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

  “I’ll do it later.”

  “You will do it now, young man. I don’t want you winding up on the third shift at Flagg-Utica.”

  Flagg-Utica was a local textile plant.

  “I haven’t bought anything new to wear in years so I could save for your education,” my mother would continue on her guilt trip, “and you don’t have the gratitude to do your homework.”

  Somehow, I never could figure how failing to read three chapters in my geography book about the various sorts of vegetation to be found in a tropical rain forest had anything to do with facing a life as a mill hand. But with enough guilt as a catalyst, you can read anything, even geography books and Deuteronomy.

  I suppose our parents also were trying to protect us when they voiced their displeasure with Elvis. They knew he was something different, too, and they were afraid of where he might lead — thinking evil thoughts about girls in Sunday School, for example.

  We want you to have it better than we did, they said, and that covered just about everything. They wanted us to have money and comforts; they wanted us to have knowledge and vision; they wanted a better world for us, one free from war and bitter sacrifice.

  They are old now, my parents’ generation, and I suppose they think they got what they wanted. I did my homework and I got the education my mother saved for, and I live in an air-conditioned house with a microwave oven, an automatic ice-maker, and a Jenn-Air grill on the stove. I also have two color television sets with remote control, a pair of Gucci loafers, and a tennis racquet that cost more than the 1947 Chevrolet my mother once bought. I eat steak whenever I want it, I’ve been to Europe a couple of times and nobody shot at me, and I have a nice car.

  The car. It’s a perfect manifestation of having achieved the success my parents wanted for me, but such success can be bittersweet. While we’re having it better than our parents did, they now may feel, in some instances, that we’ve actually gone further than they intended. They may suspect, as the phrase went, that we’ve forgotten “where we came from.”

  Allow me to explain.

  After I got my first job out of college, I bought myself a Pontiac. Later, I bought another Pontiac, bigger and with more features than the previous one. Then I lost my head and bought one of those British roadsters that was approximately the size of a bumper car at the amusement park but not built nearly as solidly.

  After the sports car had driven me sufficiently nuts, I decided to go back to a full-sized sedan, something fitting a person who was having it better than his parents did.

  I got myself a Cadillac.

  Nobody in my family had ever owned a Cadillac, so I figured if I had one, there could be no question that I had fulfilled my mother’s wishes by making something of myself.

  I had a former schoolmate who sold Cadillacs, so I went to see him and priced a couple. I couldn’t have paid for the back seat, much less an entire Cadillac.

  “Have you thought about leasing?” my friend asked me.

  As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. As a matter of fact, I never had even heard of leasing an automobile.

  “It’s the latest thing,” said my friend, who explained that I wouldn’t have to fork over any huge down payment, and for a modest (by Arab oil sheik standards) monthly installment, I could be driving around in a brand-new Cadillac.

  I bit.

  “You want power steering and power brakes, of course,” said my friend.

  “Of course.”

  “And do you want leather upholstery?”

  “Of course.”

  “And how about wire wheelcovers and a sun roof?”

  “Of course.”

  “And eight-track stereo?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” my friend summarized. “You want the kind of Cadillac that if you drove it home to Moreland and parked it in your mother’s yard, half the town would want to come by and see it. Right?”

  “But, of course,” I said.

  I drove my new Cadillac with the power steering and the power brakes and the leather upholstery and the wire wheelcovers and the eight-track stereo off the lot and directly home to Moreland.

  “It must have been expensive,” said my mother.

  “Not really,” I explained. “I leased it.”

  “Couldn’t you have done just as well with a Chevrolet? I always had good luck with Chevrolets.”

  “I just thought it was time I got myself a Cadillac,” I explained. “I’ve worked hard.”

  “I know that, son,” said my mother, “but I don’t want you just throwing your money away on fancy cars.”

  Suddenly, I felt guilty for driving up in my mother’s yard in a Cadillac. I was feeling guilty because I didn’t think a Chevrolet was good enough for me anymore. I could hear the old men sitting around the stove:

  “Got yourself a Cadillac, huh? Boy, ain’t you big-time?”

  “Hey, look who got hisself a Cadillac, ol’ college-boy here. Boy, where’d you learn high-falootin’ things like drivin’ a Cadillac? Didn’t learn that from your mama, I know that. She never drove nothing but Chevrolets.”

  The only person who came by to see my car while I was visiting my mother was Crazy Melvin.

  “What kind of car is it?” he asked me.

  “Chevrolet,” I said.

  “Thought so,” said Crazy Melvin as he walked away.

  Guilt was a very big part of my generation’s adult life. If you didn’t do well enough, you were guilty because you’d let your parents down. But if you did too well, and came home driving a Cadillac and wearing sunglasses, you felt guilty because you obviously had forgotten your roots and had turned into a big-city high-roller that you had no business turning into.

  The old men at the store: “You drivin’ that Cadillac is like puttin’ a ten dollar saddle on a thousand dollar horse.”

