive

  WHERE? INTO THE CAMERA OR AT YOU? . . . OKAY . . . YES . . . SURE. My name is Leonard Fishman, originally from Brooklyn, New York. My age is eighty-­six. This was a helluva trip for me. Overseas. In coach, no less. But I wanted to be here. Broke my heart when I heard the news. Honest to God. Poor Frankie. I was his first agent, during the fifties and sixties. We didn’t have such a good end, it’s true. He went a little nuts. Who knows why? I don’t believe half the crap they wrote about him. You shouldn’t either. Especially the stuff about me. His marriage? The movie fiasco? They want to say it was my fault. What do they know?

  You want to hear the truth? I discovered him. Someone else might tell you different, but I found him when he was just a pisher. You know what that means? A pisher? It’s Yiddish. It means a kid, young and innocent.

  Innocent. Ha! I laugh, because Frankie Presto was never that innocent.

  Huh? . . . Sure. Here’s an example. I love this story. We were in California. This was in February of 1959. I’ll tell you why I remember in a second. I had signed Frankie the year before, when he came to my office and said he’d been in Elvis Presley’s band. I was representing a lot of acts, but you mentioned Elvis, you got in the door.

  Frankie could really sing—­he stood by my desk and did “You Are My Special Angel,” his hands crossed in front of him, and it knocked me out—­and obviously he was a good-­looking kid. I knew I could make money with that face. I had a secretary, and every time Frankie dropped by, I thought she was gonna faint. He later got involved with her and broke her heart, like he usually did.

  Over the years, I saw him with a lot of women like that, secretaries, waitresses, hotel receptionists. He was like a machine, honest to God, I wish I had that energy. His longtime girl left him just before his career took off, and I used to say, “Kid, if you’re trying to get back at her, I think you won.”

  And he’d say, “Oh, Leonard, come on.”

  That was Frankie. He called me Leonard. Everyone else called me Tappy, ’cause I was always tapping my foot or my fingers, a nervous habit, look, even now, I’m doing it, see? But Frankie was different. Crazy. Mashuga. But I loved him. He had heart. The world forgot about him, and that’s a shame. Him dying like this? It’s tragic. . . .

  What’s that, now? . . . Oh, yeah. So in California in those days there was this circuit of county fairs, where they had amusement rides and zoo animals—­goats, horses, all that crap—­but at night, to keep the teenagers interested, they had rock and roll shows. And I booked Frankie on one with, lemme see, the Drifters maybe, the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Knox, Fats Domino, a few others. They’d each do two songs. A real assembly line.

  Anyhow, the promoter for this circuit was a Romanian—­big, hairy guy with a mustache. He ran the whole thing. The animals, the rides—­and the music. All the money went to him. Every night the workers had to line up to get paid, waiting in his tent until all the receipts were counted. He kept the money in this one gray cash box, and with this big cigar in his mouth, he’d count out every dollar. Meanwhile he kept the tent boiling hot—­he even had heat blowers going—so that the ­workers would get so hot and fed up, they’d leave. But Frankie stayed. Him and the Everly Brothers, Phil and Donald—­Don, they called him. They stood there on the first night, sweating until they were soaked. But when they finally reached the front, the Romanian had given out all the money from the cash box.

  “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he said.

  Well, they put up with this for four straight days. Same routine. “I’ll pay you tomorrow.” Finally, it’s the last show on that circuit. Frankie and the Everly boys were beside themselves now. Frankie loved the Everlys. He said they were better musicians than they let on, which was the case with him, too, you know. I heard Frankie sing their song once, “All I Have to Do Is Dream”—­honest to God, it made you weep. His voice? That song? I told him, “Frankie, lemme record that with you,” but he refused because—­get this—­he met the ­couple who wrote it, a husband-­and-­wife team, and he said the woman told him she’d dreamed of her husband’s face when she was eight years old, and when she was nineteen, she saw it across a room, and they’d been together ever since. True story. That’s where the “all I have to do is dream” part comes from.

  Anyhow, Frankie said a song like that should only have one home, just like the ­couple only had each other. So he wouldn’t record it because the Everly Brothers already had. Of course about a thousand other ­people have recorded it since. He had more heart than brains, Frankie, but what are you gonna do?

