by Stuart David
‘Get it fucking off,’ I shouted.
‘I’m listening to it, Peacock.’
I pushed between the front seats and made a grab for the machine, but she grabbed my wrists.
‘Peacock,’ she screamed.
‘Put it off, Bev.’
‘No. You’re always trying to spoil things for me, you big prick.’
I tried to get near enough to hit the eject button, but she forced my hands away and we slammed into Bob.
‘Children,’ he shouted, ‘your father’s trying to drive here. Don’t make me come back there, Peacock.’
‘Tell her to turn it off, son,’ I said.
‘No he won’t, Peacock. Just sit back.’
I went for it again, and she slammed me into Bob again.
‘Now I’m warning you both,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell you again.’
‘There,’ Bev said, dropping my hands. ‘The bloody song’s finished. I missed it. Put whatever the hell you want on, Peacock, I don’t care.’
So I told her to put on the Elvis CD, but she was in a wee huff.
‘Put it on yourself,’ she said.
‘Put it on, Bob,’ I said, and Bob fired it up. Then I sat back in the seat and looked out at it all.
Arriving on Elvis Presley Boulevard was incredible. Fucking incredible. There were motels advertising twenty-four-hour Elvis films in all the rooms, and everything was just Elvis. And to know that the road was leading to the house where he’d lived—that was fucking something.
Further along the boulevard we saw a sign for Graceland and Bob followed that, and it lead into the carpark.
‘Here we go, kids,’ he said, and he looked for a space. There were two fucking aeroplanes in the carpark.
As soon as he stopped I leapt out of the car, but Bev was still in her wee huff.
‘I’m going to listen to this now,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m staying in the car till I’ve heard this.’
‘Aww, for fuck sake, Bev.’
‘Leave me to listen to it, Peacock.’
‘But we’re here, Bev.’
‘Leave me,’ she said.
So me and Bob wandered about the carpark while she listened to her fucking song.
We wandered over to the planes and had a look at them. They both had Elvis’ lightning-flash logo on the tail, with the letters TCB above.
‘That must have been mental,’ I said to Bob. ‘Imagine having your own plane to fly about in.’
‘It won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Just wait till this record comes out.’
‘That would be mad,’ I said, and we laughed.
We walked back over to the car and we could see Bev’s lips moving as she sang along with herself. I banged on the window and she put her finger up and pressed it against the glass. She stuck her tongue out.
‘Come on,’ I shouted.
She shook her head and turned the stereo up louder, and she started singing again.
When it finally finished she came out.
‘Is that you happy?’ I asked her.
‘Bugger off, Peacock,’ she said. ‘Get out of my hair.’
* * *
In one of the shops Bob bought a necklace in the shape of Elvis’ lightning-flash. It was encrusted with fake diamonds and it had the letters above it where the chain went through.
‘What does TCB stand for?’ Bev asked him when he showed it to her.
‘Taking care of business,’ he said. ‘That was his slogan.’
‘They’ve certainly put it into practice here,’ she said. ‘This place is a joke.’
One side of the road was all shops where you could buy all the Elvis stuff you could ever imagine, and a whole lot that you could probably never imagine. And there were cafes and restaurants among the shops too, all selling the different foods that were Elvis’ favourites.
On the other side of the road was Graceland.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked Bev. ‘How’s it a joke? This place is fucking magic.’
‘It’s a rip-off, Peacock,’ she said. ‘What does any of this stuff have to do with Elvis?’
‘It’s got a lot more to do with Elvis than any of that crap in L.A. had to do with Hollywood.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish, Peacock.’
I pointed across the road.
‘There’s his fucking house, Bev,’ I said.
‘Fair enough. But all the rest of it’s daft. And look at the queue to get across to the house. You’d have to stand in that all day, after you’d paid a fortune for the pleasure.’
‘It won’t cost any more than those tours in Hollywood.’
‘Peacock, stop talking about Hollywood. What’s it got to do with Hollywood? Can’t I even express an opinion without you jumping down my throat?’
‘Not when it’s a fucking ridiculous opinion,’ I told her. ‘I thought you liked Elvis.’
‘I do like Elvis. Jesus Christ…’
‘So what’s the fucking problem?’
‘Peacock, shut up. Stop talking to me. You’re driving me bloody mental.’
We didn’t have to queue or pay anything to see the house anyway. You had to pay and queue to get inside, but none of us wanted to go inside. Not least because they herded you across there in a wee spazzy bus, and then dragged you around the house in groups. We crossed the road on our own and leant on the wall, looking over.
‘That’s fucking something,’ Bob said, after he’d been standing there silently for a long time. ‘Just imagine it all happening up there. All the stuff they got up to. Water fights…’
‘Water fights?’
‘All that,’ he said, and I stared at him.
The thing that amazed me most was the lack of seclusion. Even just that we could lean on the wall and look over, and from there we could see the house and all the grounds. The house was quite a way in, but the wall was on the main street. It made a change from all those fucking places up in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t the sort of place someone with that kind of fame could live in now.
