The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (32 page)

Early the next morning, with the sun just rising, Lyle felt a push on his shoulder.

“Get up, mate,” Kevin said softly.

Fifteen minutes later, the three musicians were in the back of the Jeep, wiping sleep from their eyes, as Kevin steered off the main road and drove down toward a hidden bay. He came to an opening in the trees. The Jeep stopped and Kevin pointed to a small path.

“Through there.”

“What’s through there?” Lyle asked.

“What you’re looking for.”

Minutes later, the three of them were pushing away vines, stepping over moist ground, and moving forward in near darkness caused by thick overhead branches. They saw an icebox in a tree. They saw two old speakers wired together between ladders. As they edged forward and rays of light increased, they heard a distant rumbling sound, and realized they were approaching the surf.

“Get down,” Eddie whispered.

The three of them dropped low.

“What is it?” Lyle said.

“Look.”

“Where?”

Eddie pointed to the left. Through the clearing of brush they saw a man, sitting in a hammock, hunched over a guitar and facing out to the water.

“Is that him?”

“Jesus.”

“I can’t believe it! We found the guy!”

“Wait.” Lyle put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

They leaned forward, trying to distinguish musical sounds above the small waves lapping the rocks.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“What he’s playing. It can’t be him.”

“What’s he playing?”

Lyle shook his head.

“Scales. Like a kid.”

45

1944

“Maestro?”

“Yes?”

“Is my papa coming home?”

“I don’t know, Francisco. Pour me my drink.”

“What if he never comes home?”

“Do not think such things. Now pour.”

“But what if he doesn’t?”

“Then you will have to start over.”

“At the beginning?”

“No. You cannot be a baby twice.”

“Then how do you start over?”

“The way a composer starts a new piece. Where is my drink?”

“I don’t want to start without my papa.”

“Do not cry, boy.”

“But—”

“Stop it right now.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, Francisco. Do you think I wanted a life of darkness? Do you think I wanted not to see my fingers or the frets or the tuning pegs, to have to poke around like a lost animal?”

“No, Maestro.”

“No, I did not. This is life. Things get taken away. You will learn to start over many times—or you will be useless.”

“Yes, Maestro.”

“As you are useless right now, since I do not have my drink.”

“I am sorry, Maestro.”

“Never mind it. Return to your arpeggios. This is all I will say on the matter. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Maestro.”

“Stop crying. Start playing.”

46

FEW IN HUMAN HISTORY GRABBED MORE OF ME AT BIRTH THAN LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN.
My color drew him instantly and his two-fisted clutch assured a musical existence. But when his drunkard father would wake him late at night and demand that he practice, a frightened Ludwig could hardly bring me forth. Later in life, when he went deaf as a stone, I remained in his soul, steadfast as always, but producing music without hearing it was a burden I could not lighten, not even for a favorite child.

Likewise with Frankie Presto, whose left hand was badly slashed on the Woodstock stage. All I could do was observe. Bloody and dazed, he’d been evacuated from the festival via army helicopter, thanks to a woman who rushed him to the medical area. Military personnel tended to his cuts. An army surgeon operated, saving what he could.

In the hospital the next day, the drugs finally flushed from his bloodstream, Frankie realized what had happened. He looked at his bandaged hand and cried until he couldn’t look anymore. That night a nurse entered with his guitar case, saying someone from the festival had transported it. He asked if his guitar was inside. She undid a clasp and peeked.

“Yes, it is,” she said. He felt his chest well up before telling her, in a cracking voice, “Take it away, okay? Just take it away.”

In the days that followed, he learned about other Woodstock casualties, a young marine who died from heroin use, a teenager who’d been run over in his sleeping bag by a tractor. He saw LSD victims stumbling in, most of them barely out of high school, being whispered to by volunteers who rubbed their arms as they screamed or cried. At some point, a nurse with a clipboard asked Frankie his age, and, staring at the young patients, he answered, “Thirty-three.” He felt old and ridiculous.

