‘I seemed to be living at Manly Beach.
It’s odd, I’ve never actually been there –
but that was the name that was in my head –
a huge old villa, Queenslander style, you
know, all those deep verandahs, red iron roof
and mango trees in fruit, and jacaranda
blossom. People were milling around with drinks,
I was hosting some kind of music fair –
like a garage sale, except all I was selling
was instruments. Melissa was there,
she was playing a piece, on piano, which
isn’t her thing, of course. You’ve got good
at that, I told her; she said: I’ve been
dieting on it. There was so much junk,
there were whole rooms filled with percussion
and brass, and Melissa was telling me
Anton – he was our friend from Melbourne, we
met him at the Conservatory – Anton was looking
for a new crash cymbal. I said, we need to
have sex, but there were too many people.
‘And then there’s a part where I couldn’t
remember – I mean, in the dream, it was
like I’d blacked out – and people were leaving,
we’d sold out apparently, I looked in
these rooms and now everything was
empty. Melissa had set up a stall
in the bedroom, she had all this fruit, in preserving
jars, the old-fashioned kind with the screw-on
collars, and women were lining up outside.
She told me to go and find the “accountant” –
she used that word, but I knew what she meant.
I had to organise more stock, more
instruments, so I got on the ferry.
It’s hard to describe: it was daylight still
but the towers in the city were
all lit up, and the Opera House
with a lightshow playing on the tiles.
Somebody said that the buses weren’t running,
I had to walk to Double Bay, and all
along Oxford Street there were closing-down
sales. Then I was going up in a lift
and when the door opened (the type with
the cage) my mother was sitting at
a keyboard that sounded like a spinet.
I could see she was giving a singing
lesson to a girl, a woman, her face
was hidden but somehow I knew that it
had to be Karen – but Karen as a
child, she was tiny, maybe three feet tall.
My father was there, in his magistrate’s
wig, leafing through a pile of papers – it
looked like some kind of music notation –
Puccini, he told me, it seemed to be called
“Leporello”. I started to say it was
dark outside, it was too late now to get
back to the Shore. I was worried about
having left Melissa. My father said,
come in the kitchen, I’ll warm you some milk.’
Juanita lets the silence deepen. She isn’t
rehearsing, exactly; she’s just making space.
‘Your father was leafing through a pile of music.
Does Frank leave through music, I wonder?
There’s a lot of leaving here.’
Her client
pauses only a moment as he picks out a thread.
‘The day I quit the Conservatory, I was
walking home through Royal Park and suddenly
something was wrong with my lungs – I couldn’t
get air, I was literally crying in pain.
They diagnosed something at the hospital –
God knows what, it didn’t sink in, I guess
I could tell for myself it was probably
hysterical. Then when I got out of
A&E I had to make a phone call and
break the news. Ouch! My mother was so
disappointed, the passive aggression –
Christ, it was just withering. And it
got to me, you know, I did feel scared.
But I’d been writing songs, I’d lined up
the players, I had the sound all sorted
out in my head. This is the band that I’ve
told you about – the one that got me
across to the States. It happened so quickly
it was almost too easy – I’d hardly
been on stage before – but we did the first
album, the single got airplay, the label
sent us out to LA to make another one . . .’
‘You left your partner behind in Melbourne?’
‘Melissa hung in at the Con, that’s right –
the arrangement between us was pretty vague . . .
I must have had ideas of “fun” on the road,
though actually that side of things was just bleak.
Anyway, we cut the new record, we toured
the West Coast, and the punters quite liked it.
Not the right moment – the early eighties,
it wasn’t the time to play country – but it all went
okay. Except Steve crashed the tour van, smashed
up his forearm, the bass player fractured
his pelvis. And that was the end of it.
I stayed a while; I had this warehouse
in Silverlake, any other time it would have
been a cool place. But not just then, I was
too messed up. Pain meds, you know,
familiar story – one thing led to
another. And so Melissa came over . . .’
‘One thing led to another?’
She tries not
to labour the irony, but Frank isn’t slow.
‘Fair enough. It’s true, I encouraged her.
Not too directly, but it didn’t take much.
