Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Read online

We each dropped fifteen cents into the man’s cigar box of coins and stepped inside the bus.

  The smell got us first. A hog would have buried its snout in the mud to have escaped it. Then we saw the fat lady. She was enormous. She dripped fat. She was laid out on a divan, attempting to fan away the heat and the stench. We both ran out of the bus toward the movie house.

  When we arrived at the ticket window, I reminded Bobby of his offer to stake me to a ticket.

  “I was only kidding,” he said, as he pranced into the theater. I sat on the curb and cried. Later, when I told his father what Bobby had done, Mr. Bob played a symphony upon his son’s rear and allowed me to watch. I took shameful pleasure in the sweet revenge.

  Charles Moore. His mother called him “Cholly,” and he eventually achieved some renown in high school when The Beatles hit in 1964 because Charles, even with his short hair, was a dead-ringer for a seventeen-year-old Paul McCartney. Charles was never able to make any money off this resemblance — that was before the imitation craze, e.g., the Elvis impersonators after his death and the three or four thousand young black kids currently doing Michael Jackson — but he obviously took a great deal of pleasure from standing in the middle of a group of giggling girls who were saying things like, “Oh, Charles, you look just like Paul.”

  What I remember Charles for most, however, is the fight we had in the seventh grade over a baseball score. I was a fierce and loyal Dodger fan. Charles held the same allegiance to the Milwaukee Braves.

  I arrived at school one morning with a score from the evening before, Dodgers over the Braves. I had heard it on the radio.

  “The Dodgers beat the Braves last night,” I boasted to Charles.

  “No they didn’t,” he said.

  “I heard it on the radio,” I continued.

  “I don’t care what you heard,” he said. “The Braves won.”

  The principal had to pull us apart.

  When I went home that afternoon, I called Mr. Bob Entrekin, who subscribed to the afternoon paper with the complete scores, and asked him to verify the fact that the Dodgers had, indeed, defeated the Braves so I could call Charles Moore and instruct him to kiss my tail.

  The Braves had won, said Mr. Bob. I feigned a sore throat and didn’t go to school the next two days.

  Danny Thompson. We were best friends before high school. Danny was the best athlete in our class. At the countywide field day competition, he ran fourth in the potato race. A potato race works — or worked, since I doubt potato racing has lingered with everybody throwing those silly frisbees today — this way:

  There were four cans (the kind that large quantities of mustard and canned peaches came in) spaced at intervals of ten yards. The boy running first can dashed the first ten yards, picked the potato out of the can, and raced back and handed it to the boy running second can.

  He then dropped the potato into the team can at the starting line and hurried to the second can twenty yards away. The team that got all four potatoes in its can first won the medals.

  Danny ran fourth can because he was the fastest boy in our class. We probably would have won the county potato race, had I not stumbled and dropped my potato as I tried to depart from the second can.

  Danny was also rather possessive about his belongings. He received a new football for Christmas one year. It was a Sammy Baugh model, and it had white stripes around each end. We were perhaps ten when Danny got the football.

  We gathered for a game of touch a few days after Christmas, but Danny didn’t bring his new football.

  “I’m saving it,” he explained.

  When I would visit Danny, he would pull his new football out of his closet and allow me to hold it. He would never take it outside, however.

  “I’m saving it,” he would say again. That was nearly thirty years ago. We never did get to play with Danny’s football.

  One morning in the fifth grade, I looked over at Danny and his face was in his hands. He was crying. I had never seen Danny cry before. The teacher whispered something to him and then took him out of the room.

  Word travels fast in a small town. Danny’s mother and his father had separated. He and I were even closer in our friendship after that. We shared a loss of parent uncommon to children then, but we rolled quite well with our punch, I suppose. We spent hours together deep down in the woods behind his house. He talked of his mother. I talked of my father.

