Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (13 page)

“I appreciate that,” Eddie said, “I really do, but—”

“Oh, wait a second,” Jimmy said.
 
“Maybe you can answer this.”
 
He flipped back a few pages in his pad.
 
“Do you know who said, ‘writing about music
is like dancing about architecture?
’”

Eddie thought about it a moment.
 
“I think it was Elvis.”

Jimmy shook his head.
 
“I don’t think so.
 
That’s a
little out of the King’s range.”

“No,” Eddie said, “Costello.
 
But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Hmm, that’s the first time his name’s come up.
 
Megan thinks it was Frank Zappa.”
 
He wrote Elvis Costello’s name under
Zappa’s.
 
“But neither one sounds right
to me.”

Eddie watched Jimmy writing in his notebook until Megan gave
his hand a tender squeeze.
 
When he
looked over, Megan’s violet eyes were all his.
 
And then, subtly, she winked at him.

Jimmy was too involved in his writing to notice.
 
He knew others would come along to write
about Eddie, but Jimmy’s would be the definitive biography.
 
He was the only guy who’d been there from the
start.
 
His would be the only book to
have Eddie’s first speech about ‘
It Wasn’t Supposed To
End That Way.’
 
His imagination started
to run away.
 
Rolling Stone
might preview a few chapters in a feature article,
and from there, who knew what could happen?

“Here you go Eddie.”
 
Jimmy looked up and saw the club’s manager standing by the table holding
out a cassette.
 
“Great set,” he said,
slapping Eddie on the back.

“Is that what I think it is?”
 
Megan reached for the tape.

Eddie pulled it out of reach.
 
“I had ‘em
record
it
off the board,” he said.
 
“I’m sending it
to some publishers and artist managers.”
 
He smiled as he felt one of Megan’s hands dancing lightly on his thigh.
 
“And I’ll make one for you too.”

21.

“Get it girl!” Doreen hollered as she watched Estella bump
and grind to the funky percussion coming from the jukebox.
 
Estella was on the floor dancing to Slim
Harpo’s 1966 hit, ‘Baby Scratch My Back.’
 
Otis was out there with her, clapping his hands as he circled Estella’s
big wiggling planet like a skinny little satellite.
 
His choreography was starchy, his steps
painful and economic due to arthritis.
 
The ache informed his dance resulting in a style that was pure Otis.

Toward the end of the song, Estella lapsed into some final,
frenzied gyrations.
 
“That’s it, that’s
it,” Otis said, backing out of the way until she was done.
 
“Mmmmm-lawd!
 
Yes!
 
Nobody
move
like my sweet baby,” Otis said.

Estella was laughing hard when the song ended.
 
She plopped down at the table next to her old
friends, Doreen and her husband, Maurice.
 
“Child, it’s too hot in here to be dancin’ like that,” Doreen said as
she dabbed at her forehead with a napkin.
 
“I ain’t even movin’ I’m all wet.”

Maurice pushed a cold beer over to Doreen.
 
“Cool on down with that, mama.”
 
He said it like Don Cornelius or something, a
real smoooove operator, sort of Barry White by way of Billy Dee Williams.

Estella picked up a menu and fanned herself.
 
“I’m tellin’ you,” she said.
 
“I know I ain’t dance like that in a long
time.”
 
She laughed and pulled Otis into
her big lap.
 
“But I still got it!”

“Yes, baby, you do,” Otis said, patting Estella’s
substantial thigh.
 
“And you always
will.”
 
He turned around and kissed her
cheek and they both laughed some more.
 
It was nearly four in the morning.
 
There were only three customers left in the joint and they were just
drinking.
 
Otis had closed the kitchen
hours ago and, until he got up to dance to Slim Harpo, he’d been sitting with
Doreen, Maurice, and Estella just talking about the old days.

Maurice started chuckling.
 
“I know you ‘member that show down in Baton
Rouge
.
.
.”
 
He ducked his head and started
giggling so hard he couldn’t finish the sentence.

“You talkin’ about that night the police came backstage and
caught that funny boy playing with hisself
.
. .ooohhh
child!
 
And that
promoter throwin’ a buttonhole on that half-and-half.”
 
