Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders

Fender Benders

Bill Fitzhugh

FENDER
BENDERS.
 
Copyright
 
©
 
2001 by Reduviidae, Inc., Kindle Edition copyright © 2010.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.
 
For information: Reduviidae,
Inc.,

To the songwriters,
who can say in a three-minute
song

what
I struggle to say in three hundred pages.

And to the musicians,
who can convey more

with
the right four chords than I can in an
entire book.

And to
Kendall
, who is a song unto herself.

Fender Benders

1.

Terrebonne
Parish
,
Louisiana

Fred Babineaux was halfway between Morgan
City and Houma
when he decided he had a brain tumor.
 
He
couldn’t think of anything else to explain the king-hell of a headache swelling
inside his aching skull.
 
It was a tumor,
he was sure of it, a tumor the size of a pink Texas
grapefruit.

Fred was driving south on a narrow stretch of highway that
traced the spine of a levee separating two cane fields thirty feet below on
either side of the road.
 
He was heading
for Terrebonne Bay
to meet with a man who wanted to buy a boat from the manufacturer Fred
represented.
 
The sale would mean a fat
commission but at the moment Fred would have forfeited that plus two months
salary to make the headache disappear.
 
He picked up the can of Dandy’s Cream Soda that was sweating in the cup
holder.
 
He held it to his head for a
moment hoping the cold would soothe the pain.
 
When that failed, Fred thought maybe the problem was dehydration or low
blood sugar, so he gulped half the can.

The fields below on both sides of the highway were lush with
a young crop of sugar cane flourishing in the promising Louisiana
heat.
 
It was hot for late April —
eighty-eight degrees and eighty-nine percent humidity.
 
A couple of Snowy Egrets stalked the edge of
the cane fields stabbing orange beaks at their lunch.
 
Here and there the familiar smear of
armadillo slicked the road.
 
Fred
identified with one whose head had been reduced to the consistency of a thick
roux.

His dehydration and low blood sugar theories disproved, Fred
took his hands off the wheel and steered with his knee so he could massage his
throbbing temples.
 
The radio was tuned
to Kickin’ 98, “Classic Country for South Louisiana,
playing a mix of the old and the new, because a song ain’t gotta be old to be a
classic.”
 
They were playing a ballad at
the moment, soothing close harmonies Fred hoped might ease his pain.
 
By the end of the song, however, Fred knew
the cure would require pharmaceuticals.

He leaned over for the glove compartment when, suddenly, he
heard what sounded like an airplane landing on the roof of his car.
 
Startled by the abrupt roar of the thundering
engine, Fred jerked his hands back to the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding a
long plunge off the road.
 
“Sonofabitch!”
 
Adrenaline poured into his system.
 
His heart rate soared, turning his already bad headache into severe
unilateral periorbital pain.
 
Fred looked
painfully out the window and saw the crop duster raining Gramoxone onto the
sweet young cane.
 
Maybe that’s what caused my tumor
, he thought.
 
He’d been up and down these roads so many
times over the years there was no telling how many gallons of herbicides and
pesticides he’d absorbed.
 
That had to be
it.
 
You could strap Fred Babineaux to
the bottom of one of those noisy old biplanes, poke a few holes in him, and
spray a field with whatever came out.
 
Kill anything it hit.

Fred looked to make sure the plane wasn’t coming again,
then
leaned over and popped open the glove box.
 
He grabbed the familiar yellow-and-red box of
Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder, an aspirin product sold only in the deepest parts
of the South.
 
He’d bought this
particular box at an E-Z Mart in Shreveport
the day before.
 
To Fred’s great relief,
the usually impenetrable plastic shrink-wrap on the brand new box sloughed off
easily and he quickly fingered out one of the folded rectangular sheets of wax
paper that held the powder like a professionally packaged gram of something
else entirely.

With one throbbing eye on the road, Fred unfolded the two
ends of the rectangle and then the long top.
 
He held one end closed and, with a jerk, tossed his head back and poured
the bitter powder into the back of his throat.
 
He chased it with the remainder of his cream soda and, wincing slightly,
swallowed the solution to all his problems.

In no time flat Fred had forgotten about his headache.
 
Sadly it wasn’t due to the fast-acting nature
of the medicine.
 
At first his face went
numb and his breathing became irregular.
 
He considered pulling to the side of the road but the shoulder was only
four feet wide before dropping sharply into the boggy cane fields below.
 
