I was at Frank Sinatra’s house, the one in the southern California desert. It was a complex, a compound, with a multi-story mansion and acres of well-sprinkled lawns. Many of the rooms had no furniture, as the Chairman of the Board typically only occupied a handful of rooms in the fortress and the rest of them, like the “record room” we were in now, didn’t warrant chairs or cushions or lamps or end tables. So here we are, Frank’s sitting in the middle of the unfurnished room cross-legged on the floor like an Indian in front of a frontier fire, me standing in an awkward position off to the side as if Sinatra’s the pope and I’m waiting for some sort of final blessing. The room was much larger than the typical three-car garage and a common shelf, three feet from the ceiling, encircled the entire room. On those shelves, the entire way around, were antique wooden crates filled with Sinatra albums, there had to be thousands of them. Like they have in an old university library there was a somewhat rickety wooden ladder on wheels. It was linked with bronze brass rings to a pewter pipe that protruded from just under the shelf. The ladder thereby was affixed to a track, and any brave lad who wanted access to the vinyl pressings in the wooden boxes could complete a full circuit.

I somehow met Sinatra on a soccer field in Palm Desert. He was there to watch one of his grandsons and I had a nephew who happened to be on the same team. I guess I had seen him, the figure of him, before but never realized it. On this day, temperatures are in the mid-nineties and a man slowly trickles over to where I’m standing. I see him out of the corner of my eye but never actually look at him. He’s wearing a floppy bucket hat and a windbreaker and without exchanging pleasantries he says, “It’s like watching flies fuck.” I assumed he was talking about the torture of watching little kids play soccer. It was hard to disagree with. “Yep,” I said, that’s the way George Carlin would have described it.” “I know,” he says “George was a friend of mine” and he walks away.

As he moves across the field, I watch, examine, then mumble to myself, I think I just talked to Frank Sinatra about George Carlin. I always thought that if a saw Sinatra he’d wearing a thousand-dollar suit, impeccably pressed and a fedora.

I saw him at other games, an old man, maybe trying to be normal, killin’ time in observation of juvenile pursuits. He never encouraged his grandson, never barked out that’s my boy or spewed venom at the volunteer officials. He tried to blend in. I wondered if he had a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. I wondered if he bought his sneakers at Big 5 from a pimply-faced sales kid who had no idea he was touching immortal feet.

We never spoke. I would never, ever be that guy. You know that guy, right? The guy that stumbles up to anyone with the least bit of fame, anybody they’ve seen on TV or in the paper and blurt out, “You’re Frank Sinatra, right? My dad had your record, you know, the one with the picture of you that looked like it was drawn with a crayon? I seen a mini-series about when they kidnapped your son, why didn’t you send your mob friends after them guys? I live just down the street, I’m a maintenance man at the Desert City Apartments and …”

One way or another Sinatra found out that I was a writer and that’s why I was at his house. He wanted me to help him with some of his correspondence, write up some canned responses to all of the inquiries and fanmail he gets.

He had a dog, a cocker spaniel type mongrel who had the run of the acreage around his house. Her name was Bird. I asked if I could let my dog out of the car and get a little exercise, he says, “Sure, what the hell Birdy would like that.” Next thing I know some old dude’s out in the yard spraying my dog with the hose; he’s aiming one of those high-pressure nozzles at her like he’s aiming a gun.

“Hey, what gives?!”
“That dog ain’t supposed to be out here, this here’s private property.”
“I thought it was Mr. Sinatra’s property?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, Mr. Sinatra said it was okay.”

The cranky old guy, cursing under his breath, reluctantly turned the hose off. “That’s my accountant,” says Sinatra. “He’s amazing with numbers but in most other ways he’s nuts.”

Sinatra would never listen to music unless it was the radio or vinyl. “This digital music crap they talk about all the time, well, that’s not the music I made.”

He says to me, “I want you to get up on that ladder and find a record I made with Tommy Dorsey. All of the records are in chronological order starting with the crate that’s just above the door … those are the Columbia years. Show me the covers as you grab ’em and I’ll tell you which one. Not that one … no … ya, that’s it! Now come down here and play the third track on side one, ‘Everything Happens To Me’ …”

My wet dog ways playin’ in Sinatra’s yard, I was writing form letters in a big empty room and I was listening to “Everything Happens To Me” with the man who sung it.

Then it was morning.

Photo credit: Dovima-2010 on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC