by Mitch Albom
“I think an artist should sing his own songs,” he said.
“You wrote ‘I Want To Love You,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
“For a girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did she like it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She disappeared.”
I couldn’t believe I was alone with him. I asked what it was like to be that famous—he was in LIFE magazine, was friends with Sinatra and Bobby Darin, all that kind of stuff—and he laughed and said it was usually fun, except when he had to run from screaming women. He’d actually hurt his ankle once jumping from a fire escape.
Only when he was leaving did he ask, “When’s your baby coming?” I appreciated that, since with most men, it was the first thing they mentioned. I told him six weeks, and I was just hoping they wouldn’t fire me before then. He said, “They won’t fire you. You write good hooks.” And then he said, “One day, I want to teach my kids music.”
So my daughter was born, and I took a few months off. When I returned to work I discovered, in my cubicle, a basket of toys and a note that read, “Congratulations!” signed “The Guitar Player Next Door.” Inside the basket was a piece of sheet music for a song called “No, No, Honey.” Under the title it said, “Written by Frankie Presto and Abby Cruz.”
Well, I must’ve stared at it forever. Then I slapped it on the piano and played it. The hook was the chorus I’d been playing the day he came in. I don’t know how he remembered it! But he gave me cowriting credit for the whole piece. And as you probably know, “No, No, Honey” became a top-ten song. My first gold record. And I promise you, it kept me from being fired. Carole and Gerry had written major hits for the Shirelles and the Drifters, Neil Sedaka had done it for Connie Francis, Barry and Cynthia had done it for the Crystals. But I had a hit with Frankie Presto. That was huge!
Over the next few years he’d send me little notes at the office, congratulating me on writing this or that. He always added, “Sing your own songs!” and he always signed it, “The Guitar Player Next Door.” And then the notes stopped. I didn’t hear from him for years. I know he went through a lot, and he stopped making music for a long time.
Still, when I heard how he died, I was shocked. I wanted to come. Pay my respects. He was so kind to me early on. Without him, I might have been out of the music business altogether. “No, No, Honey” put my daughter through college. I do find it strange, him being buried in Spain, because I remember him saying something very harsh about this country once.
It was the last time I saw him, in New York, 1964, an industry thing at a big hotel. By that point, he’d had all those other hits, like “Shake, Shake” and “Our Secret,” but he seemed a little less happy-go-lucky. He was wearing a yellow suit and sunglasses, and was standing with his manager and his fiancée, the actress, I forget her name. I had my little girl, so I didn’t want to bother him. But as soon as he saw us, he raced over.
“This is the baby?” he asked.
“This is her,” I said.
“How old?”
“Three.”
“Wow.”
“Your fiancée is beautiful, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“Is she the one you wrote ‘I Want To Love You’ for?”
“Nah.”
He bent down to talk to my daughter and sang her “Do Re Mi.” When he finished, she hugged him.
“Where are you getting married?” I asked.
“Hawaii.”
“Really?”
“Tappy is taking care of everything.”
“Do you have family in Hawaii?”
“I’m from Spain, remember?”
“Then why not get married in Spain?”
His face tightened up.
“I’m never going back there again,” he said.
14
THE SECOND DAY I PROMISED TO SHARE WAS THE DAY YOUNG FRANKIE LEFT HIS HOMELAND FOR GOOD. This occurred eleven months and nine days after Baffa was imprisoned for something made up by disgruntled workers that was, frankly, beyond my comprehension. You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance—to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse? As a free form of expression, I will never understand it. I can only say that some of my saddest sounds have been heard in such places. A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea.
Frankie had come home the night of the factory raid hoping to find Baffa in the house on Calvario Street, but it was empty when he entered and still empty when he woke up. He noticed the front-door lock had been broken and furniture had been pushed out of place. His stomach growled. He wished Baffa could make him his breakfast. He peeked out the windows and saw people going by, but after Luis had deliberately lied to protect him, Frankie understood not to trust anyone. He stayed in the dark, praying for his papa. He washed his face and behind his ears, in case good behavior might hasten Baffa’s return. Without a guitar, he could play no music, and he was too afraid to turn on the radio for fear someone might hear him. Soon the silence grew so loud, Frankie put his hands over his ears.
I wanted to comfort him. To drape him with a soothing melody. But I knew at that moment he was once again being watched, and I dared not interfere with such fates.
Instead, Frankie hid inside for two days, eating from jars and drinking water from the sink. He saw Baffa’s face with every blink of his eyes, saw him humming behind the wheel of the Italian automobile, tapping his foot as Frankie practiced, leaning over to kiss the boy good night.