She was jealous, I guess, and she had this idea
that she might make a fiddler – she tried for
a while – but it’s like with a lot of classical
players, improvising was a different
language. And I was, well, the thing
about coke is, you think you’re doing
so much better than you are. Really, though,
it was all pretty dismal. I had a few
gigs, I was “taking stock”, you know,
but mostly I was just taking drugs. So
Melissa – thank God! – pulled the plug. Went
back to the Con, and she aced it, of course, top
in her year group. Instant career. By the time
I got home she was set to become a soloist.’
‘Just add water . . .’
‘Sorry?’
‘You were jealous.’
‘No. Not of that career. Honestly,
it’s an awful life: all that time cooped up
in hotel rooms, the endless practice,
the colourless people. Wall-to-wall fags and
neurasthenics . . . shit. I didn’t mean that.
Sorry.’
‘Didn’t mean what?’
‘The bit about “fags”.’
‘But Frank, we don’t know what you mean. This is
analysis, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here . . .’
Frank says nothing, the moment passes.
She might have cut proceedings there – ‘short’
sessions, she’d use them more, but she doesn’t
always have the nerve. And there’s something else,
it’s in that dream, something that makes her nudge him
forward.
‘Let’s not leave the story there. That
would be mean. What else have you got for me?’
Frank blows out a gust of breath.
‘Melissa, she thought I was mean. But she
left, and that worked out okay. For her, I mean.
And I stayed on and – I’ve told you about it –
I wrote those jingles. Scads of money. Heaps
of blow – I got myself completely fucked up.
In the end a friend came through – transiting,
on her way to Britain – she managed to
push me onto a plane and I got home,
back to Sydney, managed a rehab. It wasn’t fun
but I made it, I came out clean. After that
I just laid low, did a few months of therapy –
remember Philip? – also the odd bit of
studio work. But I put up the shutters,
I didn’t play gigs. I got on this physical
fitness jag – yoga, swimming, lifting
weights – I was living the whole “recovery”
life. And I loved it. Except for the twelve-
step thing: the God stuff, all that “sharing”
crap. No way, man. It creeped me out.
I’d go because of Karen, that was all.
Karen had been in rehab with me,
boilerplate junkie, the whole nine yards.
Sydney was drowning in heroin, the industry
was a slaughterhouse. And Karen (did I
tell you this?) was a singer. A really good
singer, when she let herself be; she had
that sombre, torchy thing, but a lighter
side to her voice as well – I used to think
half Karen Dalton and half Karen Carpenter.
Anyway, she was cleaning up, and we started
doing some work together. And then, well, one
thing led to another –’
‘Again.’
‘Okay, I take
your point. But I really loved her, I loved
the effect she could have on a room, and
being part of that. It was all very “blues” –
there was that kind of aura: she sang
like a junkie, even clean. At home she was
funny, or she could be. We had lots
of laughs. But she started falling off
her programme, drinking, smoking a bit
of pot – no, strike that – I was smoking pot,
and that was more or less okay, but then
Karen picked up and it all went to shit.
To be honest, I don’t like to think about it.
Darlinghurst got really mean: sleazy,
dangerous, out of control. We saw someone stabbed
in an alley and just looked the other way.
Karen was hanging with a Serbian dude
she was getting her gear from, a real piece
of work. She came home one night with her hand
stitched up, this nasty slash across her palm,
and she wouldn’t explain, just pushed me away.
Long story short: I took the hint. I bailed.’
Frank trails off . . .
Does he want to be rescued?
The analyst leaves him to rescue himself.
‘What I should have done, I know, is to
try to get her back in the rooms. Really,
I did try. I took her to meetings, made
her come with me, made her speak.
She still had a sponsor – a flaky chick,
but she tried as well; it’s just that Karen
wasn’t having it. Finally someone
took me aside, this counsellor dude who
was also a junkie, and more or less
told me I was wasting my time. He fed
me the usual twelve-step Kool Aid –
carry the message not the addict, your
own recovery comes first, all that
self-care bullshit – and maybe he was right.
Or maybe it’s just what I wanted to hear.
Either way, I listened. I came back home.’
‘And how’s that working for you now, your
sponsor’s message? Are you milking it still?’
‘I’m back in analysis. What do you think?’
‘What do I think? I’m not the judge, Frank. You are.’