Being Frank (18 page)

“I don't smoke,” I said wearily, “but thanks.”

And then I pulled out my pack of Winstons, said a silent and desperate prayer for
that ugly Italian boyfriend of mine
, and lit up.

It was late, but fortunately Ruth was home and still awake, and she was full of details, some of them alarming. Frank had been punched hard, then pushed off the stage and into the orchestra pit by some psycho during the encore at the Rainbow Theater in London. The lunatic claimed his girlfriend had a crush on Frank. He also complained to the press that he hadn't gotten his money's worth. Talk about your
consumer complaints
... He had been hauled off to the Bridewell, or wherever it was they took felons and Labor MP's.

“I wonder if Jack the Ripper's girlfriend was a redhead,” I mused, my knee jerking.

Frank was — Ruth continued breathlessly — lying in the hospital in London with a severe concussion, a shattered leg, a bunch of smashed-up ribs, and maybe a broken neck. Right now his future looked cloudy; maybe he'd walk again, play the guitar again...maybe not; his arm was paralyzed, and it was too early to tell.

I thanked her and hung up. It's got to be the worst feeling in the world to know something dreadful is going on someplace thousands of miles away and you can't do a single thing about it. I had no money to grab a flight to London and no idea what use I'd be to Frank even if I could somehow get there. I visualized myself valiantly breaking down the hospital door and racing to Frank's bedside...where I'd probably encounter three or four weeping redheads, no doubt. (As it turned out, my old ex-roommate Miss Moviola
was
there, along with another young lady, probably
also
a redhead. Frank's wife had found them both keeping a bleary round-the-clock watch over the patient when she'd caught the first available red-eye and rushed straight to the intensive care ward to see him. Luckily for Frank, he was unconscious, or he probably would have been
dead.
What a guy
... .)

It occurred to me that Frank's attacker, while a nut case, was probably just a more
active
individual than his some of his equally wacked-out fellow audience members who'd never tried to injure their hero. Because of its ‘outsider' subtext, it was only natural that Frank's music attracted losers and loners of all stripes. A fair number of these people didn't know and probably couldn't care less that their icon actually knew when to hang up his bizarreness and go home; they were probably all confusing the medium with the messsage to some extent. Frank did stress
responsibility as well as the more ‘outside' aspects of his personality, but when you were high on that sort of rush, it was easy to bypass
the other stuff
entirely. In no way had Frank deserved what happened to him, but from another angle, he had written the script for the movie. I wondered if he was lying in his hospital bed trying not to think about that.

Ruth continued to supply me with medical bulletins every couple of days. The running commentary rather resembled a boxing match: “He's up. He's down. They say he may not play the guitar ever again... No, he's getting feeling back in his hand. He's up... The leg is in a cast. Hmm — it's broken in a weird place and won't set right. They suggested it needed to be broken again and reset, and he cheerfully told them to fuck themselves. He's down again...”

I knew what some of those injuries were like. I'd broken this and that myself, in my rodeo days, and I figured at least Frank would at least be pumped full of morphine, anyway. Turned out he wasn't. He suffered through his recovery essentially without painkillers because he had a head injury, and the doctors didn't want to run the risk of causing brain damage, or spinal cord problems, or malpractice suits, or some such idiocy.

I got hold of the phone number of the clinic where Frank was supposed to be stuck for the next few weeks. It was in Harley Street, where upper class Londoners went to ‘enjoy poor health'. I waited until it was about 8 in the morning there and called. The phone had that funny double Euro-ring to it:
Bzzt-bzzt. Bzzt-bzzt
. When the clinic switch board finally picked up and I said I was calling long distance for Frank Zappa, the lady who answered chuckled like she'd heard that one before. She asked for my name, and I hesitated. “Uh — I'm a member of his band,” I said. There was a pause, and a bunch of clicking on the line, and finally a voice I'd heard before, indirectly, a low alto, against a trans-Atlantic background of white noise. “Hello, who is this?” I declined to state, hung up, and didn't call again. I felt cowardly, but it somehow didn't seem like a very good idea.

