Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Frank in Coronado apartment. "Arrested in a big sweep. Drugs. He’s been in jail two weeks. He’s filthy. They’ve shaved his head because his hair is so matted. Not speaking."

It's just a phone call. But it changes your life. Re-jigs the whole thing. Other vague long-term plans you had suddenly evaporate. We’re in Cornwall Gardens, London, June 1983. One of those Kensington Victorian bedsit paradises surrounding private gardens nobody seems to have the key to. It’s six o’clock on a sunny morning. The daffodils are shining up from the dank green grass beneath the elms and the plane trees. The frost makes everything shine.

Frank refused to admit that he was disabled.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

“Mrs. Manson? This is Deputy Sheriff----------, in Chula Vista, California, United States. It’s about your son.”

My wife, Lita, puts down the phone. This is a moment somehow not entirely unexpected. Here we were in London, knowing her son Frankie had not been quite well when he left Ireland and his band, Van Winkle. Knowing there was family friction going on back home. Knowing something had to blow. But this is way worse than anything we could have imagined. “He’s in the sheriff's lockup, Mrs. Manson. Arrested in a big sweep. Drugs. He’s been in jail two weeks. He’s filthy. They’ve shaved his head because his hair is so matted. Not speaking. Not making any sense. He’s been living on the beach....”

Frank with his mother, 1972. In Bangkok, he was a plump little kid with an acoustic guitar.

Lita bursts into tears. Frankie’s her beloved eldest son by her first marriage. The one she dedicated to God the day he was bom, throwing all her marbles into her Roman Catholic faith. The one most hurt by her breakup with his dad, the USAID worker. The one who somehow took the heat for the breakup. He was his mother’s son.

Frank had left California in 1976 to join us and then to attend a music school in Europe. After an audition with Essex Music on Poland Street, he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Music in Dublin and began taking courses in composition, music history, and other subjects. He wrote enthusiastic letters from Bewleys, the arty Dublin coffee shop. He talked of engagement to Karen McCaffrey, niece of science-fiction writer Anne McCaffrey, with a wedding projected for Dragon Lair, McCaffrey’s estate. He wrote of lively evenings in the company of sci-fi writer Harry Harrison and others. And with his Stratocaster guitar in hand (the same kind Jimi Hendrix played), he joined a band named Van Winkle, jammed with the nucleus of U-2, and started recording his own compositions.

But I remember him earlier, in Bangkok, when he was a plump little kid with an acoustic guitar and a stack of records. I got to know him through his mom, a safe-haven wife I was working with on Thai radio. I was a 27-year-old deejay on an English-Thai bilingual radio program, desperately trying not to fall in love with Lita and desperately in need of Western music records to keep up my side of the program. Frank lent his whole library to me. Not only that, but he could play half the tunes on his guitar. I have the picture in my mind, Frank one warm night, with his mom holding a stack of much-needed records, hauling out his acoustic guitar and ripping through a few withering bars of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” I feel I have known Frankie all his life. Now he’s nearly 27 and in trouble.

We call back to Chula Vista. This time it’s Frankie’s court-appointed lawyer on the line. “I wouldn’t bother coming,” he says. “He’s a grown man. It’s a drug sweep. There’s a lot of that around here. Nothing much you can do.”

We go out, walking silently through the old pathways to Kensington High Street and on down to the Olde Muffin Shoppe. It’s a little cutesy and upper-crusty, but its scones have always been our comfort food. We order tea and scones. Sit there nibbling in silence.

“What are we going to do?” she says. We’re two years married. This is our home. She’s a social anthropologist. I’m a journalist. She is in love with London as much as she is with me.

“We have to go.”

“Of course.”

“So, farewell London.”

JUNE 30, 1983: The Glorietta Bay Inn’s lights look cozy and sort of luxuriant in their California way as we pull up in a cab from Lindbergh Field. Everything is lush rather than London-prim. It’s my first view of Coronado, the “island” Lita had always been so proud of. This was where her Spanish grandee antecedents had run cattle. They owned the whole damned isthmus until around 1857, when a tidal wave, so family lore runs, shimmied all the cattle into San Diego Bay, and they sold out to the encroaching Anglos.

Yet, too, this was the land of Lita’s entrapment, where circumstances held the young girl who saw herself as a pioneer of the Beat Generation a prisoner to child-rearing and middle-class tyranny, hard times for a nat’ral-born rebel tied to the Navy as a SEAL’s wife. Like Frankie, at 18 she had been bound for a European school as a promising young painter. But ailing parents and economics and then a Navy husband kept her home.

So the feelings are mixed as we pull into the tree-lined parking lot of the Glorietta Bay Inn. For me (an English-born New Zealander) there’s an excitement of being in the Lush Land. The swimming pool glints seductively in the warm night air. We settle into a room and wait for word to get to Frankie that we’re here. No point in going to him. He’ll know.

We telephone round to Frank’s brothers and sisters. Nobody’s seen him. His sister Martita says she went down to the beach to tell him we were coming. We fall asleep wondering if he’ll turn up in the middle of the night.

Knock-knock. I look at my watch; 2:30. Oh God. That’s London time. Subtract eight hours. Morning, 6:30. I turn over. But Lita’s up in a flash. She’s at the door. It swings open. Filling the doorway is the tall frame I knew so well. But so skeletal. I’m up and hauling on my trousers. Lita has her arms around him. He sort of stands there. Filthy jeans muddied and ripped where they’ve unrolled at their cuffs. Dirty basketball shirt. Scuzzy white T-shirt wrapped around his head like a turban. Silent. Lord, how silent he is.

“Oh forgoodness sake, darling,” says Lita. “Look at you. My eldest boy. For God’s sake....” She just holds his large frame close to her. It’s as though a world war has intervened since the last time they were together. In the window light I see Frank is deeply tanned, but his six-foot-five body is emaciated. His eyes are piercing blue-green. His skin is rough and healthy, and...smelling real bad.

We pound questions into him. What happened? How did everything fall apart when he came home? Frankie says...nothing. He seems to be in shock. Lita hugs him, talks to him, as it gradually sinks in that something radical is wrong with Frankie. “William, he’s cold as charity. Pour a nice warm bath. We’ll find some clothes. Darling, you need to warm up. You need a good scrub. You need....”

