Black Elvis

by Geoffrey Becker

  In the restaurant's bathroom, I attempted to put my hand through the sink, but met resistance in exactly the form one would expect. Death did not preclude pain, nor did it apparently come with any of the expected benefits—I could not pass through things, read minds, or see the future. Even the past was a little hazy. The present, this cinnamon-scented men's room, was all too real. When I was eleven, I sent away for X-ray specs, which never came. Probably better that way. At the Community Park Pool I stared at the girls in their suits, thinking when I get those glasses, never knowing that I had just made my first foray into victimhood and the marketplace. "Eastern Illinois State—discover your future!" So now I tried to determine whether it was just me that had died, or whether the whole bunch of us were translated. Perhaps Sherman Alexie was the one lucky member of this doomed party—Waylon Jennings opting not to take the plane at the last moment and giving his seat to the Big Bopper—and we were all of us dead. Had my dining companions, too, been in Utah? Did it matter? Maybe when it happened, you just went to Ohio, period. I checked my face in the mirror, recognized it, saw nothing particularly Native American in the features. No visible blood, either. My ribs, however, hurt with every breath.

  A perfectly pleasant day of winter sport yesterday on which I did not die. Why would I? I was forty, just turned. I was not nearly so sarcastic, the opposite, even. I rode high above those sugared cliffs and gorges, gulped distinctly western air, and thought about how certain moments can be relived. Or rather, there are places one can return to that have nothing to do with outside circumstance or chronological context. Sex. The beach. The shower. Chocolate. Listening to Sgt. Pepper's with your eyes closed, feet up. Floating unnaturally above the world on a metal bench, looking down through a pair of skis. I'd never been there, and yet I'd been there so many times I felt like slapping myself on the back: Dude! Where you been? We missed you! I thought backward from there to other ski moments. The weekend trips to A-Basin with Martin. A trip with Cleo to Vermont that proved beyond any doubt my unreasonableness, when I left her at the bottom and skied the blacks all day because it was why I had come. And yet we moved in together anyway, that next year, and she dutifully bought me calendars with mountain scenes on them every December.

  And back, and back.

  Dinner went as well as could be hoped, considering I was faking it all the way. Luckily, no one wanted to ask me anything specific—they seemed to respect my privacy as a Native American writer filling in for a Native American writer. Since I was a backup, it occurred to me that expectations were probably lower. Still, there was going to be the reading part of the evening, and that worried me. I asked if anyone had my book, and was surprised to discover that the blotchy boy did. Coffee had come—for my meal I'd opted for the steak, which was overcooked and sided with a baked potato jacketed in foil—along with a "special" dessert for all of us, a precarious piece of chocolate cake with a layer of something red just beneath the icing.

  Lucky Sherman Alexie. He hadn't fallen off the side of some mountain.

  "Do you actually know Sherman Alexie?" asked the girl. Her name, predictably, was Heather. I wondered if the rules were that everyone got to hear my thoughts.

  "No, not exactly."

  "I think he's wonderful. But I was so angry when I heard he wasn't coming that you know what? I called his mother."

  Everyone at the table seemed to think this was hilarious. Apparently, the story was familiar to them. "How?"

  "I found the number, right there on the rez, and I called. She was very nice. I just said how disappointed I was—that's all. She said she'd let him know."

  I could tell how much she enjoyed saying rez.

  "Can I see it?" I asked the boy.

  "I was hoping you'd sign it." He dug into the knapsack that he'd apparently had tucked between his feet through the whole meal. "Here."

  Had my parents (or I) been alive, I'd have called them. There in my hands was a hardbound book with my name on it. It was remarkable. I started to flip through, but from the leaving motions taking place around me I determined it was time to go. There were people I needed to call. My dentist, for instance, was expecting me on Wednesday, and that wasn't going to happen. And Cleo.

  I took the pen the boy held out and wrote my name on the title page. The book seemed to be called Zip. I tried to figure the significance of this. Zip as in pep? As in zippo, zilch, nothing? Was it a message? I could not for the life of me (hah!) remember writing it.

