by Molly Gloss
JH: You’ve sung with Roy Orbison.
EP: I met Roy the first time back in 1955 when Jesse and I were just getting started, when we were all just kids. And later on, when Roy and I were both living in Tennessee we hung out some. He had lost his wife and two of his kids, you know, in terrible accidents, different accidents, his boys drowned in a swimming pool and his wife was in a motorcycle crash. This was after Jesse had passed, and we were both interested in spiritual matters, we talked quite a bit about what it all means, the purpose of our lives and all, what death means, we were both trying to find some insight, I guess you could say. And then I hooked up with Roy again in the late eighties, and one time we were jamming in his basement with George Harrison when Bob Dylan come by and he wanted to sing with us but he had left his guitar over at Tom Petty’s, so we trooped over there to get his guitar and Tom came back with us. We had a pretty good time singing each other’s songs, so then we made a record together and did a little bit of touring—
JH: The Traveling Wilburys.
EP: Yes sir. Roy died just about the time we were bringing out our second album. So that was it for the Wilburys.
JH: Well, now I have to ask: Where do you go from here? When you’re at the top, what does the future look like to you?
EP: My brother always said there wasn’t any such thing as the future really, it was just now and now and now. He got that from the Buddhists. And I know there’s no top to any of it, to life or to music. So I’m just trying to be here now. Trying to stay sane. Trying to be a decent husband and father. Trying to make good music. But I know that’s not what you’re asking me, you want to know what I’m doing these days. I guess what I’ve been doing is reading through some letters Jesse wrote to me. You were saying earlier, about the two of us being separated from each other that first time, but we wrote back and forth every day while I was over there in Germany. The only day we didn’t write is the day we buried Momma. And after I got back we just went on writing, we wrote even on the days when we were sitting right there in the same room.
JH: It’s hard to picture what you’d find to write about when you were both in the same room.
EP: We wrote just as if the other one wasn’t there. I would write, “Jesse sounded good at rehearsal today,” and he’d write, “Elvis is sitting here fixing a broken string on his guitar.”
JH: Like keeping a diary almost.
EP: It was. And we copied down things we were reading, things we wanted to share with each other. When I started writing songs I’d send them to him and ask him what he thought. And he’d do the same.
JH: Jesse was writing songs?
EP: He said he was just writing what was in his mind. But sometimes I’d take what he was saying, put in some line breaks and maybe take out the little words, you know, to show him how he was writing poems, same as me. But he never thought so.
JH: Have you saved them all? You have twenty years of letters in a box somewhere?
EP: I still write to Jesse every day, so I guess it’s more than forty years of letters now, and I know he’s still writing to me, from wherever he is. I just haven’t seen those yet.
JH: That’s astonishing. Forty years, writing every day. That’s a lot of letters.
EP: I’ve been reading through them, which I can tell you is taking quite a while. [laughter] I want to put some of them into a book.
JH: How are you choosing which ones to include? Will you be telling the story of your lives?
EP: No, no, it’ll be Jesse’s poems, that’s what I’m doing. I’m looking for the ones where he’s talking about what’s in his mind, and then I’m trying to put them on the page so you can see they’re poems.
JH: Have you thought of putting any of them to music? Making them into songs?
EP: I have thought of it. We’ll see what happens.
JH: Well, Elvis, thank you. I would like to keep on talking. I feel like there’s a lot we haven’t touched on, but we always want to have a Q and A session with the audience before we finish, and I’m afraid we’ve already gone on so long, we’ve only got time for three or four questions. Those of you with questions for Mr. Presley, there’s microphones up front here, at the top of both aisles, so come on up and we’ll get started.
Q1: Hello, Mr. Presley.
EP: Hello.
Q1: Mr. Presley, would you talk about your interest in karate?
EP: I met up with karate in the Army. I liked what it had to say about tapping into your inner strength. The preciousness of the chi life force, the power of restraint, of stillness and concentration. I felt like I could apply some of that to my singing, and later on to my song writing and recording. I still practice it. And tai chi. I do tai chi on the days when I’m feeling too old and crackly for karate. [laughter]
Q2: Mr. Presley, I love your song “Losing You.” But honestly, I don’t know what it means. Could you say what it means?
EP: [singing softly] Only when I think past memory, past distance, in all the ways I learned to miss you, call to you beneath my breath, whisper in the language of children, then I think you can hear me, silence recognizes the silence it calls to, this grammar of longing, a book lying open as twilight deepens, and shadows cover the gray pages.
[silence] [applause]
EP: I’m sorry, honey, what was your question now? [laughter]
Q2: I just wondered what it means. It’s just so sad.
EP: Well, I guess it just means that. It means sad.
Q3: Hey. Thanks for taking my question, Elvis.
EP: Sure. Have I heard it yet? [laughter]
Q3: Well, not to be mean or anything, but your brother pretty much went downhill there at the end, he had all these fans but they were like all these blue-haired grandmothers, like he was Liberace or something, he was bloated and drugged, a joke. And then there’s you, with this serious reputation and all. Do you feel like commenting on how two men with the same DNA wound up so different, having these different lives?