“Mi ahan?”

He speaks. Very softly, he’s speaking in Thai. “Mi ahan?” “Do you have something to eat?”

“Chai, bai ser dai” I say. “You pour the bath,” I say to Lita, “and I’ll go to Wendy’s and get a couple of burgers. Then I’ll wash out the bath and he can have a second one.”

As I scurry to Wendy’s, I suddenly wonder if he’s speaking the language of the last place where his life had been sane, level, comprehensible. Before the family broke up, grew up, and he went into the shifting sands of the music world. And I know this is going to be a long haul for all of us. No more skipping the light fantastic around the world. This is reality. Responsibility. Facing consequences. I start looking at Coronado in a new way. This, I guess, is where I am going to grow up.

I get back, and Frankie’s in a pair of my jeans, a white T-shirt, with a big white towel wrapped around his head. As soon as the cheeseburgers come out, he wolfs them down, as though they’re the first real meal for weeks. Lita and I look at each other. We know what we feel: guilt.

Frank is suddenly tired. He falls asleep right here on the sofa. We arrange for a cot to be brought up. When we wake him, it’s with difficulty. He reaches out and touches his mother’s hair, as though he’s trying to believe it’s real. That she’s here. When he falls asleep on the camp bed, it is right out, with deep, large breaths, like this was the first unguarded night he can remember.

We look at him. Guilt falls like a guillotine. We see it in each other’s eyes. How could we have let this poor boy suffer this life so long? We’re all shattered. We know we should have done something, ended our overseas odyssey years earlier. Not retreated to “Well, he’s a grown boy.” “He has the whole family around him.” We should have believed what we didn’t want to believe before the rot set in. Something more, whether because of drugs or perhaps childhood fevers, has been wrong with Frankie. We tried to minimize it to make room for our life. This kind of guilt there’s no medicine for.

The irony is that we have been spending much of the last few years looking at, documenting, suffering on the Thai-Cambodia border, and inside Cambodia, and in the Sudan and other parts of North Africa. Emaciated bodies, kids suffering brain damage from malnutrition or the trauma of war or both. None of that’s new or unfamiliar to us. We’ve recorded shattered lives, Lita with her children’s anthropology kits, me with my stories, trying to get people to understand how deep the trauma can go, particularly in young people. We’ve seen babies implode from the sheer stress of their first year on this planet, teenagers stuck in time warps, unable to return to the present because of the horrors they've seen or contributed to. And yet here, under our very noses, a grown son regressing to an almost wild stale — in California. Richest, most civilized place on earth.

It’s several days later, eating a brunch at La Avenida, that Frankie starts speaking. He’s still wearing a turban. Nothing will make him show his exposed, shaven head to the world. At first we think it’s because of his shame at having it shorn by the deputies (they said it was because it was so matted and dirty it posed a health hazard). But even this early on, we realize there’s something much closer to home involved in wearing the turban, something about protecting his poor wounded head, his threatened mind.

As usual Frank is ravenous. His six-foot-five frame is down to 140 pounds. He’s just finished his second big orange juice in silence when, like a log jam that suddenly clears itself, words start tumbling out, as though he were picking up a conversation we’d been having five minutes or five years ago. Words come tumbling out. Half Thai, half English, like words sprinkling from a bilingual dictionary being shaken at the spine.

“Hai kofai Ion, mat mee alat kap... I know, I know, I know... Hey, we got ways, kin ahan gang kai krap?... Small world... Hey, Dune! Yeah, buddy, I worked on submarines..*. Cold? I’ll show you cold... The dihedral square on the hypotenuse and time-space elements in jazz...” Word-salads race out as if he wanted to get them away before they evaporated inside his head

All I can think to do is encourage him. I talk back to him’as though he’s just said something perfectly reasonable. “That’s a sentence,” he says.

“Subject, verb, object. A sentence.”

Two yuppie couples about Frank’s age, dressed in summer whites, start giggling. They’re looking at Frank astonished, with no disguise. They can’t control themselves. Their laughs snort out.

They’re waiting for the next act. In a flash, Lita has turned and whips them with her tongue. “How dare you make fun of my son. Can’t you see he has a condition that could hit any one of you? He had fevers, temperatures — 108 — as a baby. He has had some kind of trauma. He is a brilliant musician, but this neurological condition has hit him.

This could happen to you just as easily. Don’t you have any compassion? Or do you believe in some fascist world order where only the perfect, the beautiful, like you have a right to exist?”

She doesn’t care who hears. I can see she’s fighting back the tears. Frank sits straight up. I give the group a dirty look then start talking on with Frank as though everything were normal. We’re late to his aid, but we’re here. It’s going to be quite a battle, I can see.

AS I SAY, IT WASN’T THAT the whole situation was a total shock. We’d known, from London, that Frankie was having trouble. Something had happened in Scotland, when he went ahead of Van Winkle to set up play dates for them. Something happened so bad that he flew home, with the help of his brothers and sisters. He went to live with his dad in Imperial Beach. But it all fell apart. Frankie seemed to grow sloppy in his habits, didn’t help around the house, only occasionally had jobs. He took to hanging around the Imperial Beach pier, apparently smoking dope and mixing with dealers. He didn’t pursue music or studies. His drive seemed to collapse. His father saw the behavior as laziness, pure and simple, and finally kicked him out.

That’s when Frank started living on the beach, just beyond the two rock jetties north of the pier. He made himself a dip in the big sand hill there, just behind the fence of the Navy circular antenna. He would lay some plastic down, collect driftwood, start a small fire, heat up some beans he’d periodically steal by climbing into his father’s house through the bathroom window, in the afternoons (when he knew the old man would be out drinking at the Fleet Reserve), eat them, then sleep in his sleeping bag. Just him, the beach, seagulls, occasional clumps of illegal aliens walking northward, the crashing waves, the moving stars, and when he closed his eyes, a bunch of not-so-welcome memories.

When we got wind of this, we started sending Frank money and urged him to find an apartment. But he was beyond the telephone. He’d pick up the money all right, spend it, probably a lot of it on marijuana and the pills doing the rounds, and catch fish during the day.