  They drove me to a small auditorium and I did the reading. It was easy. My book was full of stories, and I just chose one. There were about twenty people in the audience. It was a Coyote story, all about how Coyote was hanging out on a big flat rock one day, when Lizard came by to ask directions. The characters all called each other "Grandfather" and "Uncle," and I didn't understand a word of it. Things happened, characters went places, had cryptic conversations, then moved on to other places. Big winds kicked up, rains came and went, talking animals were tricked into doing things. People applauded. They took me to a motel a few miles from campus and I watched TV and went to bed.

  After that reading, I did more, at other small colleges, driving myself to them in a tiny rental car, using a handout map of Ohio with "Thrifty" printed across the top and directions to the Columbus airport on the reverse. I read other stories from my book, but I didn't understand them any better than that first one. I began to think I'd written a very good book—like life, it had the appearance of meaning, but at the same time, the harder you worked at looking under the surface, the more the whole thing just dissolved before you. At a highway trading post, I bought myself a belt with a turquoise-inlaid buckle. I tried to decide which reservation I might be from.

  Sometimes, I'd stare at those directions back to the airport and wonder if there was a simple way out for me in them. Perhaps I should ignore the itinerary—it was printed on letterhead from my publisher, Zip Books—and just head home. Except that I knew what would happen. Surely that plane would take me back to Utah, and then I'd be right back where I'd started, which is to say dead on a frozen hillside, surrounded by a chastened group of men who just the evening before had found it hilarious to have emptied an entire hotel of its guests with three chickens and some garlic.

  Of course, at each successive stop, there was disappointment. Everyone had been hoping for Sherman Alexie. I got used to it. They put me up in local hotels, many of which had free HBO. I tried to telephone Cleo, but always got an answering machine. My name was not mentioned, and that led me to believe that time had moved on more than I knew. I ate Ibuprofen like M&M's, four every three hours, and drank as much as I felt like, despite what I'd read in the magazines about liver damage. I recognized some of the schools I visited as ones I'd written copy for. "Ohio Lutheran, where the future is now!" There was a sameness to all of them—the students in their baseball caps, the professors eager to meet me, the visiting dead writer. During question-and-answer time at the end of a reading, I'd often be asked specific things. Is Grasshopper the hero of that story, or is it Grandfather Owl? What was the significance of the sweat lodge? At first, I'd answer honestly that I did not know, but my honesty was taken for cageyness. After a while, I started answering questions with questions. What do you think? I'd say. Not all stories are linear, I'd tell them.

  An unexpected bump up to first class, where I drank Bloody Marys as quickly as the stewardess (sorry, attendant, but now you know her gender) could bring them. Thinking to myself, You are so lucky.

  Sliding all over the interstate trying to get myself from Utica, where we now lived, to the Syracuse airport in a blizzard, praying I wouldn't land in a ditch and miss my flight and the thing I'd been training daily at the gym for, planning my life around, to the exclusion of almost anything else. To the point where Cleo pretty much stopped talking to me at all—I mean, I was executing jump-turns in the kitchen of our tiny rental house, causing the dishes to shake in the cabinets. Turning off the radio for less distraction and leaning way forward to see
through the flakes.

  I ate, but I was always hungry; I drank, but I never got drunk. Steaks, chops, great huge sandwiches and desserts, martinis and margaritas and straight-up Scotch. I even took up smoking again. What did it matter? I'd lived with the woman for seven years, and now I couldn't even get her on the telephone. It occurred to me that none of this might be happening at all, that in fact I might still be lying on the snow like a broken toy. Nice turn.

  Her father was sick, so we moved to Utica. It was a nice thing to do, I suppose. He lingered for over a year; I telecommuted. Cleo looked tired all the time, and maybe we fell out of love, or maybe we just stopped trying to tell our story.

