The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (30 page)

“If you want.”

“The real way?”

“The real way.”

“I just came to make sure.”

“Will you stay?”

“No.”

He didn’t see her again for several weeks. On a Thursday afternoon, she knocked again.

“Are you practicing?”

“Yes.”

“Are you playing?”

“When I can.”

“Are you taking drugs and drinking?”

“Sometimes.”

“You have to stop.”

“I know.”

“Then do it.”

“Will you stay?”

“No.”

The next month, she came again. This time she spent a few hours. The next month, she came and spent the night.

She repeated this pattern, short dances—a
minuet
defined—throughout the winter and into the spring, until, on a Monday morning in the middle of a blowing rainstorm, she appeared again. This time, she was holding an umbrella in one hand and her yellow suitcase in the other.

Frankie smiled.

“Will you stay?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

43

1969

IT IS TIME WE FINISH THE WOODSTOCK JOURNEY.
Frankie had finally reached the backstage area. By this point, the festival had dissolved into mass confusion. Helicopters had brought the performers to a landing area, where they traversed a wooden bridge to reach the stage, but they were left waiting for long stretches, and many did not know when they were supposed to play. The rain wreaked havoc with the electricity. Amplifiers frizzled. Supplies ran out. By the dark hours of Sunday morning, the event had the feel of a lingering party, one that had no real end anymore, just hordes of people fighting sleep and trying to keep dry.

One story often told is that the drinks backstage were laced with hallucinogenic drugs. I cannot confirm this. But I do know that when Frankie finally got there, he was beyond thirsty and drank the first thing he saw, from paper cups arranged on a fold-up table. His face was streaked with mud and his white shirt was filthy. He rolled his head from side to side.

“Aurora . . . baby . . . breakfast,” he kept mumbling.

He stared at the other musicians, who smirked at him or looked away. A large bucket of water sat near some paper towels. Frankie splashed his face and wiped off the mud.

Finally, amid the blaring music of a band named Sly & The Family Stone, singing a song called “Stand!” Frankie twisted left and right, and began his final
minuet.

“Aurora!”

He yelled it spinning. He yelled it staggering. He held up the egg carton.

“Aurora! I’m back! Aurora!”

He slipped. He got back up. His screams were swallowed by the music, and when a vocal popped or a guitar screeched, you could not hear him at all.

“Stand! . . .”

“Aurora!”

“Stand! . . .”

“Aurora!”

“Stand!”

She was nowhere to be found.

And so finally, when the band finished to great applause—it was 4:05 in the morning—the stage lights went off. All was black.

And Frankie decided to play his guitar.

To draw Aurora to him.

And change their fate.

What happened next is not pleasant to recount and, in defense of my cherished disciple, he was not himself. His body, mind, and heart were in three separate places. He stumbled up the ramp and approached the giant stage. No one stopped him because he had a guitar around his neck and moved like a musician who knew where he was going. A few workers had begun setting up for the next act (the celebrated British band The Who) but it was late and they were exhausted and paid no heed to the long-haired musician moving purposefully toward the wall of amplifiers.

Mumbling to himself, Frankie picked up the jack end of a gray cable and slammed it into the output of his guitar, which he had equipped with an electric pick-up. He could not hold the eggs and play, so he lay the carton down. The top popped open. In the limited moonlight, he could see that all the eggs were broken.

His eyes welled up with tears.

What you cannot know—what no one knew—was what happened a few weeks earlier, the night Roger McGuinn saw Frankie in New York. Aurora, pregnant, had moved into his apartment, under the strict agreement that Frankie straighten up, come directly home after playing, and prepare to be a good father to their baby. No drugs. No drink. No other women. She was five months along and their new arrangement had worked for a while. But Frankie, upon seeing McGuinn, was reminded of London and 1965 and the Beatles and the party and how far he had fallen from his once-worldwide fame—playing in this dank and smelly nightclub—and his ego was bruised and he grew depressed and he stayed out until dawn, drinking and smoking with musicians in the club’s basement.