  Danny wanted us to become blood brothers. He had seen two Indians on television cut their fingers and then allow their blood to mix. I wanted to be Danny’s blood brother, but I was afraid to cut my finger. I suggested that we swap comic books instead.

  * * *

  It was a simple childhood, one that I didn’t fully cherish until I had long grown out of it. Only then did I appreciate the fact that I was allowed to grow into manhood having never once spent a day at the country club pool, or playing baseball where they put the ball on a tee like they do for children today, or growing my hair down over my shoulders, or wearing T-shirts advertising punk rock bands, or smoking anything stronger than a rabbit tobacco cigarette wrapped in paper torn from a brown bag and, later, an occasional Marlboro Dudley Stamps would bring on camping trips from his father’s store.

  It was a most happy childhood, because the only real fear we had was that we might somehow find ourselves at odds with Frankie Garfield. Frankie was the town bully who often made life miserable for all of us, especially any new child who moved into Moreland. There was the new kid with the harelip, for instance.

  The afternoon of his first day in school, the new kid rode his bicycle to Cureton and Cole’s, where Frankie was involved in beating up a couple of fifth graders for their NuGrapes and Zagnut candy bars.

  The new kid parked his bicycle, and as he walked to the entrance of the store, he reached down to pick up a shiny nail off the ground. Frankie spotted him.

  “Hey, Harelip,” he called, “that’s my nail.”

  Nobody had bothered to inform the new kid about Frankie Garfield. The rest of us knew that if Frankie said the nail was his, the best move was to drop the nail immediately, apologize profusely, and then offer to buy Frankie anything inside the store he desired.

  The new kid, however, made a serious, nearly fatal, mistake. He indicated, in no uncertain terms, that Frankie was filled with a rather unpleasant substance common to barnyards. Then he put the nail in his pocket and began to walk inside the store.

  He didn’t make it past the first step before Frankie began to beat him unmercifully. At first, I think Frankie was simply amusing himself, as a dog amuses himself by catching a turtle in his mouth and slinging it around in the air.

  Then the new kid made another mistake. He tried to fight back against Frankie. Now Frankie was mad. When he finally tired of beating his victim, Frankie left him there in a crumpled heap and rode off on the new kid’s bicycle.

  I suppose Frankie did have some degree of heart about him. He let the new kid keep the nail.

  We were involved in some occasional juvenile delinquency, but nothing more flagrant than stealing a few watermelons, or shooting out windows in abandoned houses, or pilfering a few peaches over at Cates’s fruit stand.

  We went to church, didn’t talk back to our elders, studied history in which America never lost a war, and were basically what our parents wanted us to be. Except when it came to Elvis.

  * * *

  Whatever else we were, we were the first children of television, and it was television that brought us Elvis. He would prove to be the first break between our parents and ourselves. That disagreement seems so mild today after the generational war that broke out in the late sixties, but those were more timid times when naiveté was still in flower.

  Elvis was a Pied Piper wearing ducktails. He sang and he moaned and wiggled, and we followed him ... taking our first frightening steps of independence.

  3

  Guilt Trip in a Cadillac

  RADIO PERHAPS WOULD have made Elvis popular, but televisi
on made him The King. We could see him, and there never had been anything like him before.

  The only music I knew prior to Elvis was the hymns from the Methodist Cokesbury hymnal; “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Good Night, Irene” from my mother’s singing while she ironed; and “Peace in the Valley,” which I had learned watching “The Red Foley Show” on Saturday nights after my aunt bought the first television in the family.

  But Elvis. Ducktails. His guitar. Uh-uh, Baby, don’t you step on my blue suede shoes, and don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.

  Elvis thrust a rebellious mood upon us. I was ten or eleven when I decided to grow my own ducktails and refused to get my little-boy flattop renewed. As my hair grew out, I pushed back the sides by greasing them down, and then I brought my hair together at the back of my head, giving it the appearance of the north end of a southbound duck. I wouldn’t wash my hair, either, for fear it might lose what I considered to be a perfect set.

