Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself
LEWIS GRIZZARD
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2011 by Dedra Grizzard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-271-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-083-7
LCCN: 2011016138
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
Other books by Lewis Grizzard:
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You (1979)
Glory! Glory! Georgia's 1980 Championship Season (1981)
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat (1982)
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About A Quart Low (1983)
Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else But Me (1984)
Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (1985)
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (1986)
Shoot Low Boys - They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1986)
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? (1987)
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny - You Know Them Taters Got Eyes (1988)
Lewis Grizzard’s Advice to the Newly Wed (1989)
Lewis Grizzard on Fear of Flying (1989)
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground (1990)
Does a Wild Bear Chip in the Woods? (1990)
Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night (1990)
Don’t Forget to Call Your Momma; I Wish I Could Call Mine (1991)
You Can’t Put No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll (1991)
I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 and Other Nekkid Truths (1992)
I Took a Lickin’and Kept on Tickin’ and Now I Believe in Miracles (1993)
The Last Bus to Albuquerque (posthumous) (1994)
It Wasn’t Always Easy but I Sure Had Fun (posthumous) (1994)
Grizzardisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Lewis Grizzard (1995)
Southern by the Grace of God - Lewis Grizzard on the South (1996)
Dedication
To Danny Thompson, Bobby Entrekin, Mike Murphy, Dudley Stamps, Charles Moore, Clyde Elrod, Worm Elrod, and Anthony Yeager — the boys from Moreland, who I hope and pray didn’t grow up to be as confused as I am.
And to the memory of Eddie Estes, a great centerfielder.
Contents
1 - A Last Toast to the King
2 - When Life was Black and White
3 - Guilt Trip in a Cadillac
4 - Camelot in Bloody Ruin
5 - Where Rock ’n’ Roll Went Wrong
6 - They Call It Blue-Eyed Soul
7 - Hairy Ode to the Goat Man
8 - The Great Double-Knit Dilemma
9 - One Table Daintz to Go
10 - Eddie Haskell is Still a Jerk
11 - Who Does My Butt Belong to Now?
12 - Women Don’t Wear Jocks
13 - Romancing the Turnip Green
14 - Somebody Pull the Plug on Modernity
15 - You Can’t Trust a Psychiatrist with Cats
16 - Maybe Someday, Rainbow Stew
Credits
About the Author
1
A Last Toast to the King
WE WERE SITTING on the beach in Hilton Head, South Carolina, me and Price and Franklin. We were mired in those squatty folding chairs, the kind the old people take down to the surf and sit in while the salt water splashes over them. We were drinking cold beer and acting our age.
You can always tell the approximate age of people by watching what they do when they go to the beach. Babies, of course, dabble in the sand and splash around in the shallow water.
When a kid is about ten or twelve, he goes out farther and rides the waves and balks at his mother’s motions that it’s time to leave.
“Come on, Timmy. It’s time to go back to the motel.”
“Can’t we stay just a little bit longer?”
“No. Your daddy is ready to leave.”
“But I want to swim some more.”
“I said come here, young man.”
“Let me ride just one more wave. Please?”
“Don’t make me call your daddy.”
“I’ll ride just one more and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Okay, but just one more.”
Parents never win at the beach, at least in these permissive times they don’t. A kid can always just-one-more his parents into another thirty minutes of wave riding.
When children become teen-agers, the girls stop going into the water because they’re afraid they will get their hair wet. What they do instead is put on tiny little swimsuits and lie on towels getting tanned. Teen-aged boys throw frisbees.
There should be a law against throwing frisbees on beaches. In the first place, throwing a frisbee is a mindless exercise that can’t be any fun whatsoever. After you’ve seen one frisbee float through the air, you’ve seen them all. They might as well try catching horseflies.
Also, on crowded beaches there isn’t room for teen-aged boys to throw frisbees. Frisbees are difficult to control and difficult to catch, so they’re always landing on people who are trying to relax in the sun. Sometimes, frisbees even knock over somebody’s beer.
A kid knocked over my beer with a frisbee at the beach once. I threatened him with a lawsuit and then put this curse on him: “May your voice never change and your zits win prizes at county fairs.” I hate it when somebody knocks over my beer at the beach.
When kids are college age, the girls still lie on towels getting tanned and worrying about getting their hair wet. The boys, meanwhile, have given up throwing frisbees and have joined the girls, lying next to them on their own towels.
They play loud rock music, and when the girls ask them to rub suntan oil on their backs, they enthusiastically oblige ... especially if the girl has unsnapped the back of her tiny top and the boy knows that her breasts are unleashed, for all practical purposes. The beach habits of people this age are basically preliminary sexual exercises, but rarely do they lead to anything more advanced later in the day. As numerous studies have shown, it is quite uncomfortable to attempt to have sex after an afternoon of lying in the sun because of the unpleasant feeling that individuals get when they rub their sunburned skin against that of someone whose epidermis is in the same painful condition.
