Free Being Frank by Nigey Lennon Page B

I dunno — do I want to be intimate with Mussolini? How do I know I’m not going to be the next one to get it?”
    â€œYou’re definitely going to be the next one to get it. C’mon, roll over.”
    Frank was an astute psychologist. He understood the personalityand peccadilloes of each of the musicians and most of the time he was easily able to motivate them without their being more than dimly aware of it. He knew when to push and when to back off; if I had been in his position, I would have been driven crazy by the swirling crosscurrents of band politics, conflicts, neuroses, and high school-level road shenanigans, but Frank had an incredible ability to shrug off the nonsense and effectively deal with what remained. It all fit in with my initial impression when he’d showed me the prospectus for 200 Motels : he may not have looked the part, but he was a born executive. Although he tried to listen to the band members’ complaints and suggestions, he basically didn’t give a fig what anybody thought of him, and he never took it personally if a musician decided he hated him and wanted to quit. This, however, was not a regular occurrence; despite the musical discipline he insisted upon, most of his personnel liked and respected him and were willing to give 100 percent, whether or not they alwaysunderstood exactly what they were doing, or why he wanted them to do it.
    My troubles with the other band members had commenced almost immediately. The guys, most of them pretty typical rock musicians, were a bunch of pathological socializers, and I wasn’t. Worse, my presence as understudy made the dissolute among them, knowing why I was there, regard me with hostility as a prig and a scab. Besides, I was a girl trying to infiltrate their male ranks. Their stage shtick revolved around road humor and groupie jokes — so where did I fit in?
    I noticed that the atmosphere of constant partying, both on- and offstage, tended to make Frank more outgoing. He’d hang out with the guys after a show the way somebody else might attend the office cocktail party — although when the action got hot and heavy (as it inevitably did), he rarely took an active role, preferring to leave that to the others. It wasn’t that he was beyond arousal — in fact, he walked around in a perpetual state of multi-dimensional sexual awareness that was actually far more dangerous than even the most incorrigible cocksman in the band could conceive of — but he had his own distinct way of viewing things, and in his mind these semi-public orgies were part of his supra-musical megastructure, the ‘conceptual continuity’ he’d mentioned to me. I think, too, that although he never admitted it, he kept a clear distinction in his mind between himself and his employees. He was their boss and then leader; tactically, there could be no question of him really mingling with them. Abandoning himself to an indiscriminate hot time with a bunch of band members and groupies one night might make it difficult if not impossible for him to maintain his position of control over ‘the troops’ the next day.
    Opportunities for optional recreational activities arose constantly in that pre-AIDS epoch, although the typical ‘tourist’ tended to resemble the young woman in her early 20s, dressed all in rusty black and with raccoon-like black circles painted around each eye, who showed up at a sound check one afternoon and ambushed Frank backstage. “I’ve been saving all my bodily secretions for you for a month ,” she crooned to him.
    â€œThat right?.” said Frank, giving me a quizzical look over her shoulder. “Is there any particular reason you’ve singled me out for this honor?”
    â€œI just knew you’d be able to appreciate them,” she gushed. Before she could offer a free sample, Dick Barber was summoned and she was escorted out the fire exit. All that afternoon