EP: No sir, I don’t feel like commenting on that at all.
Q3: If you—
JH: Well, I think we just have time for one more question. Miss? Over on the left.
Q4: Mr. Presley, I guess I have two questions. Do you have a title for the book, the one with Jesse’s letters? And could you tell us one of the poems you made from his writing, if you can remember any?
EP: I guess I’ve been calling the book The Foreseeable Future, from something he wrote to me once. I won’t tell you that one, but here’s one I think I can remember:
I come awake this morning
So damn early
Barest gray between the blinds
Heard geese calling
Wild, unruly, keen.
This is January.
Are they going south so late
Or already turning north?
Afraid to know
Which it was
I went on lying still
Didn’t open the blinds
Listened to my heart in my ears.
If there is a purpose
To me being Jesse Presley
I wonder what it is.
Then I had this worn old thought:
That time is a river
The past not finished yet.
I once was lost
But still upstream
My absence
Not yet met.
[silence]
EP: I think always of you waiting, brother. I will look for you when I get there.
[prolonged applause]
From Annie Leibovitz at Work, discussing her iconic photograph of the Presley Brothers—last known photo of the brothers together—taken the evening of August 11, 1977, five days before Jesse Presley’s death at age forty-two:
This was taken while I was on assignment for Rolling Stone, shooting Elvis Presley at the start of his “Way Down in the Heart” tour. We were backstage before the first concert at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, when his brother Jesse came in unannounced. He had flown
up from Memphis on a momentary impulse just to wish his brother a good show, and he flew back the same night. He usually went around with a large entourage but that night there were just two men with him, and they stood back and watched us all in silence. (Their shoes are dimly visible at the left edge of frame.)
I took several dozen shots that night during the few minutes the brothers were together. While I was shooting, I was struck by how different the brothers looked from each other, not like twins, certainly not identical twins, and I thought I was capturing the different ways they had lived their lives, and how it showed in their faces. But afterward, I saw what the camera had seen: how alike their expressions were—a kind of tender regard, as if each thought the other was the one needing safeguarding.
Seaborne
THERE WERE TWO PEOPLE WORKING from a raft near the breakwater, and although Neye thought they could see him come over the dune and now could see him standing against the skyline, they made no greeting and certainly made no move to come in.
It was all low sand hills along that coast, with a tough umber-colored salt grass trying to stitch everything down against the wind. Finally Neye just sat on the last seaward rise of the dunes—high enough there to see across the roofs of the buildings to the cove—and waited, watching them.
They took turns. When one’s head bobbed up beside the raft, the other would pitch over the side, then the one who had come up would sit on the raft or lie on it until the other diver came up again. They were down four or five minutes at a time. From this distance, he couldn’t tell which of them might be male, which female; their bodies were both brown and narrow and naked above the waist. He couldn’t see a power source either, but the raft moved gradually south, self-directed, beside the elbow bend of the breakwater.
He waited quite a while. It was hot and there was no shade, and the grass scratched through his sleeves whenever he leaned back on his forearms. The sun fell behind him, and the rounded shadows of the dunes spread out flatter and began to darken the water. When the edge of shade touched the raft, the divers quit. Both of them lay awhile, stretched on their backs on the fiberglass decking, and then they took the little motor skiff that was tied alongside and came in with it, sliding silently past the big two-masted bylander lying at anchor in the deeps of the cove. Gradually, as Neye watched, one began to show the long, thin back muscles of an adolescent boy. And the other became a woman. Her breasts were small and high as a girl’s, but her hair, which must once have been black, was grizzled. She wore her hair—both of them did—clipped short in a manner common to offshore farmers, so short it looked like a tight little cap.
When the bottom of the skiff bumped the beach, Neye had already started down toward them. His knees were a little stiffened from the long walk and then the long wait, so he was careful how he set his feet, pushing his boots heel-down through the long straps of grass to the sand. He kept his eyes, though, on the woman. She went over the side and hauled in the boat while the boy was still at the tiller, and then she stood a moment with the sea lapping her ankles, stood flexing her back with both hands kneading some ache there above the tailbone. She was small, her hands, her shoulders, the narrow bones of her face, small. But there was lean muscle in her arms and in the bare calves that showed below her knee pants.
She steadied the boat a little with both hands while the boy climbed out, and then they dragged the skiff up the sand toward the tide line. Neye was near enough by that time, so he came down and grabbed hold of the gunwale and helped them with it the last little way. The boy shot him a look, curious at least, or maybe guardedly friendly, but the woman neither looked toward him nor said anything. When they pulled the boat up to the edge of the grass, she reached in for what could have been a sack bunched up below one of the seats. She shook it out and pulled it over her head: a long loose tunic the color of the sand. Against that paleness her throat and wrists seemed nut-brown. She dragged out a couple of boxes of gear, too, while the boy was pulling on his own shirt, and then she simply walked away, from Neye and from the boy as well, without a word or a look, just grasping the boxes by their handles and starting up the slope toward the buildings.