But things went downhill. The Navy Shore Patrol told him he couldn't stay there. The sheriff's deputies were hassling him. Checking him for drugs. It was rumored local town fathers encouraged kids to stick broken glass in the sand where Frank slept to get him off the beach. His dad caught him stealing cans of beans. Two weeks later, local police arrested him and dumped him in CMH, County Mental Health hospital in Hillcrest. He left there when he refused to take the medication they were sticking in him. He was back on the beach.

After our first few days back, one of Lita’s friends, Fran Brown, suggests a doctor for Frankie, a local psychiatrist named T.R. Robertson. Two other doctors have already advised us to get him back to England. “People are more tolerant of...eccentrics over there,” they both said. “Here, things can be tough if you’re abnormal.”

T.R., as we came to know him, turned out to be a no-nonsense guy, an ex-Army psychologist known to be one of their tougher characters. “There is no easy cure for Frank. He has brain damage. I’m not sure what from, but this is going to be a long haul. It’ll probably ruin you financially, and even then I don’t know if it will be worth it. You’ve got to be prepared to hang in with Frank. There are no shortcuts.”

IT’S 1:00 P.M. ON A FRIDAY, late September 1983. City College, room 201. Mr. John Callaghan stands in front of the class. American History 101. “Okay, so why did the French — apart from loving our revolution — want to be so helpful to us?”

Frank and I sit in the back row. Fact is, I can’t get a green card until we prove I won’t become a burden on the State of California, and by now we realize there’s no way we can get Frank to England. So Lita has gone to work in a fashion store in the basement of the Hotel Del to boost our rapidly shrinking funds, while Frank and I have become sort of student buddies when I’m not trying to sell features to overseas mags. I’m coming with him every day to take courses. Frank, of course, insists on covering his head with a turban, wearing dark glasses, wearing thick clothes despite the warm weather.

More than a few jocks look and say, “What is that?” I get used to giving the dirty look, but it doesn’t stop much. So in solidarity I’ve taken to wearing a turban too. Hey, if it’s good enough for six million Sikhs.... But we always sit in the back because Frank often wants to pop out and have a cigarette and also doesn’t feel so exposed to all these “straights.”

But the funny thing is, when Callaghan asks these questions, Frank is always eager to put his hand up. “Yes, Frank?” says Callaghan, a solid, nervous, humorously quirky man.

“Uh, the French...they didn’t like the British, so if they could, like, cause trouble for them in America, like, I’ve had trouble with my four-part harmonics...and the mathematical delusions of the tempo.”

“Yes, yes, yes, Frank. You got it right up at the start.’

Callaghan knows Frank by now. If he lets him go on, he’ll trail off into parts unknown to all but Frank. Yet he has discovered Frank has an unerring memory for facts and dates, if he can just cut away the great wads of dross that accompany each speech. Callaghan is one of the great teachers at City College. Nothing is said, but he sees Frank trying, struggling. He looks out for Frank. And because of him the class knows that tolerance is the order of the day.

Kate Hansen, a teacher in Frank’s oral communications class, is another. She doesn’t let Frank off the hook. Every member of the class has to give a Five-minute speech. Frank stews over this. For weeks. This is when I realize that he realizes his problem. He’s not like a mentally ill person who isn’t aware he has a problem. Frank sees himself trapped behind a thought delivery-system that won’t deliver, that keeps slipping its record groove back into thoughts that simmered during all those non-communicating months on the beach.

“Frank," says Kate. “Just talk about what you know. What things do you know about?”

Frank thinks. “Uh, music, the beach.”

“Fine. Choose one of those. Either would be fine.”

So Frank decides to speak about the beach. He even goes down the day before and collects a few artifacts. “I want to talk about the beach,” he opens, finally, to maybe 25 in the class. Frank has refused to rehearse this with me beforehand. He seems to feel once it’s out, it is gone. He won’t be able to repeat it.

“There are 40 miles of beaches in San Diego County. The part I know, just by.the Navy radio antenna at I.B., has lots of seagulls, and sometimes if you lie there in the morning, you can see the dolphins traveling south. I even saw a couple of whale tails out there. And late at night, when you lie in your sleeping bag and look up, you can see shooting stars, and Orion’s belt moving across the sky, and if it rains, you’ve got to run for the phone box or the YMCA toilet block. And sometimes at high tide, you’re wakened up by waves coming right up your sand dune.”

People are beginning to realize this guy has not just been out camping one night. Frank has been living there.... You can feel a frisson run through. For me it’s the eloquence. He hasn’t descended into word-salads. There are silences where he’s ordering his brain to stay on track, but then he’s off again. Talking about the weather, the birds, the pier washing away in a storm, the police, the illegals.

“And I’d like to pass around these exhibits. They’re stones and shells I’ve picked up at my part of the beach....” Frank brings out some stones with fossils and some shells.

And when the applause rings out at the end, Frank beams. Beams shyly. This hasn’t happened in a long, long time. It’s not the wild cheering of a Van Winkle crowd. It’s better. All of the suffering and tension and anger seem to disappear from his face.

“Say, Mr. Manson,” he says after class. As usual, we’re in the B Street Burger King, munching on burgers. “Yes, Mr. Foss,” I say. We for some reason call each other by second names only. It’s a kind of mock-respect that denotes a real respect that we developed in England. Now it’s second nature. First names are only for moments of great stress or great sentiment. “Why don’t we go someplace. I haven’t been out of this town for years.”

ITS THE BEGINNING OF OUR “Travels of Don Quixote” period, with Frank as the tall, aristocratic, eccentric Don and me as his short, fat, nondescript Sancho Panza. But that first trip is disastrous. We catch the Greyhound out of downtown, bound for Anaheim. Just because that’s about as far as we can afford. We’re not thinking Disneyland. We’re just thinking “get as far out of town as possible.” For Frank it has something to do with escaping all those people who give him a hard time. All the surroundings that remind him, increasingly as bits of his consciousness resurface, of the bitterness of the “rejection years.”

The Greyhound gets to El Cajon. It stops at its depot. Frank has been speaking loudly about “rednecks” and “swabs” and “jar-heads” in the bus, like he was the attack dog of the hippie movement. Something about having a lot of people near him turns him on. He wants to dare these people to get mad. Heads have been turning in the close environment. I’m glad to get out with him.