In time, he was released and he returned to New York City, but the apartment on Twelfth Street was empty, as he knew it would be. Aurora was gone. So was her yellow suitcase. And this time he did not try to find her. Instead, he sold most of his equipment—the electric guitars, the amplifiers, the tape machines—keeping only his childhood acoustic and its mysterious strings. He drifted for months, staying in hotels, sleeping late to avoid the empty hours of staring at his hand. He longed to drink, to lose himself in substance, but he knew that was how he’d fallen into this hole.
You will have to start over many times
, Maestro had warned him. But he’d always had me to run to before, to lose his troubles in the trance of his guitar. Frankie listened to cassette tapes in his car, songs by young composers named Randy Newman and Warren Zevon and guitarists Grant Green and Freddie Robinson. But listening was not the same. He missed playing. He missed practicing just as much.

After a while, he filled the hours watching television. He saw young people protesting the war overseas. Frankie hated war, yet he knew it was the army that had airlifted him to safety and stitched him back together. He felt indebted—particularly to the surgeon, whom he continued to visit, a muscular man in his midforties who kept reminding Frankie of great musicians with handicaps.

“Did you ever hear of a jazz guitar player named Django Reinhardt?” he asked. “He only had two good fingers. But his playing was amazing.”

Frankie looked away. “Django was unique.”

“He couldn’t sing. You can.”

“Mmm.”

“Would you consider singing your songs again?”

“No one wants to hear my stuff.”

“A certain audience might.”

“It’s a whole new scene now.”

“Maybe here.” The doctor smiled. “But I wasn’t talking about here.”

Phone calls were made. Introductions arranged.

Nine months later, Frankie Presto went to Vietnam.

The United Service Organization, or USO, had been bringing entertainers to American troops for decades, starting with the Second World War. Singers like Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters made the journey. Even my magnificent violinist Jascha Heifitz took part, and once played for a single soldier sitting in a rainstorm. Jascha called it his greatest performance ever.

Music and war have long been intertwined, from ancient trumpets to the fife and drum, and late in the calendar year 1970, Frankie Presto continued the tradition, joining a Christmastime USO tour with the comedian Bob Hope, the singer Lola Falana, a group of dancers called the Golddiggers, a baseball player, a beauty pageant queen, and a big band that Frankie helped arrange. He also sang two of his famous numbers, “No, No, Honey” and “I Want To Love You.” The tour played in various military bases. Trucks rolled out, stages were built, the show took place, then everything was packed up, moved out, and done again.

Wherever the tour went, Frankie befriended soldiers, and asked them to drive him as close to the front as they could get. The misery he witnessed helped diminish his own. He saw Vietnamese children on the side of the road, their eyes vacant. He saw large gun tripods that looked like tepees. He saw explosions from a rooftop, and a sniper who was killed and fell from a window.

But the day I must recount, for purposes of our story, came in the final week of his tour, following an afternoon show in Long Binh, a major United States army base. The crowd was large, nearly two thousand people, and soldiers climbed poles for a better view. They cheered and whooped—particularly when the women danced. The Golddiggers performed in the background when Frankie sang and some troops yelled out, “Lucky you, Presto!”

After the show, as the band was breaking down, Frankie heard a voice screaming his name.

“Mr. Frankie! It’s me, Ellis!”

A strapping soldier was at the edge of the stage, smiling and waving in his green fatigues. Frankie blinked in disbelief. Ellis Dubois had been the shoe-shine boy in the alley back in New Orleans (the one who had listened to Little Richard sing “Tutti Frutti”) who later served as best man in Frankie’s impromptu wedding to Aurora York. At the time, Ellis was six years old.

Now he was twenty-one.

“Ellis, I can’t believe it,” Frankie said. “You’re all . . . grown up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well . . . come here!”

They hugged and spoke rapidly, trading details and questions. Frankie asked about the young man’s health (good), his path into the army (drafted), and the old New Orleans recording studio in the back of the appliance store (moved to another location). Ellis asked about Frankie’s hit records (Ellis owned all of them), and
The Ed Sullivan Show
(he watched it both times), and, of course, Miss Aurora.