  Despite the Cadillac, which now has more than 100,000 miles on it and is five years old (I figure if I drive it long enough, my mother will appreciate the sound common sense I used in not trading for a new car until my old one was completely worn out), despite the education, despite all the gadgetry I own, despite the fact that I didn’t wind up on the third shift at Flagg-Utica, I’m not so certain that I am having it better than my parents’ generation did.

  Let me clarify this point: I wouldn’t have wanted to go through World Wars and the Great Depression, and I like my creature comforts and the cruise control on my car, but did my parents ever have to eat a plastic breakfast at McDonald’s while some guy mopped under their table spreading the aroma of ammonia?

  Did they ever have to fight five o’clock traffic on a freeway when they were my age? Did they ever have to worry about getting herpes? Couldn’t they eat bacon and all those other foods that are supposed to give me everything from St. Vitus Dance to cancer without worrying?

  Did they ever have to put up with calling somebody and getting a recorded message? Did they ever have to make their own salads in restaurants or pump their own gasoline at exorbitant prices in gasoline stations? Didn’t they get free glasses when they bought gas, and didn’t the attendant always wash their windshield and check their oil without being asked?

  Did my parents’ generation go to movies and not understand them at all? Did they ever have to deal with women’s liberation, gay rights, the Moral Majority, the anti-nuke movement, a dozen kinds of racism, palimony, sex discrimination suits, and Phil Donahue making you wonder if you really have any business on this planet anymore?

  Did they have to endure Valley Girls, punk rock, rock videos, the “moonwalk,” break dancing, ghetto blasters, and “The Catlins”?

  So their kids worshipped Elvis. My generation’s children follow Michael Jackson, who wears one glove and his sunglasses at night, and sings songs with names like “Beat It.” It also is rumored that he takes female hormones to nullify his voice change. I cannot verify this, but there are rumors he recently was seen hanging his panty hose on a shower rod. My generation
’s children also follow something called “Culture Club,” which features something called Boy George, who dresses like Zasu Pitts.

  My parents’ generation had Roosevelt for a president. We had Nixon.

  They won their war. We lost ours.

  They knew exactly what their roles in family and society were. Most of us don’t have any idea what ours are anymore.

  They had corns on their toes. We have identity crises.

  They got married first and then lived together. We do it just the opposite today.

  They fell in love. We fall, or try to, into meaningful relationships.

  Did Lou Gehrig use cocaine? Did Jack Benny freebase? Did Barbara Stanwyck get naked on the silver screen? Did they have to put up with Jane Fonda?

  I obviously can’t speak for all of us, but here is one Baby Boomer who liked it better when it was simpler. My parents sent me out into this world to make for myself a better life than they had and maybe I achieved that in some way. But the everlasting dilemma facing me is that although I live in a new world, I was reared to live in the old one.

  I remain the patriot they taught me to be. I like music you can whistle to. If ever I marry again, it will have to be to a woman who will cook. She can be a lawyer or work construction in the daytime, and she can have her own bank account and wear a coat and tie for all I care, but I want a home-cooked meal occasionally where absolutely nothing has passed through a microwave.

  I don’t understand the gay movement. I don’t care if you make love to Nash Ramblers, as long as you’re discreet about it.

  I don’t use drugs, and I don’t understand why anybody else does as long as there’s cold beer around.

  I think computers are dangerous, men who wear earrings are weird, the last thing that was any good on television was “The Andy Griffith Show,” and I never thought Phyllis George had any business talking about football with Brent Musberger on television.

  In his classic song, “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?”, Merle Haggard says it best:

  “Wish Coke was still cola,

  A joint, a bad place to be ...

  It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV ...

  Before microwave ovens, when a girl could still cook and still would ...

  Is the best of the free life behind us now,

  Are the good times really over for good?”

  My sentiments exactly. If I could have the good times back, I would bring back 1962. At least, most of it. I was sixteen then. I had my driver’s license, a blonde girlfriend, and my mother awakened me in the mornings and fed me at night.

  Elvis was still singing, Kennedy was still president, Sandy Koufax was still pitching, John Wayne was still acting, Arnold Palmer was still winning golf tournaments, you could still get hand-cut french fries in restaurants, there was no such thing as acid rain or Three Mile Island, men got their hair cut in barber shops and women got theirs cut at beauty parlors, there was no such person as Calvin Klein, nobody used the word psychedelic, nobody had ever heard of Vietnam, and when nobody bombed anybody during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was convinced that the world was probably safe from nuclear annihilation ... an idea I do not hold to with much force anymore.

  1962. It was a beauty.

  So what happened to the simple life the boys from Moreland knew? And when did all the change begin?

  I think I can answer the second question. It was one morning in November, 1963, and I was changing classes in high school.

  4

  Camelot in Bloody Ruin

  Let the word go forth from this time and place... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans....”

  John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961

  THERE WAS ONE family of Catholics in Moreland in 1960. They had to drive ten miles to the county seat to go to church. I didn’t think there was anything particularly different about them except that on Fridays, when the rest of us were attempting to force down what they said was meatloaf but tasted like Alpo looks, the kids from the Catholic family were eating what appeared to be a tasty serving of fried fish. Had it not been for the fact that it would have put the good Methodists and Baptists in my family into shock and running fits, I might have become a Catholic, too, just to avoid the Friday meatloaf.

