Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (38 page)

Megan primped Eddie’s coat.
 
“You ready?”

Eddie snugged his hat on his head.
 
“Tail up and stinger out,” he said.

She kissed him.
 
“Save
a little of that stinger for me.”

“From Nashville, Tennessee, the man with the best selling
record in the good old U-S- of -A, please give a hot-dang-you-all Texas welcome
to Big World Record recording artist… Mr. Eddie Long!”

63.

“Just so we’re on the same page,” Jimmy said into the phone,
“we’re talking about Atlas Publishing, the biggest house in New
York.
 
That
Atlas Publishing?”

“No, I’m sorry, I talking about the one in Kokomo,
Indiana,” Jay replied.
 
“They want to turn Eddie’s story into an
illustrated children’s book.
 
Christ!
 
Of course
the one in
New York
!”

“No way,’ Jimmy said.
 
“I don’t believe you.”
 
It seemed
like the natural thing to say in such a unique circumstance.

What sounded like a tire going flat on the other end of the
line was Jay Colvin venting some frustration.
 
“Jimmy, we have to work on the trust in our relationship, I can see
that.
 
But you’ve got to understand, I
wouldn’t lie about this sort of thing.”

“But six hundred thousand dollars?”
 
Jimmy paused and sat down.
 
“It’s just hard to believe.”

“What’s hard about it?
 
It’s a great book and your timing’s miraculous.
 
It’s very easy when you look at it that
way.
 
Easy, easy, easy.
 
Atlas pays half on signing, half on
publication.
 
And they want to rush to
print as soon as you deliver the manuscript.”

“And the catch?”

“There is no catch!”
 
Jay sucked some air through his teeth.
 
“Were you born distrustful or do you train, because you have it down to
a fine art.”

“You’ve gotta understand—”

“Wait, don’t tell me.
 
This is some sort of Mason-Dixon thing, right?
 
Tell me the truth,
Jimmy,
has the word ‘carpetbagger’ crossed your mind in the past two minutes?
 
Never mind.
 
I don’t care.
 
I’ve gotta tell
you, I’ve never had such a hard time delivering good news.
 
Now I want you to sit down because if you’re
having a hard time with that, you may be unable to come to grips with this next
part.”

“What part?”
 
Jimmy
could hear Jay punching in a phone number on another line.

“Atlas wants you to include your theory, all the ‘evidence’
of Eddie’s culpability in Tammy’s death.”

“What?
 
That’s
insane!
 
Eddie and Herron’ll sue my pants
off.
 
And Atlas will hang me out to
dry.”
 
Eddie’s fax machine began to ring.

“Do you know how much it hurts that I don’t have your
trust?
 
I’m sending something that might
help.
 
Check your fax machine.”

As Jimmy walked to his office, he began to let himself
believe the good news.
 
“It’s not that I
don’t trust you,” he said, “it’s just, this is happening so fast.
 
Six hundred thousand’s a lot of money.
 
I don’t want to get all excited then find out
it’s not what it seems to be.”
 
His fax
machine spit out a letter on Atlas Publishing stationery.
 
“Okay, I got whatever you sent.”

“That’s a deal memo,” Jay said, “signed by the president of
Atlas Publishing.
 
In the third paragraph
it states that not only will Atlas not hang you out to dry but they have also
agreed to some extra language in the standard ‘hold harmless’ clause.
 
And in the extremely unlikely event the
plaintiff should win a judgement against you, you are covered by an Errors and
Omission policy bigger than the National Democratic Party’s soft money
fund.
 
And, as if that’s not enough,
Atlas has also agreed to pay you a $10,000 bonus if we
do
get sued.”

Jimmy read the applicable paragraphs.
 
“Well, that’s just plain damn crazy,” he
said.
 
“Why the hell would they do that?”

“Because they love the book!
 
Jimmy, I’m telling you, you get the editorial
staff of Atlas Publishing on a jury in a libel suit against you, and you’d end
up with a murder conviction against Eddie on the evidence you already have.”

“No charges were ever brought—”

“Jimmy, look, the cops don’t know everything you do.
 
That’s the only possible explanation for why
Eddie hasn’t been arrested.
 
You are
sitting on a stack of gold bars.
 
I’m just
trying to get you to look down and see what you’ve got.”

“It feels more like dynamite to me.”
 
Jimmy paused and thought about the six
hundred thousand dollars.
 
“Ahhh, but
what the hell,” he said.
 
“Long as we got
it in writing, make the deal.
 
I’ll finish
the book.”

64.

The
Long Shot
tour
moved east out of Dallas like a
storm front.
 
In eleven days they played
Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, The
Horseshoe Casino in Bossier City,
the Coliseum in Biloxi, the
fairgrounds in Mobile, the Daytona
International Speedway, Taladega Super Speedway,
The
Palace Theater in Myrtle Beach,
Harrah’s Cherokee Smokey Mountain Casino, and Jamboree in the Hills in Wheeling,
West Virginia.

They were averaging 18,500 a show at forty bucks a pop.
 
After ten shows they’d brought in nearly
seven and a half million dollars in ticket sales.
 
The merchandising was a whole other cash
cow.
 
The Eddie Long t-shirts, sweat
shirts, and baseball caps were hard to keep in stock, and the
Long Shot
mouse pad and the ‘
It Wasn’t Supposed To
End That Way’ screen saver were
kicking ass.
 
Of course there were
expenses — rental on two decked-out tour buses and a big equipment truck, the
band, backup singers, equipment manager, sound engineers — but even when you
finished doing all the subtraction, there was no way around the fact that Eddie
was just flat broke out with money.

