Both Buzzy and Paul are better than Elvis at talking to girls. Buzzy is already broad-chested and has the beginnings of a moustache. Paul is skinny and blonde, but taller than Elvis. Buzzy and Paul are also better at football, fighting, talking about the girls they’re going to go with and even, recently, the girls they have been with. Buzzy says he’s kissed Betty McMahon and she let him cup her titties. That’s the word he used, ‘cup’. As if he were a container for her. Elvis thinks of Buzzy and Betty and wants to hurt them both for not including him in this act of containment. He’s never properly kissed a girl – he’d always got Magdalene’s cheek, never her lips – but he has imagined kissing Betty many times.
‘Hi,’ Betty says, looking at none of them in particular. She tucks her hair, which is the colour of sand on the kind of beaches he’s only dreamed about, behind her ear. Almost immediately, it slides back to touch the side of her face.
‘I’m going up to the Incurables tomorrow, Betty, if you wanna come?’ says Buzzy.
Her eyes widen. ‘You’re going where?’
‘Up to the Home for Incurables on McLemore.’
‘Is that lepers and stuff?’ She pulls a disgusted face, but it doesn’t wholly convince Elvis. It’s the kind of face a girl might pull when talking about roaches. The kind of face she’s expected to pull.
‘Sounds scary,’ she says.
‘It ain’t scary, Betty.’ Buzzy narrows his eyes and strokes his baby moustache. ‘Sad is what it is. Matter of fact I go up there quite a bit, you know, what with my charity work with the Oddfellows.’
‘That’s real caring of you, Buzzy, but I’m kinda busy tomorrow.’
Paul sniggers.
Buzzy gives a theatrical shrug. ‘Just doing my bit. Paying my dues.’
‘You going too, Elvis?’ Betty turns towards him suddenly, her skirt swinging. The light coming from the recess behind them shines on her legs, making her ankle socks appear luminous.
Buzzy and Paul are looking at him too. Elvis shifts his guitar and mumbles, ‘Ain’t reckoned on it.’
‘Know what I reckon?’ says Betty, a little smile dimpling her cheeks. ‘I reckon them old Incurables would just love to hear you sing.’
This makes Buzzy burst out laughing.
Betty fixes Elvis with a stare. ‘I’m serious. I’ve heard your singing and it’s real nice.’
He ducks his head, wishing he could stop smiling.
‘I heard you,’ Betty continues, ‘even though you sing so low the crickets drown you out.’
Buzzy laughs again, mirthlessly this time, then makes a grab for the girl’s hand. ‘Come on, Betty,’ he says, putting on his Clark Gable voice. ‘Sit beside me here so we can discuss our future together.’
She doesn’t move.
‘You look real pretty tonight,’ Buzzy says, and Betty’s face softens.
‘Elvis, can’t you control your friend?’ she says, freeing her hand.
‘Oh, Presley’s a nice boy,’ says Buzzy, ‘but he can’t control nobody. He can’t even control his own face.’
‘Come on, now …’ Paul says. They often tease Elvis about his shyness, but until now it’s been just between the three of them.
‘One time,’ Buzzy continues, ‘his mama was calling on him, you know, in that way she does? Sort of like, “Elvie, baby …”’ Betty grins, a little bit. ‘And we all joined in, and poor old Presley – his lip just about dropped to the ground.’
Elvis looks at Betty, hoping the darkness is hiding the worst of his acne.
‘Picked it right up, though,’ he says.
‘Say what?’ asks Betty.
‘My lip,’ he says. ‘I picked it right up off the ground.’
She laughs then, and it’s surprisingly low and belly-like, and it makes him want to take her in his arms.
‘Well,’ she says, moving on up the steps, ‘see you, boys.’