‘How about all that?’ Bob said to Bev, and she nodded. She was wandering around reading all the messages scratched and written on the wall and the pavement.
‘It’s incredible,’ she said.
Some people had left flowers there too, and other kinds of gifts had been pushed into holes in the wall.
We walked further along to the Graceland gates with the musical notes on them. We couldn’t get the full effect cause the gates were open, but they were pretty outrageous all the same. And I was amazed again at how low they were.
‘I’ve got to try and go in,’ Bob said to us then. ‘I can’t resist it. Are we allowed to go in from here?’
‘You’ve got to be on that shitty wee bus,’ I told him.
‘I’m going to try it anyway,’ he said. ‘Wish me luck.’
There was a gate-man sitting in a booth right at the entrance, and as Bob walked through he nodded at the guy and said,
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Where are you going, buddy?’ we heard the gate-man say.
‘I’m…’ Bob replied, and then, suddenly, he broke into a sprint.
‘Hey. Hey,’ the gate-man shouted, and the door of the little booth flew open.
Bob started running faster then, and he dodged off the main path onto the lawns.
We went back to where we’d been before, to get a better view.
‘Hey,’ the guy shouted again. ‘Come back here. If you want to come in you come in on the bus.’
Bob turned round to face the guy and dodged about backwards.
‘Relax,’ Bob shouted to him. ‘Come on, we’ll have a water fight. It’ll be just like it was.’
He started cracking himself up then, doubling up giggling as he dodged about.
‘That’ll do,’ the guy said. ‘You’ve had your fun. Don’t let it go any further.’
‘Just a little water fight,’ Bob called back. ‘Set up the hose. Come over th
e wall, Peacock. We’ll get something going.’
Two more uniformed guys appeared at the top of the lawns then, and they started charging towards him. He was only watching the one guy, and soon the other two had him face down on the grass, with an arm pushed up his back. He was still laughing away. He’d given this strange wee shriek when he went down, but he was laughing again now.
‘A little bit of wrestling,’ he shouted to us as they dragged him to his feet, and bundled him towards the gate.
‘Alright, guys,’ he said. ‘Take it easy now, I’m going.’
They pushed him harder for that, and when they reached the gate they pushed him out and he landed on the ground.
One of the idiot busses was just pulling up to the gates when he fell, but he stood up, dusted himself down, and gave them all a wee bow.
‘Rough-housing on the king’s lawn,’ he said to us, still giggling away, when the bus had gone inside.
‘You’re a maniac,’ Bev told him, but she was laughing too.
‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said, and he took his hairnet off. ‘I’m going to leave this as a gift for the king.’ And he pushed it into one of the holes in the wall.
The gate-man and the two guards were still standing at the entrance, and he threw a quick glance towards them. Then, all of a sudden, he was back over the wall and standing on the lawn again, whooping.
He watched as they came across the lawn towards him, and then he quickly climbed back to the pavement.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to us, and he ran across the road.
‘She’s right,’ I told him, when we caught up with him in the carpark. ‘You are a fucking maniac.’
He laughed.
‘I had to do something, though,’ he said. ‘The King would have expected it.’
Chapter 28
And then it happened again. It happened again, and I couldn’t fucking believe it. We were just pulling out of the carpark, with the wee man still chuckling away, and the stereo turned itself back on. It turned itself back on at full whack, and Bev’s song started belting out of there again.
I nearly had a fucking heart-attack, and Bob got such a fright he swerved off to the side.
‘For fuck sake, Bev,’ I shouted, and I slammed the thing off.
‘What’s it got to do with me, Peacock?’ she shouted back. ‘I don’t control the machine.’
‘It’s your fucking song, Bev,’ I told her. ‘And it’s driving everybody fucking mental.’
‘I can’t win, Peacock, can I? I can’t bloody win with you.’
‘What the fuck do you want to win for?’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, ‘you need to learn to manage some of that anger, pal.’
‘I what?’
‘You need to learn some anger management.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked her. ‘What fucking American shite have you been listening to now? I don’t need any fucking anger management.’
I turned round in my seat.
‘You need to learn to manage my fucking anger,’ I told her. ‘It’s got fuck all to do with me. It’s you that makes me fucking angry. Did I get angry before she arrived here, Bob? You drive me fucking daft. You need to learn what makes me angry and then stop fucking doing it. Then my anger will be fucking managed.’
‘You’re a belter, Peacock,’ she said, and that was all.
Anger management.
Jesus Christ.
But I did a pretty nasty thing on the way out of Memphis all the same. A cruel thing. She’d pushed me too fucking far, though, and I couldn’t fucking help myself. She’d got me all wound up.
I was putting the CD of the king back on—at Bob’s fucking request, I might add—and she fucking started again.
‘We need some half decent CDs for this car,’ she said. ‘All we ever get is Glen Campbell, and now him.’
‘Don’t forget this fucking shite,’ I said, holding up her own CD. ‘We’ve hardly stopped listening to this since you fucking made it.’
‘It’s the only thing in here worth listening to,’ she said. ‘And we’ll have to listen to it a whole lot more if we don’t get something new.’
