Joy

Brenda said there was two things that put Joy off him. The first being that he was too crazy about her and the second being that he didn’t have nothing but the wages he made off playing for the Bang sisters. But with that said, I could see he didn’t love nothing living better than a black Bechstein he got to play when we was recording in the LA studio and a silver and brass trumpet he carted everywhere like it was his only child. He’d named it Sunshine and kept the silver and brass on it gleaming better than I could.

Seeing him around them Southern California boys, Joy said you could tell right off that Sebastian was foreign. And it was true. He didn’t even have to open his mouth for you to hear that English accent of his that I liked so much. Though Freddie B thought he talked like a fairy. But like I said to Freddie B to put him straight, them English soldiers that Freddie said he met when he was fighting overseas during the war must of sounded just like Sebastian, and Freddie had told me when he come home how brave he thought they was for white boys. They wasn’t no sissies. And neither was David Niven that Sebastian sounded just like to me.

Sebastian had him a college education. In fact he explained to me one night when he was setting in my room waiting on Joy that he had him two college educations, ’cause he’d been picked out special from all the people at his music college to get him a degree from a university at the same time he was taking a special musician’s course. I didn’t get all the gist of it, and I had a hard time trying to picture him being at two different schools at the same time, but I believed him, ’cause even though he was a atheist, I could tell he wasn’t no liar, and in spite of him throwing cuss words around all the time, even when he wasn’t mad, you could kinda tell he was real smart and from good people. He would just cuss for the sake of it, and like other folks would say good morning, with Sebastian it was always ‘F’ this and ‘F’ that.

It put me off him at first, but Joy told me not to take no notice ’cause he didn’t mean nothing by it, no more than them other musicians did. But I didn’t never cotton to it. But seeing as he wasn’t no child of mine, wasn’t nothing much I could say to him. He was nice enough otherwise and had a gentle way about him that I liked.

Seeing Joy standing with him reminded me of the first time I saw her walk out swinging Bernie Finkelstein’s arm when we was living on Grange. Her and Sebastian looked made for each other, and the few times I saw her let him put his arms ’round her, I could see that he didn’t want nobody else in the world but Joy. He’d kiss her on the cheek with his lips just about grazing that rouge she wore to go with her fire engine red lipstick that was all the rage then. His lips would just barely touch her like he thought she was too delicate to kiss harder which used to make me want to laugh, ’cause delicate was one of them things Joy wasn’t. And sometimes when we’d be waiting, the whole crowd of us, the girls, the musicians and the roadies, waiting to check into some hotel where we was staying on tour, I’d see Sebastian stand just close enough to Joy for their shoulders to touch, but he wasn’t never bold enough to put his arms ’round her unless she put her arms ’round him first which she didn’t do unless she wanted something off him.

Joy charmed Sebastian into loving her when he first started working with the girls. But I think it was ’cause she was antsy, with Rex off touring in Europe. She said she was bored and needed a diversion.

‘A diversion! Sebastian Egerton ain’t no road re-route. He’s a man, Joy, and you can’t get him all excited about you if you don’t mean to do right by him, ’cause that stuff comes back on you.’ And sure enough she got the same treatment from Rex Hightower.

I know Joy had Sebastian in her room all night for two nights once. But I didn’t hear no sounds like they was having no sex. ’Cause with me always in the room by hers and thin as some of them walls was in them hotels and motels we stayed in while we was traveling, I could hear if she had somebody in there and was actually doing something with all that noise she liked to make. Whooping it up like a mule on the run or a hog getting murdered. A few times I got up out the bed and took a shoe to the wall. Not that I was bothered to hear her having sex since she was grown and what she did with her body was her business, but she was s’posed to be a star. Folks got to recognizing the girls in them hotels and I didn’t think all that noise was dignified and didn’t want nobody putting it out that Joy was fast, ’cause Anndora had that reputation and deserved it.

It was Anndora said Sebastian’s dick was too small for him to be any use to her or Joy and I wanted so bad to slap her face not only for talking dirty, but for knowing in the first place what he had between his legs. I reckon she only got in the bed with him to spite Joy, and whereas Joy said after she caught ’em together that it didn’t bother her one way or t’other, I felt Sebastian had a chance with Joy before that. Anndora didn’t care where she put herself and I never thought I’d see the day when I met a woman that I felt took advantage of men when it come to sex. But there came Anndora to prove that it was possible.

