Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (2 page)

As Eddie reached the mid-point of the song he was snarling
and distorting his good looks.
 
He
wouldn’t be doing it tonight, but when Eddie smiled it was so beguiling you
couldn’t look away.
 
His eyes were the
same Cadillac Green as a 1958 Gretsch Country Club Stereo guitar, and he was a
right dresser too.
 
He was wearing
Wranglers, pressed, with a crisp white t-shirt under an open, untucked denim
work shirt.
 
A dark pair of calculated
sideburns dropped from underneath his silver belly Stetson, tapering to point
down at a pair of cowboy boots that had been selected to convey a heritage that
didn’t look nearly as store bought as it was.
 
Halfway between the hat and the boots was a shiny silver belt buckle the
size of a butter plate.
 
The result of
all this was a sort of disinfected rodeo look.
 
It was the latest in a series of styles Eddie had tested for his stage
persona.

Eddie was on the last chorus of the last song of his last
night at Mr. T’s when he looked down and noticed a change in the expression of
the National Guardsman at the front table.
 
The guy’d been drinking boilermakers all night and had just finished
eating an oyster po-boy and a side of tater-wads.
 
Suddenly he had the look of a man who
couldn’t hold it down any more.
 
Eddie
would have gotten out of the way except the stage was the size of a bath mat
and if he jumped off he figured he’d get pelted with a beer bottle.
 
It had happened before.
 
So he just kept playing.

A moment later the guy’s mouth opened like a yawning
dog.
 
What followed was a pleasant
surprise, relatively speaking.
 
A single
oyster, still intact, popped out of the man’s gaping maw and landed on one of
Eddie’s Durangos.
 
Eddie didn’t miss a beat.
 
With a deft flick of his boot, Eddie launched
the oyster back at the guardsman, missing his mouth by mere inches.
 
The man wobbled a bit then, wearing an oyster
eye patch, landed face down on the table.
 
Eddie just kept singing about how he fell into that burning ring of
fire.

This wasn’t the worst gig Eddie had ever played but it
ranked.
 
He’d been playing bars like this
one throughout the South for the past seven years, paying his dues.
 
He hoped to move up to the relative glamour
of the Mississippi Casino circuit and eventually to Nashville,
but his immediate goal was to finish this set, get his money, and get the hell
out of there.
 
Eddie had decided he was
going to do whatever it took never to have to play at a Mr. T’s again.

Eddie lived in Hinchcliff, up in Quitman
County in the delta, the birthplace
of the blues, but he was a serious student of all things country, especially Nashville
fashions, grooming habits, and music trends.
 
He subscribed to
Country Music
Weekly, Billboard Magazine
, and had his satellite dish aimed plum at
TNN.
 
It was all part of Eddie’s plan to
become a country music star.

In the meantime Eddie worked and took classes part-time at Quitman
County Junior College.
 
At twenty-seven, he was the oldest guy in his
class.
 
He’d taken a few years off after
high school and had resumed his education only after figuring out what he
wanted to do with his life.
 
Eddie was a
good student, taking business courses with an emphasis on marketing.
 
He could have taken electives in composition
or music theory down at Delta State but the way he figured it there was more to
becoming a superstar than playing the guitar or being a good songwriter.
 
You could hire people for that sort of thing
— ‘outsourcing’ is what they called it in his business management class.
 
There were talented people who supplied those
services,
helping make stars what they were.
 
And those people in turn depended on the
stars for their own livelihoods.
 
It was
symbiotic like many host/parasite relationships, though in the music business
it was sometimes hard to tell who was which.

Eddie had picked up the guitar pretty quickly and, thanks to
some lessons, he was good and getting better.
 
He practiced daily, though he tended to use practice as an excuse to
avoid doing the things he didn’t want to, like getting what his wife called a
regular job.
 
But that wasn’t to say
Eddie didn’t work.
 
He brought in money
from his singing gigs and from working part-time for nearby property
owners.
 
He helped out on the Hegman farm
during harvesting and, during the spring and summer he tended a small peach
orchard owned by the Lytle family.
 
But,
to his wife’s eternal aggravation, Eddie was far more dedicated to his dream
than to hers.

Her name was Tammy, and lately all she wanted to do was
start a family.
 
But that hadn’t always
been what Tammy said she wanted.
 
Before
they married, she had promised to support Eddie until he made it as a
singer.
 
“I believe in you Eddie,” she
used to say.

Eddie took Tammy at her word and, over the past seven years,
he had hustled together a string of clubs in Mississippi,
Louisiana, Alabama,
and Arkansas where he performed
on a semi-regular basis.
 
He was also hot
on the college circuit, playing frat parties at every university in the
Southeastern Conference.
 
He was
especially popular at Ole Miss and Auburn.
 
His repertoire was limited but smartly
chosen.
 
In addition to some catchy
originals, Eddie played the classics from the pop and country charts.
 
He had a good voice too.
 
It didn’t make you bolt up and marvel at its
distinctive
qualities,
rather it was a country-lite
tenor, perfectly suited to the songs he chose.

But the folks at Mr. T’s didn’t care about any of that.
 
Eddie was just background noise for their
Saturday night.
 
Most of them talked
straight through his sets and nobody was afraid to yell out their order to the
bar in the middle of a ballad.
 
It was
the sort of thing that usually pissed Eddie off but tonight he was past
caring.
 
He’d done this for too long and
was too good to have to put up with this kind of shit any more.
 
He finished his song and got off the stage as
fast as he could, heading for Mr. Talby’s office to get his cash.
 
He’d been counting heads for four nights and
by his reckoning was due at least three hundred dollars.