The eighteen-wheeler bearing down from behind
prevented him from simply stopping in the middle of the road.

Sixty seconds later, with no warning, Fred threw up
violently, spewing his fried lunch onto the windshield.
 
Panic set in as his body realized he was
dying before his mind could grasp the fact, let alone ask why.
 
Desperate to see the road in front of him,
Fred wiped at the vomit covering his windshield.
 
Smearing it only made
matters worse.
 
As if his
compromised vision didn’t make driving difficult enough, Fred began to hear
sounds that didn’t exist and he felt his heart engage in what would best be
described as irregular cardiac activity.
 
But at least the headache wasn’t bothering him any more.

Fred’s mind fixed on why he suddenly felt like he was
dying.
 
His wheels drifted onto the
gravel shoulder, kicking up a spray of rocks that scared the Snowy Egrets into
the sky.
 
Had Fred been listening to the
radio, he’d have heard the DJ introducing an old Dorothy Dixon song.
 
“Here’s a classic country flashback on
Kickin’ 98!”
 
But Fred wasn’t listening
to the radio any more.
 
All he could hear
was what sounded like a chorus of outboard motors in his head.
 
The auditory hallucinations were
part-and-parcel of the process taking place throughout his body, namely, the
total cessation of his cellular metabolism.
 
His central nervous system was so compromised that it was shutting down,
and not temporarily.

Roy Acuff was singing a tragic song about blood and whiskey
and broken glass all mixed together on the road.

Struggling to keep his car on the highway, Fred began to
convulse and suddenly he couldn’t breathe at all.
 
He began to shake like a dog shittin’ peach
seeds.
 
Increased amounts of unsaturated
hemoglobin in his blood turned his mucus membranes a bluish tint.
 
His body suddenly jerked straight as a board,
causing him to floor the accelerator.
 
His head pitched backwards and, a moment later, Fred’s car soared off
into the cane field just as the crop duster passed overhead heading in the same
direction.

And Roy kept
singing about how his soul had been called by his master.

“. .
.
and
I didn’t hear nobody pray
…”

2.

Forrest
County
,
Mississippi

Mr. T’s was just off Highway 49 a few miles south of Hattiesburg.
 
The place was named after the owner, Buck
Talby, a mean old coot with an ulcer.
 
From the outside Mr. T’s looked like it might be a dump but inside it
was a genuine shithole.
 
A filthy wooden
plank floor littered with peanut shells, cigarette butts, chewed tobacco, and
the occasional cockroach dimly lit by three neon beer signs and a flickering
florescent tube over a pool table.
 
The
clientele consisted of local farm and forestry product workers wearing baseball
caps touting brands of outboard motors and oil additives.
 
There were also a few jar-headed looking
yahoos from nearby Camp Shelby,
a National Guard training facility.
 
Grease-stained work shirts and t-shirts with yellow armpits met the
dress code.
 
It was Saturday night and
the men were gussied up in the hopes of picking up on a little something the
wife wouldn’t have to know about.

It was in this context that Eddie Long stood on the tiny
stage with his guitar.
 
He was tall and
lean and handsome.
 
He was lost in his
music, playing the hell out of a rocking version of ‘Ring of Fire.’
 
Eddie had tuned out his indifferent audience
long ago and was channeling anger into his performance, substituting a torrid
run of notes for the mariachi horns of Cash’s version of the song.
 
Every time he bent a note his face bent with
it like his life was attached to the strings of his Fender DG21S.
 
He wouldn’t dare bring his big flat top
Gibson into a place like Mr. T’s.
 
Damn
thing cost too much.
 
The Fender was his
road guitar but no less dependable because it cost less. It was Indian rosewood
with a solid spruce top.
 
It produced a
sturdy bass and a brilliant treble that Eddie rode like a racehorse.

Eddie’s anger stemmed from the crowd’s neglect.
 
He wanted them to pay attention, to hear what
he was doing.
 
He wanted them to be
enthralled but he would have settled for vaguely interested.
 
But they weren’t either one and there was
nothing Eddie could do but use his time on stage to practice until he found
himself in front of a crowd that cared.

What Eddie failed to notice was a guy named Jimmy Rogers,
sitting in the back, rapt by the performance.
 
Jimmy had a pen and a pad of paper and was poised to write
something.
 
But he hesitated when it
occurred to him, not for the first time, that it was impossible to describe the
sound of music with mere words.
 
Still,
he shook his head and took a stab at it.
 
Can’t win if you don’t play
,
he figured.