I was there the night she dragged Sebastian to her room. They’d both been sitting with me in the bar of a hotel we was staying at one night on East Pleasant Street in Baltimore, and Anndora handed him one of her sleeping pills to pop in his mouth, ’cause he said he couldn’t rest after them shows. Next thing I knew the boy was slurring his words and spilling his Wild Turkey that he always ordered wherever he went but never drank. Them pills didn’t affect Anndora like they did other folks. They was supposed to be sleeping pills, but no sooner than she had one, she was wanting to lay on her back and throw her legs up in the air. It was Brenda that saw Anndora lead Sebastian off and told Joy when she come to set with us that Anndora’d took Sebastian up to her room. I know she just told it to stir things up. And that’s the exact results she got, ’cause Joy went and got a key from the porter claiming she was Anndora and walked straight into Anndora’s room at that ritzy hotel and caught Sebastian sleeping there in her sister’s bed. Joy said she just walked in on ’em for a joke, but I knew that in her heart she was hurt, ’cause much as she said Sebastian didn’t mean nothing to her, he had that thing about him that made you trust him and I don’t think she ever thought that he’d be one to do no dirt like mess with her sister when he claimed he had eyes for Joy.

Sebastian tried to explain what happened and him and Joy finally had a little set to about it, ’cause I heard him say to her the next night ’fore they went out on stage, ‘You’re hot and cold. Interested but not interested. I don’t know what the fuck you want and I don’t think that you do.’ She turned her back on him and he whirled her ’round to face him. ‘If I wait for you after the gigs to make sure you don’t get hassled,’ Sebastian said, ‘you’re annoyed because you say I’m hovering around too much, and now just because I passed out in your sister’s room, you’re not speaking and moody and want to give me a hard time.’ But Joy didn’t never like to be disturbed before she went out on that stage, and always wanted to go on there smiling like the world was hers, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear her answer. She was checking herself in the mirror ’cause that’s what she did last thing and she acted like he wasn’t talking to her.

Sebastian and the other musicians always went on before the girls and did a couple songs to warm theyselves up and gee the audience up, and then Sebastian would yell to them other three players ‘Jump for Joy’, which was the title of the song he wrote that they played to bring the girls out. I used to stand by and watch ’cause didn’t matter how hot it was, I enjoyed seeing them fans get excited when Bang Bang Bang hit the stage. Sebastian always had a Camel cigarette lit, perched on the edge of the electric keyboards he played, and I never knew why he bothered to light it. Maybe just to give him some honky tonk atmosphere, so he could see the smoke drift up in front of his eyes ’cause with all that dancing his fingers did ’cross them keys, there wasn’t no time for him to smoke, he had that piano burning up so. When his fingers hopped around them keys like they was hot to the touch, Brenda used to laugh and come off and say, ‘You had that piano smoking again white boy.’

It always surprised me that Sebastian’s hands wasn’t nothing special to look at. Long as the rest of his body was, his hands was smallish for a man’s, and fingers maybe even on the short side.

I agreed with Joy that I didn’t know what all them little white girls was screaming at everytime Sebastian stepped out on the stage, ’cause wasn’t nothing manly about him but his manners and them fans wasn’t to know that. He had a girl’s face and looked too soft. Except for that square chin of his that had a dimple in it, wasn’t much sign of man, and from off stage there was no way they could of seen them long black eyelashes he had that I always teased him I wanted to borrow when he finished with them.

There was two numbers that Sebastian got to play trumpet on and when he stepped from behind his keyboards and synthesizer that was always lined up in a ‘L’ shape at the far side of the band left of the drummer to walk over and take over and take centre stage with Brenda, them girls used to get theyselves in a frenzy like somebody sanctified that had caught the spirit, screaming ‘Seb! Seb! Seb-astian’ like they was calling God. I used to get to giggling till I couldn’t catch my breath at them simpleton girls acting so crazy.

