Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself

by Lewis Grizzard

  Do you know what’s making a comeback in this country on the sex front? Strip joints, that’s what. Strip joints are making a comeback because men can go in there an ogle and whistle and make all those remarks they learned in the Navy, and the women won’t get angry and call their sisters-in-arms and cause the men all sorts of embarrassment and bodily pain.

  I wandered into a place one night in Memphis called The Yellow Pussycat. All around me were young women. They were quite naked and they were dancing. I ordered myself a drink and began to watch. Soon, I was approached by one of the young women who had been dancing.

  “Wanta table daintz?” she asked. (“Daintz” is the way “dance” comes out when a naked Southern girl with a mouthful of gum says it.)

  “What’s a table dance?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes as if to ponder what primitive means of transportation recently had dropped me at this address.

  “You pay me seven dollars,” she said, “and I daintz on your table.”

  “A sort of private dance, huh?” I probed.

  She rolled her eyes again. “Others can watch if they want to,” she explained, “but they won’t get to see nothin’ up close like you will.”

  Good sport that I am, I paid the seven bucks and experienced my first table dance. The problem was that I am easily embarrassed and often feel quite self-conscious in public, and here I was — a total stranger in a place that obviously wasn’t the Christian Science Reading Room, and a young woman I never had seen before in my life was dancing on my table, often moving close enough for me to see the innermost construction of her navel.

  I didn’t want to stare directly at her and appear like some old lecher, but on the other hand, I had paid the seven bucks and felt obliged to get my money’s worth by watching every twitch and strut.

  Had we been sipping wine alone together and Table Daintzer had suddenly been so moved by the music and the passion and the subsequent giddiness that she had climbed atop a nearby table to disrobe and move sensuously to the music, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. In this setting, however, I was more than uncomfortable.

  After the table dance was mercifully over, she asked me if I wanted another, and I said, “Thank you, but no.” Then she said that if I would buy her a bottle of champagne (she split the cost with the house twenty-eighty, she explained, and needed the money in order to pay for her little sister’s operation), she would join me at my table and we could talk.

  Naturally, I wanted to help all I could with her little sister’s operation, so I ordered the champagne and we sat and talked. It was the first time I had had a conversation with a woman in years that we didn’t have to discuss her career.

  I admit openly and without shame that I am intimidated by today’s modern woman. The female role models I had as a child were my mother, who still made homemade biscuits in the morning, and my teachers, who were too busy teaching me how to long divide to tell me that when I grew up, women would be drinking and smoking and sweating in public and telling dirty jokes and would punch you in the mouth if you made a remark they deemed sexist.

  Women didn’t sweat, or at least I didn’t think they did, until the late sixties. I went to school with little girls who wore sundresses and thought it terribly unfeminine to engage in any sort of activity that might indicate they hadn’t been born with their sweat glands nailed completely shut, so they could grow up to be cheerleaders and could lift their hands to clap and not be concerned that somebody would see wet spots under their arms. There was even the axiom that “horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow.”

  That didn’t change in college, either. The girls there wore cute little outfits and were in school to find husbands. The only ones who were in school to learn anything were the ones who wore thick glasses and played horn. They all eventually grew up to become militant feminists, of course, and they’re getting back at us now for all those years the rest of us were busy having parties and picking mates, while they were down at the music room blowing into a stupid trumpet or tuba. The fact that most militant feminists wear thick glasses and have pooched-out lips from too many nights of blowing into horns is proof of my contention.

  It was sweat, I think, that finally led to most women’s casting aside their previous role as demure little things, to be left in the kitchen while the men withdrew to the study for cigars and brandy to discuss the pros and cons of the designated hitter.

  I saw it coming in 1968. The University of Georgia at that time was intent on keeping passion to a minimum on campus. The free-sex movement had started on some Northern campuses, but at Georgia, students had remained in the political and moral status quo. Once you gave a girl your fraternity pin, you might expect a little something more than a kiss goodnight — especially if Georgia had won its football game that week — but nobody ever was late for botany class because they had lost track of the time during a heated moment of noonday passion.

  One of the ways the university attempted to keep the status quo was by not allowing coeds to walk around campus in their gym shorts after P.E. classes, thus tempting male students.

  For years coeds never muttered a sound about this rule. After P.E., they simply put their raincoats around their gym outfits and went to their next class. They never complained in hot weather, of course, because since ladies didn’t sweat and smell gamey, walking around in a raincoat didn’t bother them, even if they had just completed a rousing game of volleyball and the temperature was over ninety degrees.

  In the spring of 1968, however, a young coed named DeLores Perkwater, who wore thick glasses and played horn, passed out in class from heat exposure following her gym session. When they took her raincoat off, they noticed she was perspiring profusely.

  Even the more demure coeds from the finest sororities subsequently decided that making them wear raincoats after gym class was cruel and unusual punishment, and the first notice I had of what was to come in the feminist movement occurred soon after. A number of slogan-chanting Georgia coeds, marching in the name of DeLores Perkwater, took over the administration building and refused to leave until the university rescinded the gym shorts rule.