Just after sunrise, he stumbled back to his apartment, ashamed of his relapse and preparing for a confrontation. But it was dark inside and he was quiet entering the bedroom, and he slipped under the blanket while Aurora slept. His movement nudged her slightly awake, and she rolled over to put an arm around him.

“Francisco,” she mumbled.

“Aurora,” he whispered.

“It means dawn.”

“I know.”

“I’m hungry. If you love me, you’ll make me breakfast.”

He sighed deeply. He was safe. She didn’t know. He would never do this again. He swore it to himself.

“I’ll get some eggs,” he promised.

All he had to do was stay awake.

But his eyes closed.

The night had done him in.

An hour later, having woken to find Frankie snoring into the pillow, Aurora decided to get her own breakfast and make something for him as well. There was nothing in his refrigerator, so she pulled on a jacket, took her handbag, and left the apartment. She purchased a carton of eggs and an onion at a grocery. On her way back, a block from home, she was accosted by three young men who sprang from an alley, pushed her, and grabbed for her bag. The strap was hooked on her arm and as she pulled back on it, she spun directly toward one of the attackers, who raised his leg and kicked her hard in the stomach. She fell to her knees, the bag still on her shoulder. He kicked her again to snap it loose. The other two cursed at him and ran away, and he turned and ran as well.

A taxi screeched to a halt. A man jumped out. Aurora made a small gurgling sound, then dropped to the pavement and began to shake.

Frankie slept through the first phone call from the hospital. He slept through the second. By the time he got to see his wife, a stillborn child had been delivered and wrapped in a blanket, given to the mother to hold for a minute and then taken away. Aurora was staring out the window when Frankie entered. Her face was bruised and she was bandaged in several places. She turned her head and Frankie stood like a statue. He felt guilt in every pore.

“Who did it?” he mumbled.

She shook her head.

“How did they . . .”

She shook her head.

“Why . . .”

He was out of words.

“Where were you?” she whispered.

From that moment to the moment he started playing at Woodstock was a blur of weeks, and while Frankie could barely recall a thing, I can attest to the fact that he had not been sober a single day of them. He couldn’t face her. He couldn’t face anything. He staggered home from the hospital, grabbed his guitar and didn’t come back. He hitchhiked to upstate New York, taking any drug he could to avoid thinking about what happened. But his tortured mind could not forget. Instead, he imagined Aurora every day in every way, until reality and fantasy lost their distinction. Finally, at Woodstock, he imagined her sleeping on that hillside (“
If you love me, you’ll make me breakfast.
”) and set out on a pointless quest for eggs.

And now, in the darkness of the stage, wanting only to see her once more, he tried the last thing he could think of to change what had happened.

He stepped away from the broken shells and angrily spun the volume knob on his guitar pickup. He heard a hum from a giant amplifier. An empty beer bottle was sitting on top of it. Somewhere in his blurry memory, Frankie recalled a trick Hampton Belgrave had shown him. He smacked the beer bottle on the amp’s edge, breaking it cleanly in two, then took the neck portion and slipped his ring finger through the spout, creating a glass “slide”—a device blues players use to affect the strings’ pitch and vibrato. The moisture felt good on Frankie’s skin and he tapped his foot twice and ran the slide up the neck and fired a screaming B-seventh chord, as if to jangle the music loose.

Offstage, musicians looked up, because the chord rang out so cleanly. But all they saw was darkness. Frankie began playing like a ghost, a tangle of arpeggios that got faster and faster, then sliding down the neck as if crashing a rocket. He used the pedals at his feet to create distortion, fuzz, wah-wah. He held a high D note, shaking his hand as if strangling every breath from the fret board, then ran a blazing blues scale up and down and up again. There were no other instruments playing, no drums, no bass. Most solos are played over a melody line, or against a rhythm section. But this was a singular guitar performance, and the melodies within Frankie’s riffing made it all the more remarkable. He was a man swimming against raging waters, and in all my time inside him, I cannot recall a greater battle. I was flapping in that solo like a sheet in a windstorm. Pieces of Leadbelly, Mozart, Chet Atkins, Segovia. Frankie conjured up every musical influence he knew and delivered the notes with such emotion, tears streamed down his cheeks and fell onto his fingers.