Recording artists and their managers will tell you the great
thing about touring income is its immediacy.
 
Money from radio play, publishing, and record sales was all delayed by a
minimum of six months and it was chipped away at by suspect accounting
practices, but every night after a show there was a brand new pile of folding
money to count.
 
Of course it wasn’t like
the good old days when everybody carried handguns and walked off with a
suitcase of cash, but modern country didn’t work like that.
  
Now it was all electronic transfers and
cashiers checks and no need for a .38.
 
It was safer and perhaps even a bit bland, something the old guard might
say paralleled the music, but hey, things change.
 
Still, you needed petty cash for per diems
and just generally to keep the skids greased so, every night after a show, Big
Bill came onto the bus with a few thousand in cash in his briefcase.

“How’d we do tonight?” Eddie asked as he opened a beer and
settled into a sofa in the back of the bus.

“We got enough money to burn a wet mule,” Big Bill
said.
 
“That’s how we did.”

Eddie reached up and got a high five from Herron.
 
“Ten down, twenty-five to go.
 
Where are we tomorrow?”

Megan looked at the tour sheet.
 
“Heading east,” she said.
 
“
Medina
County
Fair in
Ohio
.”

Franklin was
standing outside the bus with one hand pressed to the side of his head trying
to keep his earpiece from tumbling out again.
 
While in New York, he had
bought a new headset for his cell phone thinking it made him feel like a Silicon
Valley hot shot.
 
Sadly, it
made him look more like a guy taking orders at the drive-through window at a
KFC.
 
He was talking to someone at
SoundScan.
 
“Good.
 
Good.
 
Wait a second,” he said, “let me get that down before you do the rest.”
 
Franklin
pulled his digital recorder from his pocket and repeated the numbers into the
memory card.
 
“Okay, go ahead.
 
No, wait, I dropped my ear piece.”

SoundScan was a company that had helped, however
inadvertently, put country music on the map.
 
They created a computerized in-store system for tracking record sales at
the retail level.
 
Before SoundScan,
artists and managers had to rely on the notoriously corrupt charts in the
industry trade papers which were compiled from the reports of easily bribed
radio programmers and record store managers.
 
Historically, the pop music industry used this system to control the
charts, but SoundScan changed all that.
 
With the implementation of their system in 1991 came numbers that were
immediate and reliable and surprising to a lot of folks.
 
The numbers showed country was selling a lot
more than anyone thought — certainly more than the record companies were
letting on in royalty statements.
 
This
public acknowledgment of country music’s popularity had an interesting side
effect.
 
Once it got out that country music
wasn’t solely the realm of hideously inbred hillbilly defectives — that is to
say, once the stigma of buying country records was lost — the citified middle
classes began buying more and more country music.
 
In effect, SoundScan made country appear
‘hip’ and this in turn increased sales even further.
 
Of course there was always a backlash to
popularity of this magnitude, thus the post-Garth dip in sales.
 
But according to the numbers Franklin
was hearing, the drought was over.

“Thanks,” Franklin
said, “I’ll be sure to pass that on to Eddie.”
 
He turned off the phone and stepped onto the bus.
 
“Anybody interested in the latest SoundScan
numbers?”

“Talk to me,” Eddie said.

Franklin wore a
grim expression.
 
“Bad news is we haven’t
hit the million
mark
yet.”
 
Then he broke into a grin.
 
“Good news is we probably will before we
cross the state line.”

“Yesss!”
 
Megan pumped a fist in the air then did a
little bump and grind.

Franklin
continued.
 
“The official numbers are
nine hundred sixty-eight thousand units in just over four weeks.
 
And it’s still trending up.
 
They’re projecting it out as double
platinum.
 
Also, I spoke to Debbie at the
label.
 
She said the single’s in hot
rotation on two thousand five hundred and forty-nine of the twenty-six hundred
stations.
 
The others, she assures me,
will follow next week.
 
We,” Franklin
said loudly, “are number ONE!”

Big Bill stood, faced Eddie, and started to applaud.
 
Everybody on the bus followed suit.
 
Eddie waved them off at first,
then
tipped his hat at them.
 
Finally he picked up his beer and put his thumb over the mouth of the
bottle.
 
He shook it up and sprayed it
everywhere in celebration to the hoots and hollers of the band and crew.

Big Bill stepped into the spray,
then
sat back down next to Eddie, wiping the beer from his face with his shirt
sleeve.
 
“Well, as much fun as this
number one record’s been
,
I think it’s about time to
pick the second single.”
 
Getting to
choose the singles and their release dates was yet another of the unheard of
aspects of Eddie’s deal with Big World Records.

Eddie stuck his tongue out to snag a large drop of beer that
was rolling down his face.
 
“Okay,” he
said, “I’m new at this.
 
What’s the
conventional wisdom?”

“Conventional wisdom says we go with ‘Dixie National,’” Big
Bill said.
 
“It’s upbeat, skews more male
than female,
broadens
our audience.
 
I think it’s the way to go.”

Eddie pointed at Franklin.
 
“Your turn.”

Franklin shook
his head and pointed at Big Bill.
 
“That’s his area,” he said.

Eddie looked at Megan.
 
“What do you
think,
puddin’?”

Megan was already shaking her head.
 
“‘
Dixie
National.’”
She
rolled her eyes.
 
“Christ a’mighty,” she
said.
 
“Did we get to where we are by
following the conventional wisdom?”

“Well, first of all,” Big Bill said, “it’s customary to—”