Neye thought to follow her. But he could feel the boy looking at him straightforward, now that the woman was gone, and so he waited. It seemed to him, among other things, that this would be an easier place to start.
“You walked in?” the boy said.
Neye had left the Osprey in Bedyn. Maybe there would have been room to land it here, maybe not, but most of these offshore farmers affected a sort of contempt of aircraft. When they could not go by boat, they went by foot. And he hadn’t wanted to provoke her by setting down in her front yard in a big government flyer.
“Yes,” he said. “I walked.”
“From Bedyn?”
“Yes.” It was supposed to be about nine or ten kilometers. It had seemed a little more than that to Neye, but fairly easy walking: low rises and a smooth beaten track and—for a while at least—the shade of the seaward dunes to break the sun.
The boy lifted his head up a little and sideways, as though he had looked away, but in fact he kept his eyes on Neye. He had a wide face, large-pored and reddish brown, like terra-cotta. His hair was reddish too, or maybe the sun had colored it so. Though he was very young, there were little pleats in the skin beside his eyes. There was nothing about him that was like Cirant, only the boyish thinness, yet looking at him, Neye thought of his own son. And he was aware briefly of his own chronic loneliness.
“She doesn’t like itinerants much,” the boy said, with that disarming sideways stare. “If you want to spend more than a day or so, you’ll do better farther up the coast. Even there you might not find anything steady. We’ve all had three shitty years in a row.”
It would have been easy to play it that way—to pretend to be what he was not. But he doubted it would get him any further than the truth. So he said, “I’m not looking for work. I’m with Registry.”
It had been more than five years since anyone from the department had come out here. But somebody had told the boy. Lisel herself, or somebody. Because he looked at Neye straight this time, with a hardened, narrow expression, and then he just walked off after the woman, going barefoot along the path that was worn down between the cove and the farm buildings.
Neye wasn’t much surprised and didn’t try to stop him. He went back for his duffel, to the place he’d dropped it on the beach when he had helped them push the skiff up. And then he followed where the two of them had gone.
All the buildings were cheap extruded dobes, so they looked like big stones or terrapins hunched down among the dunes. Through the wall of the largest, he could feel a slight vibration as if it housed a freezer silo, or, more likely, a set of nursery tanks. He stood beside it a moment, delaying, because he wasn’t sure which building they’d gone into. The air was cooler now and darkening, and he was alone. Then the woman came from a small dobe at his right, no longer carrying the boxes of gear, her hands pushed in a pouch pocket in the front of her shirt.
He could see that she meant to walk by him without speaking. He did not reach out a hand nor make any motion to stop her, only said, “I’m not looking for work. I’m with the Registry department.”
She kept going. There was only a little surprise in the sidelong look she gave him. “You should have done some checking before you walked all the way out here. Jin is legally psy-blind.”
To her retreating back, he said, “I didn’t come to talk to Jin.”
She didn’t stop, didn’t turn, but she made a loud nasal sound of amusement. “You still need to do some research. I’ve never scored higher than eight hundred on any of your many head tests.”
He had been standing in one place watching her walk away from him, but she had said enough to set him in motion. He followed her through the brown dusk to the house. “Not everything gets picked up in those neurological tests.”
She made only that sound again, that small hard sound like a laugh.
When she stooped into her house, the light came up dim yellow. There was one round room with a bite out of it where the bathroom took up space along the outer wall. The room was crowded and cluttered. Neye stood just outside the doorless air-portal, waiting, while she went out of sight into the lavatory. And after a while, still waiting, he squatted down in the open doorway.
Probably she showered. Her hair was wet again and combed down smooth against her scalp when she finally came out.
He thought if he had not been there watching from her doorstep, she would have eaten now. But she would not offer him food, and could not prepare and eat it before him. So, stubbornly, she began to pick at the room, making incomplete, indifferent tidying motions among the remains of her breakfast.
There was no point in waiting. “In Bedyn, they say you are a healer.”
She was turned more than halfway from Neye, so he could see only a part of the side of her face. He could see the small muscles of her jaw, but they did not tighten at all. After a long time, with a slight sideways glance of disgust or impatience, she said, “Then the people of Bedyn are imbeciles.”
“You deny it?”
She turned her head all the way round to him, gave him an unwavering stare. “In Bedyn they say people who work for Registry can read minds.” And then she was the one who waited, watching him. If there was any fear under there, it was damn well secured. He could feel only the smooth, hard shimmer of her armor.
He smiled just a little, as though he was faintly tired of an old canard. “I don’t read minds,” he said. “Your scores are almost as high as mine. So you’ll have to tell me if you are or are not a healer, I won’t be able to pick it out of your brain.”
There was no change in her face. But after a while he could feel her deciding to believe him. She looked away a little and said, “I’ve never seen anyone healed of anything just by the laying on of hands.”
It was not a lie, only a careful choosing of words.
“I’m asking if you are a healer.”