Brenda said it near broke her heart to hear a white boy playing trumpet as good as Sebastian could and especially with him being so English at that. She used to say she had a good ear for trumpet solos and I believed it, since she had stayed partial to the trumpet from that time I took her and Joy to First Tabernacle and she heard Sister Hall’s brother Tommy playing. Anyway, she used to grab the mike in the middle of that second trumpet solo Sebastian played and yell, ‘The white boy’s got soul,’ and Brenda could really howl it like some preacher and get the crowd to chanting it too. And Sebastian, shy as he was, used to always flush pink and slip back behind his piano like he didn’t have them wild young white girls screaming to yank his drawers off him.

Then as part of their stage routine, he would give a loud count into the next number. ‘TWO – THREE – FOUR – JOY, JOY, JOY!’ he’d call across to them other musicians and Brenda would start in on a real pretty slow tune, sounded like a spiritual that Sebastian said he wrote special for Brenda, but any fool knew he wrote it for Miss Joy as well. And I thought he liked to play that one after his trumpet solo to show that however many of them girls in the audience that was hollering out his name, Joy was all that was on his mind. And I believe she was all that was in his heart. Yes indeedy. Sebastian Egerton was in love with the whole of Miss Joyce Clarissa Bang. Every fart. Every bruise. Every hangnail. Every period pain. Every dark mood. And I noticed she had more than a few when we was on the road … he loved her for all of what she was. Not like them boys she met down them places where the girls played who was only interested in the glamorous, smiling Joy; the one they figured had some money in the bank, which wasn’t nothing but a illusion ’cause that music business is a pot of gold with a hole in the bottom of it for most of them people struggling to get by in it. Though Sebastian, unbeknownst to Joy at the time, was one of them with better luck.

Joy said the love flowed so from Sebastian Egerton’s eyes when he looked at her, it was like staring into full beam headlights and she had to look away to keep him from blinding her. And at them rehearsals, I’d catch him sometimes staring so hard at Joy it’s wonder he didn’t bore a hole into her while her and Anndora’d be practicing their back-up steps.

One time when we was setting in a hotel bar by ourselves and there was a piano, he played me a instrumental he wrote for Joy called ‘Without You’. Way before it ever got recorded. Then later he showed me all the music that he wrote out for it. I couldn’t believe it.

‘You did this by yourself,’ I asked him. It looked as much Greek to me as them pages of Hebrew I see written in the front of Freddie B’s big Bible.

‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian holding them thirty or so music sheets like they wasn’t nothing. But every line was filled in so neat with music notes and dots and dashes and I don’t know what all. ‘It’s a concerto,’ he told me, and showed how all the parts was for different instruments, violins, violas, flutes and a harp, that he believed he would one day get to play it.

‘Child, you a genius! Did you let Joy see this here that you done?’ I asked ’cause I thought that seeing how smart he was might warm her to him a bit more.

‘No. It’s no big deal. I learned to do it at college. It passes the time,’ he said and sifted them all back in the big brown envelope they come out of. He wasn’t one to brag about nothing and the onliest time I heard him brass his buttons was the night that he come to sit in my room and told me about his two younger sisters that he raved about and who was still living in some place in England near Birmingham. He didn’t talk all that much about his folks and I didn’t get the feeling he had a lot of time for his daddy who was a retired physics professor.

I loved that boy like a son by the time we’d been out on the road a few months, ’cause I noticed he always made sure I wasn’t stuck nowhere by myself and got me anything that was handed out free. Course I realized part of it was to do with him knowing that I was closer to Joy than even Brenda and Anndora, and he probably figured that getting to me was a way of getting through to Joy. But for all that, the boy was special and I even respected him for leaving us when he did ’cause it showed he had heart.

It happened after our big show at the Buzz Club in Chicago. The next day we was driving fast out of south-side headed for a club we was playing in Rockford and our limo hit a dog. Joy told the driver to keep going which wasn’t like her ’cause she liked animals. But she liked being on time more. Then Sebastian chimed in and said he rather be late for a gig than to hit a dog and leave it in the middle of the road.

That poor limo driver that come with the car we was renting for that day didn’t know what to do when Sebastian pulled back the window separating driver from passengers and told the man to stop after Joy’d just told the man to keep going.

Only Sebastian, me and Joy was in the car, ’cause the rest of ’em had gone in another car with Danny Lagerfield who was managing the girls.

