Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders

by Bill Fitzhugh

  Once again he thought about calling Megan to apologize. He knew the worst thing he’d done was to buy cheap flowers but he was still thinking about an apology. Christ, he thought, this sensitive guy thing’s got a death grip on me. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why should I always be the one to try to smooth things over? Would it be any skin off her perfect, slightly upturned nose to pick up the phone and call me with a little sweet talk and an ‘I’m sorry’? I mean how tough would that be?

  All this was running through Jimmy’s head as he sat staring at his computer. On the screen was a tentative outline for the opening chapters of The Eddie Long Story. But Jimmy hadn’t written anything lately. The momentum of his great book project had petered out owing largely to the fact that Jimmy was spending most of his time trying to figure out a way to make Megan fall in love with him. Jimmy looked up at plastic Elvis for inspiration. “Give me a sign,” he said. “Tell me what to do.” Jimmy jumped when the phone rang. He stared at it a moment before picking up. “Hello?”

  “Hey, man! You workin’ on my book?”

  Jimmy smiled. “Hey, Eddie, how you doin’? I was just about to call you.”

  “Uh huh, and I bet you promise you’ll pull out in time too.” Eddie laughed the way guys do when they retell old jokes. “Listen, Mr. Hemingway, I was just callin’ to let you know that I got your next two chapters. It turns out yours truly has signed a contract with Herron and Peavy Management.”

  “Holy shit! As in Big Bill Herron? Damn. Congratulations!” Jimmy opened a new blank document and started typing. “Details, man. What’s the deal?”

  Eddie told the story of his performance at the Bluebird. “After I played the song,” he said, “I just walked out of the place. Left ‘em with their jaws on the table tops.” He told Jimmy how Herron and Peavy had approached him afterwards, and how they had sealed the deal at Estella’s.

  Jimmy pried the particulars from Eddie. He knew there was a good anecdote in the scene where Eddie negotiated changes in his contract over a plate of fried shrimp with Joe Tex singing in the background. Now that Eddie had signed with one of Nashville’s most storied producers, Jimmy felt new momentum gathering on his project.

  “Alright,” Jimmy said, “so you signed with Herron and Peavy. What’s the other chapter?”

  “My marketing plan.”

  Jimmy paused. “Your marketing plan?” He stopped typing. “I don’t think so. But here’s an idea,” he said brightly. “Maybe you could write a song about it. A real honkey-tonker about direct mail and targeted demographics. I can hear it now.” Jimmy started singing in a twangy baritone. “Come ‘n’ listen to a story ‘bout my marketin’ plan, gonna do some advertisin’ and establish me a brand.”

  Eddie summoned a dark chuckle, then lapsed into his own exaggerated country accent. “Well shoot me for a billy goat if ‘at ain’t the funniest thang I ever heard!”

  “You’re the one with the funny ideas,” Jimmy said. “The book’s supposed to be about the rise of a populist singer-songwriter, not a business plan.”

  “And if it was still nineteen-fucking-sixty and I was just handing my career over to a producer and his shyster partner, I wouldn’t even bring it up. But times’ve changed and one of the things you’re gonna wanna put in there is how I took charge of my career from the get go. And, to tell the truth, I bet this’ll be one of the better chapters.”

  “Yes, as the marketing section of most musician’s biographies tend to be,” Jimmy said.

  “Look, smartass, you don’t have to use it, but you oughta at least hear it.”

  “All right, what’s the plan?” Jimmy sat back and propped his feet on the table, figuring there was no need to write this part up.

  Eddie took a deep breath. “We’re creating a character,” he said. “A very mysterious character, a guy with a tragic background. And once we’ve generated sufficient interest in this mystery man, we’re going to find him. And then we’re going to sell him to the public.”

  Jimmy sat up. He had no idea where this was going, but it wasn’t what he’d expected. He put his hands back on the keyboard and listened with increasing fascination as Eddie explained the plan. They had already put the first part into play.

