Being Frank (13 page)

Since I couldn't begin to understand my feelings toward him, I was at a loss as to how to behave, so, in typical adolescent fashion, I largely retreated behind a wisecracking, sarcastic facade. Ironically, Frank, although he had no use for hearts ‘n' flowers niceties, sought emotional honesty in his relationships, or thought he did, and he was bothered because he suspected I was holding out on him. I couldn't bring myself to treat him like a human being. I knew this, but something was holding me back from trusting him. It was partly because he had been my musical idol long before I'd met him, and partly bound up with my fierce desire to maintain my dignity as a musician; above all else I craved Frank's respect. Somehow I was afraid to come right out and admit to him what he undoubtedly already knew -- that I was horribly in love with him, as only a 17-year-old can be. The situation would have been difficult enough even if I'd been older and wiser; and for all my strong will and creative precocity, I was a pretty emotionally undeveloped 17-year-old.

For his own part Frank, who was so accustomed to maintaining control over the situation around him, couldn't decide what he should
do with me: educate me or debauch me. What a choice — frustration or incest. For the time being, the latter won out, but Frank had other concerns. After all, he had a wife and kids to go home to; it wasn't as if I was going to be moving in with him at the end of the tour. Then there was the pesky point of my being underage. Frank had done his jail time in San Bernardino in 1965 on a set-up morals charge — “conspiracy to commit pornography” was the verdict; as the proprietor of a little recording studio in Cucamonga, he'd made the mistake of producing an X-rated “patty tape” for a guy who turned out to be an undercover vice cop. One of the conditions of his parole had been that he couldn't fraternize with an underage female unless a “responsible adult” was present. I would have died rather than admit that I was still a minor, but I'm sure that fact was never far from his mind.

A
s Frank had mentioned before I joined the tour, the band had been on the road for the best part of six months by the time I came on board. It didn't take me long to understand what he meant by “battle fatigue.” For a week or two, it may seem like an adventure to go from city to city playing a concert every night, but after a month every place starts looking the same, and after two months utter psychosis sets in.

Frank was far from robust physically, and endless touring was probably the worst punishment he could have inflicted on himself. He may have expressed an aversion to drugs, but that didn't stop him from chain smoking three or four packs a day, guzzling gallons of coffee, and adopting a devil-may-care approach to diet. One of the guys in the band was on a macrobiotic kick, and he carried a rice cooker with him so he could always have brown rice and tamari. Frank thought this was very quaint, almost religious. His own culinary theology revolved around the mantra: “Whatever it is,
fry it first and ask questions later”
. He constantly suffered with stomach troubles and bouts of diarrhea, and was forced to consume gallons of Kaopectate and Maalox.

I'd always thought I was quirkier about food than most people — until I had to turn the trophy over to Frank. One day at the airport, with our flight due to leave in fifteen minutes, I left him watching the luggage and ran to grab a couple of sandwiches from the fast-food counter. Up until
now I'd never had to actually order anything for him, and I decided to play it safe and stick to turkey and lettuce on rye. When I got back to the waiting area and handed him his sandwich, he opened its sheet of wax paper, took apart the two pieces of bread, and proceeded to poke around minutely in the filling before committing himself to a bite. Suddenly his probing finger encountered a few little slivers of chopped onion, and before my incredulous eyes he was instantly transformed into Superman in a petulant frenzy: what was I trying to do,
stuff him with Kryptonite when he wasn't looking??!
I sat there in disbelief, trying nor to laugh, as he chucked the sandwich, wrapper and all, into the nearest garbage can, all the while keeping up a scathing commentary on the villainies of (allegedly) edible bulbs. Frank also actively disproved my long-held theory that people of Mediterranean ancestry had evolved a garlic gene. He had about as much fondness for garlic as he had for onions. In fact, when it came to any sort of Italian-type food (with the lone exception of pizza), he exhibited a pronounced
attitude
. I once offered him a bite of lasagna in a coffee shop. He looked queasily at the ricotta and sauce dribbling off my fork and said weakly, “Looks authentic.” Now if I'd spiced it with tobacco and coffee grounds first, I could probably have induced him to eat the whole thing. What he
really
lusted after was peanut butter, with or without anchovies.