The next day, straight after school, Elvis boards the Oddfellows’ bus with Buzzy and Paul. As they travel through town, he hardly notices the department stores, movie theatres and cafeterias. Instead, he sits on his hands and thinks about Betty and that movement she makes, tucking her hair behind her ear only for it to slide back again. Having learned all about love from Eddy Arnold, Kay Starr and Bing Crosby, he longs to experience for himself that yearning for another, special human being, and he’s decided that human being should now be Betty McMahon. Magdalene Morgan was, he tells himself, somebody special, but she was not special like Betty. All night he relived the moment when Betty said, I’ve heard your singing. She has his voice in her head! She must have heard him sing ‘My Happiness’ in the dusk of the Courts. Was she alone then? He hopes so. Maybe she was sitting at her window, a hand in her beach-coloured hair. Or maybe his song made her stop whatever she was doing – reading her romance novel or fighting with her sister – and pause, take a breath, and wonder, Who is this, singing so soft and low and tender?
His mama has said it’s a fine thing, going to the Home for Incurables. Elvis is more than a little worried, though, that he’ll catch something, or that the sadness of the place will be unbearable. Gladys has warned him that, though they are not contagious, the Incurables might look scary. He imagines himself telling Betty about it, afterwards: ‘Such poor folks, without hope,’ he’ll say, and perhaps she’ll squeeze his hand.
The Home for Incurables is in a large old house; they spot its turret from the end of the street. The porch is pristine white, the drive long and curved. The bus slows to a halt and everybody goes quiet. As they disembark, the boys stop chattering and laughing and let the elder Oddfellows lead the way to the door. They are a small group, about ten in all. Elvis, Buzzy and Paul hang back and are the last to step inside.
Once he’s over the threshold, Elvis’s instinct is to turn around and get right back on the bus. It’s not the look of the place. It’s grand, opulent, even: there are thick carpets, an antique clock ticking louder than his heart, a sweeping oak staircase of the kind Bette Davis might descend. There’s only the occasional, muted sound of somebody coughing. But there is a smell. A greenish, antiseptic odour fills the air, making him think of the nurse in the school medical room, stainless-steel kidney dish to hand and bony fingers prodding his stomach for signs of some terrible inner disease.
A woman who has introduced herself only as ‘the matron’ is leading them down a corridor. Her starched skirt stands proud of her knees like a pegged tent as she shows them into a room with the word Solarium stuck on the door. High-backed chairs are arranged before the long windows, and in the chairs are the Incurables themselves. The bright heat of the place sets Elvis sweating. He cannot look at any of these people, and fears he’ll puke if he has to breathe that smell for a minute longer.
Paul says, ‘You OK? You don’t look so good.’
Elvis says nothing. Somebody is coughing again, more urgently.
Paul thrusts a tray of milk and cookies at Elvis. ‘We got to hand these round.’
Elvis nods, and his feet move across the carpet. In the first chair is a boy, younger than him, with yellow skin and patchy hair. He refuses a cookie and Elvis, relieved, is about to move on when the boy grasps the arms of the chair, displaying the flaking skin on his knuckles, and asks, ‘Can you play that thing?’ so loudly that everyone in the room turns to look.
Elvis had almost forgotten about the guitar slung across his back. He still doesn’t play so well, but lately he’s started taking it not just to school but everywhere he goes, even though he has yet to admit that he wants people to listen, that this is the reason he has it on him at all times. Performing is still more pain than pleasure for him. He’s been singing before an audience in church for years now, but in any other setting he can get seriously spooked. At his cousin’s party he’d insisted Aunt Lillian – whose family have recently made the move to Memphis – turn off all the lights before he would sing.
‘Cat got your tongue? Can you play guitar, or what?’ the boy asks.
‘He always carrie
s that old thing around,’ says Buzzy who, Elvis now notices, is sitting next to the prettiest Incurable in the room. ‘He’s kinda shy about playing it. He ain’t bad, though. Not good, but not bad.’
An old man seated near the window, legs wrapped in plaid blankets, begins to moan softly. Elvis throws a look at the matron, who is standing by the door. She nods. ‘Sing something for us, son. I think we’d all appreciate that.’
Here there are no lights to turn off. There is only the sun, flooding the air around him, making his eyes water. He wipes the sweat from his brow, clears his throat, laughs a little, hangs his head. And everyone is still looking at him, waiting.
Jesse, can you see me now?
The old habit of talking silently to Jesse comes back, completely unbidden. It’s a shock, and a relief.
