Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (17 page)

During a lull in the pitch, Eddie glanced out the
window.
 
He’d been in Nashville
long enough to recognize what neighborhood they were in.
 
He leaned forward and tapped Franklin
on the shoulder.
 
“You mind if I ask
where’re we
going?
”

Franklin reached
into his coat pocket and pulled out his global positioning satellite receiver,
showing it to Eddie.
 
He pointed at the
map on the screen.
 
“We’re here,
right?”
 
He pointed again.
 
“Place we’re going to is there.
 
It’s called Estella’s.
 
Best fried shrimp you’ll ever put in your
mouth.”

“Plus they got a great jukebox,” Big Bill said.
 
“If you like old R&B.”

Eddie smiled and nodded.
 
“Sounds good.”
 
He didn’t care about the jukebox or how good the shrimp were.
 
His just wanted to get down to business.

As he pulled into the parking lot, Bill looked in the rear
view mirror at Eddie.
 
“You like old
R&B?
 
I’m talking Little Milton,
Jackie Wilson that sort of thing.”

“That’s a little before my time.”

“You know I managed some of those R&B acts when I first
started.”
 
He shook his head.
 
“Boy, that was a long damn time ago,” he said
with a laugh.
 
“Produced some hits
too.
 
Also did some concert
promoting.
”
 
Big Bill
found three parking spaces near the front door and took them all.
 
As soon as they got out they could hear the
jukebox.

“Hey,” Eddie said, cocking his ear toward the music, “Tyrone
Davis.”

Big Bill gave Eddie a shove.
 
“You rascal.
 
Before your time, my ass.
 
I been
had!”
 
He chuckled.
 
He was starting to like this Eddie Long.
 
He had a bit of the larceny in him.

Eddie smiled.
 
“Well, you
know, I heard a little of this and that.”

Big Bill reached the door first, opening it for the
others.
 
The smell of tobacco and fried
shrimp hooked them and drew them in where they were greeted by Estella.
 
She was perched on her stool, her upper body
heeding the call of Tyrone’s song.
 
“Well, well,” she said as the three men came through the door.
 
“If I could turn back the hands of time…
Come ooon in!”
 
Estella slowly got up off
the stool and slid three menus off the stack in front of her.

Big Bill stepped up and slapped the top of the podium, an
old man acting foolish.
 
“Who do I see
about gettin’ a table at this establishment?”
 
He forced a laugh, causing everyone else to do likewise.

“Hello, Mr. Herrons.”
 
Estella had a habit of putting
an ‘s’
on the
end of his name.
 
“How
you doin’ tonight?”
 
Not that she
cared.
 
She didn’t like the man.
 
Didn’t trust him any further than she could
comfortably spit a rat, but there was no point in acting it out.
 
There was nothing wrong with his money.
 
“Good to see you.”

“We’re all right,” Big Bill said.
 
“We just come to get our mouths greasy.”

“You come to the right place, then.”
 
Estella had long suspected Big Bill of
stealing money back when he was Otis’s manager.
 
It was just a hunch, of course.
 
It wasn’t something she could prove, so she just kept him at a polite
distance.
 
Estella looked at Franklin
and gestured with the menus.
 
“You want
the booth, Mr. Peavy?”
 

“That’ll be fine, Estella,” Franklin
said as Estella led them toward their table.
 
“You doin’ all right tonight?”

“Oh yeah, ain’t complaining.
 
How ‘bout you?”

“Good, good, we found us a new young talent here and decided
to fatten him up with some of your shrimp.”
 
Franklin clapped Eddie on
the back and winked.

Estella led them to a corner booth and pulled out the table
so they could squeeze in.
 
“Well all
right.
 
Everybody just set down
here.”
 
After pushing
the table back in, Estella took their orders, then left to get their drinks.

Bill leaned back in the booth, arms spread wide across the
back of the seat.
 
“You know, Eddie, I
been in this business a long time and I’ve come to be a pretty good judge of
talent.
 
And I gotta tell ya, when I got
your tape, I said to Franklin, I
said, ‘betcha dolla this boy’s goin’ places.’”
 
Bill gave a quick nod to confirm he was speaking the truth.

“I appreciate that.
 
But here’s the—”

“So,” Big Bill interrupted, “where’re you from and how long
you been in Nashville?”

Eddie leaned forward and fixed Bill with his eyes.
 
“Mississippi
and long enough,” he said.
 
“If you don’t
mind, Mr. Herron, I’d like to cut to the chase on this.”
 
Big Bill and Franklin wouldn’t have looked
more surprised if Eddie had stood and pissed on the table top.
 
They glanced at one another, curiosity
replacing surprise.
 
“No disrespect,”
Eddie said, “it’s just that I ain’t much for small talk and I kinda take a
business approach to things.
 
That’s
all.
 
I hope you don’t mind.”

Franklin and Bill looked at one another for a moment then
laughed.
 
“Well all right, then,” Bill
said.
 
“Let’s cut to the chase.”
 
He gestured at Franklin.
 
“Show him the contract.”

Franklin pulled
a document from his inside coat pocket and handed it to Eddie.
 
“This is a standard artist-manager
contract.
 
It has all the usual clauses
detailing our percentages for the different types of deals you might enter
into, touring, recording, publishing, et cetera.”
 
His tone was relaxed and meant to imply that
there was no reason to even read the thing it was so standard and usual and
normal.
 
“Why don’t you go ahead and take
a look at it while we have our drinks.”
 

When Estella brought the drinks to the table, she saw Eddie
looking through the contract. She was tempted to warn him against selling his
soul to Mr. Herrons, but it wasn’t any of her business, so she held her
tongue.
 