Doreen slapped a hand down on the table.
 
“Liked to never stop!”

They all hooted and still acted as shocked as they’d been
when it happened.
 
They were younger
then, by about forty years, and innocent in the ways of a wider world.
 
They had all traveled together while Otis was
having his moment in the sun.
 
Estella
and Doreen were backup singers.
 
Maurice
played tenor sax.
 
He was smoooove back
then too.

“Whatever happened to the man what opened that show?” Doreen
asked.
 
“Great big, fat
mother.”

“Old Chubby Dykes?”

“Yeah, what become of him?”

“He moved back to Georgia
long time ago,” Maurice said.
 
“Sure
could sing.”

“Sure could,” Estella agreed.
 
“I
be
surprised if
he’s still alive though, big as he was.
 
Probably had a heart attack by now.
 
I know he had the high blood.”

“You one to talk,” Doreen said.
 
“And you ain’t done half
a
what
that doctor told you.
 
You
ever quit them cigarettes?”

Estella waved a hand in front of her face.
 
“Lawd, yes, child, I quit.
 
Takes me a mumf to smoke a
pack now.”

“Well that’s good,” Doreen said.
 
She nudged Otis.
 
“You know who I was thinking about the other
day?
 
That white man you used to run
with.”

“Who you talkin’ about?”
 
Otis took off his beret and wiped his
glistening head.

“You know, played guitar on Ray Charles’ country records,
you know, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ and them.
 
He had a couple sides of his own got pretty big.”

Otis nodded.
 
His face
creased, all serious.
 
“You talkin’ ‘bout
Chester Grubbs,” he said.

Doreen pointed at Otis.
 
“That’s him.
 
Where’s he at now?”

Maurice shook his head.
 
“I heard all sorts of things ‘bout that man.
 
Either
drunk
hisself
to death out in Texas or maybe it
was heroin, I forget, but I heard he’d passed.”

“That’s a shame,” Doreen said.
 
“He sure had it going on for a while.
 
Yes he did.”

Otis looked off into space, thinking about his unlikely
friend, Chester Grubbs.
 
The two of them
had hit it big at the same time.
 
Both
based in Nashville, they played on
some of the same bills when Otis’s records were crossing over to a white
audience and Chester was playing
with Ray Charles.
 
They shared a taste
for livin’ high on the hog and they rode their respective waves to the top
before things went bad for both of them.
 
Their friendship was like a struck match, flaring up hot and fast and
going out before the whole stick was consumed.

For Otis, it was the confluence of jealousy, liquor, and
knowing he’d lost most of his money.
 
He’d had his early hits but they’d stopped coming just as quick as
they’d started.
 
But Otis thought the
money would never stop coming in, so it had never stopped going out.
 
Before he knew it, he had to trade his
Cadillac for a Chevrolet.
 
When Bill Herron dropped him and took most of his royalties, Otis
was forced onto the chitlin’ circuit where he started drinking too much.
 
Otis could see the writing on the wall and it
left him in a foul mood.
 
One night, out
back of a club in Memphis, drunk
and angry, Otis pulled a knife when he caught a man trying to force himself on
one of Otis’s backup singers.
 
The man said
he wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer from the woman, so Otis did what he had
to.
 
He killed the man.
 
Stabbed him to death.
 
“
Don’t nobody
mess
with my woman,” Otis said as the man bled out at his feet.
 
The woman was Estella.
 
She and Otis had been married less than a
month.

The Memphis
police might’ve written it up as justifiable, except the dead man was
white.
 
Otis was looking at a one-way
ticket to Fort Pillow State Penal Farm, so he called the only lawyer he knew,
one Franklin Peavy, Esq.
 
Franklin
was a young, white attorney who hadn’t partnered up with Big Bill yet.
 
Franklin
had negotiated the contracts of several R&B artists Otis knew from the
concert circuit.
 
The two had met in Birmingham,
backstage at a show headlined by Percy Sledge.
 
Franklin told Otis that his
song, ‘Lookin’ for Ruby,’ was one of his all-time favorites.
 
He gave Otis a business card and told him to
call if he ever needed a lawyer for anything.
 
