Losing Graceland Page 3

  “I swear.”

  “I mean really swear. Not the kind of swear where you tell your woman and make her swear, and she tells her friends and they all swear.”

  “I really swear,” Ben said, “and you don’t need to worry because I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Why not?”

  “I got dumped.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Six months and eight days.”

  The old man belched again. “You been laid since?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll fix that. Best medicine, another woman. Hair of the goddamn dog.”

  The old man put his hands on his lower back and leaned backward. Ben heard a drumroll of cracks. The old man sighed. Then he told his tale, and it was, as he said, the biggest pile of horse shit Ben had ever heard.

  The Old Man’s Tale

  By 1977 I’d had enough. Shit my pants in Indianapolis after “Early Morning Rain,” and by the time I stumbled off the stage, the shit had drained into my shoe and I was walking around with a shoeful of shit, smelling terrible, and Schilling says to one of the roadies, You keep farting like that and I’ll shove a cork up your ass. Course, we both knew it was me—I’d shit myself in Rapid City five days earlier—but Schilling wanted me to save face. He was good like that.

  I was in a bad place, doing bad things. Everyone knew it, but no one asked me to stop. People said you can’t help a man who won’t be helped; no such thing, a man who won’t be helped. He just needs someone to hold his hand until he’s ready for salvation. Ginger said something about rehab. I told her she was fucking nuts. No difference between rehab and a show, I told her. Flashbulb entrance, band intro, some ballads, and the big finish; no difference at all. The minute I’d have checked out of rehab there’d be a bucket of pills waiting in the limo and a six-week contract in Vegas. No one cared, man. I was a golden calf squirting bullion from my tits, and everyone lined up with their mouths open.

  The official report says I died on August 16, 1977. But in truth I died the day I began to hate, and I’d been hating for as long as I could remember. I hated the goddamn fans who didn’t care if I forgot the words, I hated the goddamn cameras that kept looking for someone handsome when all I had was ugly. I hated the goddamn women who were looking to be my Mary, talking about You’re the sweetest man I ever knew when everyone around me knew I wasn’t sweet. If I could’ve put a bullet between the eyes of every sonofabitch that screamed themselves hoarse whenever I faked my way through “Polk Salad Annie,” you’d be looking at a man who gave the Angel of Death a run for his money.

  Five million in 1977 goes a long way, and here’s what it got me: peace. Kept the circle tight, made sure everyone got paid, and let everyone else believe what I wanted them to. It didn’t take much, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be. I’d been giving people what they wanted for twenty years. Pretending Elvis was alive was a hell of a lot harder than pretending he’s dead.

  “So that’s it,” Ben said.

  “That’s it. What do you think.”

  Ben looked over his shoulder, across the street. Their waitress had taken a cigarette break and she stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. One hand on her hip, cigarette between two fingers. She stared at them.

  Yeah, Ben thought. I know.

  “I think ten thousand is a lot of money,” Ben said.

  The old man sighed and looked skyward. “Looks like rain. We better get rambling.”

  4.

  ne year earlier a young woman talking on her cell phone jumped the curb and plowed Ben’s father into a hot dog cart. His father had been having lunch with his coworker June, and she broke her collarbone, pelvis, and suffered third-degree burns when french fry grease splattered across her legs. He died instantly, though Ben wondered how the coroner knew that. He just figured it was something they told family members to make them feel better, but he hoped his father had held on for as long as he could, so he could prepare himself for death and not be snuffed out like an ant crushed under a shoe.

  Death by hot dog stand made it performance art. Ben realized this—the lethal hot dog cart was now part of his family narrative, a tragic tale that lacked the irony to reach surreal. If only his father had heart disease, and if only his doctor had warned him the week before that his penchant for greasy hot dogs would be the death of him … but it was too much to ask. The universe doesn’t believe in compensation; its better narratives are accidental, and Ben was left with the image of his father lying in a bloody jumble next to a stainless-steel hot dog cart, Kosher Franks yellow umbrella tilting on the sidewalk like a scene from a French movie.