On the third morning, Frankie heard a scratching at the door. He feared it was the soldiers and ran out back to the garden, hiding behind the table where he once drummed a jota beat. He waited, expecting someone to kick the door open. Instead he heard a whimpering sound, and he slid out to see the hairless dog slinking toward him, his breath labored and his pink tongue drooping and wet.
I cannot tell you how that creature made the journey, but Frankie had never been so happy to see anything in his life. He grabbed the dog by the neck and hugged it, burying his face in the animal’s coat and crying for a long time. They lay there together in the garden, two members of the trio, missing their third.
Everyone joins a band in this life.
One way or another, the band breaks up.
That afternoon Frankie changed his shirt, tied his shoes, pulled on a tweed cap, and took the hairless dog with him out the back gate of the garden. An hour later a police car would arrive, and two officers would again search the house. This may seem highly fortuitous, but when a higher power has plans for you, life can be full of near misses.
Frankie walked with his head lowered and the cap pulled down until he reached the laundry on Crista Senegal Street. He climbed the steps. He banged on El Maestro’s door. No answer. He banged again.
“Quién es?” came the raspy voice.
“It is me, Maestro.”
“Your lesson was yesterday.”
“Yes, Maestro.”
“Is today yesterday?”
“I am sorry, Maestro.”
“Go away.”
“Please, Maestro.”
“Today is not your day.”
“May I come in, Maestro?”
“Go back to your papa.”
“I can’t, Maestro.”
“Why not?”
Frankie didn’t answer.
“Why not, boy?”
Frankie couldn’t breathe.
“I am going back to sleep now—”
“My papa is gone!”
Frankie began crying the moment he said “gone.” Everything he’d held inside came gushing out. His knees buckled. He dropped to the floor. His sobs we
re more inhale than exhale, and the hairless dog nudged his face with his nose, whimpering with him, harmonizing his misery.
Finally the door swung open. Frankie grabbed the bottom of his teacher’s legs and squeezed them tightly. The blind man stood with the dark glasses on his nose, tilting his chin upward.
“You will come inside and eat,” he said softly. “Then you will tell me what happened.” He shook his head. “This country has gone to hell.”
Suffice it to say that Frankie and the hairless dog lived with El Maestro from that day until the night Frankie boarded a ship. I will skip over most of the details for now (we do have a funeral service to get to), but I will tell you that student and teacher had a profound effect on each other, as humans thrown together by trauma often do. Frankie slept on a sheet beneath the kitchen table, and in the morning he swept the flat and wiped dust from the guitars. He bought food from the markets until the money in El Maestro’s drawer was gone, then he stole from bakeries and fruit stands. He backed up to their edges and slipped the goods into his jacket pocket. When El Maestro discovered what Frankie had been doing, he scolded him harshly.
“You have lost enough, boy. Don’t lose your soul as well.”
“How will we eat?”
“Are you hungry again?”
“Yes, Maestro.”
The blind man fumbled for his wine. Having never had children, he’d been unaware of how much you had to feed them. He heard Frankie take his place under the table and mumble, “Good night, Maestro.” He heard the hairless dog whimper, as if echoing him. He stayed in his chair until the last of the wine was gone. Then he rose and went to bed.
The next day he woke up early, bathed, shaved his face, put on a pair of leather shoes, and tucked in a clean white shirt. He asked Frankie how he looked, and when the boy said, “Like you are going to work,” he informed Frankie they were heading out.
“Where are we going, Maestro?”
“Just take me where I tell you.” He paused. “Bring the dog.”
Minutes later, Frankie was leading them through the streets of Villareal, along the Calle Mayor and down a side street of shops and awnings. They were going back to the old taberna—the place where Baffa first saw the blind man perform. When they entered, El Maestro lifted his nose and turned his face both ways, as if recalling the room by scent. He then announced, loudly, “I wish to see the owner!” When the man approached, El Maestro sensed him before he spoke and immediately held out his hand.
“We meet again,” El Maestro said.
“So we do,” the owner said, cautiously.
“I come today with a proposition. I am offering to allow you to host my playing again.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I am good.”
“Not when you are drunk.”
“No longer a concern.”
“So you say.”
“So I do.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Two shows each night. In exchange for a fair wage, of course.”
“We do not play the same music as before.”
“This I know.”
“Only what the Generalísimo approves.”
“This I know as well.”
“You still want to work?”
“Am I not here in front of you?”
“What about the drinking?”
“I do not drink anymore. The child makes sure of it. Right, boy?”
He tapped Frankie’s shoulder, and Frankie forced a smile.
“My nephew,” El Maestro said. “And our lovely dog.”
The dog whimpered.
The owner pursed his lips.
“You have changed your life quite a bit.”
“As you can see.”
“You’ve even shaved.”
“Indeed.”
“Well . . . You are the best who ever played here.”
“I agree.”
“But I cannot have the customers upset.”
