New Frank story idea BEING FRANK

DRAFT 1 Being Frank

Frank Stimmer, a little the worse for wear, had made his way home from the Scene; his local and favourite bar. He had been there drinking wine and smoking like a dragon with friends and associates, Cass, Fox, Rema, Mice, Sandra, Teen, and the rest. Who he referred to collectively and jokingly as The Rabble. And of course there had been 'the usual bunch of 'fucking hangers-on' who he refused ever to refer to, either singularly or collectively, by any name....'If that was snobbish of him, so be it!'...There are always rival theories out there, he grinned. Frank now sat on his wine-red chaise longue in his studio. On the large coffee table before him stood an opened bottle and glass of red wine. As he had come in, he had first stood for a few moments before his large and diverse collection of vinyl records, musing on what he should play, before deciding on his rarely played '200 Motels' Frank Zappa album. He did a little jive; twisting, doing the running arms, and raising one knee, before putting the disc on. He had then spun himself a joint with some fine looking black stuff Fox had slipped him, which he now relaxed back in his seat with, and expectingly sucked down into his lungs. Frank's face was unshaven, with a pointy nose, yet he was arguably handsome. He was around thirty-five or maybe a little older. There was the slightest look of suffering in his face, which was all but out-weighed by deep attractive laugh-lines around his brown sparkling eyes. His hair was black, shoulder length, very thick, and wild. He was, as always, dressed in black, and today he wore a black neckerchief loose around his throat. ..Frank reflected on the evening....The Scene had really been kicking. Its warren of rooms had been full and loud....The Rabble had occupied their usual room with the piano in one corner....Later they were joined by Jean The Machine who began: 'fingering the jazz from the keys releasing her magic patterns that only await the union of mind and matter Into being! Into being! Releasing possibilities in the listeners receptive brain...' Frank laughed. This way of talking about Jean had become a kind of

running joke with them all. Each of them would try to heighten, and out do the other's praise of her playing....O what a find they thought her when she had first started to turn-up to play the piano for them....A wonderful musician, with a manic enthusiasm...able to jazz any tune make if flip, fly, wriggle, or float....also a very beautiful, intelligent woman, too. Whenever they met he found himself flirting with her. This evening he had quietly admired her fine figure....She had sat opposite him talking to Teen...wearing a classic short little black dress, which exposed the full length of her long, shapely, black-stockinged legs. He had noticed how she had a habit of letting a forefinger linger on her inner exposed thigh, as if pointing to something. Unable to take his eyes off her, he had become as hot as the Bengal fires. At the end of the evening he had tried, sadly unsuccessfully, to persuade her to join him here for a glass of wine and a joint....Well, he knew how things can easily turn into a sex, drugs, and alcohol binge. He laughed like a pirate. But it had been a great evening anyway....Lots of stoned chatter and rowdy discussions....Fox had read some of his poems; real in-your-face stuff...(frightening!), and Jean had fittingly accompanied him with some strange and subtle tonal improvisation....and how Fox looks the part with his long flowing blonde hair and black eye-patch!...'He keeps deep water, that one'.... The more he got to know him the more he liked him...'full of ideas...the dog that's hot right now...a cutting sense of humour, too.' Frank had recently read a short story by him in the Ragbag. It was called Puss in Box; based on Schrdinger's Cat...very funny, and very surreal. When everyone towards the end of the evening had become more animated, they gathered around Jean on the piano, and sang all kinds of stuff. Someone would sing a few bars and Jean would quickly pick it up...and they'd all joined in. Frank thought about Sandra's sudden announcement; very comic! really! At the hight of the evening she had stood up, called for silence. He had thought she was about to announce she was pregnant; the way Mice was sat beside her smiling like the cat that had drank the milk. But she then announced proudly, that she had just been appointed Chairwoman to some blah, blah, commie committee. He now laughed out loud, remembering the look of horror on her face when he had asked if that was a

step higher than the Committee for the Annual Summer Gulag Reunion. 'Frankie!' was all she'd managed, but that look said far more....She has a habit of sniffing the air when she's displeased....And Fox had tuned-in at the end with: 'So, now, comrade, off to the commune with you!' in a mockShakespearian voice....'Greek gods! the woman is humourless!'...She is one of the worst of those dogmatic, chocolate, trendy reds....indoctrinated, romantic fools...'fools of the feather that's a good one.' Frank hated their selected rose-tinted history. Yes, all very anti-fascist...while conveniently dismissing their own past as 'just history!'-- unread history at that as if it were somehow now irrelevant...clean again! like laundered money....And Lenin, to Sandra, is some kind of Father Christmas figure...and the Socialist utopia workers paradise is just about to come down the chimney; 'just a matter of organising people.' Well, she isn't going to organise him! But the Scene...unique! when the mix is right...when the right heads are there...the bright lights...such a mix; painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians...plus the odd-balls.... A proper Fizzywicks Ball. Charlie Blame, the mad scientist had swung by later...with another of his mind blowing facts; scientific mysteries -- the best kind! Frank remembered as a kid a scientist had been pretty high up on his 'what I'm gonna be list....'What I could have been...? Could have been an actor...yeah, could have been an actor!' But Charlie had baffled everybody with a trick well no trick...pulling apart the sticky edges of an envelope in the dark, causes a blue flash!...No one believed him until he actually did it!...Barman John providing an envelope, turned out the light, and there it was...though we argued about the colour of the flash: red, green, blue?...But Charlie said the flash is actually x-ray!...That boggles the mind...and no one knows how it's produced!...Charlie had said he should try to figure it out, and cash in on it...develop some kind of x-ray machine cheaper and no reason to store dangerous radiation....Charlie's head is full of that stuff...next week it will be something else....But he's a good egg! Zappa was weaving his cosmic sound. Frank sipped his wine,and sucked deeply on his spliff. He looked around his spacious studio. In the centre, as always, stood an easel supporting his work in