  Finally, at a small alternative college—there really are a lot of colleges in Ohio—a young man in a cape was assigned to show me around. He had the usual multiple facial piercings and a speech impediment from the silver ball imbedded in the center of his tongue. "Do you know Therman Alexie?" he asked.

  "Oh, we all know each other," I said. We were headed across the main quadrangle. The buildings were of gray stone, planted two hundred years earlier by earnest Unitarians intent on civilizing the frontier. A couple of girls in oversized dresses played a lackluster game of Frisbee, both of them with cigarettes in their hands. "I want to go up there," I said, pointing to the clock tower. "I'll bet there's even a legend about it."

  "Thatth right," he said. "It will thtrike thirteen—"

  "The day a virgin graduates."

  "How'd you know?"

  "Lucky guess."

  "Ith a joke, man. The women here want you to thign a contract before you hold their handth. That thing ought to thtrike thirteen every night."

  I got him to take me up—he had a big key ring with keys to all the buildings. We went out on the balcony overlooking the quad. It was dark already, and nearly time to head back to my room and change for dinner. The girls had given up on their game.

  "What do you write?" I asked the boy.

  "Poetry, mothtly. I can't theem to tell a thtory. Fiction ith boring anyway."

  "I'll bet you've got something to say. I'll bet you're really talented, but just too unusual for the world to understand your talent. You're misunderstood, aren't you, cape-boy?"

  "Are you being tharcathtic?" he asked. "And if tho, how come? What did I do to you?"

  "Nothing," I said. "I was just checking." And then I climbed up onto the railing and swan-dived toward the concrete below.

  This fall wasn't much like the last. For one thing, it was over in a second. Just a graceful suspension, then the hard smack of the ground. No time to think, in other words, which was just as well. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to know what would happen if, for instance, I tried to ditch my responsibilities in a less dramatic way and simply steal away to the Columbus airport.

  That morning I'd arisen early, intending to leave her sleeping there, but she'd beaten me to it, and the coffee was already going downstairs. I put on my robe and clumped down to where she was sitting at the table in the predawn, knocking snow off the morning paper, which had somehow made it to our doorstep. "I'll miss you," she'd said. "Even though you're abandoning me."

  And I kissed her on the top of her sleep-smelling head and didn't say anything, because I never did, but instead just began assembling my bags.

  I don't know who they got to replace me.

  Jimi Hendrix, Bluegrass Star

  In front of the Pompidou Center, a pretty redheaded girl with a violin case took a position about fifteen yards to my left. She wore tight jeans and a black cowboy shirt with pearly buttons, and I kept one eye on her as she took out her instrument and applied rosin to the bow in brisk, short strokes. I finished up "All Along the Watchtower," nodded to the family from Peoria who had stopped to stare at me as if I were a roadside accident, laid down my Strat, and went over.

  She launched into something lively and Irish sounding, her eyes closed, her head tilted thoughtfully to one side. I maintained my position as her entire audience until I was joined by a few skinny Parisian teenagers in black clothes, generating their own weather system of Gauloises smoke and attending to the music as if it were a philosophy lecture. When she finished, I tossed a few of my coins into her case to set an example, but it didn't make much of an impression on my associates, who moved quickly on down the line toward the guy who was walking on broken glass and eating fire. That bastard always had the crowd, and it had crossed my mind more than once to think up something a little more dangerous for myself, too. I didn't know how he did it. The glass was real, jagged and sharp—I'd checked it out.

  "I know some bluegrass," I said to her, when it was just the two of us. "You want to play together? We'll double our income."

  "You do? What do you know?"

  I knew exactly four tunes, all of them learned to help out my college roommate with his senior thesis, "The Dave Katz Project." Katz had completed a music major without developing facility with any instrument, bravely working his way through the trumpet, the piano, and the upright bass, before finally settling on the banjo.

  "'Sally Goodin'?" I said. "'Rocky Top?'" I didn't want to give her all four at once.

  "'Sally Goodin'."

