by Brian Hodge
Becky... Rebecca wore red, with the effects of the pink gels overhead traumatizing the stage, and the men wore black. Blue gels hung above them, and the background was a pair of descending candelabras with a silver Christ crucified between them. The cross and the figure of Jesus danced indigo to the candles and the gels and the haunting mystical folk songs. At that particular moment I am writing about now, seven weeks later, Rebecca was singing "City of Strange Delight." Only now, from my room at the Ravenswood Mental Health Center, am I able to try and make sense of what followed, opening my memory as if it were Jack the Ripper's bloody black bag and the kill was on. My memory of sharpened metaphors and unspeakable actions. Also, I write this now because I have tired of watching animals being mutilated in the traffic on Damen Avenue below me.
The crowd at The Nunnery was a hundred strong, seated or standing in semi-circles around the stage as if at a poetry reading by Kerouac or Ginsberg. A hundred more; punkers who weren't born yet when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, ambled in the adjoining room.
Ed was examining something in his beer glass; the blue gels reflected in a kind of black light effect off Sherry's Ramones shirt and the sleeveless T- that Jim Null, Jack's weight trainer, wore. Their skin was different shades of dark. I had been standing next to Janet and Troy, who was wearing this eerie Criswell shirt; all of us were parroting the man by saying "God Help Us In The Future" the entire day. Next to me was Pat McCrae, wearing his Ripper suspect outfit for the following festivities. Jack whispered an aside to me that Pat was probably wishing he were at a Sinatra concert. Frank was his idol. I laughed at that: Red Jack and Ol' Blue Eyes. A riot, I tell you.
Time to get back on track here; I'm massaging my face so hard my beard's coming out. Short and curly reality stains on this sheet of paper
"Doesn't she sound as if her throat had been slit and her soul is singing its way to heaven?" The last syllable caressed my ear like a tongue.
I turned to face a blind man. Yes, I am certain that he was sightless, even after what happened later. He had no cane, but he had despair instead. And I knew it was the singing that set him off.
If you are blind at birth, how do you perceive a dream? What constitutes a wet dream...?
I saw this: the man was dressed in blacks and greys. He seemed to melt out of the floor. He had a clean-cut face with high cheekbones and a narrow nose. The dark glasses were aviator style; through the rims silver as the crucifix on stage I saw Rebecca reflected in red and Oscar in blue, their faces small and warped. Before I could react, the song ended and Jack took my attention away for just a moment, and in that second, the man was gone.
I saw him again, a blur of dead color in the hallway outside. I guessed on where he was headed; the guy's john was at the far end of The Nunnery's upper floor, across a huge lighted hall. Teens danced and capered in cones of light situated six steps apart. Passing the girl's bathroom, I heard someone furiously brushing her teeth and spitting repeatedly into a sink. There was no outer door to the men's room.
The guy's john had three urinals flattened out like troughs, with two filthy sinks separating them from the stall. I read several of the usual admonitions and the expected directory of Nashville women who would or would not put out, and this curious little Elvis poem, as well. I've written it down here because I was putting the verse onto one of my business cards when I noticed the blind man committing suicide in the stall.
The poem, if you could call it that, went like this:
I'VE GOT ELVIS CANCER
I've got Elvis Cancer
The discipline of the Stage
I've got Elvis Cancer
So disengage me from my Slaves
I've got Elvis Cancer
Stake me back into my Grave
I've got Elvis Cancer
Let the new boy come of Age
My pen skipped on the last line, and I turned to my right to scratch it against the wall and try and get it to work again. I saw the silver glint of his knife then.
The stall was unlit; there was darkness behind the door. It was like an outhouse door, vertical wooden boards reached from ankle to head level.
Two of the boards were missing; those nearest the black, rusted handle. It was in the light spilling through the gap that I saw the blade strike his wrist. I saw the red. The blade was so small.
No one else entered the room. I gagged and grappled my way to the entrance. This after I heard the blood dripping to the cement like butter pats hitting a grill.