  The funeral was common, the cards were plentiful and heartfelt, and the world gave him and his mom a wide berth. Everyone seemed to talk in whispers. Everything was in bright focus. Giddiness. Despair. Floating through class, through campus, through the mall. Self-absorption run wild. Department store songs a message of healing. His dad’s ghost in a stranger’s smile. Apophenia, it’s called. Finding meaning in meaningless events, seeing patterns in random data.

  The old man slept, snoring quietly, his head bobbing with every bump and pothole. Ben gazed at the road and remembered his first girlfriend. Molly Howe in sixth grade. He’d given her a Valentine’s card with a little candy heart that read Will U B Mine? The next day she brought him a sugar cookie wrapped in a pink bow, and they shared it over lunch in the cafeteria. She seemed nervous, fidgety, laughing too hard at his jokes. He was self-aware even then, he realized, incapable of enjoying the simple pleasures of a sixth-grade girlfriend.

  She laughed and he remembered seeing a speck of sugar cookie stuck to her cheek. She laughed again, brown mush between her teeth. They’d had hot dogs for lunch with skinny french fries, and that sugar cookie wrapped in a pink bow for dessert. He remembered at that moment he didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore. He remembered she disgusted him.

  As the sun set, the old man awoke and asked where they were. He hated sleep. Always had. Saw it as a scrimmage for dying, because it came and you had no control over it, and then it showed nothing but nightmares and fire. Whispers from the grave, the same whispers the old man figured all old men heard. Whispers of regret and guilt. No more chances. All used up.

  And the books. Goddammit, the books. They all spoke hogwash—life after death, reincarnation, transmigration and transmogrification. Would his soul occupy a tree somewhere in Tupelo? Or a dandelion in Cheektowaga? Would he be reborn into a baby in India? Or would he just lie in the ground and rot?

  Please no, he thought. Let me become a handsome young man on the beach. Sand between my toes and stomach fluttery from watching pretty little things walk by. Something good when I look in the mirror. Thick hair, tight skin, bronzed and beautiful; I’ll take that life at thirty. Forty, even. Hell, I’ll take it at fifty if that’s the best you can do.

  The old man figured even if there was a God he’d already forsaken His gift of life, so there may as well be nothing. He couldn’t say for certain what had happened to him—some nights he woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat, and he couldn’t remember his life. Maybe it was all fantasy, shoveling myth into the sinkholes riddling his age-addled mind. Maybe the hazy memories were hazy for a reason. Charlie Hodge had told him stories about his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s. How he claimed he’d fought in the Battle of Ieper in WWI when he’d actually been a cobbler on the Jersey Shore, deemed unfit for military service due to scoliosis.

  Jesus Fucking Christ, the old man thought he remembered saying. Charlie, swear if that ever happens to me, you’ll put one between my eyes.

  Charlie promised but the old man knew they all made a lot of promises back then. When the world was their giant fried oyster. Before the great big lie. The whopper to end all whoppers. So big he’d abandoned everyone and everything he knew. I must have needed it so bad, he thought, that I was willing to trade death for a life without my daughter. It must have been worse than I remember. If I remember.

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sp; The map lay in Ben’s lap. The old man had traced the route with a red marker. The road rose and dipped, a narrow strip with a dirt shoulder and weeds on either side. Small homes set atop small lawns with garden sculptures of bent-over hausfraus in polka-dot underwear. The evening sky was hemmed in by overhanging trees.

  It was Monday and Ben thought about last Monday’s basketball game at the town park with Jim and Steve. Jim wore his favorite basketball shirt, picture of a jacked guy dunking on a hundred-foot rim. Samantha watched like she always did, feigning disinterest, gabbing on her cell and smoking her little black cigarettes, a bad habit she’d picked up last semester in Paris. One semester abroad and she came back a Francophile, and Steve figured she’d fucked some Frenchman but he was willing to let it slide because he said the thought of it kind of turned him on. Besides, Steve had said, I haven’t been one hundred percent faithful anyway. I slept with this girl at work. A little Asian hottie. I don’t know what it is about Cheesecake Factory, but they hire the hottest chicks.

