All Shook Up

by Shelley Pearsall

  “Over his head,” I answered. “Not really at him.” I’m not sure why I thought this was an important point to make because nobody else really seemed to care. Just the fact that the dog-collar guy ended up on his butt in the grass and I scored a home run was all that mattered, it seemed. So, after a while, I just went along with Dave’s version of what happened.

  It felt strange to be the center of attention all of a sudden, though—to be asked about Boston and the teams I played on back there—but it was kind of reassuring, too. In Boston, I was used to sitting at a table of guys and talking about normal, everyday stuff. A few weeks of sitting by myself and having silent conversations with my lunch had been enough for me. Although I had to admit I was a little surprised by how easy it had been to get to the vending machine tables. Only one well-placed home run and I had somehow landed in the prime seats at Listerine.

  It would have been a lot tougher at my Boston school. You had to be on the right teams and have the right friends. Just smacking a few hits in gym class wouldn’t cut it.

  Glancing around, I noticed how things looked different from the vending machine vantage point, too. For one, it seemed brighter and cleaner. This may have been due to the fact that there was a glass-enclosed courtyard close by. The doors of the courtyard were propped open slightly, so breezy gusts of air and a few dry leaves swirled inside.

  Being next to the machines also had other advantages. It seemed to be the custom for the guys at my table to buy a few snacks to share with the rest of the group. So a shiny brown bag of M&M’s or a pack of mini Oreos could come shooting past you at any moment, scattering pieces as it traveled. If you sat at the end of the table, you were the one who had to be prepared to catch the item and keep it from plunging into oblivion. Then you sent the bag sliding back down the length of the table for everybody to take seconds.

  I was so focused on not messing up my snack-catching job that when the bell rang at the end of lunch I realized I hadn’t eaten any food on my tray except for a handful of potato chips and part of a chocolate chip cookie. Still, I felt as if things had gone almost perfectly. Let’s just say Ivory’s horoscope book probably couldn’t have predicted a better day for Josh Greenwood. First, a home run. Then an invitation to become the newest member of the vending machine tables. The planets and stars were definitely on my side.

  Until I got home. Then I got a third unexpected surprise. Which may have been the one the zodiac book was warning me about after all.

  20. Watch Out for an Unexpected Surprise

  My dad was mowing the lawn when I got home from school. This, by itself, was not unusual. September in Chicago had been pretty warm, so the grass was still growing fast. As I walked down the street, I could hear the uneven roaring of Dad’s old mower going back and forth. Every time the ancient mower seemed on the verge of conking out, Dad had to speed up to keep the motor going.

  He was finishing a row and getting ready to continue down the next patch of grass when he must have spotted me out of the corner of his eye. As I came walking up the driveway, he stopped and turned off the motor—which was something he almost never did, if he could help it. The sudden silence made my stomach lurch a little toward my throat, and the first thought that popped into my head was that my dad had some bad news about my grandma to share. Had she gotten worse? Had something else happened to her? But as my dad came closer, I was relieved to see his expression didn’t look like anything serious had happened.

  “How was school?” he asked, mopping his face with the bottom half of his shirt.

  “Okay, fine,” I said with a shrug, although I felt like shouting that it had been A GREAT DAY. That I wasn’t a loser. That I had hit a ball out of the park. (Okay, into the weed-infested outfield at Charles Lister.) That I was now sitting at the vending machine tables. That Dog Face had fallen on his butt. However, none of these details—well, except for the home run—were the kinds of things a parent would understand and bringing them up would probably lead to more questions than I wanted to answer. That’s why I kept my mouth shut.

  “Guess what?” My dad rubbed his hands together. “I’ve got good news.”

  I eyed my dad cautiously, knowing it had to be something about Elvis: a new gig or a special event because that was the only good news he cared about.

  “The music director called me today about something at your school—”

  And this was the moment when things began to get hazy, literally. The sun suddenly felt blazing hot on my face and I could feel a trickle of sweat start creeping down my back. “What about school?” I said, dropping my backpack beside my feet.

