Cadillac Woodstock

Cadillac Woodstock

Robert Duncan

We — I mean Frankie and me — stumble blinkingly into a not very bright daylight. A guy with a watch tells us it’s seven. (We don’t wear watches because we don’t really want to know when last call may be coming up, the bar closing, the party over.) Seven. Yes, but the essential questions pose themselves: dawn or twilight? the next day? two days later? The last thing/we knew — we barely knew it, actually — this guy was sittin’ at the bar and his chick had split and he was goin’ on and on...but when he announced “Drink up! The .drinks and the laughs on me!,” well, we just figured he was dll right.

Daylight, huh. You know it’s real nice out here. (We forget how much we love our saloons.) Anyway, some kindly soul informs us that, indeed, it’s getting into evening. Good enough by us. Now we can start drinkin’ again legitimately.

We’re fifty miles north of Detroit and right smack in the middle of this beautiful open rolling green farmland (Frankie do you realize there’s cows out there!) is a place called Pine Knob. In the winter it’,s a ski resort (for when you can’t make it out to Aspen or Sun Valley) and in the summer they have this open-air amphitheatre for concerts. (Now that’s class: concert.) Around the amphitheatre it’s “simply drippin’ with chrome,” as Frankie once put it. You see, they drive in Detroit — they gotta drive in Detroit, I hear the subways is lousy. And since it’s Sinatra, it’s strictly the Caddies and the Mark IVs, though near the entrance a few earth colors Winnebagos — land yachts — occupy some of the prime parking spots (the guys must have. been here for days), and around them people chat and jiggle plastic coctail glasses in which ice cubes cluck against the sides.

And since it’s Sinatra, everybody’s brand spanking clean and shiny, just like chrome. Thousands of them converge on the turnstiles at the entrance to take their seats on the lawn that rises from the stage; while the click, tap, tap, scrape of new shoes on the acres of asphalt outside and the hiss and swish and sizzle of dacron double knit in motion creates a percussive fanfare at twilight that heralds the dawn of Cadillac Woodstock.

“You know why Italians have no necks?” asks a middle-aged Jewish comedian on the run across the stage (this cat’s workin’it!). “From answering questions at Senate subcommittees!” He shrugs np his shoulders exagerratedly, palms out, in an “I-shouldknow?” gesture. Bits of laughter... Now, let’s see: boy, girl, boy girl.

Having darefully smoothed out their blankets and puffed up the pillows with the designer cases, the party nearby on the lawn sits and silently waits as one of the men removes the wine from the coolerand then carefully unveils the chilled silver goblets, his punchline. The two men — they’re about forty-fivb, dressed in similar white versions of those new walking suits that’re are becoming so popular these days — recline on the pillows so they can' see each other as they joke behind the wife who sits between them. She half-turns towards them. It’s an awkward potition, more awkward still when she throws her head in their way when she laughs. The other woman in the party sits a barely noticeable distance away from them, knees drawn up into her chest. She infrequently sips from the silver goblet and casually, composed, watches the stage, beside her a pair of binoculars (though it’s not that far). Her very practical pantsuit is expensive, but hardly ostentatious. Her brown hair is cut short and two kids and thirty-eight years later, surprisingly her hips are spreading just ever so slightly around that place which in this position she seems to be guarding, the moistness therein not aging to taste, but just simply ignored. A husband has more important things on his mind — I mean, where in the hell do you think I get the money to buy you those goddamn clothes? , And who else do you see around here drinking outta silver glasses? C’mon, now, honey...But me and Frank (as the Scotch disappears) are thinkin’ of her; she’s the girl down the row with that short hair and the cutest goddamn nose: “My love’s misspent with Angel Eyes tonight...”

The joker on the stage moves fast through fags and Polacks. Thirty-four of the thirty-five members of the orchestra behind him are silent and bored; the drummer has to work, though sporadically, spotting the punchlines with a pop or a quick roll. But the joker moves fast, like I say, and one minute one Polack is saying to another and the next, suddenly — the orchestra starts in slow, low, then faster; down the row little Angel Eyes raises those glasses — “But ladies and gentlemen [he’s still moving" fast] I’d like to bring on the greatest entertainer in the world” — the orchestra swells and rises in pitch, slowly, tensely - “MR. FRANK SINATRA!!!” The sun has set, the star rises from backstage... or does he stumble? “YOU are the sunshine of my life...” and POW! that monkey-suited bleacher-ful of veteran hopheads hits it!...Like a band!

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40.

“I’d like to sing that song to Jennifer O’Neill” — Frankie’s always right on top of the hottest action — “in fact... I’d like to do a whole lot more than that to Jennifer.”

If she’s out there right now, well, God bless her cause if I know old Frankie, he probably ain’t kidding. Though / know and he knows it’d never really work out, but, hell, there ain’t one he ain’t finally been able to get stoned out of his system.

“Moo,.moo, mah, mah, mah, dee, dee,” he’s spinning about the stage and he’s stoned now, still singing that song by “STEVIE WONDER! Ladies and gentlemen!” He’s stoned on the crowd and being back and he’s just a little bit stoned on “a'few backstage.” But he’s in absolute and wild control of the joint.