‘Sing, then!’ demands the boy.
Old dead brother, where have you been?
The boy rises from his chair and turns to face the other Incurables. ‘He can’t play,’ he sneers. ‘I can play one of them things. Who wants to hear me play?’
‘Lee,’ the matron warns. ‘We’ve all heard you play, and you’re real good. Everybody knows it. Sit down.’
Reckon I oughta hit him, Jesse? One push and he’d be over.
Lee sits, and gives Elvis a defiant stare. Buzzy begins whispering to the pretty Incurable, and Paul starts the rounds with the cookies once more. But Elvis can’t let the moment slide. He clears his throat.
‘Might I sing right now, ma’am?’ he asks the matron.
‘Only if you want to,’ she says, smiling.
‘Oh, now he’s gonna sing!’ Lee says.
Watch me, Jesse.
So Elvis swings his guitar to his front and takes hold of its neck. Then he closes his eyes and begins to strum. The man in the blankets moans louder as Elvis begins in on ‘My Happiness’, the song he’s most comfortable with. He gets it wrong, though, and has to start over.
Are you with me?
He fears his body might melt, here in the solarium with ten pairs of Incurable eyes upon him. His fingers feel like rubber and he has little control over the chords, yet he carries on, because, despite everything, the room is listening. He can feel them listening, all of them. Even Buzzy has stopped chewing on his cookie. Elvis dares to open his eyes but cannot look at their faces yet, only at the picture on the wall of wheat fields, the clouds behind them yellow and splitting. He focuses on the edge of the largest cloud and keeps singing. His voice is not as good as he wants it to be. It doesn’t vibrate with sadness or swoop with longing. Sometimes, when he’s singing on his own in the darkness, he feels his voice beginning to do both those things. It’s like it lifts from his body and goes someplace else.
He gets through the song. Nobody moves, smiles, or claps. He wonders how he can escape the room without anybody noticing.
Then he hears the matron’s voice. ‘Young man, that was real pretty. Sing us another.’
And so he does as she asks. He sings the same song again, and this time he lets his eyes rest for a few moments on Lee, who cannot look back at him, and then on the pretty girl next to Buzzy, who cannot take her eyes from him.
Back at the Courts, his mama asks him to go to the laundry room to check if the wash is done.
He likes it down here; it’s warm and hushed, it smells good, and it feels hidden. He makes a mental note that it would be good to come here at night, to sit alone among the pressing irons and airing racks, the washtubs and spin dryers, and practise singing.
Several machines are humming. He watches the top of a washtub as it vibrates and steams. Together the water and the motor make a regular slosh-thud-slosh-tick-tick-slosh-thud-slosh rhythm. Shifting his focus to his own reflection in the shining metal front of the machine, he puts down the basket and tries to replicate the way he stood as he sang in the Home for Incurables. He thinks he had his right foot forward, and maybe rocked a little on his heels.
‘Hi, Elvis Presley.’
Betty McMahon is standing in the doorway, cradling a plastic basket similar to his. She walks over to a tub and places her laundry on the floor. She takes her time, swaying her hips as she moves.
‘Let me help you with that,’ he says.
‘Thanks, but I oughta take care of my own dirty clothes, I reckon,’ she says, bundling items into the machine.
Elvis laughs, too loud. He’s about to turn away and hide his embarrassment by checking his own laundry when she says, ‘So did you go sing to them Incurables?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You did?’ Betty turns to face him, her eyes alight. ‘How was it?’
‘It was a real old place, but the patients didn’t look too sick, and there was this smell—’
‘I meant, how did the singing go?’
‘Oh!’ He laughs again. ‘They liked me, Betty. They really liked me.’
She pours out a cupful of detergent, tips it into the drum, slams the lid, then sets the dial. ‘Well, sure they did.’
A great churning noise starts up as the machine gets going, and she has to raise her voice. ‘I knew they would.’
Leaning on the machine, she looks him over. It suddenly strikes him that if he can be that person who sang this afternoon, he can be a person who kisses Betty McMahon.
‘They really liked me!’ he repeats.
She shrugs. ‘That’s because you sing nice.’