‘Stop the fucking car,’ Sebastian said like he wasn’t in no temper but was about to be. ‘I’ll get out and take care of the fucking dog and you can stuff your fucking gigs, Joy. See how well they’ll play tonight without me, you cold-hearted bitch, because I couldn’t play anyway if I had to think about that poor fucking animal we left in the road.’

Joy was used to having her way with him, and I was kinda glad to see him putting his foot down, ’cause I thought he was right and it was the Christian thing to do, although his cussing and name calling wasn’t necessary.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Joy said in that sweet way that had him wrapped ’round her finger. ‘We haven’t got time to stop, Seb, and as hard as we hit it, he’s probably dead anyway.’ Sometimes she could be as good as Tammy at making sense out of nonsense.

Sebastian wasn’t listening to her. ‘Stop the car,’ he said again to the driver. ‘I’m out of here!’

I didn’t think he had it in him, ’cause he was always so easy going which I forget and mistake for weakness.

Wasn’t no way in the world that we could of got through a show that night without that boy, and Joy knew it good as he did, ’cause he was band leader and apart from that, he had made a name for hisself working for Bang Bang Bang, and a lot of them girls come just to see him.

Joy didn’t never let herself get mad if she didn’t figure being mad was the best way ’round a situation. Otherwise, I guess she would of told him where to go then and there, ’cause I saw the thought flash through her eyes. Her lips was pursed tight like they always was when she was thinking hard, though she let common sense guide her, and I let out a sigh of relief.

‘Please turn around and pick up the dog,’ she said to the driver like the idea’d been hers all along. But I knew she was already steaming and scheming which is how she did if she thought somebody got the best of her. She was setting quiet in that limo planning vengeance, and I think she knew I knew it. ’Cause I knew her good.

I used to always try and tell her when she was growing up not to forget that vengeance was the Lord’s. It was in Joy’s right ear and out her left.

That poor cocker spaniel was still laying out there in a pool of his blood and whining though it didn’t look like there was much left of it to be conscious, and Sebastian lifted it careful up in his arms like it was his sick child and he couldn’t see the blood. Then when he climbed back in the car with it, he insisted on sitting up in the front with the driver so we didn’t have to look at it, and made the driver circle slow round that slum till we found a kid on a bike who knew where there was a vet. Sebastian paid the boy five dollars to have the kid lead us there on his two wheeler, but all that boy was interested in was getting Joy’s autograph and since we had a few records of ‘Chocolate Chip’ we gave the child that as well as the money.

Though Joy got to smiling and acting friendly, she was still in a heat, I could tell from her pursed lips, which meant that even if it didn’t look like nothing was eating her, she was actually setting there figuring out a way to get back at Sebastian. It was pitiful to see her wanting vengeance, ’cause her mind would get set on that one track and she couldn’t hardly think of nothing else. That was her only big weakness and I couldn’t train her out of it from when she was a kid.

Even though Sebastian was in the right that afternoon, I could tell that Joy wasn’t gonna let him get away with backing her in a corner and wasn’t but a week later that she convinced Danny, the girls’ manager, that Sebastian had too much to say in things and made sure she’d found a replacement before Danny fired Sebastian.

I was sure sorry to see Sebastian have to leave and he took the guitar player, little Jimmy Fraser, with him which Brenda said was to be expected as him and Jimmy was best friends and it was Sebastian that had introduced little Jimmy to Bang Bang Bang in the first place. I didn’t let Joy know that I got ’em both a going away present and when I give Sebastian the ashtray I got for him, I told him that I knew good as he did why he was really getting fired. He squeezed my hand, but didn’t say nothing.

No sooner they was gone, they put their own group together … I think it was called Margarine. No. Maybe it was called Butter, I can’t remember but it was something that you could spread on bread, and whatever the name of it was they had a great big ol’ hit with the song Sebastian wrote called ‘Too Old to Boogey, Too Young to Die’. Couldn’t hear nothing else on the radio. They put it out after Bang Bang Bang broke up over that mess about Brenda being a lesbian. And since Joy knew I liked Sebastian a whole lot she made me a tape with that song on it and the one that was on the flip side which had that instrumental on it Sebastian’d wrote for Joy, ‘Without You’. It was beautiful, and I didn’t dare tell her that I knew he’d wrote it for her. ’Cause whereas on the one hand she was thoughtful enough to tape it for me, Sebastian didn’t never get mentioned again after he got fired. She’d erased him which wasn’t easy to do seeing how big that band of his and Jimmy’s got. Hit after hit they had and got way bigger than Rex Hightower ever thought to be.

