Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (49 page)

That shut Jimmy up.
 
The whole scenario was so far-fetched he couldn’t think of what to
say.
 
The words ‘two to three million’
were rattling around his head so loudly he could hardly think.

“I told you to trust me, didn’t I?
 
Haven’t I always come through for you?”
 
Jay’s tone was both smug and joking.
 
“Listen, I’m over-nighting a check to you for
a hundred thousand.
 
So pack your bags
and get to Nashville.
 
I booked you a suite at the Vanderbilt
Plaza.”

“What the hell for?”

“You’re covering the Country Fanfare Awards.”

89.

Franklin was at Owen
Bradley Park sitting on the same bench where he and Big Bill had spoken days
earlier.
 
It was a nice day, not too hot,
a slight breeze coming from the east.
 
He
was watching the clouds drift above the Nashville
skyline when he noticed a man approaching him.

“You Mr. Peavy?”
 
The man’s face was hard as a prison
wall.
 
“Otis sent me.”

“Sit down,” Franklin
said.
 
“You know why you’re here?”

Chester
nodded.
 
“Otis said we needed to have a
little conversation ‘fore we could do this thing.”

“That’s right,” Franklin
said, pulling his recorder from his breast coat pocket.
 
“You understand there’s no
guarantees
this’ll work.”

“Otis told me everything,” Chester
said.
 
“It’s a chance I’m willin’ to
take.”

“All right.
 
I’m going to ask you some questions and make
some statements, you just respond anyway you want to them, doesn’t matter
how.
 
Just don’t step on my lines.”
 
He handed Chester
a piece of paper with some phrases typed on it.
 
“Then I’ll need to you to read these.
 
Understand?”

Chester looked
at the words.
 
“Uh
huh.”

Franklin pushed
the ‘record’ button.
 
“You ready?”

Chester
shrugged.
 
“Go on.”

Franklin slipped
the recorder back into his pocket.
 
“Thanks for coming,” he said.

Chester looked
at him with coal black eyes.
 
“No
problem,” he replied.
 
They talked for
about ten minutes before Franklin
had Chester read from the piece of
paper.
 
“I understand you wanna take out
a contract,” was the first line he read.
 
A few minutes later Franklin
had all he needed.
 
He handed Chester
an envelope containing some cash and an ‘all-access
pass’
for the Country Fanfare Awards.

90.

Later that afternoon Franklin
was sitting at the controls of his ProTools rig feeling inspired.
 
His system featured a d24 audio card, a DSP
Farm card, TDM and AudioSuite Plug-Ins including high quality multi-band
parametric EQ, dynamics (compressor, gate, peak limiter, etc.), digital delay,
and lots of other computerized goodies.
 
It was a digital beauty and capable of feats recording engineers would
have considered science fiction fifteen years earlier.
 
And all for less than the
cost of a brand new pickup truck.

ProTools did all the things they used to do with multi-track
tape recording, only much faster.
 
For
example, both recording methods allowed you to take a verse from one take of a
song and put it together with a chorus from another take and then let you go
back and stack guitars and background vocals and so on.
 
But with ProTools you could do it about ten
times faster because there was no waiting for reels of tape to rewind and
locate before starting work on the next track.

The magnitude of the benefit of the computer manipulation
was like the difference between writing a novel with a typewriter versus a word
processor.
 
If you want to move a
paragraph from page six to page two hundred you just pushed a few buttons and
it was moved.
 
There was no need to
retype the thing, no literal cutting and pasting with scissors and tape.
 
And with all the fudging of information that
computers make possible, ProTools also allowed you to do things like make an
off-key singer, sing on key.
 
With its
advanced editing features, like it’s non-adjacent region selection,
command key focus, TC/E while trimming, scrub while trimming, clip replace, fit
to marks, fill paste, and other innovations, a reasonably adept engineer could
do remarkable, almost magical things.

Franklin
downloaded the recording of his conversation with Chester
into the ProTools system just as he had done with his recording of Big
Bill.
 
He compared them.
 
The ambience matched.
 
Then he set about doing the same thing
engineers all over Nashville did,
which is to say he started to create a recording of something that had never
happened.

91.

After his last conversation with Big Bill, Whitney had
entertained some violent notions.
 
He had
vivid thoughts about how he would kill the fat son of a bitch but his hostility
eventually waned.
 
The anger remained but
the urge to act on it gradually submerged in the rest of Whitney’s emotional
soup.
 
He realized he wasn’t capable of
the violence he wanted to visit on Big Bill and he wondered if that proved he
was rational or if it just made him a coward like he’d been before.

Whitney was unloading empty boxes from the bed of his truck when
the first limousine drove past.
 
The
windows were blacked out so he couldn’t see inside but he despised whoever it
was.
 
He couldn’t help it.
 
His mood was black as the windows.
 
Whoever was in the back of that limousine was
a member of the club that wouldn’t let him in even though he felt he
belonged.
 
For Whitney, the proof of his
worthiness lay in the fact that even an ugly bastardization of something he had
written had reached number one.
 
From his
perspective, the fact that his song was strong enough to survive such whorish
meddling confirmed his talent.
 
It never
crossed Whitney’s mind that the song was a hit because of the changes, not in
spite of them.
 
He’d never buy that.

The Country Fanfare Awards wouldn’t begin for a few hours
but the celebration had already started.
 
It was Nashville’s big
night.
 
The night they
celebrated the music and the artists who made it.
 
Viva NashVegas!
 
Limousines were brought in from surrounding
states to meet the demand and every couple of minutes one would roll down the
street in front of Whitney’s place, stretch reminders of his failure in Music
City USA.

Whitney carried the boxes inside and started packing.
 