“Of course.”
“You must arrive on time.”
“Early, even.”
“If you drink, you are out, understood?”
“Understood.”
He looked at the new trio, man, boy, dog.
“You start tomorrow.”
“As you wish,” El Maestro said.
When they got home, Frankie gathered the bottles of wine and aguardiente and put them in a garbage pail.
“What are you doing?” El Maestro asked.
“It’s not right to lie,” Frankie answered. “You told him no more drinking.”
El Maestro groaned, but he didn’t stop the boy. Instead, he slumped into the couch, as if resigned to a new fate. He held his face in his hands, then lurched forward until he found his guitar. Frankie was privately happy to get rid of the alcohol. He liked El Maestro better without it. As his teacher began playing a Segovia composition, Frankie carried the bottles downstairs and gave them to the woman who did the laundry, in exchange for several months of free washes and a promise she would make them dinner that night.
And thus did Frankie Presto, in his newest band, influence its blind leader, who, despite swearing he would never do it again, returned to a stage to play his beautiful music.
15
PERHAPS YOU ARE WONDERING ABOUT BAFFA, THAT POOR, SIMPLE SOUL. Frankie wondered, too. In the beginning, he asked El Maestro about his papa every morning, but there was no word. I have mentioned how the fear of tyrants chokes humans; to even inquire about a “disappeared person” in those years meant you might be next. The world was at war, Spain was under martial law, and anything that offended the Generalísimo’s political or religious beliefs was punished by prison, even death. El Maestro told the boy it was too dangerous to speak about Baffa outside the house. In time, Frankie stopped asking altogether.
But being silent is not forgetting. And the child never forgot his papa. Each night, before crawling under the kitchen table, he would turn on the stolen phonograph and listen softly to an Ella Fitzgerald recording of “A-Tisket A-Tasket,” the song about losing a brown and yellow basket.
In the song, Ella pined for her basket and wondered where it could be, and the men in her band responded, “So do we! So do we!” Frankie felt the same way about Baffa. So do I! So do I! Where could he be? The song gave him comfort. That is often why you come to music, isn’t it? To feel that you are not alone?
Meanwhile, during the daylight hours, Frankie studied intensely with his newly sober teacher. It would be the boy’s most fertile musical growth period. As he no longer went to school (an arrangement that did not bother Frankie at all), the two of them worked hours at a time on the guitar. Before he turned nine years old, Frankie could already play multiple styles, from jazz to flamenco, turning his fingernails inward to strum in the rasgueo technique. Going classical, he could finger-pick with great speed through difficult arpeggios that made it sound as if one hand were playing a bass line while the other hand played a cascade of notes. El Maestro, despite his blindness, painstakingly taught Frankie to read music, through description, listening, more description, more listening. The teacher could hear even a single note out of place, and insisted Frankie check the sheet music and read him where every dot, line, sharp and flat occurred.
Although his cheeks were still soft and his thick hair carried the sheen of youth, the boy’s music displayed a sensitivity beyond his years. “An old soul” is how you sometimes describe it. But talents like me have been inside you since creation. Every artist is old in that way.
Frankie even mastered the much-revered twelve études of Heitor Villa-Lobos, which were extremely demanding in how they stretched his left fingers. If he complained about how hard they were, El Maestro would tell him, “Mr. Lobos lived with cannibals in the Brazilian jungle to learn his music. That was hard. What yo
u are doing is not.”
“Is that really true, Maestro?”
“What?”
image/25655.png “That story?”
“Of course.”
“Cannibals?”
Maestro sighed.
“Man suffers for his art, Francisco. That is what you must remember. Sometimes it is cannibals. Sometimes it is worse.”
Although Frankie asked many times, he was forbidden to accompany El Maestro to the taberna. “You must have your sleep,” El Maestro said. Instead, a mustached conga player named Alberto came by each night to take the blind man to work.
“Tu tío es un gran artista,” Alberto often said. Your uncle is a great artist.
“Yo sé,” Frankie replied. I know.
Sometimes the boy would wake up in the morning and smell a faint trace of perfume. He thought about the dresses in the closet and he wondered if a lady had been there while he was sleeping. It made him think about the pink cheeks and the thin white fingers of Aurora York, and the afternoon they had together before everything changed.
“Maestro?” he asked one day as they ate breakfast, “When is the right age to get married?”
“Are you not telling me something, Francisco?”
“No.”
“Have you met a girl?”
“Once.”
“And you want to marry her?”
“Maybe.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“In the woods.”
“Was she a fairy?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did she have strange eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Was she kind and helpful?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen her again?”
“No.”
“She was a fairy. An anjana. Don’t fall in love with fairies, Francisco. They are not real.”
“She was real.”
“She sounds like a fairy.”