  I can’t believe you cheated on Samantha, said Ben, and Steve grinned, waving to Samantha, who sat behind the pole at the end of the court, Indian-style, with a cellphone pressed to one ear, a thin trail of smoke rising from the little black cigarette pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

  Cheating on a hot girl sends the world a message, Steve said. Like you can trash a Ferrari because you got three others waiting in the garage.

  Ben thought about Carrie, the one girl he’d cheated on Jessica with. Had Carrie been a Ferrari? No—she was more like a customized Hyundai, if Hyundais had any sort of edgy appeal.

  Passing headlights lit the old man’s eyes. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Near Ashland,” Ben said.

  “Where’s Ashland?”

  “Ohio.”

  “You been driving long?”

  “Four hours.”

  “I had a dream.” The old man rubbed his face. “Saw myself lying in my grave and the preacher was laughing.”

  Ben thought about Jessica. Two months before the end. Before she left for college and made him regret every moment he’d spent with her, cursed every time he’d deluded himself into believing they’d be together forever like some ridiculous young couple in a fifties movie. For fuck’s sake, she was a virgin before they met—did he seriously think she’d stay with him? That they’d get married?

  Yes. And he knew it made him sound like a douche bag, but he couldn’t help it. He’d never had a girlfriend that hot. He considered himself average in every respect. Average height, average looks, average straight brown hair. With Jessica he felt like the star of his own movie. Like everyone was watching. Watching her sleep in his bed when the lights were low, candle reflection glowing softly on the baby fat of her cheeks.

  It had been a big deal the first time Jessica spent the night at his apartment. She’d lied to her parents and told them she was going camping with her best friend, Mindy. Ben bought candles and put on some Miles Davis, bought a framed Brando poster for the living room and a Klimt poster for his room, bought goat cheese, and crackers made from organic wheat, dusted with French sea salt.

  She arrived with an overnight bag. Frayed cutoff shorts, tight plum-colored tank, blond hair in a ponytail. Lips glistening, eyes bright and wet. Patrick flirted with her a little, and she flirted back in the way all high school girls flirt with college guys. Ben finally corralled her into his room. She ate some cheese and told him she hated jazz. They talked for hours. He couldn’t remember what they talked about. Any discussion of high school was taboo. They ran out of things to say, then fucked, and when they finished Ben sat up and stared at her. She told him to stop staring. He asked why and she said, Because it’s weird.

  Jessica woke around seven A.M. She kept asking if he thought her mom knew she’d lied. She complained she didn’t smell like a campfire because everyone smells like a campfire after a night of camping. She fell into an immature bad mood, the high-schoolgirl pout, the unwillingness to relax and take a few puffs or fuck until you felt better. Her childish anger seemed to Ben a vestigial limb.

  He dropped her off at Mindy’s. A peck on the lips, then Ben shuddered as he watched Jessica sprint up Mindy’s driveway. He drove back and crashed on the couch, waking up to Patrick taking hits from his three-liter Coke bong. They ate lunch in their grungy kitchen, sitting at a table covered in dirty dishes and pizza boxes.

  Patrick cracked the end of a chicken wing and munched on the charred marrow. He smiled at Ben.

  You two had fun last night?

  We did, Ben said. Many times.

  A blonde with small feet and big tits, Patrick said. How did you ever land someone like her?

  Ben glared, and Patrick laughed.

  Are you angry? For real?

  Ben said nothing.

  Bet you she can suck her own nipples. Does she suck her own nipples?

  He shoved Patrick. The box of wings toppled, bones spilling. Patrick shoved Ben back, half smiling. They grappled and rolled into the living room, and it ended when Ben punched Patrick in the mouth, his lip parting like a wet paper towel. Blood poured down the front of Patrick’s shirt, onto his jeans, onto the brown carpet.

  What the uck? Patrick had screamed. Asshole. Ucking asshole.

  “Stop at the first bar you see,” the old man said. “I’m in the mood for something fried.”

  Ben had called Jessica from the hospital. She was taking a day trip to Toronto because she’d applied to college at UT.

  Why not University of Buffalo? Ben had asked her.