Frank finally returned home a month later in a wheelchair, with a cast up to his hip. In the hospital, he'd been visited by a deputation
of the band members. They had asked how long his recovery was likely to take, and when they realized they might have to go a while without paying work, they bailed. He had been intending to release an album of material from the tour, but since the band was broken up for good, he had evidently decided to move on to new territory and put the past behind him.

I debated whether I should pay a little sympathy call to
Chez
Zappa, the Laurel Canyon rancho, and give Frank a nice bouquet of pansies to try and cheer him up. He definitely needed cheering — not only had he been injured and deserted, but a couple of weeks before his accident, a fire at the Montreux Casino had destroyed all of the band's equipment. I wondered if the fire had spared my Gibson, and I decided to go ask Frank what had happened to it.

One afternoon I purloined my parents' new Mazda station wagon (the same recalled rotary engine model that developed a sticky throttle mechanism after 50,000 miles, causing a number of unwitting Mazda owners to
dance themselves to death
) and drove to Hollywood. I turned up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and picked my way through the rush hour traffic (back in those days it hardly amounted to a trickle) until I got to the top of the incline. I turned onto Frank's street and pulled up in a little cul-de-sac across from his house.

Nothing looked any different. The big Mercedes was still in the driveway. The security fence was as stout and impenetrable as ever. I rolled down my window and listened. Nothing. Just an endless-loop version of John Cage's
4'33”
— silence. No amazing guitar chords. I hesitated, then quietly got out and crossed the street. Next to the gate stood a big metal U.S. Postmaster-Approved mailbox on a post. I opened it slowly so the door wouldn't squeak. Inside was a thick pile of envelopes, little parcels, and magazines, probably two or three days' worth of mail. On top was a postcard with an air mail stamp. I didn't mean to snoop, but I couldn't help noticing that it was signed, “Miss you! When are you comming (
sic
) back? Much love — Greta.” Now just why was I receiving this psychic transmission that Greta might possibly have...

...
red hair?

There went my damn knee again. I stuffed my big bouquet of purple flowers, tied together with a purple sock, into the mailbox orifice. Then I shut the mailbox door, got back in the car, and drove away.

T
hings began to get very strained at my parents'. I couldn't really blame them; here I was, looking down the barrel of my 18th birthday, and I was still no closer to charting a sensible course in the straits of Life than I ever had been. I had sold a couple more music reviews to local publications, picked up an odd music-copying job or two, played an actual paying gig leading a band opening for Dave Mason (
remember him?
) at an arena concert in Long Beach (psychedelic blues jams in E and A), and quietly bowed out of El Camino. When the student loan administration saw my parents' tax return, they had nixed my application for a loan. I didn't have the energy to work full time
and
go to classes, so I bid a reluctant farewell to a potentially fulfilling career as an unemployed music professor making ends meet as a low-paid, part-time teaching assistant in General Semantics with a full-time job as a cocktail waitress in the Marina.

I was on the verge of being officially evicted from the family domicile, and had been making tentative, grovelsome approaches to various friends about sleeping on their floors and couches, when one night around 10 p.m., the phone rang. My mother, a spectacular panorama in her ratty flannel nightgown and green face cream, grumbled, “Your inconsiderate friends, as usual?” I snatched up the receiver. “Hellor” I said testily.

“Hey
...” The voice was much quieter than it should have been, and sounded muffled and lower in pitch than I remembered.

I spluttered, regained a semblance of composure, managed to stammer out a greeting of sorts, and asked him how he was doing. I did it in on auto pilot in a fog, my heart thumping so loudly I suspected he could hear it on his end of the phone.

“I'm awreet,” he said simply. “Listen, we just got the insurance settlement on Montreux. During the fire, your guitar was in the anvil case backstage with a bunch of other equipment we hadn't been using lately, and when that part of the building went, everything in there all got sort of scorched together. All Dick could find of it afterward was the tailpiece and one of the melted tuners. They figure blue book on it is four hundred. I think that's kind of a hose job, but hey, what you gonna do? It's the American Way... You want to pick it up at the office, or do you want it mailed to you?”