[Kzyxtalk] My Jay Frankston.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: My Jay Frankston.

Back even before the paper version of /Memo/, in the final two years of 
the Harry Blythe era of the Mendocino Commentary and Peddler, when Carol 
Root had moved away but Judy Brown was still doing the artwork and 
layout, and then Marsha bought the paper and drove it into a tree, 
something I printed gave Jay Frankston the impression that I, whose 
grandparents on my bio-father's side were Jews who escaped Germany just 
in time, was an anti-semite. He wrote some things about it. Of course I 
printed what he wrote. He was angry that I, as editor, didn't bother to 
tell off writers who /he/ disagreed with. He wrote, "Without even 
comment. Without even comment!" Then during /Memo/, after Issue No. 8 
(of 76 total), where the cover I chose was a photograph of the 1916 
Alberta women's hockey team all athletic in fluffy swastika sweaters 
(the symbol is thousands of years old and found all over the world, 
sometimes whirling one way, sometimes the other, always meaning good 
things until well after 1916), Jay cornered me in the Mendocino post 
office, thrust his tiny but fierce self up at me, thumping at his own 
solar plexus with the stiffened fingers of one hand, and he 
growl/scream/whined, "Theaw is PAIN, heah, Mah-co! PAIIIINNN!" (One 
thump for each word, then five thumps for PAIIIINNN.) Kids are growing 
up now with no experience of being screamed in the face from less than a 
foot away; they're missing out.

(This sort of thing goes with the territory, or rather did before 
everyone got the internet. In the same post office, maybe a year or two 
after the PAIN thing, a densely-formatted middle-aged woman with 
dyed-black hair saw me bringing in papers to mail and latched on. That 
issue or the one before, I had published a letter someone wrote who 
mildly sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians. She said it was 
crazy. I said, "I print everything sent to the paper." She said, with 
venom, "Then you gonna print trash? From CRAZY PEOPLE!")

And awhile after that, another couple of years, I was standing in line 
to go into the new (I still think of it as new) Mendo High gym to see a 
performance of Taiko drummers all the way from Japan with their drums 
from the size of a hat to the size of a garden shed. Jay cut into the 
line near me and had something to tell me, but he didn't want to tell it 
to "Mah-co the editow", he wanted to tell it to "Mah-co the /man/". I 
said, "What is it?" He said, "Theaw is a thing called off-the-weckod. Do 
you know the concept of off-the-weckod? I don't want it to show up in 
youw /Memo/." (Drawn-out contempt in that last word.) I said, "Jay, if 
you wanta tell me something, tell me. If you don't wanta tell me, then 
don't." He didn't.

Years after that, Jay came to me in the lobby of a theater show I was 
about to record, and, referring to something he heard on my radio show 
on KMFB, that he assumed I'd understand this was about, but I had no 
idea what it was, he said, "I am a wacist!" Just so there's no 
confusion: he was saying that /he/ was a wacist, not me. And he wasn't 
asking, he was telling. He continued, "You have no soul! Black people 
have moh soul that you will evew have!" My mother was in town; she'd 
just moved here, so this would be maybe 2004 or 2005. She was in the 
lobby, right there. I said, "Jay Frankston, this is my mother, Evelina," 
and all of a sudden he was calm and sweet and he stood there talking 
with her until it was time to go in.

All this time he was giving me books he wrote. He had me come over to 
his house and help him with his computer a few times. Monique gave me 
soup and maybe a sandwich. (One time borscht and sour cream. One time 
Campbell's chicken noodle soup, plop, in the pan.) Jay showed me art 
he'd collected and pictures of his family, and he'd talk about his 
project to teach the Holocaust in schools. Some of his books he gave me 
in text files, on a floppy disk, so I could read them all in serial form 
on the radio, and I did that. There's one long one about a trip he took 
to Bali and the people he met there, the customs, friends he made, 
ceremonies, drugs. One book is about quitting his lawyer gig on the East 
Coast and, in his forties? fifties? hitchhiking all across the U.S. with 
his wife Monique, waiting on the side of the road for hours, smoking 
weed with hippies in a van who picked them up, eventually traveling to 
settle in Mendocino after going back east. My favorite book of his, that 
I've read on the air over the course of months at least three times, on 
KMFB and then KMEC and KNYO, was /El Sereno/; it's about the entire 
modern history of Spain from the early 1900s through the 1970s. The main 
character kept the keys to all the houses and gates in a whole district 
of Madrid and walked around in the dark every night of his adult life 
letting people into their houses when they clapped for him, keeping the 
peace like a guardian, and participating in the anti-fascist movement 
and war and tumult of the times, winning some, losing some, making 
friends and losing them to fascist bombs and guns and police torture and 
prison, and finally dying, very old, with no-one left alive who even 
knew his name, and the local official is standing there with a heavy 
iron ring of hundreds of unmarked keys and not the faintest idea how to 
proceed. Maybe I should do that one again.

He wrote a novella about his and Monique's experiences leading up to and 
during World War Two. There are fat poetry books, and very thin books 
with just a story or two in them. One is about a person who appears in a 
forest with no memory, finds his way to a village where he is taken for 
the fulfillment of a prophecy but feels stifled, oppressed. He escapes, 
is pursued, and dies in the forest, then wakes up with no memory, 
somehow renewed, and it starts all over again. Jay wrote and printed and 
stapled together dozens and dozens of different books, maybe a hundred, 
and sold them by mail and through the local bookstore. Max the Piano 
Player, when reminded of working with Jay on one of his musical plays, 
would always make that face you make when you you're poised to start 
bitching about somebody but you stop yourself, because what for, all 
this time later? I got the impression they didn't get along, and it was 
something that happened during that play.

In the course of Jay's life he had several major surgical procedures 
performed on his heart and the various tubes and wires running into and 
out of it. In his late old age, last year, he wrote to the listserv 
about being lonely, just sitting in a chair waiting to die. I read about 
this on the radio and a few people told me they went there to visit, so 
that's good. I think there might be something wrong with me in the way 
of relations with other people. I felt bad that he was lonely, and there 
were times when I was driving past the Y of the road and could have 
easily gone there again, turn right instead of left and go for /one 
minute/, but I didn't want to, so I didn't go. Maybe later, next time, 
you know?

It's always and never next time. Now there is no more loneliness for 
him, as they say.

Really, I'm going to dig out /El Sereno/ and read that on the radio again.

--
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com