“Hey, Eddie!” a familiar voice called out.

Eddie turned and, for the first time that night, saw a
friendly face, the one he’d missed earlier.
 
It was Jimmy Rogers, a freelance writer he knew from Jackson.
 
Jimmy had reviewed several of Eddie’s
shows.
 
“Hey, how you
doin’?”

“Not bad,” Jimmy said with a shrug, “I heard you were
playing down here so I convinced
The
Hattiesburg American
they should hire me to write a review.”
 
Jimmy had been following Eddie’s career for
several years and had become something of a fan.
 
“Lemme buy you a beer?”

Eddie looked towards Mr. Talby’s office.
 
“I’d like to but I’m driving back home
tonight.
 
Can I get a rain check?”

“Sure, no problem.”
 
They shook hands.
 
“I’ll send you a copy of the review.”

“Thanks, man.
 
Say
nice things about me.”
 
Eddie turned and
headed for Mr. Talby’s office.
 
It was a
cramped space with liquor boxes and broken stools stacked around the perimeter.
Mr. Talby was sitting behind a desk in the middle of the room looking every bit
like the fat sixty year old mean-ass backwoods cracker that he was.
 
He was pouring whole milk into a glass of ice
and scotch when Eddie walked in.
 
Next to
the glass was the tray from a cash drawer, a rotary phone, and a .38.
 
Sitting on the edge of the desk was a bouncer
who answered to the name Hummer.

Mr. Talby looked up at Eddie standing on the other side of
the desk with his guitar case in hand.
 
“I suppose you’re here for some of my money.”
 
There was nothing friendly about the way he
said it.

“Just what I’m owed,” Eddie said.
 
“By my count it’s about three, three-fifty,
somewhere around there.”

Mr. Talby’s head jerked backwards.
 
“Three-fifty!
 
You must be seein’ double or something.”
 
He took a gulp off his drink and winced.
 
“Hummer, what was your count?”

Hummer shook his head.
 
“More like two hundred.”

“That sounds more like it.”
 
Mr. Talby peeled
ten twenty
dollar bills off a stack and held it out to Eddie.

“Two hundred?”
 
Eddie couldn’t believe it.
 
He looked at the money, then at Mr.
Talby.
 
“That’s not right.
 
Can’t be.”
 
He pointed out toward the main room.
 
“I counted every night.”
 
He pointed at the cash register tray.
 
“It’s at least three.”

Mr. Talby put the two hundred dollars back in the
stack.
 
“Well now, what’re you sayin’
son?
 
You callin’ me a
cheat?
 
‘
Cause
I don’t take that kinda bullshit from faggots like you.”
 
He slid his hand over to the gun, pulled it
towards him.
 
“You want the two hundred
or you want Hummer to show you the fuckin’ door?”

3.

Quitman
County
,
Mississippi

Eddie and Tammy Long lived in northwest Mississippi,
in a small two bedroom brick house not far from the Tallahatchie
River.
 
The living room was appointed with a
rent-to-own sofa, love seat, and press board entertainment center.
 
There was a faded ‘God Bless This House’
needlepoint on the wall by the front door.
 
Over the sofa was an unframed watercolor of a cow in a cotton field done
by Eddie’s Aunt Theda who lived down in Greenville.
 
The master bedroom was given over to Tammy’s
grandmother’s four-poster bed, a dresser, and a vanity, all in naturally
distressed pine.
 
The window unit air
conditioner worked non-stop from May ‘til mid-October.

The kitchen, which was also the dining room and the laundry
room, was tighter than the skin on a sausage and slightly less attractive.
 
It was all mismatched appliances and bad
lighting.
 
The avocado green fridge
pressed against the rust brown stove.
 
The washer and dryer were squeezed over by the back door, preventing it
from opening all the way.
 
The dishwasher
was on wheels and hooked up to the sink faucet.
 
A large heavy table and four chairs were wedged into the corner forcing
you sideways to get past.

Eddie was in the kitchen and was in a good mood for the
first time in a coon’s age.
 
It had been
three months since he got ripped off by Mr. Talby, and he hadn’t had much work
since then.
 
But he’d just received a
good news phone call that made him feel like writing a song.
 
Eddie sat on the edge of the kitchen table
with his feet on the seat of a chair.
 
He
hunkered over his pride and joy, a Gibson SJ-200 Reissue.
 
It was an instrument of unrivaled beauty both
in looks and sound.
 
And that beauty
hadn’t come cheap.
 
Eddie had dropped
nearly three thousand dollars on this baby.
 
Its gleaming body of solid flamed maple and spruce lent instant artistic
credibility to
whomever
held her close.

Eddie focused on the bound Madagascar
rosewood of the fingerboard and the creamy dollops of rainbow radiating from the
mother-of-pearl inlay.
 
He rearranged his
fingers and tested a new chord.
 
Six
strings of honey.
 
He tried his newest
lyric, “I’d cross a double yellow line to get to your heart.”
 
Chord change.
 
“You know I’ve loved you like that right from
the start.”

Eddie smiled and pulled the pencil from behind his ear.
 
As he wrote the lyrics on the pad of paper at
his side, Tammy shuffled into the kitchen in her pale green housecoat.
 
She stared at the dirty dishes stacked near
the sink, then made a production out of sighing.
 
“I thought you was gonna do these,” she said.

Eddie peeked up from under his cowboy hat.
 
“Hang on, Sugar Britches.
 
I think I got one here.”
 
He looked back at his lyric sheet.
 
“Uh, get to your heart, right from the start,
uh.
. . let’s load the cart… I need a spare
part.
. .I want your cherry tart…”