  She came over to my spot and stood beside me as I slid my guitar back on. It was a midseventies model in a particularly ugly color called "Antigua," a kind of puke-and-cigarette-ash sunburst. I'd picked it up cheap from a guy I met in a record store who claimed he wanted to get rid of all his worldly possessions. It had a sawn-in-half baseball bat neck, and gouged into the back of the body was the legend "Satin Lives"—the work of some former owner with either poor spelling or a shiny wardrobe. I turned off my distortion and tried to get the cleanest, most mountain-pure sound I could. A few minutes earlier, I'd been blasting nuclear holocaust through that runt speaker. Now I wanted pine trees, moonshine whiskey, cold running streams. "There," I said, strumming a bright, open G.

  "Wendy," she said, meeting my eyes briefly, without much interest. "I like to go fast." She stomped her foot three times.

  Playing with The Dave Katz Project had always left me slightly depressed, since we never went fast—it was like sitting for the SATs. But Wendy took off like a bottle rocket. I thumped along, careful not to be too loud, trying to emphasize the bass notes and not let the pace drag. The Parisian teenagers came back. A small crowd began to gather.

  The money rained in, copper, silver, even some notes. I asked her where she'd learned to play like that.

  "Suzuki method. How about 'Cotton-eyed Joe'? It's just A-E-A."

  When we'd done all we could to that one, a man with a bad hairpiece asked us if we wanted a job. He wore a suit and seemed reasonably believable when he said he could offer us 750 francs to play for the night, plus room and board. Wendy's French was slightly better than mine, and between the three of us we managed to clarify that the place we were going to was a sort of retreat for les travaileurs of the Renault automobile company. "They like very much the American music," he assured us. "John Denver."

  In the van, I let my hand rest against Wendy's leg, which she didn't seem to notice. "I'm Phil," I said. She was staring out the window, so I did, too. The day had started out sunny and warm, but had been disintegrating since noon, and now it looked like rain. Jean, our host, drove us first to my hotel, where I grabbed my pack from the front desk—I'd checked out after breakfast and hadn't made any plan yet for tonight—then on to the youth hostel, where Wendy had her things. I'd learned she was from Baltimore, but that was about it. She seemed intent on not sharing much. I thought about what I might say to make myself seem interesting.

  "How do you like France?"

  "It's OK," she said. "I'm running out of money."

  "We could make a killing together. We're eclectic."

  "That's what that thing is? An eclectic guitar?" Her eyes were light green, almost feline. "I'm getting married in December."

  "Good for you. Where is he, now?"

  "Back home. Mad at me for being here."

 
; "He should have come along. Does he play anything?"

  "No. He doesn't really like music."

  "And you want to marry him? Have you thought this thing through?"

  She smiled, one side of her mouth going up higher than the other. "He voted for Reagan, too," she said. "It's sort of a problem."

  It took about an hour to get where we were going, which was out in the country, and to the south. What we passed through to get there confirmed my suspicions that much of Europe was just an extension of the New Jersey Turnpike. Train tracks, concrete bunker-style warehouses, power lines, freight yards, and ratty fields where they appeared to be raising weeds. Eventually we slid off into prettier territory, with farmhouses and trees. Then we were getting out in front of a big white house. Jean took us upstairs and showed us to our room.

  We explored our quarters—twin beds with orange spreads on them, a sink in the room, a small bathroom off it with a toilet, tub (no bidet). I had found out a few things: she was twenty-four. She smoked Marlboros, lighting them with a World War II–vintage stainless steel Zippo. She had been traveling three weeks on an Inter-Rail Pass in France and Italy, busking infrequently, and with mixed success.

  "They think we're together," she said, sitting on the edge of one bed.

  I sat down beside her, but she got right up, went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth.

  In the time we had before dinner, she showed me three more songs. I kept trying to rock-and-roll around underneath her traditional melodies, but she was having none of it. "Straight," she warned me. "Please, just keep the beat and hit the right chords."