Two guys are sitting on the concrete bench. Frank sits beside them. “You from San Diego?” I hear one of them say to him as he lights up. According to beach protocol, Frank doesn’t refuse when they bum cigarettes off him. “Well,” he says, “I’ve been everywhere, mon. I was in Vee-yet-nam. Laos, Vientiane, Bangkok, my dad, he was with the state department. I flew with him down the Mekong River. We got shot at. He was state. He wasn’t no swab.” I leave them, get the Pepsis, come back. The two guys have gone. Frank is still talking. “They sure didn’t put up with no hippie scum in Vee-yet-nam. No siree.” Frank’s drawling up his best I.B. beach talk, never mind that his hair is hippie-long again. “Not with all them swabs and...but you know what he did? You know what that limey geezer did? He hurled me out of that house. His own son. landed up on the beach...CMH. Hey, buddy. I’m going to sue their goddamned pants off! I have a lawyer. He’s going to...we have ways... Commie bastards... Gotta watch out for those dealer boys, give you mucho trouble. Any jarheads around here? Get a life, boy!”

“You think we should go back, Frank?”

“I’m not feeling too good, Mr. Manson. Don’t know this place. Where’s...home?”

SEPTEMBER 1986: Frank is with me in the back of Ria’s car. Ria’s his younger sister. Lita’s up front with Ria. This is the Big Experiment. We’re on our way to Sharp Hospital. We’ve been more and more worried about Frank having no friends. He doesn’t seek them, of course. The loner thing goes back before his crisis. But we keep thinking, if he only had others who were going through the same sort of thing he is, it would help him.

His only friends, we suspect — though he is very private about this — are the bums he meets down at the I.B. pier, people who have marijuana to sell, who accept the likes of Frank because whatever his idiosyncrasies, he’s one of them. They’re outside the net too. They have the 70s lingo that oils communications. They know what sleeping on the beach is. They know every sheriff s deputy by name and every undercover car license plate. Every second day, that’s where Frank goes. By bus, hitchhiking. Gotta get down there. But that’s it.

Now there’s no thought of seeking out other musicians, of making music. He doesn’t even want to hear the tape of the 40-minute electric guitar “solo symphony” he wrote and performed and recorded in Ireland, called “Fire and Diamonds,” or another called “Pinwheels.” His Stratocaster sits either in his closet or, when we’re all going through particularly hard times, in the I.B. hock shop, along with my electric piano, assorted watches, and a couple of amps. His Strat always brings $100, because it was the last model made here in the States, before the company went offshore.

Then we hear about the San Diego Head Injury Foundation. They have meetings Wednesday nights, in a hospital meeting room. Frank is, unexpectedly, keen as mustard to go.

We all go in, to this brightly lit white room, with parents or companions looking worried and protective and trying to be bright, with one weather eye on their wards. But once we’re inside, the head-injured are separated from the parents and partners and herded into a room opposite. Such wonderful, bright-looking kids, mostly. One particularly striking teenage girl, perhaps 17, leads a bunch into the room. They all look excited and hope-filled and perfectly normal, except for one thing. Most of them have hats. Outrageous hats. Turbans. Protecting the wounded limb, the head. Frank is taller than any of them, but his wool hat is suddenly just another hat in a room of hats. It is the norm. I take a great gulp of hope.

We parents and spouses wave and shuffle into another meeting room, take paper cups of coffee, and with the door dosed, start talking about our problems.

A moderator gets things going, trying to set the tone for an upbeat atmosphere. There are jokes about the kind of hats their kids insist on wearing. “You’re lucky,” says one aging mom. “My son insists on wearing his motorcycle helmet everywhere. To bed even!” The laughter is one of pain and understanding.

It soon becomes apparent that many parents have been ruined financially trying to care for loved ones who, mainly, have been in car and bike accidents and are no longer the whole people they were. A lot of anger bubbles just beneath the surface. And a lot of pain. I find my own bile rising as people speak out about the impossibility of their situations. Getting too old to care for kids they love and suffer for but who, now, will never grow up, will drain away all the money they have, and worst, will never be what they once were: the hope of their parents’ lives.

Some of the head-injury statistics come out. They’re horrifying. One in four street people have some form of brain damage. Someone receives a head injury every 15 seconds in the U.S. Conservative estimates claim over two million individuals suffer a traumatic brain injury each year. Most survivors are between 15 and 24 years of age. Head injury costs the nation $25 billion per year. Hospital stays for a severe head-injury victim average 45 to 60 days and cost $324,000. Post-hospital rehabilitation services cost around $ 125,000 per year. For an individual, the lifetime costs for care of a head-injury survivor are estimated at between $4.1 million and $9 million.

Lita talks about Frank, mainly because Frank seems to be the only one here with neurological as opposed to head-trauma problems. She starts tentatively, but like a volcano that breaks through a cold lid of magma, suddenly a billion things coming out, and the more she talks, the more it’s about the Frank she has lost. About how Frank had been at music college, about how the Korean ambassador had complimented young Frank on his and his siblings' “perfect manners” at table aboard the SS Constitution on their way to Asia, how Frank had helped out changing the diapers of Mongoloid babies at the Abandoned Children’s Ward in the Women’s Hospital in Bangkok. How CBS had wanted to do a documentary about him. About how he had been fat when he was young and laughed at by other kids, until he pitched a no-hitter in Little league and was never laughed at again. This lady I love, who has seen so much trauma in her work in the field and considered herself a tough guy when it came to such stuff, suddenly faces emotions she has bottled up for years. I hold her hand. It doesn’t slow the torrent.

“This is the thing,” says the moderator. “The most difficult thing. The need to grieve for the child you have lost. You must take time to do this. The one that is never going to come back. That person has died. What you have now is another person. It is very important to go through that grieving process so you can learn to live with your new son and not try to make him into the one you remember. That is too hard on you. And on him.”

As the meeting wraps up, sounds of commotion come across the hallway. The door opposite bursts open and young people dash out. Some in tears. We look inside. Frank is one of the few remaining. “Crazy,” he says. Turns out one young man has been insisting on reaching into girls’ bosoms. And the beautiful young girl had gone around lifting her skirts, bending over, rubbing up against men, desperate to have sex then and there, her libido apparently de-inhibited by the frontal brain damage she suffered in a car collision.