In Jhe Brooklyn/Jersey tawk that he never had the patience to get coached out of he’s apologizing for his casual white suit and shoes because this cat is a monkey-suit singer if there ever was one and he knows it. (“It was outdoors and I figured what the hell.”) Because in the monkey suit, no matter how drunk you get or whose gutter you’re lyin’ in, you ain’t a bum. And if Frank Sinatra didn’t wear a tuxedo most of the time he’d be that guy they’re always tossing out on his ear, who turns over all the tables and takes a little blood with him on the way out and “WOMEN JOURNALISTS ARE WHORES!” I may look like Palm Springs tonight but I KICK ASS, is the message, and I’d just as soon kick yours if you care to engage..,:But then, later, it’s always: Forget it, Mac. We was all fractured!

* “Cole Porter! Nelson Riddle arrangement!” And he’s got her under his skin. For sure! Down the row (I sidle closer as the whiskey disappears), Angel Eyes is glued to this lumpy faced salami of a guy with a toupe onstage. To his smile. We’ll go see it for the girls, said hubby last week to the pal with whom he now jokes in a forced' camaraderie that’s predicated on the existence of dirty jokes that are neither very dirty nor very funny. For the girls, indeed. One is smashed out of her gourd on the wine and the other? Through his impotent chill'even hubby begins to detect what’s happening with his ol’ Angel.

“I’d like to do something for you by one. of the great young song writers... George Harrison.” It’s certain that George is just another songwriter, grist for Frankie’s mill, as the Man launches into “Something.” The way he searches for just the right word...“something”..,.he can’t pin it down but there’s no question in his mind that it’s there as he slides up “the way” into “you moove,” stretching the last word out, almost adding a second syllable that becomes instead an afterglow. Angel feels it. She, moves. Her hubby’s' empty din is beginning to subside precipitiously.

Frankie’s doing nigger talk for a rest. Really gettin’ down to it: Stepin Fetchit, yet! The crowd is diggin’ it (though you gotta remember that Frankie ain’t no comedian, this is just an excuse to take a break) and take your mealy-mouthed moralizing outta here, Mac, cause the niggers is doin’ up the honkies just as bad — ever hear Richard Pryor? — and we’ll, beat each others’ brains in if you make one more goddamned move... Shit, do you know we were all so goddamned fractured?

Frankie’s got some fag jokes (featuring “Bruce”), fucking jokes, and one that goes: “I got a letter from a chick who had my face tattooed on her. rear end...Her.cheeks are filled out as fat as mine.” Dumb joke, Frankie, and he’d admit it in a minute. But really it’s more than a dumb joke and everybody knows it. It’s a confession, very personal, from the Man they love: I’M OLD AND I’M GONNA DIE! I know it, Frankie, so gimme more!

It was one thing, those kids slogging through miles of mud to get near their Jefferson Airplane, their Grateful Dead, their Ten Years After, whatever, sure, they’re gonna live forever. That’s the credo of the young: WE WILL LfVE FOREVER!!!

WE WILL DIE!!! is the applicable credo here. And there’s a whole lot more at stake. Frankie has stated his solidarity.

Gimme more! Her binoculars remained tuned into HIM, the bright spot. A husband begins to tense, to tap her on the shoulder at his own weakening punchlines. But Frankie can love her. “Tell me where it hurts, baby!” he answers the screams. He does love her, his Angel Eyes. “Hey, drink up! All you people, order anything you care...the drinks and the laughs on me...” The lights are low. It’s a medley and all the unabashed WEWILL-DIE self-pity wells up from the stage and through everybody — except Angel Eyes’ hubby — in sweet catharsis. And the “last of the great saloon singers” says he’d even like to do “One For The Road” but, you know, I just can’t do that to ya here, this far from the nearest bar. I mean, ya gotta have a drink with something like that!

“I did it my way!” the Man sings. Last year at the Garden he called it “the national anthem,” but we know that was just so much show biz — Frankie gets sucked in too — and anyway he had to be stone sober for that TV thing. Tonight, it’s a song about getting down with Angel and then maybe losing her and always living to tell about it'. Frankie, the big loser who always wins. Frankie’s still blasted and the song’s over and he’s wandering around the stage again. Accapella: “Ooo, weee, oo, oo, weee...we did it s/cfe-Ways!” He teases Angel with his funny or maybe he tips his hand or maybe it’s the come-on and it works. .. He’ll never tell. She’ll never tell. That’s the way they do things. But later that night a husband picks a fight with his wife whose mind is in another place with some lumpy old singer from Jersey who just ripped up a bar in her honor:.. -

Finally, Frankie’s hit the road. .The road that most of us take, the one we lie about in our folklore. You kid yourself if you think he’s on that mystical, magical frontier road careening through space.at 100 mph-plus. No, Frankie’s on our road, that good old main drag between the hotel and the saloon down the block, the one we all know so well. And outside the dirty windows of those dumps something called time careens past him at an immeasurable speed... “Scuse me while I disappear...” Remember?

„ But outside the amphitheatre on the asphalt display shelf where the deepwas chromium dreams shine on under the lights and are never exactly it, like they should’ve beens thousands crane their necks as a ^helicopter jauntily circles overhead and then soars away into space. They all wave and smile. Yeah, that Frankie’s got class! But it’s just the sheriff’s department having a little fun. Nah, when Frankie “hit the road” tonight, he hailed a cab. Will ya go ta Jersey? he asks the cabbie. Aw, c’mon mistah, I’m goin’ off duty... Screw it, Frankie tells him and hops out. And sitting backstage at this Pine Knob joint, he sucks on a scotch, feelin’ lumpy and" kind of low, he kind of slurs a lil’ bit: Ya see...there was dis broad...we called her Angel Eyes...