  “We set up a website attributed to a woman named Frances Neagley,” Eddie said. “She lives on a farm somewhere in the Tecumseh Valley. Her website is dedicated to an unknown musician, the identity of whom Miss Neagley is trying to discover. According to the information on her site, this unknown musician — apparently a young man — is the artist behind the most beautiful song Frances Neagley has ever heard.” Eddie sounded like he was sitting around a campfire telling an old story.

  The story, as Miss Neagley related it on her website, was that she was surfing the net one night looking at the web sites of popular country music artists when she stumbled on an otherwise unidentified site called ‘Mysong.com.’ According to Miss Neagley, the mysterious site had a little text and one small MP3 file free for the downloading. Here’s a song that came from deep within my heart, the mysterious musician had written at ‘Mysong.com.’ Please listen to it and pass it on if you like it. Miss Neagley downloaded the file but promptly forgot about it as she continued surfing that night.

  A week later, according to the story, she remembered the file and listened to the song. What she heard was so moving she could hardly believe her ears. She sat there, at her computer, mouth agape, as this stranger probed the aching parts of her heart. She felt like he was singing to her the song she would have written about her worst heartache if she could ever write a song. Her sense of wonder at all this suddenly turned to shock when, halfway through the refrain, the song stopped cold.

  At first, Miss Neagley wrote, she thought she’d accidentally hit a wrong button or something. She played the song again and, just as it had the first time, the song ended abruptly before it was half over. Miss Neagley assumed she had done something wrong in downloading the file. She immediately went on line searching for ‘Mysong.com.’ But the site was gone without a trace, as if it had never been there.

  “‘I listened to this fragment of my heart over and over that night,’ Ms. Neagley writes.”

  “Now wait a second,” Jimmy interrupted. “Is this for real? How did you find this woman?”

  Eddie laughed. “There is no woman,” he said. “Well, there is a Frances Neagley. She’s a friend of mine, she’ll be the webmaster for the site, but the rest is just story telling.”

  “Alright, alright, keep going.” Jimmy had been sucked in.

  “She was so haunted by this song that she’s been trying ever since to find out who and where the mystery musician is and where she can get a complete version of the song, because she has to hear how it ends,” Eddie said. “Now, somewhere on her site, Frances gets a little confessional, and she tells us about herself. She’s a woman in her late thirties, raised in the country, moved around a bit over the years. Had her share of relationships, good and bad, but she finally met the love of her life. They got married and bought a small farm and on their first anniversary her husband was killed in a tragic accident. Frances had no other family and she was left with little more than a mortgage and a hard heart. After her husband died, she thought her capacity for feeling had died with him. Until she heard that song.”

  “We’re talking about ‘It Wasn’t Supposed to End That Way’ right?”

  “Of course,” Eddie said. “At any rate, she’ll start writing letters and emails to country music radio stations asking about this unknown artist, citing lyrics from the song, asking if anyone knows who the musician is.” Eddie paused again. “Are you gettin’ all this?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “This is the best chapter so far.”

  “Like I said.” Eddie continued with mounting enthusiasm. “Okay, in the meanwhile, music directors and programming consultants in other parts of the country are going to start getting letters and faxes from the general public asking about this MP3 file that’s been floating around the net. They
want to hear the whole song, they’ll say. People will start writing to country music magazines and record labels and sooner or later, somebody in the business is going to have to hear this song.”

  “What if nobody writes these letters?”

  “Jimmy?” Eddie sounded like he was speaking to a child.

  “Yeah?”

  “Wake up! We’ll be the ones writing the letters, people we hire. They’ll mail the letters, and send the faxes, and zap E-mail from all over the country. It won’t cost much more than the price of stamps and some long distance charges.”

  “Clever boy.” Jimmy had never thought of Eddie as devious, but this was certainly in the neighborhood. It was an inspired deceit but it raised a question. “How ethical is this?”