“I’m never coming back here,” Frank says.

AND HE DOESN'T. Wild horses won’t get him back. So Frank and I try the traveling gig instead. We try Anaheim again, and this time we make it. Up to the Golden Palms motel, and from there, straight to the Bandstand disco, down past Disneyland, near the railroad tracks. The place is humming, and we wait in line outside. Of course, it is all suave kids with shiny shoes and slick-back hair and the predictable looks askance at us. We’re dressed in jeans and shirts, and, inevitably, Frank’s woolly hat, which he has pulled right down, here on a summer’s night. But inside it’s big and anonymous enough. Five different dance floors. Frank’s too shy to dance, of course, even when a couple of girls come up and say, “Hey, big boy, how’s the weather up there. How about a dance?”

We have a couple of beers, listen to the music, and leave. Not all a loss. At least we’re back in the world here. We walk the two long blocks over the railroad bridge to Crackers, another place we spotted on the way in, a kind of balconied Wild West saloon, with the waitresses and waiters taking turns onstage to sing and dance. Sawdust floor, beers, rowdy crowds. Great. Just enough life for Frank to feel part of the action and not the center of attention.

Then it’s back to the Golden Palms and to our beds, up on one elbow, looking out the window, watching the midnight fireworks display shooting up behind the Matterhorn. “Wow,” says Frank. This is the best moment of all. Something about it takes him back to childhood, and he’s as relaxed and rational and open as he ever was. We turn out our lights and roll over in our beds in the dark.

“Good night, Mr. Manson.”

“Good night, Mr. Foss.”

“Hey, those go-go girls were some sexy babes. When are we coming back?”

“Soon as we get some money together. Soon as I write my bestseller. Then we’ll come up by limo, dude, and stay at the Disneyland Hotel.”

“Hey, dude. Uh, that’s okay. This place is better. Don’t have all those stuck-up people checking you out. Man, can’t wait for breakfast. Let’s go to that Swiss place. I’ll have one of those gnarly omelets with ham and chorizo and green peppers and Swiss cheese.”

BUT TIJUANA SOON TOOK OVER as the spa of preference. It started when Lita’s pop came down from Fresno. He was bilingual, English-Spanish. And the Spanish he spoke was the old settler lingo that was slow and dignified and used almost extinct words.

Frank and he and I went down one Sunday afternoon. To see the two of them together, both tall, dignified, you realized these were people who should command armies. Whose ancestors did command armies. All of a sudden, Frankie looked part of something.

Pop took us to a fish restaurant near the jai alai, and we ate fairly formally. I noticed that he inquired, in Spanish, about the Johnson Ranch, which once had straddled the border. He had known Tijuana before the war and after it, when the likes of Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan came down to gamble and follow the nags. He was disappointed to see that Plaza Arguello — Arguello was his forebear— had been changed to Plaza Santa Cecilia.

The only time he let his hair down was when he suddenly decided we three should have our picture taken on a striped donkey at Sixth and Revolucibn. The picture of the three of us, black and white, now has pride of place in Frankie’s apartment.

The things that Frankie loved about TJ were, one, everybody wore hats of some kind; two, gringos were assumed to be a little crazy; and three, language difficulties were expected. Frankie could get all tied up, and it was just part of the gringo thing. And four, any “senorita babes,” as Frank called them, who came to have you buy them a drink in the bars, would be pleased to see you. They’d smile. They’d make an effort. You felt welcome. Soon, when Frankie’s large frame darkened the doors of places like Coco’s or the Molino Rojo, screams went up, and Frank’s face would light up like a jack-o’-lantern.

The perfection-only intolerance of San Diego bars melted away, and for a couple of hours, good cheers and a couple of beers would bring this boy back into society, for chrissakes. And the more the ladies laughed with him, the more Frankie relaxed and became something like his old self.

Soon bullfights became the thing. We fell in with the lovely elderly ladies of the Club Taurino de Chula Vista. Kay Scott and Inis Hazelton embraced Frankie, took us both along, and seemed to know everyone from the matador David Silveti to the owner of the ring to the venerated Senor Hurtado, who had carried a Wild West-style pistol since his days riding with Pancho Villa. I introduced Frank as one of the Arguello family. That immediately got him respect. He accepted the role with grace. After one bullfight, we went to a paella place where the owner, a refugee from Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, caught the spirit and sang unaccompanied Gypsy dirges. Frankie was suddenly interested in the semi- and demi-semi tones of the Gypsy scale. He was talking about music again. The wine, the music, the acceptance, above all, the politeness. I suggested seriously to Lita that we move south of the border permanently.

BUT THE REALITY OF LIFE WAS SCHOOL, money, going to I.B., seeing Doc Robertson, going to Social Security, going to housing offices, looking, trying to hook into a system designed to help people with visible disabilities. Not the kind whose problems were in their cerebellums.

All the action seemed to help Frank. The first sign of progress was his saying to me one new-term morning, “Uh, that’s okay. I can do this class on my own,” politely but firmly. I felt like the father whose daughter doesn’t want him to dance with her anymore. But it was just as well, because I was trying to restart my badly damaged writing career.

Despite the progress, as we tried to sign Frank on with various agencies, our biggest problem came down to one thing: Frank refused to admit that he was disabled. He blamed a childhood fracture in his arm for everything. It took years to realize this was a kind of metaphor for a wound that was not otherwise visible.

The biggest leap forward came when Frank announced he needed more space. He was becoming sick of staying in such close quarters with his ma and me. So we started looking and walked slap-bang into California’s admirable pro-victim laws.

“Things that Have Been Done to Find a Place for Frank” (a list written up by Lita)

1. Father Joe Carroll of St. Vincent de Paul. Warned against Frank settling in downtown San Diego. Would be “eaten alive” once it was discovered he was receiving SSI — i.e. protection money, shake-downs, etc. Victim situation rampant within his own shelter. SVdeP Society trying to contain. Sugg, call Sister Maxine Kramer of El Cajon.
2. George McNeely, Disabled Center of San Diego, University Ave. Little they can offer because of the nature of Frank’s disability and his refusal to admit that he is disabled. Board-and-care not always the best since it could add to Frank’s emotional problems.
3. Ken Mayers, City College Disabled Center. Little they can do or offer without Frank’s admitting that he is disabled. Has, however, alerted Frank’s teachers.
4. Sister Jennings, “Noah House,” La Mesa/Spring Valley: Frank does not qualify, because does not have “learning disability,” e.g., Down syndrome.
5. Father Claude, Benedictine Abbey, Oceanside. The abbey is no longer allowed by the state to shelter people like Frank who “fall through the net.”
6. Head Injury Foundation. Trying to find ways to help people like Frank. No accommodation.