progress; this time a two metre square abstract drawing; swarms of little expressive charcoal marks fading in and out in a kind of web. His eyes scanned the many pictures hanging on the walls. Some were from way back when...They always brought a flood of memories: place, music, friends... Frank had no head for dates; they were all so vague, just numbers, just the past....Through the pictures he remembered the life that had being happening outside of them 'off canvas', he laughed. Oh yes, but he did remember that one, there! He had just finished studying when he drew that....He had simply held a tangle of thick, rusty, steel wire in his hand, and with just a few pastels had began drawing it from scores of different perspectives. One on top of the other.... It always was that way with him, it came in a mad rush of inspiration....In between there was a lot of observation, playful experiments, and days of idol thought. It was all a matter of the right state of mind...Painting had always been the ballast of his days...always what occupied him. Frank thought about himself. If he had a philosophy, he thought he leaned and swayed a bit towards existentialism...or maybe he was something of a post modernist...Sure, up to a point he believed in the Platonic purity of the idea...he saw how the subject always degenerates....But does the ideal prevail?...Every thing in the world is in a mad flux, always in a state of becoming...and that is also true of the ideal....The ideal doesn't just hang in there, unchanged....And are we just one person? Or a multi-personality?... And as for the world?...We must all find our own way, socially and individually...the multi personality seems to strive to be unified....Every thing is relative rather than certain not facts.... 'Shit...who was it said: ''Truth is what our peers let us get away with saying'?'' Frank also had a lot of time for Camus...the world is absurd...or maybe just neutral....You can do all the right things, and still get all the shit that's out there....So you must take it as you find it....'But what does Camus say?...His solution? Frank looked to his shelves of books.'Yes! he bets on man... 'He bets on man!'. Frank smiled. And Zappa was singing his very cryptic 'Mystery Roach'. For Frank art had been his source of meaning...for him the artist is a real hero! Not some action seeking comic book stereotype...risking or throwing his life away for some imagined duty, or for someone else's jingoistic expectations...that was all upside-down....The artist also doesn't think of his

own well being...nor for wealth....But he puts himself to work on the gigantic task of expressing the human condition....And life has to be lived freely for it to have any authenticity...'Learn to say no. and practice it a lot!' That was Franks motto....But that puts you out! Everybody is rather in or out...one or the other...one of us or one of those...You rather squeeze in, or you are squeezed out....Both have their limitations...in is suffocatingly limiting. He thought of Nietzsche's idea, that we have to shrink our lives to fit some kind of rigid system. And outside can be very lonely....Man is a social animal, he seeks understanding from other warm-blooded beings....Yet, it is outside where you find art....But of course curiosity is the real key...and reason: that flash-light in the blackness of the unknown 'Mmm, not bad!' He smiled, pleased with himself. And art is meaningful for the social and not just for the individual...An artist is both the transformer and the transformed.... When he wakes up in the morning and enters his studio he is alive...animal in the body, his mind hungry, and the spirit surging....One becomes one's own experiment...always becoming... And art, in the very end, always wins against the mob... Frank's mind, now stimulated by his inner dialogue, drifted back over to the picture in the centre of the studio, which led him to ponder his forthcoming exhibition at the gallery of 'Grub and Peck'. He laughed at the names. It had been Fox again, ever the writer, and as quick as a whip, who had bestowed these aliases -- so to a tee upon the two curators....Though he'd never met them, and had only Frank's brief description of them, which 'certainly highlighted Fox's acute talent for caricature'. 'Grub' had mentioned that after the exhibition there might be the possibility of him becoming part of their 'stable' 'What as one of their fucking horses?' Frank grimaced. But signing up with these people did seem like a good opportunity....They had probably given him the exhibition to test his selling power, and to find out what 'their people' thought of him. He felt a surge of optimism; he hoped to sell at least two or three pictures...and if Grub and Peck do take him into their 'Stable fucking grooms!' it would help....He would have at least one of his picture hanging permanently in their gallery....And he wouldn't be constantly searching for new exhibitions...they have the connections, alright...they would be behind him...and he'd get a new catalogue! That was fair.