From the way she studies his face – as if there is something about him that she finds both amusing and sweet – he senses he can move closer to her now.
He walks to where she is and leans next to her. The washtub’s vibrations run along his spine.
‘I like your hair,’ he says.
‘Say what?’ she asks, tipping her head towards him.
There she is, so close that he can smell apple shampoo.
When he puts his mouth next to her ear, she doesn’t draw back.
‘I said, I’d like to kiss you,’ he whispers.
She looks at him hard. Then she places a hand on his shoulder and pulls him in.
It is a short, dry kiss, but to Elvis it seems to make everything stop, apart from the rhythm of the laundry as it tumbles from side to side in the drum.
1952
He spends his summer vacation doing four things: working at Loew’s State movie theater as an usher (he loves the uniform), kissing Betty in the laundry room (he wouldn’t say they’re dating, even though they’ve stolen the occasional kiss over the last two years), trying to persuade Gladys that he should quit Humes High, and growing his hair.
On Wednesday – his first day back at school – nobody notices his hair, and Gladys is still insistent on him getting his High School Diploma. And so on Thursday morning, as he stands studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, Elvis decides to make a change. If nothing else, he is going to be different. His hair is long enough, now, to style into a pompadour, like Tony Curtis wears. He applies a good wodge of Vaseline to the sides of his head and drags his comb through the goo, slicking it back. It stays in place well enough, and shows off his sideburns, which have also grown over the summer. Then he tries to pile what’s left on the top, curling it with his fingers. But his hair is fine, and won’t do anything but flop, so he shakes a few drops of Fitch’s rose hair oil onto his palm and tries again. He manages a wave of sorts, and while it’s not long enough to hang in his eyes, it is longer than any other boy’s at Humes. He isn’t entirely happy with the result, but it’s better than before.
As he’s leaving the apartment, Gladys stops him.
‘Don’t forget your lunch money,’ she says, holding out fifty cents.
‘That’s OK,’ he says, patting his pocket. ‘I got it.’ Working at Loew’s, he has his own money.
She grabs his shoulders and pulls him close so she can examine his hair.
‘What you done here?’ she asks, peering all around his head.
He ducks away from her. ‘Just trying something out,’ he says.
She steps back and fold
s her arms. ‘It looks different,’ she says. ‘If different’s what you want.’
‘I kinda had Tony Curtis in mind.’
Gladys snorts. ‘You and a hundred thousand girls.’
He reaches past her for the door.
‘Come over here.’ She holds her arms open, and Elvis relents, settling himself in the familiar space between them.
‘Mama’s so proud of you,’ she whispers. ‘You gonna to be the first in this family to finish high school.’
She releases him, looks his hair over again and says, ‘I could put a permanent on there when you’re home. Give it some whump. I got a home kit somewhere.’
He thinks this sounds like a good idea.
All morning, Elvis’s stomach fizzes with something between fear and excitement. He meets Buzzy and Paul, and they look at his hair quizzically, but don’t say anything about it. He’s decided, anyway, that one of the things that should be different about Senior Year is the company he keeps. Buzzy and Paul are fun but, he thinks, pretty ordinary. And they don’t care about music in the way he does. When he starts talking about the latest record he’s heard on WDIA, they look bored.
By lunchtime, Elvis has waited so long for somebody to say something about his hairstyle, that he begins to wonder if it isn’t actually that noticeable. He heads for the bathroom, because he doesn’t want to spend his lunch money. He wants to save every cent for records, and perhaps even a new shirt. With all the hours he’s put in at Loew’s he might even be able to afford one he’s seen in the window at Lansky’s Tailors, so long as he can get credit.
As he pushes open the greasy door, a wall of cigarette smoke sets his eyes watering. It billows over the tops of the stalls and obscures the mirror – not that he could get close to it, with all the other boys crowded around. He produces his comb from his pocket and becomes aware of them nudging each other as they watch him in the glass. Every one of them sports a fierce crew cut. The word faggot is whispered. He manages to ignore it, but his hand shakes a little as he tries to sculpt his pompadour.
Graceland Page 16
