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