Of course, Franklin was
thinking more along the lines of contract work but, when Otis called from jail
about fifty dollars from being broke, Franklin
agreed to handle the case pro bono and he did a good job.

Otis was sentenced to eight years for manslaughter, an
unimaginable sentence for a black man convicted of killing a white man in Tennessee
in the 1960s.
 
And Otis knew it.
 
Just before they took him from the courtroom
after sentencing, Otis turned to Franklin
and said, “I owe you, Mr. Peavy.
 
If
there’s ever anything I can do for you—
”
 
Then
they took him away.

Estella was faithful to Otis while he was gone.
 
She visited him and she went to church.
 
And she went to night school to learn
bookkeeping.
 
She’d saved all her money
and, without Otis knowing, she’d saved some of his too.
 
She bought a little piece of property in Nashville
and put a mobile home on it.
 
She lived
in the back and ran Estella’s Shrimp Joint right out of the kitchen.

Otis got out in five years for good behavior.
 
He went back to Nashville,
joined Estella, and had been fryin’ swimps ever since.
 
But Estella would tell you, Otis was never
the same after prison.
 
He’d been plenty
crazy when he was younger, but now he was quiet, maybe even a little
philosophical.
 
Standing over that deep
fryer night after night, Otis reflected on all the things that had happened to
him and all the things he’d let get away.
 
One of those things was his friendship with Chester Grubbs.
 
He wondered whatever happened.

22.

Franklin was in
his office reviewing royalty statements.
 
God, this is depressing
, he
thought.
 
The money wasn’t coming in the
way it used to and that had Franklin
worried.
 
He hadn’t made as many
investments as he might have when the firm was on top, and the one’s he’d made
turned out to be bad.
 
Like many
day-traders Franklin had managed to
screw the securities pooch during the biggest bull market in America’s
history.
 
On top of that he took
expensive vacations and put four kids through private colleges.
 
And now, with retirement looming it was
becoming clear Franklin wouldn’t be
able to maintain the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed, unless
something changed.

He slipped on his brand new Q375 Technologitronic wireless
phone headset and turned to look at his reflection in the window.
 
It didn’t change his financial situation, but
he liked the way it made him look — on top of it, technologically hip,
superior in a cutting edge sort of way.
 
If nothing else, he had that.

As he returned his attention to the royalty statements, Big
Bill started the tape for the umpteenth time.
 
Despite being able to hear only muffled noise through the wall
separating their offices, Franklin
could tell his partner had been listening to the same thing all afternoon, and
it was driving him nuts.
 
He yanked the
headset off.
 
“Bill, turn that shit
down!” he yelled.

Big Bill ignored the request.
 
He was leaning forward, his head positioned
perfectly between the two speakers mounted on the far corners of his desk.
 
Lids closed over his bulging eyes, he moved
to the music and mouthed the words.
 
He
looked like a bullfrog doing karaoke.
 
When the song ended, he reached over and hit ‘rewind’ again.
 
He turned and yelled at the wall, “Hey, Franklin,
come in here!
 
You gotta hear this!”

“In a minute!”
Franklin
yelled back.
 
“I’m trying to run our
business!”

Bill turned to the wall and made some sort of angry Italian
gesture he’d picked up from a movie.
 
“The hell you think I’m doin’ in here, lap dancin’?
 
I’m working on the part that actually brings
in money!
 
Now come listen to this!”
 
He lowered his voice slightly, “You prick.”

“What was that?” Franklin
thought he heard the word, ‘prick’ seep through the wall.
 
Who the hell did that toad think he was?
 
Franklin
had put up with a lot of shit from Bill over the years but he wasn’t about to
put up with name calling.

“I said come here quick!
 
You’re going to want to hear this!”

Franklin flipped
the bird at the wall and mocked his partner under his breath.
 
“You’re going to want to hear this …
”
 
He
snatched the
royalty statements off his desk and went over to Bill’s office, waving the
papers as he walked in.
 
“Hey, you’re the
broke dick with the cash flow problem.
 
The sooner I go over these things and review the allocations, the sooner
you’ll get your dough.
 
God knows you
need it.”
 
Franklin
enjoyed pushing Bill’s money button.