  The adults in town didn’t trust Catholics. One of the old men down at the store said he heard they stole babies. Somebody else said Catholics drank a lot, and half the time they didn’t even speak English when they were holding church services.

  John Kennedy frightened the local voting bloc, perhaps a hundred-or-so strong. He was Catholic and his daddy was rich, and despite the fact we’re talking lifelong Democrats here, they were having a difficult time accepting the idea that a person with religious beliefs so foreign to their own might actually occupy the White House.

  The old men around the stove:

  “I ain’t sure we ought to elect no Cathlic.”

  “I ain’t votin’ for him. He’d take all his orders from the Vaddican.”

  “The what?”

  “The Vaddican.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Itly.”

  “Reckon that’s so?”

  “‘Course it’s so. Them Cathlics stick together like buttermilk sticks to your chin.”

  “You ever know’d any Cathlics?”

  “Naw, but I think one come in the truckstop a week or so ago.”

  “How’d you know it was a Cathlic?”

  “He’s wearing a white shirt. Who else ’round here wears white shirts?”

  If Elvis was the first break between the Baby Boomers and their parents, then John Kennedy — at least in rural Georgia, which was my only horizon at the time — was a second. Kennedy never started the youthful explosion that Elvis had, but there was something about the man that appealed to us. It was later described as “vigah.” Although I was too young to vote in the 1960 presidential election, I did my part to elect Kennedy by running down Richard Nixon.

  I was born under Truman and then came Ike. The General was okay, but I didn’t like the way Nixon, his vice president for eight years, looked even then. He already had those jowls, and when he talked, it seemed like his mouth was full of spit and he needed to swallow.

  I also was never able to understand how Nixon fathered any children, because I was convinced he slept in his suit. I suspect Richard Nixon was born wearing a tiny little suit and tie, and his aunts and uncles probably stood around his crib and looked at his beady little eyes and at his jowls — I’m sure he was born with them, too — and said things like, “Well, let’s hope and pray he grows out of it.”

  He didn’t, of course. The older he got, the shiftier he looked, and that’s why Kennedy beat him in 1960. When they debated, Nixon looked like a 1952 Ford with a busted tailpipe and foam rubber dice hanging off his rear-view mirror; Kennedy was a Rolls Royce in comparison.

  All the girls at school liked Kennedy, too. “He’s sooo cute,” was their usual adept analysis of his platform.

  Historians who have looked back on the brief thousand days that John Kennedy was our president have failed to note that Kennedy did, in fact, accomplish an important feat with his looks. Remember his hair? John Kennedy’s hair was sort of fluffy. Nixon probably greased his down with whatever it was I used to slick down my ducktails.

  In the early 1960s, most men were still using Vitalis and Wildroot Creme Oil on their hair. But I don’t think John Kennedy used anything like that on his. In fact, Kennedy may have been the first American male to show off “The Dry Look.” It was only a few years after Kennedy became president that we celebrated the death of “The Wethead,” and American men poured their hair tonic down the drain and spent millions on blow-dryers and hairspray.

  Looks are important to a president, and Kennedy was the most handsome American president since Andrew Jackson — who wasn’t any Tom Selleck, but at least he didn’t have one of those cherub-looking faces like John Quincy Adams, and he didn’t wear a powdered wi
g.

  Look at the appearances of our presidents over the years. The pictures of George Washington that were in our history books made the father of our country look like somebody’s sweet little grandmother. Abraham Lincoln was no day at the beach, either, and Rutherford B. Hayes had that long scraggly beard, and William Taft was fat. FDR was fairly handsome, but he used that long cigarette holder that made him appear a bit stuffy, I thought. Truman wore funny hats and bow ties, and Eisenhower was militarily rigid and grandfatherly.

  John Kennedy, however, was the torchbearer for the new generation. If the times were Camelot, then he was certainly Arthur. He seemed more of an admired, understanding big brother to us than an awesome patriarch ruling from some distant perch.

  The youth of the early sixties knew little of the system, other than what we had learned in Civics class, but here was a man with whom we were able to relate — if not to his substance, then most certainly to his style.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us even closer to him. He told the Russians where he wanted them to stick their missiles and in the meantime created several marvelously exciting days at my high school. I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the crisis at first. Basketball practice had started, and that had me too occupied to consider the end of the world as we knew it.

  I was in Jacobs’s Drug Store in Newnan eating a banana split the night the president went on television in October of 1962 and told the nation that we were about this far from having to sink a few Russian ships and maybe start World War III. I hesitated and watched and listened for a few moments, but then I went back to the banana split.

  The next day at school, however, our principal, Mr. O.P. Evans, called the student body together and began to prepare us for the nuclear attack he seemed certain would come before the noon lunch bell.

  Mr. Evans was a tall, forceful man with a deep, booming voice that was a fearful and commanding thing. He ran the school with a Bible in one hand and a paddle in the other. The school was his passion, and even an imminent nuclear attack would not deter him from making certain that we would be a model of order until the last one of us had been melted into a nuclear ash.