Then the very idea of Frank living alone, with his absentmindedness and memory lapses, had us writing worry lists to ourselves. REAL WORRIES: Keeping himself and his apartment clean: being alone too much: too much extra time on his hands; cooking with gas, remembering to turn it off, etc.; eating properly; taking his medication.

In the end we did it anyway. But only after contacting the San Diego County Housing Authority and caring people like Doug Colmenic and Debbie Lewis, who became Frankie's dreaded housing officers. Dr. Robertson set things in motion by certifying that Frank indeed had “neurological damage.” It took six months, but the wheels of bureaucracy did start turning. My view of the state and its much-maligned social agencies made a U-turn. These people were helping us put a man’s life back on track, as far as that is possible. This is the tribe helping its members. This makes me almost happy to pay taxes.

We figured Frank should stay in Coronado. It has the image of a fat-cat admirals’ playground, and yet it has a friendly smalltown feel and a big mix of housing. In with the $3000-a-month rents are some that are downtown boarding house prices, $400, sometimes less. It also has quite a reputation. Frank is not the only eccentric sequestered in its alley houses and pseudo-Egyptian studios and Moorish apartment houses. Artists, opera singers, rich kids still surfing at 55, poor kids working in the Hotel Del’s night cleaning department, they’re all here. It was a big step forward, the day he moved into his first place. Now, all we had to worry about was that he kept it up for his Annual recertification. Each fall would come the most dreaded day of the year.

SEPTEMBER 1989, Panic on Fourth Avenue: I’m wobbling down Orange Avenue at 6:00 in the morning on a bike loaded down with brooms and mops and Comet, a Hoover and hammers and rags and paintbrushes and cans of paint. It has been about three months since I’ve been in Frank’s place. I know by now what to expect.

“We’ll do it in half an hour, no problems,” says Frank, smoking on his porch. Uh-huh. That’s why I have turned up so early. Mrs. Lewis is due at 1:00 p.m. We start off with the garbage. Four huge black plastic bags. The ashtrays, three months full, the kitchen sink, plugged, the, uh, roach problem, the bathroom steam problem. It has been getting away from him. I suddenly think of his exasperated dad. But this is part of Frank’s neurological problem, I’m told. So today, on the day of days, when a roof over the head for the next 12 months is at stake, we're both sweating like pigs, dusting, washing, wiping, cleaning out the old curled sausage in the fridge, putting new bags in the Hoover.

Come midday, Frank and I have discovered that a leak in one of the bathroom pipes has rotted two of the floorboards. “Oh, God. What can we do about this?” Frank has sunk his heel through one of them, all the way into the dirt below. The inspection list is clear. “#9. There must be no plumbing leaks or plugged drains.... #15. There should not be any tears or holes in the carpet that may cause someone to fall." This is a bump in the carpet with a hole underneath.

We go on a wild search for wood. I have a saw. We hack, hammer, screw, plane, and just before one, have solid timber beneath our feet. We have one last-minute panic, getting all the garbage bags out and down to the curbside bins, when Mrs. Lewis drives up. “Hi, Frank. You look relaxed.”

“H-H-Hi, Mrs. Lewis. Nice day. This is my stepdad.”

OF COURSE, WHEN HE PASSES THE INSPECTION, we have to celebrate. This is perhaps the best day in Frank’s calendar. The fear of being sent back to the “briar patch” seems ever-present. But now he knows he won’t have to go back to the beach for at least another year.

So, because I’ve just had a check come in from a story, we decide to take the Greyhound east, to Calexico. It’s on me. “Go," says Lita. She knows it gives Frankie a boost. “Just stay in touch. Stay together.” By nightfall, we’re across the border and downing 504 beers in the Bar Negro, part of a marvelously louche old hotel that costs $5 for a room. We check in, then come down to the street jungle to celebrate. We have a second beer and listen to two mariachis play the song Frankie always asks for, “Cielito I.indo.” Then we’re up the road in a red-and-brown place also called Bar Negro having a third beer. A jukebox is in full swing, playing ranchero music. Cowboys are doing wild quebradita moves with their partners on the small wooden space beside the bar. Frankie says he needs some air. He steps outside for a moment.

I wait. Five minutes go by. I get up and go outside. No sign of Frankie. I come back in, order a Coke this time, and wait. Half an hour later I’m outside, asking people if they have seen a tall man, gringo, walking around here. I walk around the block. I walk back to the first Bar Negro. No sign. I return to the second Bar Negro. He hasn’t come back.

Now I’m starting to feel sick with worry. What if he has had some turn? Has lost his memory, sense of his surroundings? I was an idiot to let us separate. Maybe he’s been rolled. Soon everybody recognizes me as I trample back and forth in ever-wider sweeps. “No, still haven’t seen him,” says the little old lady dispensing beer at the second Bar Negro.

By 2:30 in the morning they’re saying, “Why don’t you call the police. Maybe he was caught in a sweep. Maybe he’s in the town jail.” So I do. I speak my best Spanish to the desk officer, who gives me another number for his chief. The chief says no Americans have been arrested or brought in tonight. But they’ll keep an eye out for him.

It’s 4:30 a.m. Stone cold sober and scared stupid. A constant drum beats in my gut. I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to say to Lita when I have to telephone her in a couple of hours. By now I’m as well known by the night denizens as every regular prostitute on the corners.

I check in at our hotel one more time. The whole floor is one big space divided into small cubicles, so the entire floor’s sounds hum everywhere. All around me, creaks, sudden laughs, grunts, and an occasional shriek puncture the murmurs of conversation that dampen the music coming up from the Bar Negro below. The cubicles, I realize, are for ladies of the night to ply their trade. Christ, I think, what sort of a stepfather am I, bringing a young man in a vulnerable emotional state at the best of times and letting him get lost, maybe abducted down here among the seediest of the seedy?