Outside, the songs were over and the concert had ended. Several punkers and a young cowboy moved past me into the bathroom. I came across my friends near the front of the hall; Jack told me that they were going down to Rod's car, parked alongside the N.A.C.R. tracks, to pick up a Kolchak the Night Stalker tape. The "Ripper" episode, or course. I told them I'd catch them outside, as I was waiting to use the bathroom stall. Which, in a sense, I was. Ed told me to hurry up as he wanted to pick up some cheeseburgers at Krystal's to go with his jalapeno peppers back at Jack's apartment.
Others had gone into the bathroom. Why hadn't they noticed the blood, the body? Why had I been singled out, first to hear such an awful thing, and then be witness to something worse? I went back into the john after a minute went by without anyone entering. I probably walked in like a cop expecting an ambush.
I immediately saw that the blood spatters had been wiped up from alongside of the toilet bowl.., my last sane thought for the evening was one of relief in that the whole thing was just a cruel joke, the kind that doesn't go away once you've left high school.
I was even breathing easier, like I had survived a mugging back home or something, when I heard the small scraping sound from the darkness. Maybe I whimpered when I realized I was moving forward to discover the source. I really don't know from this point on.
I pushed open the stall door; it creaked. It was so dark back there. I smelled backed-up sewage. I saw a glint of silver, thought first of the crucifix on stage, then of the blade. My eyes focused in the darkness and realized the silver was reflected light on the glasses the blind man wore. The silver seemed to descend as he moved closer to me.
"I bet listening to her sing gives you blue balls, hmmn?"
I remembered his voice like a throat wound, speaking just the way he did.
He then kneed me in the groin, hard, and I fell to my knees. I saw blue patches around the corners of my head, remembering reading somewhere as a kid that color meant that your brain was hitting the side of your head. I believed it when I was ten, and I believed it with my left hand in a puddle of urine as I tried to balance myself in a place I thought might be my grave.
When he pulled my hair and whipped the back of my head into the front of the ceramic tank, I began recalling prayers from my childhood. I couldn't close my eyes, the blue was so blinding. The man had not said another word, made another sound. Deep in my throat, I began whimpering. I am not proud of that now. Through the blue I heard him unzipping his jeans. I thought of how the zipper handle looked like a crucifix, if one were mad enough.
To this day, I will swear that I thought it was a hardening knife that he thrust into my gaping face.
That it was my warm blood that washed over my open eyelids like a coroner's shroud...
Nashville, Chicago:
October 1988
Orient Are
(this story is for Norman Partridge)
The Elvis impersonator made one of the biggest mistakes of his life by passing the gray Dodge pickup on a rain-slicked stretch of Interstate 64 just the other side of Crothersville. And even at the very end he never completely understood it at all.
Elvis Weekend, 1995. Everyone who remotely resembled the late king of rock 'n' roll, pre-bloat or post-bloat, some with no gut but a fat ass, they all journeyed up to their Midwest Mecca. The Holiday Star Theater outside of Merrillville, Indiana. Twenty minutes from Chicago's city limits. They came from Green Bay, Akron, Louisville, and Decatur.
Men (and women) who sometimes
resembled Roy Orbison or Johnny Cash or even Billy "Crash" Craddock, but could pass off the patented Presley sneer, you know, ah got sumpin' on my lip, punchline of the joke being, yeah, it's embalming fluid, you fucking corpse. All heading up to celebrate Elvis' birthday, he'd have been sixty. And Jesus Christ would be pushing two thousand years of age, kids.
The thing with the Merrillville bookings was that the name Holiday Star conjured up religious images of the King being born under the Star of Bethlehem — although, he'd be hard pressed to find Jews this side of Mishawaka, King of the White Trash with Cars on Blocks would be the best a modern-day Christ could hope for — plus, people gathered around the Memphis Wall all year round. At least in Indiana, it was all Americans who showed up for Elvis Weekend. This is what brought nearly every Midwestern impersonator to Exit 253A on the interstate.
Merrillville was a cubic zirconium magnet pulling at the starched and studded lapels of every man with porkchop sideburns and every woman in sore need of electrolysis.