  “They want me to perform there.”

  A boulder of dread slammed into my stomach. “What?”

  “They’re going to be doing some kind of fifties concert at your school in November, and Viv told the music director about me, so he called this afternoon to ask if Elvis would be part of the show.” Dad crossed his arms and grinned. “I said to him, ‘Son, the King of Rock and Roll would be real proud to come and sing a few numbers for your program. Just gimme the word and I’ll be there.’”

  I wanted to die. Really, if a bolt of lightning would have come out of the clear blue sky right then, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the way. I would have stood there with a big metal pole in my hand and said, just hit me.

  21. Words

  Who was to blame? Lying flat on my bed staring up at my bumpy white bedroom ceiling, I decided the concert had to be Ivory’s idea. Or partly her idea. Her mom had made the phone call to the music director, right? And Ivory was the one who had told me to watch out for an “unexpected surprise.” She and her mom had probably planned the whole thing.

  Well, it wasn’t going to work. I swung my legs off the bed and headed into the kitchen to get the Viv’s Vintage number from the scrap of cardboard that served as my dad’s “important phone numbers” list. After a few rings, Ivory answered the phone. She sounded busy, as if there was a mad rush on disco pants or tie-dyed shirts. “Viv’s Vintage, where you never go out of style….”

  I didn’t even bother to say who it was. Let her figure it out. “You knew about my dad being invited to be Elvis at school, didn’t you?” If a voice could be cold, mine would have been like those mammoths they find frozen in the ice in Siberia. A frozen mammoth voice.

  Ivory pretended to be clueless and said she had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Well, thanks, I appreciate it,” I continued. “I spend a whole Saturday helping in your mom’s store. For free, by the way. And then you go and tell everybody at school about my dad, so now the whole entire place will know about him being Elvis. I mean, why not?” My voice was getting louder and I had the feeling that maybe I wasn’t making as much sense as I wanted to, but I kept going. “Just go ahead and make me look like a complete freak, just like you and all your dog-collar friends—”

  Ivory interrupted again to say she had no idea what I meant.

  “Ask your mom,” I said, and slammed the phone down.

  This was the first time I had ever hung up on somebody because I was mad. My mom would say it was totally out of character for me. Maybe it was. I mean, my friends and I goof around on the phone all the time and cut each other off in the middle of our conversations. Brian is especially famous for doing that—you’ll be telling him a story and he’ll say, “Another call, gotta go,” and click, he’s gone. Half the time he doesn’t bother to call back, either. But I had never hung up on somebody on purpose. Until now.

  The phone rang again about five minutes later.

  “Did we get cut off?” Ivory asked sharply.

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “Okay, well then,” she continued, “I’m calling back because if you were referring to your dad and the school concert, I didn’t have anything to do with it. My mom was the one who suggested it to the music director a while ago—not me, so don’t blame me.” She hurried on without even taking a breath. “And I don’t appreciate you talking about my friends t
hat way. Digger said you were a real jerk to him today in gym class. I don’t know what’s up with you, but I’m just calling to tell you that I don’t care if your dad is dating my mom. I don’t deserve to be treated like this and my friends don’t, either, so just”—the voice paused as if searching for the right words—“get a life.”

  Then I think Ivory hung up on me, because there was a click and a dial tone. I tossed the phone onto the pillow and flopped back down on my bed to stare at the ceiling again. It hadn’t changed much. Same ceiling fan. Same bumpy white plaster that looked like a really bad rash.

  What were my options now? Clearly, calling Ivory had solved absolutely nothing. If she was telling the truth that the whole thing was Viv’s idea, what could I do? Call Viv and ask her to uninvite my dad? They were “dating,” so there was no way Viv would tell him he couldn’t be part of the event.

  What if I told him instead?

  I tried to picture myself jogging out to the yard and telling my dad that I had given it a little thought and, hey, I didn’t think it was a smart idea for him to perform at my school—that it would be best if he backed out of doing the show for his own good, for my own good, and just for the general good of society.