  “If you don’t wash your hair, young man,” my mother would warn me, “you’re going to get head lice.”

  I didn’t believe her. Nothing, not even head lice, could live in that much greasy gook.

  I also pushed my pants down low like Elvis wore his.

  “Pull your pants up before they fall off,” my mother would say.

  “This is how Elvis wears his pants,” would be my inevitable reply.

  “I don’t know what you children see in him,” she would counter.

  I wrote her off as completely without musical taste and suggested that Red Foley was an incompetent old geezer who couldn’t carry Elvis’s pick.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with young’uns these days,” was my mother’s subsequent lament.

  My stepfather eventually entered the ducktail disagreement and dragged me to the barber to reinstate my shorn looks. I cried and pouted and refused to come to the dinner table. Why were these people so insistent that I maintain the status quo when there was something new out there to behold?

  We fought the Elvis battle in my house daily. Sample warfare:

  “How can you stand that singing?”

  “Elvis is a great singer.”

  “Sounds like a lot of hollering and screaming to me.”

  “It’s rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “It’s garbage.”

  “It’s Elvis.”

  “It’s garbage.”

  “It is not.”

  “Don’t you talk back to me, young man!”

  “I wasn’t talking back.”

  “You’re talking back now.”

  “I am not.”

  “Turn off that music right now and go to bed. This Elvis is ruining all our children.”

  I suppose if it hadn’t been Elvis who ruined us, it would have been something, or somebody, else. But it was Elvis, and it was his music that set us off on a course different from that of our parents.

  “That Elvis,” the old men around the stove at Cureton and Cole’s would say, “ain’t nothin’ but a white nigger.”

  “Don’t sing nothin’ but nigger music.”

  “That little ol’ gal of mine got to watchin’ him on the teevee and he started all that movin’ around like he does — look like a damn dog tryin’ to hump on the back of a bitch in heat—and I made her shet him off. Ought not allow such as that on the teevee.”

  “Preacher preached on him last week. Said he was trash and his music was trash.”

  “He’s ruinin’ the young’uns.”

  The teachers at Moreland School caught one of the Turnipseed boys, I think it was Bobby Gene, shaking and humping like Elvis to the delight of a group of fifth-grade girls on the playground one morning during recess.

  They took him to the principal, who paddled him and sent a note home to his parents, explaining his lewd behavior. Bobby Gene’s daddy whipped him again.

  “Do your Elvis for us, Bobby Gene,” we said when he came back to school.

  “Can’t,” he replied. “I’m too sore.”

  Bobby Gene Turnipseed may have done the best Elvis impersonation in Moreland, but each of Elvis’s male followers had his own version. After my stepfather forced me to have my ducktails sheared back into a flattop, my Elvis lost a little something, but I still prided myself on the ability to lift the right side of my lip, a la Elvis’s half-smile, half-snarl that sent the girls into fits of screaming and hand-clutching.

  There was a girl in my Sunday School class who was a desirable young thing, and as our Sunday School teacher read our lesson one morning, I decided to do my Elvis half-smile, half-snarl for the latest object of my ardor.

  Recall that we were children of church-minded people, and I was quite aware of the wages of sin. I once snitched a grape at Cureton and Cole’s, and my cousin saw me and told me I was going to hell for thievery. I was so disturbed that I went back to the store and confessed my crime to Mr. J.W. Thompson, one of the owners. He was so moved by my admission of guilt that he gave me an entire sack of grapes free and assured me I’d have to steal a car or somebody’s dog to qualify for eternal damnation. When my cousin asked me to share my grapes with her, I told her to go to.... Well, I ate all the grapes myself and spit the seeds at her.

  Stealing grapes was one thing, but thinking unspeakable thoughts about girls while in church and curling my lip at my prepubescent Cleopatra while the lesson was being read probably would bring harsh punishment from above. I couldn’t remember which thou-shalt-not such activity fell under — I wasn’t certain what covet meant, but I figured it had something to do with wanting another boy’s bicycle — so I decided to take a chance and do my Elvis lip trick at the girl anyway.