The three of them had always met at the Tasty World Food & Gas where U.S. 31 crossed Stansifer Avenue in Clarksville. Dick Varco was from new Albany and specialized in Elvis circa the '68 Singer Special, ballads like "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" and "Long, Black Limousine." Presley Pinkham (named after his grandfather who fought with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, supposedly) did a kind of disco version of Elvis. He lived in a trailer up on blocks in Shively, south of Louisville, and looked like John Travolta as drawn by a caricaturist for 'Mad Magazine'. The Angel's Flight leisure suit he wore didn't help matters any.
Vossner Wells was the last of the three kings who hooked up together in a shit town that had an abundance of seafood restaurants — Moby Dick's, Captain D's, Long John Silver — as if anybody would mistake the Ohio River for Cape Cod.
Right out of Aloha From Hawaii 1973, this was Vossner. Tan the year round, pearly white teeth that were still all his own, made all the more dazzling by the sculpted cheekbones of one of God's own sons. Hailed from Cementville, done sang "Hound Dog" on his first birthday.
The ritual ran true as it did ever since the first trip, back when the Holiday Star opened in 1986, the three of them sitting at a table eating boxes of Little Debbie's Figaroos, Varco solemnly singing key stanzas from "Don't Cry Daddy" and "In the Ghetto," talking over expected sexual conquests and making bets in which the losers would pay for the winner's peanut butter and banana pie at the Take A Break Cafe in Crothersville, made special for them by the head waitress, Murline.
Varco and Pinkham were driving up together this time around, the latter's '74 Gremlin up on blocks alongside his trailer, making him a true-blue Shively status symbol. Wells was driving his pride and joy, a 1976 Gold Eldorado kept up with immaculate care. He has purchased it with winnings from the state lottery. The previous owner was not Elvis, but the owner of the EP Museum in Nashville. Elvis had roused a car dealer out of bed when he was in Denver. He had been hyperactive as all get-out from the fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches he wolfed down off Wazzee — the place was close to Peterson Field, and the Lisa Marie was always welcome to land there, never mind it was a military airport. (Truth is, after Elvis died, Vossner Wells as well as anybody else worth his salt knew that the CIA used the Lisa Marie to fly Manuel Noriega out of Panama City)— and plopped down cash for the Eldo, the dealer being smart, the peanut butter breath on the King a plus, as well.
Wells liked to tell stories about the car, even saying that it was this car Elvis drove on the night of his death, coming home from racquetball practice. For those privy to the actual event, or for those who had seen the 1973 Stutz Blackhawk in the David Wolper documentary This is Elvis, Vossner would describe how the King would often change cars in mid-route, turning the Eldo over to Red or Sonny.
The plates were vanity, reading ECOPPA. Vanity in that it was the short version of Echo Papa, control tower talk for E.P., and everyone knew what that stood for. The frame itself was backed by the slogan Wander Indiana, which is how the commercials for the tourism bureau ran. Pinkham, with his Shively mentality, asked Wells the first time out where the hell the town of Wander was. Hadn't been impressed with the Eldo in the least, whereas Wells' reaction to the grape-colored Gremlin with powder blue Pinkham behind the wheel was nothing short of incredulous.
Everything was moving along swimmingly until they neared the Mile Marker 22 Rest Area; Wells pulled alongside Varco's '92 Chevy Celebrity and told him he had to take a crap. Must have been the Yoo-hoo chocolate drinks he had with those snack cakes. Varco said that he and Pinkham would wait, but Wells told them to go on ahead. All the way to Indianapolis, the interstate was two lanes northwest and two southeast, separated by grass and piss creeks like the Muscatatuck River. Shitfire, he'd be able to spot the apple red Chevy Celeb a mile back. And besides, Vossner Wells was not one to give himself enemas of Dialuid, as Elvis had; he knew that he needed more fiber, and he'd be in the stall pinching a loaf and painting it green.
So the other two went on ahead, Wells clenched his sphincter and sang "How Great Thou Art" to find his center. He pulled off at Exit 19, the Phillips 66 Memphis Plaza Truck Stop like a damn ballpark out there at the side of the road. A battered Dodge pick-up was parked up close to the restrooms, and Wells would have been bemused by the plastic Elvis statue on the dashboard if he hadn't needed to get the Hershey squirts from putting too deep a stain into his gold lamae undies.