‘Will we fuck,’ I warned her, and that’s when I did the thing. The nasty thing.
I snapped it.
I’ll tell you; it wasn’t fucking easy either. I bent it one way and it wouldn’t give, then I bent it back the other way and it went. A piece of it fucking cut me too, which made me even more mad.
‘Fucking bastard,’ I shouted, and I rolled the window down and shoved all the pieces outside.
I was dripping blood onto my trousers, and I wrapped one of the Elvis scarves I’d bought around the cut.
‘Look what you’ve fucking done to me now,’ I said, turning round to Bev. ‘Is that you fucking happy now?’
But she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. She looked at me as if I’d smacked her in the mouth—and her eyes started to well up. Then she looked down at her hands, and slowly lay down on the seat, facing in towards the back of it.
‘That was too far, Peacock,’ Bob said quietly. ‘That was fucking cruel.’
‘It was hard on me too,’ I told him, and held up my hand. ‘Look at the state of that.’
There was blood leaking through the scarf, but he shook his head.
‘Don’t fucking act it,’ I warned him. ‘You were as sick of that song as I was.’ But he wasn’t having it.
‘That’s no excuse,’ he said, and he shook his head again.
‘Ah, fuck off,’ I muttered.
It was pretty fucking miserable in the car for the rest of the afternoon, after that. No-one spoke. I tried to make some conversation with the wee man now and again, but it wasn’t happening. It was like that all the way to Nashville, where we stopped to get some food.
‘I’m fucking famished,’ Bob said as we got out of the car, and we started walking along the street to see what was there—but Bev hadn’t followed us.
‘What the fuck’s she playing at?’ I said, and I went back and opened her door.
‘Are you coming?’ I asked her, but she shook her head. She was still lying facing the back of the seat, and I crouched down outside. I put a hand on her shoulder.
‘You must be starving,’ I said, but she only moved her shoulder.
‘Get off me, Peacock,’ she said. No anger, no pleading—just the fucking statement.
‘Will we bring you something back?’ I asked her.
‘My song. Bring me my song back, you wanker.’
‘Aww, for fuck sake, Bev,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the fucking song. Okay? You wound me up too much. You were driving me fucking mental. Come on. Come and get something to eat.’
‘Just leave me, Peacock,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
I stood up again, but Bob had come over, and eventually he managed to talk her out of there. She gave me this look as she stood up, and then fixed her hair in the reflection on the window.
‘You were right,’ she said to Bob, as we went off looking for somewhere, ‘I am hungry now that I’m standing up.’
But she only gave me that look again.
There were plenty of places to choose from. The town seemed to be made up pretty much of one street, but everything on it was either a place to eat or a guitar shop. I pointed out a few places, but I soon got the hint that Bev wouldn’t go anywhere she thought I wanted to go, so I left it up to them.
I fell back and took the scarf off my hand to have a look at it. It had stopped bleeding, but the cut was deep. I could pull it apart and have a good old look in there.
That’s what I was doing when they suddenly came to a stop. I looked up and realised we were outside a place that we must be going into. They were reading the menu and nodding at each other.
‘Will this do?’ I asked them, and Bev saw I was studying my wound.
‘I wish it had taken your whole hand off,’ she said.
Fucking charming.
It was an alright place they’d chosen, though. The food was fucking magic, and when it came I realized how fucking hungry I was too.
‘I’ll tell you this,’ Bob said, while we ate, ‘we’d better not let anyone around here know what we’re up to. We’d better hope they don’t find out what we’re about or they’ll fucking lynch us.’
‘How come?’ Bev asked him.
‘Fucking with their country music,’ Bob laughed. ‘They take that shit seriously around here. They wouldn’t like it if they knew we’d corrupted one of their songs.’
‘I wouldn’t like it either if someone else had done it,’ I told him. ‘It’s fucking criminal.’
He started smiling to himself, and he laid his cutlery down.
‘Maybe we should have some fun with it while we’re here,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should shake them up a bit.’ And he started laughing.
So when we’d paid up and got out of there, he got the bag from the boot with the tapes in it, and fished out the CD. Then we drove up and down that street three or four times with the song fucking blasting.
He’d put all the windows down and he kept sticking his head outside as he drove, whooping.
‘How about that?’ he shouted to passers-by.
The last time we went down the street there were broken lines of people standing along the kerb-sides, watching us going past.
‘I think it’s time we got going,’ he said then. ‘One more trip and they’ll be organised enough to come after us.’
He turned off the street after that, and started heading out of the town—cackling away to himself.
‘It won’t sell much here,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how many million copies it sells elsewhere; it’s never going to sell a single copy in Nashville.’
It seemed to me he’d have got the same reaction with any song, in any town. If you see some moron driving up and down the road with the stereo pumping full-blast, hanging out the window whooping and shouting, sooner or later you’ll stop and look. And not long after that you’ll try and fucking kill them. Still, he was happy. And it kept him happy driving long into the night; out of Tennessee and into Virginia.
‘It sounded good though, huh?’ he said to me when we were a long way out of there.
‘It sounded fucking magic, son,’ I told him.