  I curled up the right side of my lip perfectly as Cleo looked over at me. I didn’t know what to expect. Would she absolutely melt? Would she want to meet me after church and go over to what was left of the abandoned cotton gin and give me kisses and squeezes?

  She didn’t do either. What she did was tell the Sunday School teacher I was making weird faces at her while the lesson was being read. The teacher told my mother about it, and my punishment was to read the entire book of Deuteronomy and present a report on it to the class the next Sunday. I learned a valuable lesson from all that: When you’re in church, keep your mind on baseball or what you’re going to have for lunch, not on something sweet and soft and perfumed wearing a sundress. Church and Evening in Paris simply don’t mix.

  Never one to be selfish, I attempted to share my ability to mime Elvis’s facial expressions with others, especially with Little Eddie Estes. Little Eddie was a couple of years younger than me and I served as his self-appointed mentor. I taught him how to bunt, where to look in the Sears Roebuck catalog for the most scintillating pictures of women in their underpants, how to tell if a watermelon is ripe (you cut out a plug and if what you see inside is red, it’s ripe), and I also attempted to instruct him in mimicking Elvis.

  “What you do is this,” I said to Little Eddie. “You curl your lip to the right a little bit, like the dog just did something smelly. If you want to add Elvis’s movements to this, you bring one leg around like a wasp has crawled inside your pants leg, and then you move the other and groan like when your mother insists you eat boiled cabbage.”

  Little Eddie made a gallant attempt. He got the lip fine and he groaned perfectly, but he couldn’t get the legs to shake in the correct manner.

  “I couldn’t shake my legs, either, when I first started doing Elvis,” I told him. “What you need to do is practice in front of a mirror.”

  Several days later, Little Eddie’s father found his son curling his lip and groaning and shaking his legs in front of a mirror in his bedroom and thought he was having some sort of seizure. His mother gave him a dose of Castor Oil and put him to bed.

  * * *

  I don’t suppose that any generation has really understood the next, and every generation has steadfastly insisted that the younger adapt its particular values and views.

  My parents’ generation, true t
o form, sought to bring up its young in its mold, but it also had a firm resolve to do something more for us.

  It was much later in my life, perhaps at a time I was feeling terribly sorry for myself and looking for a way out of that constant dilemma, that I decided my parents’ generation may have endured more hardship and offered more sacrifices than any other previous generation of Americans.

  So they never had to cross the Rockies in covered wagons and worry about being scalped. But my parents, both of whom were born in 1912, would live through and be directly affected by two World Wars, one Great Depression, and whatever you call Korea. And when they had been through all that, they were ushered into the Cold War and had to decide whether or not to build a fallout shelter.

  It is no wonder that the men and women who came from those harried times were patriots, were traditionalists, were believers in the idea that he who worked and practiced thrift prospered, and he who allowed the sun to catch him sleeping and was wasteful perished.

  These were hard people, who had lived through hard times. But they endured and the country endured, and they came away from their experiences with a deep belief in a system that had been tested but had emerged with glorious victory.

  Looking back on my relationship with my own parents and with others from their generation, I think they also felt a sense of duty to their children to make certain that, at whatever cost, their children would be spared the adversity they had seen.

  Have we, the Baby Boomers, not heard our parents say a thousand times, “We want you to have it better than we did”?

  They wanted to protect us. They wanted to educate us. They wanted us to be doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers, not farmers and mill hands. They hounded us to study and to strive and avoid winding up in a job that paid an hourly wage. They may have mistrusted individuals their own age who had educations and who went to work wearing ties, but that’s exactly what they wanted for us. And they made us feel terribly guilty if we did not share their desires.

  “Have you done your homework?” my mother would ask.