The driver of the pick-up left the diner portion of the Memphis sprawl, sated and full of energy from his meal of steak, eggs, biscuits and gravy. Even though there was still a slight drizzle, he chose to carry his jacket in his hand. A portion of the red and white Crown Electric logo the brightest thing in the parking lot.
Next to the gold Eldorado, that is. He understood the vanity plates, as well. The driver of the pick-up had almost forgotten that it was this time of year again. The saving grace was that nobody at Crown ever brought up the subject about his own career pursuits. His family was his career, not the road.
These days, the road was as grey and relentless as the Indiana skies above. He climbed into the cab, adjusted the angle of the Elvis statue on the dashboard. It was cream-colored and detailed more like one of those 1960s Universal Monsters figures than one of Jesus Christ. He opened his wallet and looked at faded photographs of his wife and children. The driver of the pick-up then took a plastic tube of Icy Hot and swiped it across his neck.
He turned the key and popped the clutch, turning the faded blue truck northward once again.
Vossner Wells truly hadn't expected to be in the shitter as long as he had. He had some catching up to do. No longer needing to sing religious because his bowels were cleared, the Elvis impersonator put the soundtrack from Clambake into the dashboard CD. He had changed the words to the title song, ever since discovering the sweet taste of beignets at the Cafe Du Monde during a family funeral in New Orleans. Despising his older brother Earl, who worked for John Deere his whole life and couldn't understand why anyone would want to live the haphazard life of a writer, artist, or Elvis impersonator, Wells had gone down to play nice to the young 'uns and his sister-in-law Charlene Dean, who everyone called Deeny, but then he found he could make some jingle by playing The King in Jackson Square. Let people photograph him with their loved ones, he got a few bucks, what was the harm? Went to the café and fought hypoglycemia.
The new version of the song went Beignets, beignets, gonna eat some beignets! Vossner's little tummy like beignets, beignets, Vossner's little tummy likes sugar, too. So he'd never be a songwriter.
He realized that with what little traffic there was, he was unable to get past fifty on the speedometer. When several cars that were in front of him took Exit 46 past Uniontown, Wells understood that the traffic was slowed by the piddling movements of a light-blue pick-up.
Picking up speed, Vossner Wells moved into the left lane, cut the pick-up off, all the while flashing his middle finger at who he expected to be an old fart farmer who still thought it
was 1955.
Smartass bastard, the driver of the pick-up thought as the gold Eldo shrank from view. He massaged his neck with his fingers, the ball of his palm brushing against porkchop sideburns.
The hell with it, the driver thought. It was payback time.
Vossner Wells did not suspect he was being followed until after he had left Indianapolis behind him. The Dodge pick-up had stayed behind him with no problem, as the '76 Eldo was in need of enough repair to keep from going too far above sixty. And what Wells did not realize was that he had actually passed up his two other erstwhile companions; Varco and Pinkham had detoured at Exit 107 Keystone Avenue, and had driven past the Market Square Arena where Elvis had performed his last show on June 26, 1977, with almost twenty thousand in attendance. They had passed by the Stouffer's Indianapolis Inn, solemnly aware that this was where Elvis rented his last room, and quite possibly shot up his last television.
Vossner Wells was singing "You Gave Me A Mountain" when the pale blue Dodge pick-up rammed him from behind. Let him get ahead a bit, then gunned it and near rammed him off the road into the exit sign for Thalmus. Vossner Wells was mouthing the words to "What A Friend We Have In Jesus," as the pick-up passed him, then sat further up the road.
Seeing little option, Wells turned the Eldorado up the exit ramp, the Axman Carnival fairgrounds in the distance to the east, a Bob Evans to the west. He needed to call for help. What the hell was the area code here? 219? 317? Shitfire, he was calling 911. Shitfire.
If he found a phone, that was. Motoring past the fast food restaurant, he was on Indiana Route 24 now, he saw that Bob Evans must've been down on the farm. like in the commercials, because the building was dark and empty. He silently wished for a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, even a warm one.