  God. I rubbed my eyes in frustration. I didn’t want to hurt my dad’s feelings, I just wanted him to get a clue. I mean, why couldn’t he see how this would humiliate both of us? Didn’t he remember what middle school was like?

  I could just imagine the entire Charles W. Lister auditorium full of kids staring at my forty-year-old dad as he came strutting onstage with his black leather outfit and gold chains and chest hair and orange makeup and sunglasses. He would start twisting his hips and singing “Hound Dog” or something like that, and the kids would collapse into hysterics. Or worse yet, what if they started booing and yelling things at him like, Get off the stage, loser? Think about how it sounds when an entire gymnasium is booing the ref during a basketball game. Now imagine it isn’t a basketball game but your dad.

  And once word got out that Elvis was my dad—because Ivory would probably blab to somebody who would blab to somebody else and soon the news would spread through the entire school—can you guess what it would be like to go to the cafeteria for lunch? Forget the vending machine tables, I wouldn’t even be able to sit at the garbage can tables.

  I clenched my hands over my eyes and tried to force myself to think more calmly. There had to be a way out. A way to keep my dad from performing that wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. A way to keep myself from being humiliated….

  Looking back, I believe this was the point where I went wrong. It was impossible not to hurt somebody. There’s a line in an Elvis song about being caught in a trap with no way out. Just like in the song, I was caught. And there was no good way out. Somebody was going to get hurt by whatever I did. It was just a matter of who would be hurt the most.

  22. Sweepstakes

  As it turned out, the idea for how to keep my dad from performing came from an unusual place: Gladys. A few days after I’d found out about my dad’s Elvis gig, I was walking home from school when Gladys flagged me down outside her house. She said she had a letter she wanted me to read.

  “I’ve got something I need you to look at, dear,” Gladys called out from her porch, where she was standing in a rose-flowered housecoat and pink slippers. Once I got to her door, she held an envelope toward me. “This letter came in the mail today,” she whispered in an excited voice. “It says I’ve won a million dollars. A million dollars—my stars, can you believe that?”

  Of course, once I looked at the letter I knew exactly what it was. The metallic gold print at the top actually said GLADYS BEDFORD, YOU MAY BE OUR NEXT MILLION-DOLLAR SWEEPSTAKES WINNER. However, you had to send in your name and address in order to be entered in a drawing for the prize. Most of the important information about your chances of winning or not winning was in microscopic blocks of print at the bottom of the page.

  Standing uncomfortably on Gladys’s porch, I tried to figure out the nicest way to explain to her that she hadn’t won any money. “I know the letter says you’re a million-dollar winner, but that’s not really what the letter means,” I began. “It’s a contest, see, where you send in an entry and you get entered into a drawing with millions of other people and somebody in the drawing wins a million dollars.”

  “So I didn’t win all that money?”

  I shook my head. “I mean, you have a chance—”

  “Well, shoot,” Gladys interrupted. “And there I was thinking I was gonna die a rich old lady. That’s the way life goes, though. Easy come, easy go.” She waved her hand in the air. “How about coming in for a drink of something before you leave?”

  I didn’t really want to stay, but I felt like Gladys had been disappointed enough for one day, so I told her a glass of water would be fine but I couldn’t stay very long. While I was sitting at her kitchen table, my eyes glanced over the sweepstakes letter again.

  GLADYS BEDFORD, YOU MAY BE OUR NEXT…

  And I started thinking about what would happen if my dad got the same kind of letter. What if he actually won a million dollars, for instance? Would he give up being Elvis? Would it stop him from performing at my school?

  That’s when the idea hit me. Well, no, it wasn’t like bam, here’s an idea—it was more like in the game of Solitaire when you turn a card over and you don’t see where it fits at first and then all of a sudden you do. And once that card is moved into the right spot, a lot of other cards fall into place.