  Officials might have won out, but the protest took place late in spring quarter, and after the coeds had been inside the administration building (which was not air-conditioned at the time) for several days without benefit of bathing, the atmosphere became so pungent that the university decided to give in.

  “Coeds Free To Sweat!” screamed the headlines in the school newspaper, and soon women all over the country began sweating in public and thinking nothing of it. This eventually led women to begin exercising, building their bodies, and applying for jobs as construction workers and goat ropers and all sorts of other jobs previously performed by men only.

  Once women began to do all that, there was no stopping them. And they owe it all to DeLores Perkwater, now commander of the 14th Bomber Wing of the National Organization of Women.

  * * *

  I’m not certain what my own future will be regarding women. I am currently single, and I don’t know what sort of woman I would want to marry if ever I married again.

  I still would like to have a wife who cooks a meal occasionally, even if she happens to be the governor. I still like women who don’t know everything that I know, so I can tell them something occasionally and they can look at me like I’m quite intelligent. In other words, I want a woman who I stand at least an even chance at beating in a game of Trivial Pursuit and who doesn’t understand the infield fly rule, so I can take her to baseball games and put my arm around her and say things like, “Well, sweetheart, it’s like this....”

  I do not want a woman who has hairy legs like mine. I don’t want a woman who is in any shape or form involved in the martial arts, and I don’t want a woman who comes to bed smelling like a can of Penzoil because her hobby is rebuilding race cars for the Junior Johnson racing team.

  I don’t want a woman who introduces me to all sorts of strange sexual techn
iques that she picked up on a recent business trip to the Orient. I don’t want a woman who knees me in the belly when I forget to put the top back on the toothpaste, and I don’t want a woman who gets into drinking bouts with Marine recruits and maintains a winning percentage.

  It’s the same old problem for me: I want a woman like women were in 1962, because I remember them as being soft and nice to hold and, like Merle Haggard said, they could still cook back then and still would. I don’t mind if girls grow up to be president these days, and I don’t think women should be given smaller wages simply because they’re women, but what do I do with these old-fashioned feelings that were instilled in me? What can I do about the fact that a woman in a coat and tie carrying a briefcase doesn’t do much for me in the area of physical attraction? I didn’t come here to take out a loan, madam, I wanted to hug you and kiss you on your mouth.

  What I’m doing here is dilly-dallying around. I know exactly what I want in a woman.

  I want a woman who was raised in a rural atmosphere and whose mother taught her to bake pies and fry chicken and make gravy and iced tea.

  I want her to have no ambition beyond making me very happy and comfortable, including giving me back rubs at night and not complaining when I keep the television on until two in the morning watching a ball game from the West Coast.

  I want her to be good to my dog, and I want her to take her own overheads when we play tennis and to lob when I tell her to. I want her to be open and willing sexually, but I don’t want her to insist on anything acrobatic that could cause me to have a back injury or get an eye put out.

  I want her to like country music and at least understand the basics of college football as it is played in major conferences, and I want her to make devilled eggs to carry to the games for the pre-game brunch, and if it happens to rain, I don’t want to hear, “How much longer is this thing going to last?”

  I want her to pop me popcorn on cold nights when we’re sitting in front of the fire. I want her to make certain there always is cold beer in the ice box and that I never run out of clean underwear. I want her to talk sweetly to me on mornings after I’ve made a fool out of myself at a party and have a terrible hangover, and I want her to be afraid of spiders and call me to come squish them when she sees one running across the floor in the kitchen.

  The sad truth is that I have known and have had such women, but for one reason or other, I have let them get away. I’m not certain there are very many like them left, and it probably would serve me right if I wound up with DeLores Perkwater.

  In the midst of this dilemma, I always harken back to the words of my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker, Jr., a great American, who once surveyed the changing scene of the roles for women and said, “The whole thing boils down to the fact that the opposite sex ain’t nearly as opposite as it used to be.”

  To further complicate the matter of sex in the 1980s, of course, we are a society attempting to deal with the gay movement. I cannot quote Weyman on his thoughts regarding the gay movement, because he is not at all tolerant in that area. Okay, maybe just one quote:

  “All you hear about these days,” says Weyman, “is them queers (I’m sorry, but Weyman refuses to say gay and it took me months to get him to tone it down to queer) and how they have all come out of the closet. I’ll tell you one thing — I bet it was a mess in that closet when they were all back up in there together.”

  Weyman’s basic problem with the gay movement, and mine as well, is that we have had no background whatsoever in dealing with something that seems quite unnatural, occasionally appalling, and, even in my most tolerant moments, something that I one day might be able to accept but never understand.

  As far as I know, the first gay person I ever saw was a waiter in a spiffy Atlanta restaurant. I’m not certain why, but it seems there is an overabundant number of effeminate young men working in spiffy restaurants these days. Now, I understand that just because a male is effeminate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s gay, and just because a man may come on as a rugged, macho-type, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s straight. However (and I promise this is the last time I’m going to quote Weyman on such a sensitive issue), when I see a young man sashay over to me in a spiffy restaurant, and he just sort of floats when he walks and he’s what we used to call prissy, I cannot help but harken back to what Weyman says when he sees somebody like that: “Damn, but if I don’t believe that ol’ boy’s about half-queer.”