At about age thirty, most people have the good sense to stop frying their skin in the sun for hours. They know by then that having sex is more fun than having a sunburn; they have heeded all the reports about how lying in the sun causes skin cancer; and they are usually working on their first nervous breakdown by age thirty, and all they want to do at the beach is sit there and relax while drinking cold beer.
The three of us that day at Hilton Head had already tiptoed into our thirties and the beer was going down exceptionally well. I have no idea what women talk about when they’re sitting on a beach together without any men around, but when no women are present, men talk about the physical attributes of everything that happens to walk past them — or is lying close to them on a towel — wearing a bikini.
Me and Price and Franklin were doing just that:
“Good God.”
“Where?”
“Left.”
“Good God.”
“How old do you think she is?”
“Eighteen.”
“No way. Sixteen.”
“Did they look
like that when we were sixteen?”
“They couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“If they had, I wouldn’t have lived this long. Some daddy would have shot me.”
“Yeah, and they got the pill today, too.”
“I wonder if the boys their age know how lucky they are.”
“They don’t have any idea.”
“Wonder how old they are when they start these days?”
“Rodney Dangerfield said the kids are doing it so young these days that his daughter bought a box of Cracker Jacks and the prize was a diaphragm.”
“Great line.”
“Look coming here.”
“It’s a land whale.”
“Damn, she’s fat.”
“If somebody told her to haul ass, she’d have to make two trips.”
“That’s awful.”
“Hey, we’re out of beer.”
I remember distinctly that it was Franklin who went back to the condo to get more beer. I also remember distinctly that the month was August and the year was 1977. We had the radio playing. It was a country station.
Franklin was gone thirty minutes. When he came back, he had another twelve-pack. He also had a troubled look on his face.
“What took you so long?” Price asked him. “You didn’t call Sweet Thing back home, did you?”
“You’re not going to believe what I just heard on television,” he answered.
I had just taken the first pull on my fresh beer when I heard him utter three incredible words.
“Elvis is dead,” he said.
Elvis is dead. The words didn’t fit somehow. The queen of England is dead. There has been a revolution in South America and the dictator is dead. Some rock singer has been found in his hotel room with a needle in his arm and he is dead. All that made sense, but not Elvis is dead.
“They figure he had a heart attack,” said the bad news bearer.
A heart attack? Elvis Presley couldn’t have a heart attack. He was too young to have a heart attack. He was too young to have anything like that. Elvis Presley was my idol when I was a kid. Elvis changed my life. Elvis turned on my entire generation. I saw Love Me Tender three times. He died in Love Me Tender, but that was just a movie.
I figured this was some sort of joke. Right, Elvis Presley had a heart attack. And where did they find his body? In Heartbreak Hotel, of course.
The music had stopped on the radio. A man was talking.
“Elvis Presley is dead,” said the voice. “He was forty-two.”
Forty-two? That had to be wrong, too. How could he be that old? Elvis had to be younger than that. He was one of us, wasn’t he? If he was forty-two, maybe he could have had a heart attack. If he was over forty, that meant he probably had wrinkles and maybe his hair had already fallen out and he had been wearing a wig.
But if Elvis Presley was forty-two and old enough to die, what did that say about me and the generation he had captured? He had been what separated us from our parents. He had been our liberator. He played the background music while we grew up.
Elvis is dead. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so good myself.
“Damn,” said Price, “if Elvis is dead, that means we’re getting old, too.”
“Damn if it don’t,” said Franklin.
I asked for another beer.
The announcer on the radio had stopped talking, and the three of us fell silent as an eerie sound came forth. It was Elvis’s voice. It was a dead man’s voice. Elvis was singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” It was spooky.
“‘Don’t Be Cruel’,” said Price. “That was his best ever.’’
“‘One Night With You’ was my favorite,” Franklin said. “I remember dancing with Doris Ann Plummer and singing along with Elvis in her ear. ‘Oooooooone ni-ite with yuuuuu is all I’m way-ayting fooor.’ Doris Ann said I sounded just like Elvis, and soon as I got her in the car after the dance, it was all over.”
“Everything he did was great,” I said.
Elvis went on singing. I sat, still stupefied from the news, and listened. My friends went on talking.
“My old man hated Elvis.”
“So did mine.”
“He was always screaming at me, ‘Get that garbage off the radio!’”
“Mine was a religious nut. He said the devil had sent Elvis, and anybody who listened to his music was going to hell.”
