Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  It certainly wasn't an original defense, but Jim Ed made the mistake of pausing and trying to answer, and to defend himself. Sure, he drank—not as much as in the old days, but some—didn't everybody?

  "Maxine—" he began, but she was laying into him now, terrified and yet seeming also to welcome the opportunity for a fight. What had he been thinking? He looked around at the solitude of the house—the ridiculous plate of crackers—and realized how foolish he had been.

  "You're so pious!" she said. She didn't know whether to go ahead and get the rum or not—was afraid at first of conceding any scrap of territory with any small gesture, but then chose rebellion over victory and went for the rum anyway; poured two, three, four big glugs. Fire in her veins, fire in her brain. She saw Jim Ed's face go pale, saw it shut down and withdraw the way Chet's had so long ago, when he'd tried to ask her how she was doing; and as if delighted by this observation of weakness, she poured two or three more glugs into her coffee, to help aid in his retreat.

  The scent of it filled the room, sweet and thick, and reminded them both of things that were not altogether unpleasant.

  She was just warming up. "You just got lucky. You and your damned big hit, and your damned big house, and your pretty young wife, with her own damned big hit," she shouted. "You all just got lucky. You're the worst kind of hypocrite," she said, "hell, it was you and Jim Reeves who taught me to drink! Don't tell me to stop. Don't you dare tell me to stop."

  She can't remember now, but she thinks she might even have taken a gulp of her coffee then, and another, and that she might even have said something along the lines that she knew how to handle her liquor. She thinks she might have said some other things but can't remember them.

  It was sad, and still is sad; there was a distance in Jim Ed after that. He argued a little with her, but never raised his voice—more of a wan disagreement—and shrugged finally and rose to leave, told her he loved her and hoped she'd think about what he'd said.

  Later, after she finally did stop drinking, she would write him the requisite note, would thank him for having the courage and compassion to speak to her about it—to attempt to come to her rescue. She would thank him for his love. But even then, there was still a distance in him. As if even love, like fame, could be eroded, its moth dust finally wing-worn, wind-scoured, forgotten.

  Now and again she touches the thick scar tissue of the memory, the new slight distance, the widening distance, the space that neither love nor family can quite fill. She wishes that things had been otherwise, had gone a different way, but then shrugs. That's just what happens, she tells herself, if you live that long. She remembers the boy he once was, and the girl she was, but moves on. Moves forward, into the darkness.

  She did stop drinking, she tells herself. That's what matters. She survived.

  ELVIS'S DEATH

  WHAT SHE REMEMBERS is pretty close to the facts; what she remembers is pretty close to the truth. She doesn't recall much from those days, when she was having so many various cancers cut out of her—always, the cancers were discovered just in time—and not much memory transcends the decades-long alcoholic haze after her career went away.

  Even her receipt of the news was muted. Bonnie took it hardest, but they all three had to agree, he wasn't Elvis anymore, hadn't been for a long time—but of the funeral itself, the spectacle and pageantry, her memories are piercing.

  Had she been drinking that day? She can't imagine that she hadn't been, but perhaps not. She drank afterward—she knows that.

  She remembers the throng as if it were a holy experience: a hundred thousand mourners, all clawing at the wrought-iron fence or prostrate in the road, in the August heat; she remembers the crowd's lamentations as the mule-drawn hearse passed by, which is what he had wanted, though the King himself was in the long white Cadillac in an open casket on ice, his insides baking, they said, decomposing faster than those of most normal people, falling apart, riven by violent internal chemistries, the simmerings of errant prescriptions and unsustainable excess.

  She remembers Chet Atkins was one of the pallbearers. Things had changed between her and Chet; there was still friendship and respect, even love and affection, but there was that distance now, nearly twenty years later. She would never have guessed that.

  She remembers thinking with a clarity she had not known in a long time that almost none of the people who were worshiping Elvis—neither the hundred thousand who were keening nor the millions beyond—had any clue as to who he was, or who he had been, so that despite the fame, it might almost as well have been as if he had never existed.

  There were a few. Bonnie, Jim Ed, herself. Maxine remembers him as if the memory is coming up from the depths, lung-bursting, for a breath of fresh air, recalling those quick good young years when he had first entered their lives, lingered, then been drawn away.

  She forgives him for what he took from them. She forgives him for his fame. She did then, there at the funeral, and she does now.

  Chet had known him—had known the boy rather than the corrupted man—and certainly his daddy, Vernon, had known him, was wailing loudest that day, throwing himself onto the casket and promising that he would be joining him soon, which he did, dying of a broken heart less than two years later.