But then he thought about their 'fucking percentages.' That would knock up the prices...and their greater share of the percentage seemed to suggest they thought their services were more important than his work...'These guys would steel your fucking fingers from your hand!'...It isn't just the fact that bastards like them use art and culture to dominate, but what he hated even more was their pure ignorance of art's real power....And what tosh they talk....Poppy and cock!...He hated having to listen to them telling someone about his work. Frank's brain now bristled just thinking of it. He felt slightly soiled. 'Bloody educated idiots!'...As soon as they open their mouths and begin the blah, blah, you know they have no idea of what they are talking about....They just can't get it in their heads that art the stuff they sell -- has the power to transcend everything...it seems beyond them.... For them, it's all just a matter of appearances....What they see they get....When he talked about his work with them, he could see on their double-blank faces when he had crossed a certain line; they were lost, unable to go with him into any kind of metaphysical ideas....And how cool they thought they were....He hardly made it through their meetings without exploding into one of his rants....And the way they were always trying to get him to perform jump through hoops for their associates and friends which they, somehow, think reflects on them....They want the bohemian-artist bit.... And they want their bloody hooks in him...and what did they have him down as? Some kind of stereotype garret- living, 1920s or 30s angry, Dadaist dandy...? It seemed to Frank, that what they see in him is only a weirdness; which in fact is the artist in him...but is, for them; for sure, approximate to some kind of power, yes, but what they really think they are selling is his weirdness....'Is it...?' ..Frank thought hard about Grub and Peck he tried to imagine what was in their minds. They were nouveau-wide-boys in sharp suits and flash cars, with perfectly groomed heads....They had an air of entitlement written all the way through them like Blackpool rock....But from his few encounters with them when their families were around, he could well imagine that under all that arty-poseurism was in fact a life of social rectitude and tedium. Frank had heard their story: they were in fact 'lawyers'. German, and rich lawyers but who 'always loved art!' They had become rich. not without a bit of serendipity....Who was it said 'being lucky is

very close to being mighty?'...They had been working for a family law-firm in their own small town, which lucky was one of those firms selected, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to track down the original, often Jewish, owners of houses in East Berlin who had fled before the War....And that turned-out luckily to be a very lucrative business....So after they had made a large stash, they were able to fulfil a life's dream...'to have a gallery'. Frank's thoughts went back to the exhibition, he hoped he would sell something...he might then be able to afford to spend a month in the commune....Just slow down...do a lot of sketching, walking and thinking soul-time....A break from the teaching, and maybe Rema would be interested, and might take the car. The commune was refreshing; a crazy bunch there...but enough black flags and free-thinkers to put off the reds forming their usual disruptive blocks, or the nitwit esoterica getting up to their silliness and nonsense....Yes, he could talk and express himself with most people there....A lot of them were just people like himself...seeking a bit of authenticity....It was so relaxed and easy, yet evolving...always someone, or something new, and that suited him....He always came back with a head full of ideas and impressions....Over the years it had become his escape....He'd take off there when life became too much when it wasn't his own; when there was only the stress of teaching every day, and he became swamped in the over-boiled-vegetable-life, the general mindlessness and shallowness of people...plus the constant bureaucracy....What they call normality!...It all added up to a feeling of gritty, sandy irritation....'Sand' that was it.... 'Absurd sand!' Which seemed to get everywhere...intolerable!...He found it even down the Scene....He thought about Flaubet in his ivory tower, and yet, the shit lapping at the walls....But for the time being he had to suffer the Wonkerery of the likes of Grub and Peck; be as patient as a milk jug...to get the money before he could take off anywhere. Frank crushed the remaining roach of the spiff in the ashtray. He felt really stoned. The room was looking rather abstract flattening on the retinas of his eyes. For no apparent reason he suddenly thought of Helen...poor Helen...gone so young...just a girl....He pictured her in the white dress she had

worn when they had first met. Tears came into his eyes. Such a shock....He had never been so down...he had nearly fallen of the edge....It had taken so long to recover....Distraction had been the way distraction, and perseverance he didn't know he had...instinctive reactions against the horror. He had thrown himself into his painting from morning till night...when the nightmares would start...Painting even when he was in total panic about to crack...that pressing urge to flee...flee from oneself; your mad self! Flee from the theatre of your skin, which feels as if it is shrinking-- ever tightening. Words and meaning now surrounded his feelings giving them their own realm; a realm of understanding built on all the earlier layers of memories of his feelings for her. 'Enough to peel the heart'....She still had this effect on him....Still too painful to dwell on....The result would be to fall into the emotional doldrums....Would it ever become bearable? He rose quickly from his seat, and stood before his shelves of books, and began to browse the titles trying to distract his thoughts. He wiped the salt from his eyes so he could see. His eyes fell on Paradise Lost, which said it all really. Frank laughed and cried. He laughed ironically at himself, and cried at all his sharply awakened sorrow. His body shook. He wiped his eyes again, then quickly took down Ulysses, hugged it lovingly to his chest, and returned to his seat. He put up his feet on the chaise longue trying to make himself comfortable. He opened the book at the last chapter, and began reading Molly Bloom's mental soliloquy. Franks eyes felt heavy. The music came to an end.