  Anyway, some years ago I went into a restaurant, and a young man fitting the above description prissed over to my table and said in a delicate voice, “Hi, I’m Keith, and I’ll be your waiter this evening.” He sort of put a question mark on the end of “evening,” ending his pronouncement with a bit of a wrist movement that you never see from the grill man at an all-night truckstop.

  I didn’t know exactly what to say, so I said, “Hi there, Keith, I’m Lewis and I’ll be your customer.”

  All that straight, he began by telling me and my party about what wasn’t on the menu. (I don’t know why spiffy restaurants never put their good stuff on the menu, but they don’t.)

  “Tonight,” said Keith, “we have some absolutely sker-rumptious specials.”

  With that, he delivered an entire litany of dishes I had never heard of. When I said I’d just have the ground sirloin steak, well done, and some fries, he looked at me with a beady-eyed smirk as if to say, “How on earth did someone so uncivilized find my table?”

  I think that’s what I dislike most about going into an overpriced restaurant and having to deal with gay waiters: If you don’t order something that sounds like it ought to have a part in a film with subtitles, gay waiters look at you like you’ve just broken wind. I try never to break wind in a restaurant, which is why I never order anything that might start my gastronomic network into embarrassing emissions.

  There weren’t any gay people in Moreland when I was growing up. We thought there was one once, and that led to months of gossip and suspense, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

  There was this kid named Donnelle Spinks, who was about my age. His mother named him after his great aunt Donnelle, because he was her eighth and final child and she already had produced seven boys, all ugly and quite useless, and she had prayed for a girl. When Donnelle was born and turned out to be quite male, she figured she would simply make up for the Lord’s obvious mistake.

  She dressed Donnelle in girl’s clothes until he started school and put ribbons in his hair and bought him dolls, and she would have taught him to sew and given him piano lessons had Mr. Spinks not eventually put his foot down. Donnelle, however, had to face terrible abuse from his classmates because of his name and the way he walked — it was aptly described as walking like he was trying to carry a corncob in his crack.

  Donnelle also had a rather effeminate voice with a slight lisp, and when it was discovered during a recess baseball game that his throw back to the cut-off man in the infield was delivered with the wristy technique of a girl, he was further branded as “queer as a rooster that wouldn’t set foot in the henhouse.”

  Donnelle took the blows and the nasty comments until one afternoon in the sixth grade, when Alvin Bates, a smart-aleck teacher’s pet, began to chide him on the playground near where the second graders were swinging on the monkey bars.

  “Hey, Donelle,” said Alvin, “your mother still puttin’ dresses on you?”

  Donnelle was used to this sort of thing, of course. He continued to do what he always did when somebody started the queer business with him — he ignored Alvin.

  But then Alvin got nasty. “Hey, Donnelle,” he said, “you going to play dolls after school today?”

  Donnelle was still ignoring Alvin, who hadn’t had enough.

  “Hey, Donnelle, you a boy or a girl?”

  “Quit picking on him, Alvin,” said Betty Ann Hillback, who had performed a duet with Donnelle in the piano class recital.

  “What’s he going to do about it, Bett
y Ann?” asked Alvin. “Why don’t you go hide in a closet and improve the scenery around here?”

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Donnelle was walking towards Alvin. “You can’t talk to her that way,” he said.

  “What’re you going to do about it, queer boy?” Alvin replied.

  Betty Ann, the nervous type, had begun to cry.

  “Tell her you’re sorry for saying that,” Donnelle demanded of Alvin.

  “Who’s going to make me?”

  “Tell her.”

  “Kiss my....”

  It all happened so quickly. Donnelle pounced on Alvin and inflicted facial wounds by the dozens. Donnelle then dragged Alvin over to the monkey bars, doubled him over one, and began giving him a series of quick kicks to his rear. Alvin soon was more than ready to apologize to Betty Ann for his insult.

  Later, Alvin told the teacher that Donnelle Spinks had beaten him up, and the teacher called Mr. Spinks in to discuss the violent behavior of his son.

  They say that after Mr. Spinks found out Donnelle had severely thrashed another boy on the school playground, he and his son became much closer, and Mr. Spinks bought Mrs. Spinks a little poodle dog, so she would still have something to pet now that Donnelle had become Don and had taken up the habit of walking to church with Betty Ann Hillback and holding her hand. That’s when we knew for sure that Donnelle wasn’t gay.

  Today, I have too much trouble dealing with my own problems in the area of sexual relations to spend a great deal of time being concerned with those of others. That’s why if someone chooses to be gay — or can’t help it — that’s fine with me ... as long as they don’t attempt to do whatever gay people do near where I’m eating, watching a movie or a ball game, or attempting to fish, because such antics can be terribly distracting.