The worst thing about touring was the
Day of the Living Dead Syndrome
. I had never been a heavy sleeper, but five or six hours a night was my bare minimum. Frank needed closer to ten. We were lucky to average three. After a month or so, I decided that the standard media picture of him as a scowling misanthrope had been shot at 6 a.m. in an airport waiting area when the Kaopectate had run out. I felt sorry for him, but I couldn't really understand why he spent such a disproportionate chunk of his life suffering like that, especially since there was minimal profit in touring; the only reason he was out there playing hockey rinks in Peoria was because he had to promote his latest album, and now his new movie. It was only much later that I realized why he did it. He sold more records if he kept his profile up, but touring fulfilled another function for him too: it was both a great source of material and it provided a strong contrast to his life at home, which tended to be comfortable but insular — the kiss of death for such a topical composer as Frank was. At home, he virtually never went out, preferring to sequester himself in his own reality, staying up all night working and sleeping during the day. He needed stimulation and inspiration, and touring was the only way for him to meet people and get a feeling for what was going on in the world. (Later in his life, when he no longer had the financial compulsion to tour, and middle age had rendered him physically and emotionally less capable of the exertion,
he became addicted to C-SPAN and Cable News Network, but for much the same reason.)

He had devised ways of making use of the inevitable stretches of dead time. While sitting around a motel room or waiting for a flight at the airport, he'd haul out his orchestra pad and start composing on the spot, staring into space and tapping his foot to private rhythms, his left hand in sync on his knee. I wondered what he could actually
hear
when he did it, but he had written a fair amount of music that way, including the entire score to
200 Motels
(hence the title). As he jerked the pen along the staff, drawing clusters of precisely spaced little dots and linking them with crossbars and ‘tuplet ligatures, he was as happy as I ever saw him — in public, anyway. He had been a commercial artist for awhile, before music had sunk its permanent hooks into him. I wasn't sure he recognized any boundaries between graphics and music, any more than he made value judgments about Varèse or Stravinsky being “better” than the Penguins or Guitar Slim. It was all part of the ongoing process of his work — his “composition", as he called it.

Frank wasn't exactly clumsy, but he tended to be the catalyst for improbable accidents. One bleary morning when we were driving to the airport, guzzling dubious Holiday Inn coffee in a futile attempt to stay awake, the lid popped off Frank's styrofoam cup and I was baptized in 12 ounces of scalding tan water. That certainly woke me up. In agony I lurched and writhed across the back seat of the station wagon, howling at the top of my lungs as the hot fluid penetrated my T-shirt. As I writhed, I inadvertently kicked the hell out of Frank's shin with the toe of one of my cowboy boots. He had been solicitously trying to conduct mop-up operations on my torso, but when I booted him he doubled over in pain, jabbing his elbow into my ribs and upsetting
my
cup of coffee, the contents of which came rushing out to join the first cup — on my already soaked shirt. I wound up with some awfully nice blisters, and Frank went scowling around with a noticeable limp. (I don't know what the other band members thought we'd been up to, but their theories about us were always pretty colorful.) Meanwhile, Frank and I conversed in irate grunts during the remainder of the day; each of us was convinced that the whole mishap was solely the fault of the other. Frank grumbled that if I'd been wearing decent, civilized shoes instead of those
barbaric poot-stompers
, he wouldn't have been so badly crippled, while I nattered back that only a
caffeine junkie with a terminal jones
would have been trying to get a fix in a moving car at six in the fucking
morning
.

The tour ground on, ebbing and flowing like a perverse river. At that point, in the early ‘70s, Frank Zappa occupied a position in the high middle level of touring rock acts; his arrival in town elicited some fanfare, but the truth (some would say farce) nevertheless remained that bands like Three Dog Night or Ten Years After could far outstrip him in ticket revenues. In several cases, the bands that opened for Frank were better known locally than the Mothers were; after these local fave raves finished their sets, a lot of audience members would listen to the Mothers for a few minutes, decide they didn't like them, and split, leaving Frank and company staring out at a vast landscape of vacant seats while performing.

The venues tended to be War Memorial Halls, college auditoriums, municipal theaters, and, of course, hockey rinks. I hadn't brought along very much of a wardrobe; luckily for me, Frank seemed to have packed every piece of clothing he owned, and so, although I had to roll up the legs of his jeans, I never wanted for raiment. (When during the writing of this book I was looking through old photos of him, I found one in which he was wearing the particular pair of tie-dyed Levi's I had borrowed the most often. My first thought was,
“How the hell could I have ever squeezed into those damn things?”
) On some especially cold nights we bickered over which of us got to wear
The Ugliest Overcoat in the Universe
, a wonderfully stodgy Donegal tweed monstrosity (women's size 18, according to the faded tag inside) to the gig. Being both more cold-blooded and more dogged than I, he usually won, but then he'd take pity on me, ransack his luggage for a couple of his warmest sweaters, and insist that I put them on. It became quite a joke between us, although it didn't stay private: After the band members had seen me shuffling around in Frank's clothes for a few weeks, a couple of them began to make wisecracks, kidding on the square: “Hi, Frank — oh, sorry, Nigey, I didn't know it was you for a second there.” Frank, ever the old pragmatist, advised me not to pay any attention. “Sticks and stones... just be glad they're not pouring lukewarm beer over your head.”