I make one more hopeless foray into Bar Negro #1 and am just coming out, deciding I’ll cross the border and see if police there might have spotted him, when a blue state judicial police car sweeps up to the corn-cart-crowded curb. Two cops jump out. I suddenly wonder if they have news. Are they coming to tell me they’ve found Frankie?

Instead they come right up to me, turn me round, throw me against the car, spread-eagle me, pat me up and down, look at my wallet, ask for ID, tell me to get in the back. They slam their front doors shut and roar off up the street.

“I was searching for my stepson,” I say. “Tall, gringo, bandanna around his head.”

“What are you doing here?” says one of the policemen.

“We were visiting,” I say. “We got separated."

“What were you doing in that bar? Buying drugs?”

At this moment the driver swings a hard right down a broad street, then a hard left into an alley. A dark alley. Halfway up, we come to a stop. Engine off. Lights doused.

Now I’m cursing Frank. Goddammit, if you hadn’t wandered off, I wouldn’t be about to get beaten up here. At the same time I’m calling forth every lesson I can remember from Sr. Garcia, who for two years dealt patiently with every attempt I made to learn Spanish without having to actually work at it.

“I’m a journalist,” I say in Spanish. “I write for the L.A. Times. ’’True at the time. I sold features to them. “I am writing a story about Mexicali, and my...experiences here." The idea hasn’t crossed my mind till now. Now it crosses my mind like a lifeboat trailing a rescue rope. I haul out a notebook I always carry.

“Periodista. ”

They seem to be thinking about it. “Identification?” I haul out my “Bill Manson, Freelance Journalist” card. God! I wish I had some impressive logo at this moment.

The two scan the card. Then the smaller cop says. “Okay. Go.”

“Go?”

“Good-bye, senor. Be careful at this time of night."

“Uh, you didn’t see a tall gringo, then?”

They shake their heads. It is not wise to dally. I am out. I am walking back toward the light in the alley, listening for any sudden reverse of the car. I don’t dare check my wallet till I’m out in the main street and around a corner. I unfold it. Money’s gone. Twenty-some bucks. Quite a smooth operation, fellas.

I decide I’ll have to wait for light to continue my search for Frankie. Perhaps he’s at the hold. Yet the cubicle is untouched. I lie down, listening to the business of drunken sex, feeling like I’m in the middle of a pod of whales, as their whistles and judders fill the last of the night.

An hour later, as the day dawns, I tell the lush-lipped, tired-eyed woman guarding the hotel entrance that I’m going to the plaza near the border, and if my tall gringo friend comes, tell him not to leave. I’ll be back. She nods.

At the plaza, 6:30 a.m., someone comes up to me and offers to be my guide around Mexicali. Juan. No guide, I say, but perhaps he could ask around to see if anyone saw my stepson. “I’m going across the border to get some money from the ATM machine and I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” he says. “And I’ll call my friend at the police station."

I cross over, worried to heck, cursing myself, trying to figure out this Frankie thing. I think back to the bright-eyed little boy in Bangkok who lent me all his records so I could keep up the ferang — expatriate — side of my bicultural radio show. I think of Frankie flying round Laos with his dad,

I think of the bright hopes, even envy on my part, I guess, at the brilliant sounds he was making with his music composition in Ireland and with a future maybe rivaling U-2 that Van Winkle seemed to promise. Then the sudden transformation to washed-out soul on an I.B. beach, the man, now my age when I was in Bangkok, blown away. Mumbling Thai. Some stepfather. Some life. I guess we’ve all come down in the world a little.

I’m through the tunnel, in America, inching toward a U.S. phone outside a Burger King. I know I have to tell Lita about...the problem. I mean, Frank’s a big boy. The guy probably just got lost, except maybe he got lost inside his head first, then outside.

I decide to go to the ATM first. It works, thank God. I withdraw $20. Then I decide to go back once more and see if this guy Juan by any chance has found Frank. I cross back through the gates, alone in this direction. Everybody’s coming north to work and shop at this hour. I come out of the tunnel. The sun is warming up the plaza. “Senor! Over here. Over here!"

I see Juan the guide coming back into the plaza. Behind him is...a big, six-five character lunging forward, grinning away. I feel almost like doing a slo-mo run, like in the movies.

“Where the hell were you?”

“I walked out of the bar,” says Frankie, “and then I couldn’t remember which door it was. I started walking. I got clear to the end of town. Goddam! Then I lay down in a ditch and fell asleep. Then I got a hitch back to town. But that must have been hours later.”

I mean, Frank’s a grown man. I try not to get all ducky about the kid. But I realize how much he has grown a part of me. How much I love him. How much he’s the one running this show. He’s the tail wagging the dog. All these multifarious adventures I’m having — it’s thanks to Frank.

Juan had called the cops — no news — then started looking near the Bar Negro and found Frank still trying to get his bearings.

Juan offers again to show us around sunny Mexicali. But Frank wants a Burger King breakfast, so, hey, right now he gets whatever he wants. I slip Juan the latest $20 bill with a lot of thank-yous, and we go back to America and its burgers. Gunge never tasted so good.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH FRANK? I asked T.R., Doctor Robertson, who’s become a pretty good friend over these dozen years he’s been treating Frank, giving him a medicine, Prolixin, and talking with him once a month. Even so, he wouldn’t say a thing to me without Frank giving his permission. His written permission, which Frank gladly did.

Robertson sips his Heineken beer. I’m sipping my Eureka ale. We’re both crunching black bean chili chips.

“Frank — I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Whatever’s wrong with him is atypical. Atypical psychotic disorganization. I think it’s organic, and it’s due to some damage in the brain to which he had a predisposition. When I first saw him, I would say he had a ‘psychosis not elsewhere classified.’ If he’d stayed on his course, he’d have been dead now. Sleeping on the beach and taking dope. I think Frank took a chemical lick to the head of some sort. I think in his case, drugs played a major role in what the problem is. Only we don’t know that.”

In the old-days, someone like Frank who had lost the ability to talk, Robertson says, would have been assigned to the back ward of an institution, to while away his days, trouble free, challenge free for life.