He’d had it.
 
After years on the road honing his skills, he’d come to town offering
his talent and had been fucked for his trouble.
 
He took a lot of pride in what he was and felt he deserved better than
what he’d got so far.
 
Whitney reached
into the paper sack that was sitting on the end of the bed.
 
He pulled out another sixteen ounces of
friendship and loyalty the likes of which he’d failed to find on Music
Row.
 
He drank half of it and resumed
packing.
 
It wouldn’t take long.
 
He didn’t have much.

When it came time for the awards show he would turn on the
television.
 
He wouldn’t be able to help
it.
 
It would gnaw at his gut to watch
the parade of people with less talent than he possessed strut up to the podium
like they were better than him, but he’d have to watch.

An hour or so later Whitney’s life was tucked away in the
boxes.
 
There were six empty cans lined
up on the bedside table and the show was set to start in ten minutes.
 
Whitney sat at the foot of his bed with his
guitar.
 
He looked around the forlorn
apartment.
 
Reminded of one of his
favorite old songs, Whitney strummed a chord.
 
“
Hello walls
…” he sang
slowly.
 
His intonation and arrangement
was far darker than Faron Young’s and his voice bleaker than Willie Nelson at
his most hopeless.
 
He sang about his
fear, about losing his mind, and about ruin.

Whitney played the song out then sat a minute looking at the
ragged bandana tied around his wrist.
 
Eventually he reached over and removed it.
 
Underneath was the silky scar that proved his
cowardice.
 
He’d been too scared to do it
deep enough.
 
He touched it and thought
about trying again, but decided he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction
that they’d beaten him.
 
As if they’d even notice.
 
Fuck ‘em
, he thought.
 
He had to face the
music,
this just wasn’t where he belonged.
 
He’d
go elsewhere, try to find people who appreciated him.
 
Maybe they were down in Austin.
 
They damn sure weren’t here.

92.

Eddie’s punch left Megan speechless and sprawled on the
floor.
 
It wasn’t a particularly hard
hit, certainly not as hard as her father used to hit her, but it caught her off
guard.
 
She stood up slowly, her mouth
half open, her hand on her cheek.
 
She
tried to think what she could do or say to fix things, to take them back the
way they were.

Eddie was just as shocked as she was.
 
What the hell had gotten into him, he
wondered.

How and when did he make the transition to short-tempered
mean fuck willing to hit a woman for no reason other than his own
frustrations?
 
The moment seemed to last
forever as the two of them stood in the middle of the living room.
 
Eddie didn’t know what to say when all the
sudden he saw Megan’s face twist slowly into confusion and pain.
 
Her eyes drifted down and her mouth opened
wider.
 
She made a weak moaning noise
before slowly bending over, grabbing her gut.

“What’s wrong?”
 
Eddie
had a sick feeling.

“Oh God.”
 
Megan began stumbling toward the bathroom.

“What the hell’s wrong?”
 
Eddie took a tentative step toward her, reaching out, but she swung at
him.

“Get away!”
 
Megan
rushed into the bathroom, whimpering, and slammed the door behind her.

Eddie got there just as she flipped the dead bolt.
 
“Megan?”
 
He sounded scared.
 
“Megan, are
you all right?
 
What’s going on?”
 
She didn’t answer, all he could hear was
Megan, apparently in pain.
 
Then he heard
the toilet seat going up or down, he couldn’t tell which.
 
He banged on the door.
 
“Megan!
 
Let me in.”
 
She made the noise
again and it made Eddie sick.
 
It was a
caterwauling.

“Oh God,” she moaned.

“What’s going on?” Eddie yelled.
 
“Tell me what to do!”

“We’re…”
 
It
sounded like she was crying.
 
“We’re
losing it.”

“I’m calling nine-one-one!”

“No, Eddie, don’t!
 
It’ll be okay.
 
There’s nothing
they can do.
 
It’s okay.
 
We won’t tell anybody,” she said.
 
“We’ll just say it hap—
”
 
Suddenly
it sounded like every muscle
in Megan’s body contracted to squeeze the life out of her.

“Oh my God.”
 
Eddie slumped into a heap by the door, his
face buried in his hands.
 
He sat there
for a long time, finally overwhelmed by his life.

After a while Megan began to speak again.
 
Her voice was growing raspy and tired.
 
“You don’t need this in the press,” she
said.
 
“I’ll protect you.
 
I won’t tell anyone.
 
I swear.”

93.

Chester arrived
at Opryland USA
four hours before they were scheduled to open the doors to the public.
 
He was stage-fright nervous but he wasn’t
scared.
 
He parked his beat up old Impala
near a couple of RVs in the Little Jimmy Dickens section of the vast Opryland
parking lot for no other reason than he always liked the song ‘Country Music
Lover.’
 
Besides, it didn’t matter where
he parked.
 
Chester
knew he wouldn’t be returning to the car after the show.

He pulled a guitar case from the trunk and headed for the
Opry itself.
 
It was a long way to the
auditorium and, realizing it might be his last free walk for a while, Chester
tried to enjoy it.
 
Along the way he saw
a few reminders of his past.
 
He stopped
to read a plaque with names of some of the old-timers he knew.
 
A little further on he paused to look at some
hand prints set in the concrete by Country Music Hall of Famers, some of whom
he had mingled with at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge where he tried to make
connections with someone who might’ve helped him back then.
 
That’s where he met Big Bill two weeks before
he signed with Herron Management and Promotions.

Looking up from the handprints, Chester
was startled to see Minnie Pearl strolling with Porter Wagoner but it was just
some actors dressed that way.
 
They
wandered the grounds of Opryland giving tourists photo ops.