  Huh? . . . Oh, yeah. The Romanian and the money. So the last night they do their show—­Frankie kills ’em, by the way. I was there. He was doing “I Want To Love You”—­he hadn’t even recorded it yet, but you could see it was gonna be huge by the way the girls were jumping up and down. So when the show finished, again the musicians line up at the tent, and I went down, too, because it was the last chance to get the money, see? It’s hot as hell. Frankie’s nowhere to be found. We’re all waiting for the big Romanian. Suddenly there’s this screaming and yelling and everyone scatters because—­you ready for this?—­the elephants are loose!

  You ever hear such mishugas? The elephants are loose? So everyone runs. You don’t want to get crushed by an elephant, right? The police cars arrive, the sirens, it’s crazy, and suddenly a car pulls up and Frankie is driving with a girl next to him, and he yells to me and the Everly boys, “Get in!” And we take off. And everyone is a little shaken up—­except Frankie, who seems perfectly calm. He drives us to the hotel.

  “Where did you get this car?” I ask him. And he just smiles. You know that Frankie smile? Those God-­blessed white teeth? Ach, I wish I had his chompers. Mine are mostly gone now, all bridgework . . .

  Anyhow, I know not to ask again, and the Everly boys get out at the hotel, and Frankie runs after them and he says, “Hey, hold up.” And he gives them this envelope, and I see it’s money. And he whispers something and they pull him around by the neck, give him a hug, and when they leave, I say to him, “Just tell me you got paid, too,” and he smiles and says, “Leonard, come on.” And then he remembers the girl, and that was the last I saw of him that night.

  But here’s what I was telling you about the date, February 1959. The next morning, I’m in my office and the phone rings. It’s Frankie. And he says, “Where is Pacoima?”

  Well, Pacoima is this little town in the San Fernando Valley. He says he wants to go there. Right away. I say okay, what, you want me to drive with you? And he says he doesn’t have a car. I say, what about the car from last night? He says he doesn’t have that car anymore. Don’t ask.

  So a few hours later I drive out to pick him up, and I turn on the radio. That’s when I hear the news. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash. You know that story? In Iowa, that’s right. A snowstorm.

  Well, Frankie makes me drive to Pacoima, because that’s where Ritchie Valens was from. Valens was just a kid when he died, maybe seventeen, but he met Frankie once, on a road show, and since
he was Mexican and Frankie was from Spain, they took to each other. Frankie loved that Ritchie actually had a hit song in Spanish, “La Bamba.” He thought that was the greatest thing.

  So we drive to Pacoima, and we stop at a gas station and Frankie goes in and he comes out with an address. It’s Ritchie Valens’s mother’s house. We drive over and there’s a bunch of cars and some reporters outside. So Frankie makes me wait. We wait maybe four hours, sitting in that car parked on the street, until all the ­people are gone. It’s dark out now, and he says, “Okay, I’ll just be a minute,” and he gets his suitcase from the back. And he opens it. And what do you think he takes out?

  A gray cash box.

  Yep. The Romanian’s cash box. He’s got it. My right hand to God.

  And he walks up to the porch and he leaves the cash box there, just inside the door. Doesn’t even knock. Then he gets back in and says, “We can go.”

  I said to him, “Frankie, what did you do?” But he never really answered me. He just said losing a kid had to be hard, and Ritchie’s mother would need some help now. Can you believe that? He’d orchestrated the entire fiasco—­the elephants, everything—­just so we’d get paid. Then he gave it all away. The whole ride back, I’m looking in the rearview window, hoping that crazy Romanian isn’t coming after us.

  9

  MONEY. A MYSTERY, I MUST ADMIT. While it clearly means a great deal to humans, it seems, to me, an enormous burden. I have never held it. Never experienced its benefits. All I know is that while some of my disciples have grown quite rich, many more, in need of money, have chosen to abandon me. Why? Wealth has never defined music. What is played from the heart can be played anywhere.

  On anything.

  Frankie made his first music on his cheap braguinha. He graduated to a six-­string when El Maestro approved, directing him to take one from the closet, a caramel body with a mahogany neck. Because Frankie was now going for lessons several times a week, often while Baffa was at work, Baffa purchased him a wagon the color of a pale green apple, which Frankie used to pull his new guitar through the streets.