The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (45 page)

Oh, if you let me

Show my love to you

Then by tomorrow

You’ll love me tooooo!

They held on to the last word, someone rattled a spoon like a drumroll, and the others laughed and yelled, “Whoo-hoo!” It was, to Frankie, the best version he’d ever heard.

Everyone joins a band in this life.

Sometimes just to be brave.

Frankie grinned and looked down at his wife.

“Aurora?”

Her eyes were closed.

59

THE FATAL STROKE, DOCTORS EXPLAINED, WAS MOST LIKELY BROUGHT ON BY THE TRAUMA OF HER EARLIER BLOW.
They could not be certain; Aurora was sixty-eight years old. Nurses had rushed in with flashlights, but attempts to revive her were futile. She was gone that fast. A young physician offered condolences then rushed to help other storm victims. Frankie slumped in mute disbelief as orderlies entered with a gurney. When they took her body, he fell to the floor and crouched against the wall, rocking back and forth, holding his arms as if freezing. The streets outside were flooded. The hospital was like a war zone. There was nowhere to go. No place to scream. Once again, his life was altered by rushing waters.

It was four weeks before they could bury her.

At the graveside funeral, Kai held her father’s hand and wept. Aurora’s fellow churchgoers held hands and wept. Cecile (York) Peterson flew in from London and held Kai’s hand and wept. She also delivered a warm, economic eulogy that spoke about her sister Aurora as brave and smart and—sometimes—the happiest woman she had ever known, a person who clearly thought of others before herself. The Big Mess Band from the community center played a funeral dirge, a New Orleans tradition, performing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

Frankie did not join in any of it. He did not sing a word. He stood to the side of the service, looking a thousand miles away.

I have said Aurora York was my only rival for Frankie’s heart. On that day, she vanquished me. Not a note of music was left inside him. His desperate love for her, with no release, went crashing into his inner walls like the waters of that flood, drowning me out, rendering him silent. He kept seeing her face, asking him to sing in the hospital. He kept seeing her as a little girl, asking him to play in a tree. He kept thinking about the old guitar he had left behind, and its one blue string, still unused.

“
What if you need to save a life?
” she had asked.

It was too painful to consider. His mind shut down. His eyes went glassy. He was empty as a hole.

At the end of the ceremony, he remained by the grave, waiting until everyone left him alone. Then he squatted, took something from his pocket and pushed it into the earth: a small, round flower made from a guitar string. His eyes welled up and he lost his balance and fell forward, the wet grass soaking his hands and knees. He whispered her name again and again.

“A long time from now,” he gasped. “You said ‘
a long time from now.
’ ”

Everyone joins a band in this life.

Some of them break your heart.

60

THE REMAINING YEARS OF FRANKIE’S LIFE WERE SPENT AS FAR AS HE COULD GET FROM HIS MEMORIES
, in the city of Manila in the nation of the Philippines, teaching classical guitar at the University of Santo Tomas. His daughter, Kai, at her father’s request, had used her symphony connections to secure an interview.

“It’s so far away,” she protested.

“I know,” he said.

Frankie’s Catholic upbringing was helpful in his hiring. He never told his new employers that he had given up on prayer, church, and God. Instead he took the teaching position, which paid modestly, and lived in a small apartment on España Boulevard, which allowed him to walk back and forth to campus, crossing to the Plaza Intramuros under the massive, baroque-style Arch of the Centuries.

He found Filipino students polite and respectful, and he taught them one on one, patiently, firmly. They admired his knowledge. But he rarely played for them. Nor did he join an ensemble or a faculty orchestra. He was there for one reason, to be someplace nobody would find him.

Only at night, alone by a window that overlooked a bus terminal, did he touch a guitar. He played slow baroque melodies by Gaspar Sanz and old blues by Robert Johnson. But his fingers now hurt all the time, the arthritis ravaging his nerve-damaged left hand, and a permanent stiffness had settled into his shoulders and neck. He no longer ran. He no longer cooked penne pasta. He no longer restored amplifiers or made tea or took part in any routine he had shared with his wife. Loneliness was like an ogre hovering over those activities.

Aurora had once said that, besides Kai, he would have his music when she was gone, and she was right. But I brought him little comfort. He wrote one song in the months after her death and he never wrote anything again.

In the calendar year of 2009, Kai came to visit at the close of a symphony tour, and informed Frankie that she had been selected for the prestigious International Francisco Tárrega Guitar Competition in Spain. It was a celebrated festival, more than forty years old, and this year was a special honor since it marked the hundredth anniversary of Tárrega’s death. Because of that, the festival and competition would be held, for the first time, in the town of Tárrega’s birth, Villareal.

“Papa, I want you to come.”

“No, Kai.”

“It’s important to me.”

“I can’t.”

“You taught me Tárrega. It was the first thing you taught me. Everything I know about his music is from you.”

“There are too many . . .”

“What? Memories?”

“Yes.”

“Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind. They’re here, too. In this”—she looked around—“stupidly tiny apartment.”

Frankie rubbed his face and pushed back his hair, which, although thinned and gray, still mussed over his forehead.