Sebastian rang me a few years later when he was getting ready to go on a solo tour of Japan and asked if I would tag along with him to look after the back-up singers that he was taking. I was wanting to ’cause he was offering me a lot of money and Freddie B was out of work, but I felt that Joy would have been upset with me if I had of gone, ’cause she was used to me siding with her over everything. Including her firing Sebastian Egerton like she did. When he asked on the phone about Joy, I reckoned he wasn’t over her ’cause he was so salty when I said that she was on the road with Rex. Sebastian said, ‘What’s she still doing wasting her time with that fucking no-talent coke head?’ I took coke to mean Coca-Cola, naive as I was, and thought that Sebastian was smarting over Joy choosing Rex over him. But I should of listened. Sebastian give me different numbers I could ring if I wanted to change my mind and go out touring with him, and though I scratched them down in pencil in the back of Freddie’s Bible, I didn’t reckon I’d ever put them to use.

But Sebastian Egerton was the onliest person I knew of in the record business that would of cared as much as I did about how Joy got buried and I toyed with the idea of calling him to see if he could help me get to New York. Out of all them rich folk that Joy claimed she knew including ‘Lord this’ and the ‘Earl of that’ she met over in England, if any of them would mourn her passing, it was him.

And Freddie B of course who was still laying sleep and none the wiser …

I peered out my kitchen window again down to the San Francisco streets and wondered why everything hadn’t stopped, but like Jesse had said, life goes on. And though I wanted to stick my head out that window and let out a long roar over San Francisco to raise the spirits of my mama, and brother Caesar, and Tondalayah Hayes that I had lost to death, and beg them to stand together and wait on my Joy who was coming, I didn’t. I just cried.

Fifteen minutes later I had wiped so many tears away on the hem of my nightgown that it was near to sopping wet. I decided to get dressed and to pull myself together for my husband’s sake.

I thought I should put on something cheerful, so I would look bright even if I didn’t feel it. ’Least it would make me feel better when I caught myself passing the hall mirror. So I went and stared into the hall cupboard where I kept my good clothes and wondered what was gonna be right for me to wear to tell Freddie B that Joy was dead.

Pink ain’t what I call my color, but Joy once surprised me when she said I looked my best in baby pink ’cause dark as I was, it lifted my complexion, and Freddie B sat there with a lump of snuff in his mouth agreeing with her. At the time, I didn’t know they was conniving me and that what was really about to happen was that Joy was planning to buy me a pink silk trouser suit as a Easter present. It was made in France, ’cause she didn’t bother with nothing made in America if she could help it, and Freddie B loved that it had a floppy long buttoned down shirt that hung over the baggy pants to hide my backside.

I pulled that suit off the hanger and took it in the bathroom to put it on, trying all the while not to let myself get to crying again ’cause it seemed like I’d lost control of them tears and they was starting and stopping when they felt like it. Like I myself didn’t have a bit of say in it.

While I washed and slipped on my things, I was practicing the best way to tell Freddie B about Joy but however I put them words together they didn’t come out no easier and said the same pitiful thing. Our God-sent child was dead.

First off I thought I’d say, ‘Listen, Freddie B, why don’t you have you something to eat ’fore I tell you something bad that’s happened.’ But he didn’t like me beating about the bush over nothing important so I thought he’d better have the direct approach. ‘Listen Freddie,’ I said out loud, ‘ain’t no use me mincing words, ’cause Joy is dead and I might as well let you have it straight.’ But that seemed too mean, so I was thinking I’d say something soothing with it, so I said, ‘I can stay home and keep you company watching the wrestling on Sunday night like you like, ’cause Joy’s dead and I won’t be going to Reno.’ But that didn’t sound like I was telling him no more than that he had pork chops for dinner. Then I figured that the nicest way to tell him was by taking him a mug of coffee and setting at the end of the bed to say ‘I got sorriful news Freddie B from Tammy that you ain’t gonna want to hear no more than I did …’