  “This is a marketing campaign. What’s ethics got to do with it?” Jimmy snorted a laugh. “Anyway,” Eddie continued, “assuming this works and we get the attention of the marketplace, we’ll move to phase two where someone posts a message on Miss Neagley’s site saying they think the mystery musician is a guy named Eddie Long who wrote the song after his wife died and no one’s seen him since. Now, one thing we want to do, but we haven’t figured out how to do it yet, is to get promotion directors at country radio stations to turn this into a ‘Find Eddie Long’ contest. But we’re working on it.”

  “Interesting,” Jimmy said. He was impressed by the quirky possibilities of the plan, but he was skeptical of it’s viability.

  “Again,” Eddie said, “assuming all this works, Herron and Peavy eventually contact the record labels to announce that they represent this Eddie Long guy, the artist behind the most wanted song in America. And any record label that wants me and my song is welcome to make offers. Whaddya think?”

  Jimmy thought about it for a minute. “It’s different, I’ll say that. But, I don’t think that’s how record companies work. I mean, I guess I’m having a hard time imagining that a record company would sign an artist based on Internet buzz.”

  Eddie paused a moment. “I’ve got three words for you, Jimmy. Blair. Witch. Project. Remember that a few years ago? No major Hollywood film distributor would ever consider picking up and releasing a feature shot mostly on videotape by a bunch of nobodies from Florida, right? Never happen, right? Not in a million years. But it did happen, and the damn thing made over two hundred million dollars.”

  “Well, I’ll give you that.”

  “We’re just trying to find a new way to skin the cat, that’s all. If it doesn’t work, we can still take our tape to the record labels, we just won’t be in as good a negotiating position. No big deal. See, even though the Internet’s ready to be a means of music distribution, the general public isn’t ready to use it that way. But the public is already using it to get information, even if the information isn’t genuine, so that’s what we’ll use it for.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jimmy said. “Could be a great way to get the labels’ attention.”

  “That’s the plan,” Eddie said. “So what about the book? How’s it coming?”

  “It’s shaping up pretty good,” Jimmy said. “Especially now. I mean you getting hooked up with Herron and Peavy, well, I know it doesn’t guarantee anything, but that’s a major step. Right now I’m still working on the first three or four chapters and I’m heading up to your old neck of the woods to find out about the young Eddie Long. You know, interview some of your old teachers, friends, and neighbors, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh?” Eddie’s tone changed suddenly. He sounded unenthused.

  “Yeah, who’s most likely to tell embarrassing stories on you?”

  “No shortage of folks to do that,” Eddie said. “Most of ‘em’ll make shit up if they think it’ll get their name in a book. Fact there ain’t no tellin’ what kind of crazy shit you’ll hear about me from those folks. Best advice I got is, don’t believe everything you hear.”

  29.

  Jimmy felt like someone had plugged him in. He pushed back from his desk and spun around in his chair a few times. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes and let things take shape in his mind. He could see the cover for the book — a tall backlit figure wearing a Stetson, arms outstretched with a guitar held aloft in the right hand, a glint of light starring off the pearl inlay of the fingerboard. The title stretched boldly across the top: The Long and The Short of It. The Eddie Long Story cut a path through the middle of the backlit figure. Finally, in a slightly larger typeface across the bottom, the author took his place: Jimmy Rogers.

  Someone called his name. The curtain pulled back. Jimmy strode onto the stage to warm applause. “Oprah! So nice to see you,” he said, bussing her cheek. No, it wasn’t really an Oprah book, was it? “Dave!” Nah. “Jay!” No, none of the network shows ever promoted authors. “Charlie Rose, such a pleasure.” Unlikely. PBS was probably too snooty for the book. “Crook and Chase! So nice to be here!” Syndication was better than nothing.

  But what if Eddie didn’t make it? What if he was a complete failure? Jimmy couldn’t afford to waste a year writing a book about a guy no one ever heard of, unless he recast it as a work of fiction. Hmmm. On the one hand, if Eddie succeeded, Jimmy had a great biography. If Eddie tanked, Jimmy simply had to add a few small elements, a murder or two, perhaps some sex, a little betrayal, and voila! He had a novel. It was a great story either way and Jimmy could end the fictional version however he wanted. Country superstar rides off into the sunset or failed artist dies by his own hand.