“Mr. Peavy, ya’ll wanna go ahead
and order?”

“I think we’ll have three
shrimp plates,
if that’s
all right.”
 
Franklin
looked at the others to get their approval.
 
Big Bill nodded.
 
Eddie never
looked up from the contract but made a vague wave of his hand.
 
“Yeah,” Franklin
said, “three of the plates’ll be fine.”

Estella took the menus and went back to the kitchen.
 
“Three swimps,” she said as she came through
the swinging door.

Otis went to the refrigerator and pulled out the large metal
bowl.
 
He set it on the counter and
turned to Estella.
 
“This
Mr. Peavy’s order?”

“
Un
huh.
 
He’s over there with Mr. Herrons, ‘bout to
get some boy to sign papers.”
 
She looked
out the service window at the booth where they were sitting.
 
“That man is ugly as a stump full of spiders
and twice as crooked.”

“Man can’t help the way he looks,” Otis said.
 
He sunk his hands into the big bowl of cold
milk and paprika and he gathered extra shrimp the way he always did for Mr.
Peavy.
 
“And you don’t know he’s gettin’
his hooks in that boy’s pocket any more’n I do.
 
Now just do like me and let it go.”
 
He lifted his hands out of the bowl and let the juices drain between his
fingers.

Estella put her hands on her hips and looked at Otis.
 
“That’s right.
 
That’s ‘xactly what you did.”
 
Her head jerked from side to side as she
spoke.
 
“You just let it go and he just
went right on down to his bank and made a gret, big deposit with all yo’
monies.”

Otis smiled serenely, forcing the little grey tuft of
whisker under his lip to point outwards.
 
“Jus’ let it go,” he said as he worked the wet shrimp into the spicy
flour.
 
“Bye, bye.”

Estella turned and headed for the door.
 
“Hmmph.”
 
She loved Otis, but she could never understand
his peace of mind and the way he accepted his fate.
 
There was no denying that he had stabbed that
man in Memphis, but the way Estella
figured it, Big Bill Herron had put the knife in Otis’s hand.
 
When she walked by the booth, Estella looked
at Eddie and hoped things would turn out better for him.

Eddie didn’t notice Estella.
 
He was absorbed in the subparagraphs of the clauses in the
contract.
 
Somewhere on page seven he
stopped and looked up.
 
“What’s
this?”
 
He turned to Franklin.
 
“You co-produce everything I do?”

It was hard to say who was most surprised by this
question.
 
Franklin, who never expected
some hick kid to actually read the contract, let alone understand it, or Big
Bill who, up until this moment, had always been the sole producer listed in the
contracts they issued.

“Oh, that’s just a credit,” Franklin
said, trying to remain calm.
 
“It’s
nothing, standard stuff.”
 
He tugged on
the cuffs of his shirt and inspected a button closely.
 
He hoped against hope that Big Bill had
suddenly gone deaf and that Eddie would drop the matter.

But Bill’s hearing was fine.
 
And, despite the web of veins in the whites of his bulging eyes, so was
his sight.
 
He stared across the table at
his entrepreneurial partner.
 
The son of
a bitch was sneaking shit into the contracts.
 
Bill wondered how long that had been going on.
 
He wanted desperately to say something about
the knife twisting in his back but he didn’t want Eddie to know there was
dissention in the ranks, so he acted like this was business as usual.
 
“Oh yeah,” Bill tapped his forehead with his
fingers.
 
“That’s the credit-only clause
we discussed adding to the new contracts?
 
I’d completely forgotten about that.”
 
He emphasized the word ‘completely.’

Franklin looked
at the tiny red veins in Big Bill’s eyes.
 
“Yeah, credit-only, like we discussed.”
 
He’d begun to sweat like a pedophile on a
playground.
 

Eddie flipped ahead a page and pointed at something.
 
“Well here in paragraph six, sub-b, doesn’t
that trigger this producer royalty?”

“Let me see what you’re pointing at.”
 
Franklin
took the contract and pulled some reading glasses from his pocket.
 
Head tilted downward, Franklin
pretended to read what he already knew was there.
 
“Well, I can see how you might misread that,
yes.
 
It’s a complicated clause and
perhaps not as artfully written as it might—”

“Well, let’s lose it all,” Eddie said flatly.
 
“No offense, but I’m only going to agree to
have Mr. Herron produce the record, all right?”
 
He flipped forward to review the last pages of the contract without
waiting for a response.

This was a first.
 
Big
Bill and Franklin didn’t know what to say.
 
Bill was tempted to laugh since Eddie had just pulled the rug out from
under Franklin’s attempted
co-producing scheme.
 
And Franklin
was tempted to reach across the table to strangle him for doing it.
 
But neither of them said anything.
 
They just sat mute, waiting, as if under
Eddie’s spell.
 
He had taken control of
the situation and the two veterans were willing to let him, for now.
 
Eddie had a song they wanted.
 
It was a hit, plain and simple.
 
They figured the best way to get it was to
play along until the kid was in so far over his head they had to bail him out.
 
Then they’d show him how to renegotiate a
contract.

Eddie gauged the reactions on their faces.
 
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said.
 
“I want you guys to handle things for me, but
let’s get one thing straight from the get go.
 
I’ve done my homework.
 
I know
about compulsory licenses, producer royalties, synchronization rights, and mechanicals.
 
I also know about things like MP3 files,
I-drive, and Internet marketing strategies.
 
The bottom line, fellas, is that we can have a mutually beneficial
relationship only if we don’t try to fuck each other at every turn.
 
Know what I mean?”