  We can’t go to the same college, Jessica had said. It would be like we’re married.

  He said nothing because he knew Jessica was on loan. She was far too beautiful to be anything other than a high-end lease. For the first three months he’d had the upper hand by virtue of being a college guy with an apartment, messy hair, clear skin, and a sob story about his father’s tragic death. But then one night he’d had an awful realization, remembering how he viewed the college guys who dated the hot girls in his high school.

  Losers. Losers who couldn’t get birds their own age, so they had to dip down. And even the hot high-school girls knew it, but they were so eager to play grown-up—to drink bad wine, eat bad cheese, and engage in angst-ridden late-night group talks while lounging on papasans—that they bided their time until they learned how to give proper head.

  Losers, Ben thought, and the next five months he never forgot. The first time Jessica swallowed, he realized it was already happening. The next week she grabbed her giant breasts while riding him, and stared at him with wide brown eyes as if to say, Teach me what else to do so I can please my future boyfriends.

  He remembered driving Patrick home from the hospital. It was a quiet, sullen ride, Patrick with a Darvocet prescription and ten stitches in his lip. Patrick dry-swallowed three pills and Ben helped him up the stairs. Then Jessica called and said she wasn’t going to Toronto. Why don’t they go to the mall instead. Her mom hadn’t suspected a thing.

  They ate in the food court. Red plastic trays and screaming children. Ben bought Jessica two bagfuls of clothing, and stood by like a silent idiot when she ran into a gaggle of high-school friends and showed them her new outfits.

  “There,” the old man said. “Pull over there.”

  The bar was called Sensations, a cinder-block box with a buzzing neon sign that advertised Karaoke Night Ladies Drink FREE! It had a pool table and a dark bar with a gleaming brass footrest. Bikers mingled with locals in Carhart jackets, but there were a few suburban types who drank more than anyone else, husbands in high-waisted jeans and wives in low-cut blouses showing cleavage that rivaled any biker chick. The old man and Ben took a corner booth, and the old man ordered fried shrimp with a pitcher of beer.

  Ben tried to ignore the stares. Men at the bar looked over their shoulders. Suburban couples whispered.

  “If you’re in hiding, you sure don’t dress like it,” Ben said.

  The old man munched
a fried shrimp and washed down the grease with a swig of beer. “I’m not in hiding.”

  Ben grabbed a shrimp. “But you said you were a fugitive.”

  “No one believes I’m alive. No family to speak of. No friends, no lovers. I could jump up right now and tell everyone who I am, and they’d laugh.”

  “So why do you dress like that?”

  The old man tossed a tail onto his plate. “Like what.”

  “Like a trailer-park Elvis.”

  The old man licked his fingers. “You been waiting to use that line or did you just come up with it right now?”

  “It’s not a line. I’m trying to understand.”

  “I dress how I want to dress.” The old man poured the rest of the pitcher into his glass. “I’m the freest man in the world. Freer than you. How would you dress if you could dress the way you wanted? And don’t tell me you’d wear jeans and a T-shirt, because that’s bullshit. You’d walk around in your bathrobe, maybe just your underwear and a pair of comfortable socks. Maybe even turn your socks inside out ’cause that way the seams don’t itch.”

  The old man pointed at his lion’s head belt buckle. “You see this here? Had it custom-made in Spoke, Alabama. Melted gold from the fillings of a Confederate general. Made in a shop owned by a little Chinese woman who’d married a Navy man. They’d seen my show in Birmingham and told me if I was ever in the neighborhood to come on by and they’d make something for me. The lion head is a Chinese guardian dog. They call it Shi.”

  A woman with high blond hair stepped onto the little stage in the corner of the room and announced that the karaoke contest was beginning. Someone shouted, “Show us your tits,” and there was scattered laughter and she wiggled her chest, giving an exaggerated wink like a Kabuki actor.

  Then she stepped off the stage and a man in his mid-forties with wrinkle-free khakis and a short-sleeve button-down grabbed the mike off the PA and belched into it. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to kick things off with an oldie but a goodie,” he said, and he pointed to the short bald man operating the karaoke machine.