  Inspired by the possibilities, he spent the rest of the afternoon writing. He fell into a state as everything Eddie told him poured out of his head. Jimmy had never been to the Bluebird Cafe, so he was forced to add some imagined details. He wrote up Eddie’s account of the negotiation at Estella’s, softening Eddie’s portrayal of Herron and Peavy as obsolete country buffoons, rendering them instead as crusty old music industry sages.

  Jimmy then got into the chapter on Eddie’s marketing plan. The more he considered the details, the more he came to see how canny the idea was. An alternative fictional ending abruptly presented itself: Eddie fails in Nashville, then moves to New York and becomes the most successful marketing strategist in the advertising industry. Nah, if he fails, it’s better if he hangs himself. Dramatically speaking.

  Several hours later Jimmy came out of his state. His eyes were red and dry, his neck hurt, and he longed for Megan. He wanted to call her while still exhilarated from his writing. He wanted to tell her about Eddie. He wanted to tell her he loved her and he needed to hear her say it back, so he picked up the phone and dialed. No apologies this time, he told himself. No one’s to blame. He’d just ask if she wanted to go down to

  George Street for a drink. He’d casually mention his idea about writing the book as a novel if it didn’t work out as nonfiction. He wouldn’t make it sound like he was seeking her approval, of course, just another idea he had, no big deal. He’d been wanting to write a novel for years anyway. Maybe if she started thinking of me as a novelist, he thought, then she’d start taking me seriously. He smiled. Things were going to work out just fine. He could feel it.

  After the fifth ring he started to think she wasn’t home. And sure enough, a recorded voice came on the line. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound like she meant it. “The number you have reached is no longer in service.” What? That’s impossible. “If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please hang up and dial the number again.” Jimmy looked at the number pad. Must’ve dialed wrong, he thought. He dialed again, concentrating on the digits this time. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. Jimmy hung up. A lonely feeling grew in his heart and it made him desperate for an explanation. Maybe some psychotic radio fan had gotten Megan’s number. Sure, and she’d been forced to change it. That had to be it. No problem. Jimmy would just call the station.

  “Yes, I’d like to leave a message for Megan Taylor please.”

  “Miss Taylor no longer works here,” the receptionist said. “She got a new job.”


  Jimmy grew desperate. “Really? Like over at Z-102?” He asked the question without any conviction because he knew the answer. He just couldn’t bring himself to say it. So the receptionist said if for him.

  “No, some station in Nashville. I don’t know which one.”

  Jimmy hesitated. “Yeah, okay, thanks.” He hung up, shaking his head. What a schmuck. He could hear Megan’s voice. ‘Nooo, I’m not moving to Nashville. Well, it’s not up to me, anyway. He just asked me to send him an air check tape. He didn’t even say they had a job available or anything. And who knows? The guy’ll probably be working in Buffalo by the time this tape gets to Nashville. You know how radio is.’

  Yeah, Jimmy knew. Radio was famous for disloyalty. You give your heart and soul to a station, then you come to work one day and find the locks changed, the format abandoned, and the request line no longer in service. It reminded Jimmy of somebody he knew, or someone he thought he knew. Damn. He wondered if she was already there, wondered what she was doing. Was she thinking about him? He wished he could read her mind, just for an hour.

  He sat there thinking about her for a long time. Segments of their relationship popped up on the screen in his head. He remembered the time she got the hiccups from laughing so hard at something he did, and he thought about that day in Vicksburg. God, he’d never forget that. He pulled an envelope from his desk drawer. It held photos Jimmy had taken at a party a month or so ago. He flipped through the photos until he found one of Jimmy with his arm around Megan. He was smiling like a fool drunk in love. Megan looked like she was just waiting for the moment to pass. He hadn’t noticed that before. Now that he did, he began to fear it was over. She was gone. Maybe she’d never wanted to be there in the first place. She’d dumped him. And now he was alone, sitting in a small room in a small apartment in a small town feeling sorry for himself as the broken-hearted are wont to do.