“I wish my old man was alive today to see who the kids are idolizing now.”
“Yeah, Elvis wouldn’t look so bad compared to some of those weirdos they got today.”
“He probably wouldn’t even be noticed.”
“You really scored with a girl because she thought you sounded like Elvis?”
“Doris Ann Plummer, right in the back seat out behind the National Guard Armory.”
“I always used Johnny Mathis.”
“Well, Doris Ann wasn’t exactly a great conquest. I found out later she’d do it if you sang like Lassie.”
“Everybody had somebody like that in their school.”
“Yeah, but just one.”
“Imagine if it had been like it is now back then.”
“I’d have never graduated from high school.”
“I guess we were pretty naive back then compared to the kids now.”
“Maybe we’re better off.”
“Maybe. I wonder if we’d have taken drugs if we’d had ’em back then.”
“Hell, I thought drinking a beer was the wildest thing I could do.”
“I went to a fraternity party at Auburn when I was a senior in high school. I drank gin and 7-Up and danced with college girls. I didn’t think there was anything you could do any better or wilder than that.”
“We didn’t have it so bad growing up.”
“At least we had Elvis.”
“He was the greatest ever.”
“The King.”
“I don’t think there will ever be anything like him again.”
“Hard to believe he’s dead.”
“Think he was on drugs?”
“Probably.”
“Ready for another beer?”
“Let’s drink one to Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
I joined in. “To Elvis.”
The King was still singing on the radio:
“Love me tender,
Love me true,
Make all my dreams fulfilled.
For my darling, I love you.
And I always will.”
* * *
I have never forgotten that day at the beach. It was like the day John Kennedy was killed. Like the day Martin Luther King was killed. Like the day Robert Kennedy was killed. Like the day Nixon resigned.
You never forget days like that, and you’re never quite the same after them. There have been so many days like that, it seems, for my generation — the Baby Boomers who were minding to our business of growing up when all hell broke loose in the early sixties.
A few weeks after Elvis’s death, I heard another piece of startling news. I heard they found Elvis dead in his bathroom. I heard he died straining for a bowel movement.
The King, we had called him, but he had gotten fat and at the age of forty-two he had died straining for a bowel movement. Or so was the rumor. I have spent much of the past seven years hoping against hope that it wasn’t true.
2
When Life was Black and White
I AM THIRTY-EIGHT years old — it’s approximately half-time of the promised three score and ten — and I don’t have any idea what is taking place around me anymore.
Lord knows, I have tried to understand. I have dutifully watched “Donahue” in an attempt to broaden myself into a creature adjusted to the eighties, but it has been a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.
How did Phil Donahue do it? He’s even older than I am, with the gray hair to show for it, but he seems to understand what people mean when they talk about the new way to live. Me, I feel like a
n alien in my own country. These new lifestyles seem to be in direct contrast to the way they taught living when I was a child. Back then, gay meant, “1. Happy and carefree; merry. 2. Brightly colorful and ornamental. 3. Jaunty; sporty. 4. Full of or given to lighthearted pleasure. 5. Rakish; libertine.” (That’s straight from my high school dictionary.) Pot was something you cooked in, and back then nobody ate mushrooms. Where did I miss a turn?
The first hint that the world was taking leave of me came after Elvis died. The women who mourned him were older and had beehive hairdos and children of their own. Their teeny-bopper, socks-rolled-down days were far behind them. They were my age and they were weeping not only for Elvis, I think now, but for the realization that an era and a time — their time — was passing to another generation. To know that Elvis had gotten old and sick and fat enough to die was to know that their own youth had faded as well.
Elvis, forty-two. Elvis, dead. The voice that sang for the children of the late forties and early fifties stilled, and in its place a cacophony of raucous melodies from scruffy characters playing to the screams of young earthlings of the modern generation, to whom happiness and normalcy was a computerized hamburger at McDonald’s and mandatory attendance at earsplitting concerts given by people dressed as dragons or barely dressed at all. Elvis may have shaken his pelvis, but he never by-God showed it to anybody on stage.
Why this gap between me and the younger generation? Why, in my thirties, do I have more in common with people twenty years older than with people five or ten years younger? Where is my tolerance for change and modernization? Why would I enjoy hitting Boy George in the mouth? Where did the years go and where did the insanity of the eighties come from? And why did I ever leave home in the first place?
Home. That’s probably it. I don’t seem to fit in today because it was so different yesterday.
Home. I think of it and the way it was every time I see or hear something modern that challenges tradition as I came to know it.
Home. I was born in 1946, the son of a soldier who lived through seven years of combat and then drank his way right out of the service, but who still stood and sang the national anthem to the top of his forceful voice at the several hundred ball games we watched together.
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