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