“Do you ever use a brush?” Kai asked, trying to make him smile.

“Who for?” he said.

She looked away.

“I miss her, too, Papa.”

“I know.”

He stared at his daughter and how beautiful she had grown, in her early thirties now, peaking as he was shrinking.

“Will you stay a few days?” he asked.

“I’m here until Friday.”

“A few days after that?”

“I’ll have to make a call.”

“You can use my phone.” He motioned to a desk.

“I have a phone, Papa. Everyone has a phone now.”

“Oh. Right.”

She leaned in and rubbed his knee.

“Are you okay?”

A rush of love and anguish hit him at the same time, like converging waters.

“When is the festival?” he asked.

John Pizzarelli

Jazz guitarist, singer, composer, son of famed guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli

YES, CERTAINLY. . . . MY NAME IS JOHN PIZZARELLI, I’M A MUSICIAN, I LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY.
I’m here because Frankie Presto was an old friend, and because he asked me to do something before he died. . . . He asked me to find the original tapes of
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
and give them to his daughter. . . . They’re in this suitcase. . . .

Frankie and me? A long time. He first knew my father, Bucky Pizzarelli. They met in the mid-1960s, after Frankie appeared on
The Tonight Show
, where my dad was in the band. Being guitar players, they got to talking, and Frankie tried my dad’s seven-string and knocked his socks off. Dad loved him. He’d say, “And he ain’t even Italian!” We thought he was one of us. “Presto,” you know? It
sounds
Italian.

Anyhow, the next few years, if Frankie came through New York, he’d drop by our house and jam with Bucky and the jazz guys who came around after their gigs, mostly to eat my mom’s rigatoni. I was probably six or seven the first time I met him. He looked different from the older guys. He was handsome and had black hair and wore sunglasses. He was kind of like Elvis to me. Or as close as I was gonna get. I was learning the tenor banjo and after Frankie played a song on his guitar, I held up my banjo and said, “Yeah, but can you play this?” Obviously, I was a smart-aleck kid. But he took it and winked at me and played “La Malagueña,” that famous Spanish tune, and he went faster and faster until I was like—gah!—my eyes were bugging out. And this was the banjo, which wasn’t really his thing. He finished and said, “How was that?” And I said, “Pretty good,” and he said, “Pretty good is pretty good.”

He used to call me “LPJ,” for Little Pizzarelli John, because the president at the time was Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ. So I was LPJ. He loved to watch me play with my dad. I guess he didn’t really know his father, so the idea of father and son playing together was special for him.

Then, for a long stretch, we didn’t see Frankie. He came by once in the seventies, when he was married to Aurora and they were passing through New York. My mom made her pasta. I was in high school and had a big mop of wavy hair—I was really into Peter Frampton—and he said, “Is that LPJ under all that flop?” and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “How you doing?” and I said, “Pretty good,” and he said, “Pretty good is pretty good.” And then he said, “Have you learned ‘La Malagueña’ yet?”

It was a long time before I saw him again—not until I was in my thirties, already recording and traveling around the world. I heard that he was teaching in a music store in, of all places, Staten Island, under a different name. I drove out there, and sure enough, it was him. He made me close the door, and then he gave me a big hug and asked how my father was. He told me about his daughter and the Juilliard thing and why he was lying low, because all these people were curious about him. I was playing in the city at that time, and I begged him to come sit in with us—I promised I wouldn’t introduce him—but he declined. He said maybe he and Aurora would come by the house one night, but they never made it.

Then they moved to New Orleans, and we lost touch.

The last time I saw him was a year ago. Our band was doing some gigs in Asia, and we had a show in Manila. Afterward, a student from the university was hanging outside the stage door, and he said he had something important to tell me. A message from a man who used to eat meatballs at my house. And he said the words “La Malagueña” and gave me an address. Like something from a James Bond movie, right? But it wasn’t far from where we had played, so I asked a cabdriver to take me there. I went up to the apartment. No doorman or anything. I just knocked.

And Frankie answered the door and said, “Hey, LPJ.”

I did a double take. He didn’t look healthy. He was bent over and really thin and he was wearing reading glasses and his hair was all mussed up, like a discombobulated professor. I didn’t know Aurora had died. Once I heard that, I understood. They were so crazy about each other.

We talked for a while and he asked about my father, like he always did, and he wanted to know if we still played together and when I said yes, he seemed happy. I asked if he was recording or writing or anything, and he said he’d only written one song since his wife died. I asked if I could hear it. He sang it for me, and it was short enough that I can remember the whole thing.

Yesterday

I saw a bird

Whose tree had disappeared,

The clouds lay claim

To a moonless sky

You are gone

I’m here.

It broke your heart, it was so sad and beautiful. I asked if he was going to record it and he looked at me as if that was never going to happen and he said, “You can have it if you want.”

That’s when he asked me the favor. He said this bootleg of him playing guitar called
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
had been out there for years (I didn’t tell him every guitarist I knew either had it or had heard it) and he really needed to get the original tapes. I figured he wanted the money that was due him.