  Birdie had known him, as had Bonnie, who had already said good-bye to him so long ago. There had really been no one else; no others had known him for who he really was, and no one else carried the burden of that knowledge now. No one else knew that he had had everything in the world and had traded it for nothing.

  The ghouls had been there, even then—those who had been close enough to witness him cooling on those blocks of ice, or who in later days would see photos of the same; even that day at the funeral they claimed that no undertaker could have made him look that good, that young, that hale and healthy, and that it had been a ploy, a way for Elvis to evade payment of the millions of dollars he owed in back taxes. Like hounds or wolves back in the forest, they clamor even today for an exhumation: they cannot let go of the myth, they cannot say goodbye, cannot acknowledge the mortal decay of what was once great beauty.

  In some ways it was dreamlike to Maxine—people in attendance all around her whose faces she knew only from the newspapers and magazines now—Sammy Davis Jr., James Brown, Caroline Kennedy, Ann-Margret, Jimmy Carter, Lisa Marie and Priscilla, the Jackson Five—and during the service, there was mention that Elvis's record sales around the world that day were nearing the four hundred million mark.

  Those people didn't know anything. Hardly any of them knew anything; only she and Bonnie and Jim Ed knew the best. When she hears reports now of people continuing to claim that he still lives, she understands and forgives them, knows that they're simply not capable of letting go of their hopes and beliefs, the best parts of themselves that they imagined he could give back to them with his songs—some of that excessive beauty that they could not find in themselves except when he sang.

  Who would possibly want to bid farewell to that? Who would not possibly want to hold on to that forever?

  And what we had, Maxine thinks, was even better. We had the real beauty. The songs were just the echo of it. A fifty-year echo.

  She forgives him, again and again. She would have done the same—taken his path, all the way to the end, forsaking anything else she already had—in a heartbeat.

  It was not so long after the funeral—five, six years—that she stopped drinking. It was not easy, and it was made harder still by the fact that she did not relinquish her hunger for other things—but that one day, his funeral, sharp through the otherwise fog of her numbed consciousness, gave her a moment of clarity from which she could fight the enemy, which was not anonymity or obscurity, as she had once believed, but another enemy, myth and surface representations rather than any deeper truths. The enemy was herself—or who she had been, up to that point.

  The hundred thousand mourners crawling all over the roads, the millions or billions beyond, had been loving someone they h
ad never known—someone they themselves had manufactured, sleek and polished. Someone about whom they had never known the first tiny bit of sweetness or reality. They might as well have been drunk themselves, during those years.

  THE DEBUT

  THE DEBUT COMES only a month later. Jefferson Eads has been working around the clock, sleeping only intermittently, as lost in his project as his namesake was in his valiant attempts to map the unmappable. He finally gets it just the way he wants it, and has it set to music—sometimes the Browns', other times Elvis's, or that of some of the Browns' peers. He's researched on the Internet relentlessly, has pulled up old archival photos of the Louvin Brothers, Patsy Cline, Eddy Arnold, Johnny Cash, Elvis and the Jordanaires. The cut of John Lennon singing "The Three Bells" is in there, as is the footage of Maxine today, and the interviews. It's a good piece of work.

  He shows the movie at his junior high. There won't be enough people attending to hold it in the big auditorium, so instead it is shown in his homeroom teacher's classroom, which is small but intimate. A couple of teachers have brought their history classes—it's extra credit—so there are forty or so squirming kids, and maybe a dozen parents. Jefferson Eads's parents are there, prouder than proud—if a parent could choose genius over normalcy, knowing the costs of genius, would they still make that choice? Perhaps it is as well that none get to make that decision—and Jefferson Eads's teachers, too, are beaming.

  Jefferson Eads seems very calm, very content. Only his parents and teachers know how much work it has taken for him to reach this momentary plateau of calm, of peace. It is like this for some kids, some adults, all the time, all their lives—this steady calm in the world—but he has had to work hard to get here, and those who know this are proud of him.

  Remember this, Maxine tells herself—he escorts her in, down the hallway with its crepe paper decorations hung only that afternoon, past the colorful posters with children's lettering. "Welcome, Maxine Brown!" and "Queen of Country Music!"

  I should have invited Bonnie and Jim Ed, she thinks. They would have loved this, and though she is beaming, in that moment she misses her family more than she can say, and thinks, We must get back together.