So has his decade of effort with Frankie been worth it? Would he do it again?

The human contact of patient and doctor, Robertson says, is vital. “The autistic child doesn’t dare to come out of his little cocoon. So the trick with somebody like Frank, who had also withdrawn into himself, the most important part, is establishing some kind of contact with them.

“Of course, I was 45 back then [when he took on Frank in 1983]. Young enough to still undertake somebody like Frank. And now I’m not. You can only have a few of those kinds of patients in your life. Everybody knows that doctors, psychiatrists, as they get older, get worse and worse at treating really psychotic people because they give up. They realize how much trouble it is and how little you actually get. If you look at Frank, he’s still not quite ready to be the chairman of the board of General Motors. He has some social skill problems. He’s a lot better than he was, but look at the investment. In time and everything else.”

Robertson says — especially under managed care — many younger psychiatrists prefer “the 2-cent treatment to 50 instead of the 50-cent treatment to 2. Let people like Frank go and just bomb them with medication. Large doses of Haledon and Prolixin so they don’t have a life, they wander through it like zombies. This is where you need to question the balance between psychopharmacology and chemical restraint. Frank at least has a kind of a life. “They say it’s not cost effective. What are you going to do?

Have the doctor sit there and talk to this guy for 45 minutes for ten years? It’s much more cost effective to just make it so that he doesn’t cause any trouble.

“I heard this guy, this doctor I knew, he said he didn’t want to spend the time that was not cost effective for him talking to a patient. One, he wasn’t very good at it and didn’t have a feel for it. He didn’t like dogs; that’s always a clue, by the way. So he would approach a patient like this: Patient comes in, he says, 'Wait, wait, wait. Before you tell me this story, do you want to go through all this bullshit or do you just want to feel better?’ And the patient will say, ‘Oh, jeez, I want to feel better.’ ‘Good. I’m going to give you these medications. Come back in a week and I’ll see if you feel better, and if you don’t, we’ll change it or increase it, or add something to it.’

“His deal was cost efficiency and seeing the greatest number of patients in a given amount of time. Two-cent treatment, but it cost the patient a lot more, of course.”

I take one more glug at my Eureka. “So what’s Frankie’s future?”

“I don’t know how to be honest about this,” Robertson says. “See, even if you spend a lot of time and a lot of effort and skill, with certain types of patients the outcome continues to be not very good. And at best is minimal. Let’s look at Frank. He’s better than he was. But he’s not going to be fully functional. And this society doesn’t have much room for people like him. Society thinks if you really do a good job, it expects a Clifford Beers. He was one of the old classic psychiatric patients who (made a complete recovery and | wrote this classic book called The Mind That Found Itself.

“Frankie, it’s not complete recovery. He works in a sheltered environment. Maybe that’s about it. And so how many doctors are going to spend a hell of a lot of time and effort getting that result?”

Except “that result” is the Frankie we know and love. Who returns that love. Who “makes contact” like never before. Who, in the last five years, has graduated with an Associate of Arts degree from Mesa College in social sciences (a big occasion that got him speaking out for disabled students on TV), got himself assembly jobs at Gateway Sheltered Industries, and now, for the past five years, a stacking job at the commissary at North Island Naval Air Station that provides company benefits, picnics, a sense of belonging, and money in his pocket.

Robertson might be selling himself — and Frankie — short. The human contact, the authority figure he provides each month, has been the governing wheel in Frankie’s recovery.

These days Frankie is in his third pad in Coronado. He even pays a friend to come over once a week and clean up those things he finds so difficult. She comes with her kids. Family atmosphere is growing around the man for whom family has always been important. Six years ago, when his dad was dying of cancer of the lung and couldn’t speak anymore, Frankie was one of the three family members who went down every day to read to him and make conversation. He’d sit there and talk for hours and read from the paper, until his dad would have to signal him he needed a rest. It was so clear. To Frankie this wasn’t the guy who kicked him out. It was his dad, and he loved him.

Then, last Thanksgiving, Frankie announced he had saved enough money to throw a party for “the family,” us, his brothers and sisters, friends from the job. He had the lot: turkey, ham, the whole fixin’s. And for the first time you could see his siblings saying, “My God, Frankie is coming right after all. Maybe we were wrong about this guy.”

But it was Christmas 1995 that gave us all a twinge of hope we hadn’t dared harbor for years. After the gift-giving around the tree, and with nieces and nephews seated all round, Karen, a sister-in-law, did the impossible. She persuaded Frank to drag his old Stratocaster from the closet, hook up an amp, and, for the first time in nearly 20 years, play that ax. He started off with “The Girl from Ipanema,” then moved onto scales, then, boom! hit the strings with riffs from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” “ ’Scuse me,” everybody yelled, “while I kiss the sky!”

I look across at Lita. It’s a sweet moment, but I see she’s mourning too. She’s thinking of the Frankie she knew last time she heard him play that riff. She’s thinking of that quote by a lady named Isabel Moore that they give you at the Head Injury Foundation: “Life is a one-way street. No matter how many detours you take, none of them leads back. And once you know and accept that, life becomes much simpler. Because then you know you must do the best you can with what you have and what you are and what you have become.”

Me, I can’t help smiling. I too am thinking of that kid in Bangkok strumming an acoustic, that same Jimi Hendrix tune, chord for chord. As usual, Frank leaves the party early. Too much crowd and company still confuse him. It goes without saying I’ll walk back with him. Between us and his place is the local school, and even though it’s Christmas, years of taunts at the tall guy with the woolly hat have left their mark.

That’s okay. We’ll walk, smoke Christmas cigars, and talk, probably of Petunia, the senorita babe from Guadalajara, who always greets him so warmly at the Adelita bar down in TJ.

Afternote

October 13, 2010 — In the years since this article, Frank earned an AA degree at Mesa College, settled into a Section 8 apartment in Coronado, worked with Job Options (a career guidance organization for the disabled), and read voraciously, from Anaïs Nin’s diaries to Carlos Castañeda. He became a fixture in Coronado, and never wanted to leave. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2008. He never complained, and he never gave up smoking. “Need the buzz, dude,” he’d say. He died in January 2009. Coronado’s Sacred Heart Church, where he had been baptized 51 years earlier, was almost full at his funeral.
— Bill Manson