  What if my dad received his own sweepstakes letter? Not a letter offering him a million dollars, but one that invited him to enter a special Elvis competition in Chicago? And what if the contest was on the same day as the school show?

  JERRY DENNY, YOU HAVE THE CHANCE TO BE OUR NEXT CHICAGO ELVIS….

  It was exactly the kind of opportunity that would appeal to my dad. He was always looking for bigger and better places to perform. And if it was on the same day as the school event, he’d definitely go ahead and cancel the school gig. Maybe the contest could even offer the winner the chance to compete in Las Vegas at a national—no, international—Elvis competition with the best Elvises from all over the world.

  The only drawback I could see was the fact that there wasn’t going to be a real competition. But I thought I could solve that problem by sending another letter later on—maybe a week or so before the competition date—saying the show had been canceled but would be rescheduled at a later time.

  The beauty of my plan was that it didn’t really hurt anybody. The school wouldn’t be hurt—they would have plenty of time to find another Elvis to perform. My dad’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt by standing in front of a crowd of howling, jeering middle school kids. And I wouldn’t be hurt by people finding out who he was.

  Sure, it required being a little dishonest. But in theory (my Listerine science teacher’s favorite phrase) my idea was no different than a sweepstakes letter telling people “you may be a winner.” My dad might be the winner of a Chicago Elvis contest, if it actually happened. Only it wouldn’t. And even if he was a little disappointed when the contest was canceled, it still wasn’t as bad as being publicly humiliated. Being disappointed was like going to the store and discovering they were sold out of your favorite ice cream flavor. No big deal. You got over it.

  However, being publicly humiliated was way worse. Especially if you were my dad and you hadn’t been to middle school in, oh, about twenty-seven years and you had no idea what you were getting into when you agreed to perform in front of hundreds of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. So by writing the letter, I swear I believed I was saving him from being hurt.

  What I didn’t consider at the time was the effect the letter would have on somebody like my dad—somebody who thinks he always has a chance in life, no matter what the odds are. My dad is the kind of person who would actually believe he could be a MILLION-DOLLAR WINNER, while my mom and I would just laugh and toss the letter in the trash. Since I did
n’t think about how seriously my dad might take the whole idea, I didn’t realize what was totally wrong with my plan.

  The other mistake I made was taking the idea too far. Once I started putting my ideas down on paper, I couldn’t stop. I’m kind of ashamed to admit it now, but I had a lot of fun creating the Elvis letter on my computer. It took me about three days to pull together the whole page. I found a great black-and-white clip art picture of Elvis in his younger years, and I put that in the upper left corner of the invitation. Across the top, I typed: CALLING ALL CHICAGO ELVISES! A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY! YOU MAY BE THE NEXT LAS VEGAS ELVIS!

  Note: If some of the words have a familiar ring, it’s because I borrowed a few of them from Gladys’s sweepstakes letter.

  Searching through the Chicago Yellow Pages, I found a fancy downtown hotel to use as the site for the contest: the InterContinental Hotel with the Grand Ballroom. That sounded convincing enough to me. Who wouldn’t give up a crummy middle school program at Charles W. Lister for the opportunity to perform at the Grand Ballroom? And just to be sure the whole plan would work, I listed five thousand dollars as the first prize—with the chance to be part of a special Las Vegas Elvis concert.

  I had to admit, it looked completely professional when I was finished. I even added a few lines of microscopic type at the bottom: THE INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL AND ITS EMPLOYEES ARE NOT LIABLE FOR THE JUDGING OR OUTCOME OF THE ELVIS CONTEST. ALL DECISIONS BY THE ELVIS JUDGES ARE FINAL. NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

  Note: I was very proud of the word “liable.”

  I mailed the letter in the blue post office mailbox across from Charles Lister. As I pulled back the handle of the mailbox and watched the envelope slide down the metal chute, I felt like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Three days of work with fonts and mailing labels and spell-checking everything about a hundred times—and now the letter was done and out of my hands. Calling all Chicago Elvises….