  Inside Mrs. Keys's room, there is a long table with a plastic tablecloth, on which paper plates of cheese cubes, cookies, and donuts are arranged. There's a big Igloo cooler of Kool-Aid, twin stacks of tiny Dixie cups, and Jefferson's peers, a throng of young boys, are gathered around the Igloo, drinking and refilling, and when he enters with Maxine, they greet him with a modicum of manners, formality, respect, and envy that is not customary in their relationship with him, or anyone else.

  Slow this down, Maxine tells herself. She is acutely conscious of the boy's loose hold on her arm. Why can't this last forever? she wonders, looking around at the awe with which the children and even their parents are beholding her—and she feels the demon in her settle down in a way it has not done in a long time.

  There's almost a purring going on inside her, and it's good, so good that it even feels it was worth the wait.

  No work is ever wasted, she knows now; no waiting, no dreaming, is ever wasted. Soon enough Jefferson Eads is going to let go of her arm and escort her into the hard metal folding chair at the front of the room that is to be her seat of honor, soon enough he is going to stand before his class with pride and announce his project, soon enough he is going to grow up and leave her—maybe tomorrow, maybe even today—but for now, for right now, she is sixteen again and the elemental thing, the greatness within, is both contented and excited, agitated. It's the best possible combination, this elixir of sleek momentary power if not immortality, and she squeezes his hand, wanting to hold it just a little longer—these are strangers all around her, but at least they are here to see her—and then Jefferson Eads is up in front saying something, she can't quite hear all of it, and then the lights go out, and the music and the movie begin, and for the next hour, at least, she is able finally to live without regret.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  I'm grateful to the Browns—Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie, as well as their extremely close and extended family, past and present—for their generosity of time over the last five years—and I continue to be astounded by the living storehouse of their knowledge and experiences from the old days, and greatly appreciate their support in this venture, particularly given the novelist's mandate (as with a musician's) to occasionally temper certain highs while also adjusting or recasting certain lows; attenuating some things, creating others, and removing still others. Every novel that ever gets written carries a disclaimer of the imagination, and this one is no different. The Browns are real, and what they gave to American music, and how they did it, is real; Nashville Chrome, however, is a work of the imagination. For true-life details, facts, precise dates and events, see Maxine Brown's Looking Back to See (She and her son Tommy also maintain a web page, www.themaxinebrown.com). Nashville Chrome is, among other things, an attempt to portray the emotional truths of their journey and its challenges. As the writer Ron Carlson says, "I try not to confuse the facts with the truth." Lesser beings than the Browns would not have survived their journey.

  From these basic truths—Maxine's heroic and indefatigable hunger, Bonnie's joy, and Jim Ed's durability—I have tempered and adjusted. They are not perfect—no more and no less than anyone else—but it might well serve a reader interested in the delineations between novelistic excess and "regular" life to view anything distasteful or negative in these pages as only an exercise of the novelist's imagination and the story's craft, rather than true-life revelation of flaws or failings in the Browns or their family.

  For assistance during the writing of this novel, I'm extremely grateful to Kathi Whitley of Vector Management in Nashville and to the Browns' publicist, Norma Morris. I'm grateful to my wife, Elizabeth, for an early reading of the manuscript, and, as ever, to my agent, Bob Dattila, for his quixotic efforts to help a writer be able to keep writing. I'm grateful also to editors of the magazines in which sections of this book first appeared, in slightly different form— Gray's Sporting Journal, Southern Cultures, The Southern Review, Whitefish Review, and Big Sky Journal.

  I'm grateful to all those with my publisher who have worked on this book—Alison Kerr Miller for line editing, Rachael Hoy for production assistance, David Hough for proofreading, Patrick Barry for design, Marc Burckhardt for artwork, and Taryn Roeder for publicity. In my last few years of publishing with Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), I've been fortunate to work with a number of their wonderful editors—Sam Lawrence, Camille Hykes, Larry Cooper, Dorothy Henderson, Hilary Liftin, Leslie Wells, Lisa Glover, and recently the late Harry Foster, and then his assistant, Will Vincent—and when I received still another editor, Nicole Angeloro, all I could do was hope for the best, which I got. The hours and effort she put in on numerous drafts, her enthusiasm for the entire publishing process, her good cheer in helping pursue even the most mundane details, her unafraid reliance on not only her formidable intelligence but native intuition, her sense of balance and reach—all of these things remind me of what is best about publishing. The book publishing industry might lie at the edge of ruin, but what fun in the still-living.

  * * *