Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  “All right, now—what’s your name? Jerry?” asked the quarterback.

  “Yeah.”

  “You can catch a football?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how to run a slant?”

  “Sure.”

  He held his hand out, palm up, and sketched out a play. “You run down the sidelines about ten yards—run it easy, not full speed. Red, you go up the middle and buttonhook. Jerry, when you see Red make his turn, you hit the gas, man, and run your slant. If you get past whoever’s covering you, the ball’s coming to you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The quarterback’s serious expression shifted a bit. He looked at me dead-on. He had ice-blue eyes, and when he looked straight at you, you felt it. A little twist of half-smile showed up on his face.

  “‘Sir?’ Hey, Red, I like this kid’s attitude,” said the quarterback.

  “He’s all right,” said Red, giving me a clap on the back that just about knocked the breath out of me.

  Red didn’t introduce us. I didn’t hear his name spoken by any of the other guys. But I didn’t have to hear it. I knew who he was.

  This was the boy from Humes High named Elvis Presley.

  My mother, Dorothy Schilling, died when I was a little over a year old. She contracted rheumatic fever shortly after I was born, and spent most of a year in bed, wasting away. The disease was close to a death sentence back then, but it wasn’t always quick. From what I was told later by my grandmother and my aunts, my mother held me as much as she could for as long as she could. But eventually her skin was so sensitive that even the weight of the sheets was painful, and I can only imagine the heartache she must have felt not being able to hold her new baby to her.

  My mother’s dying request to her mother, my Mamaw Gilkey, was to secure a promise that my brother and I would be loved and taken care of when she was gone. Mamaw delivered wonderfully on that sad promise. I grew up with a fair amount of confusion about how exactly I fit into my family, but I never doubted for a moment that my Mamaw loved me with all of her heart.

  From bits of conversations—little hushed pieces of grown-up talk I’d occasionally catch as a kid, I got the impression that my mom had been happy, pretty, and the kind of person who took care of everybody else first. The peacemaker and pep-talker who made everybody around her feel special. She was one of seven children and my father was one of four children, and growing up I heard plenty of grumbling and complaining from and about each side of the family. But I never heard anybody say anything mean about my mother. And I don’t think that was just because she was gone—I think it was because she was considered a truly special person by everyone who knew her.

  My father, Bill, grew up in Memphis, and from what I know of my dad’s early years he didn’t have much of a childhood at all. He was the oldest son, and when his father abandoned the family, he had to drop out of middle school and start working to help put food on the table. He started at a grocery store and, as soon as he could drive, moved on to a better-paying job as a truck driver. Before he got married, he’d landed his job over at the Firestone factory.

  I think my dad may have spotted my mother on a dance floor at some local Memphis event. Both of them loved to dance, and both of them got into contests when they could, so it makes sense that that’s where they crossed paths. I do know that my mother and father got married when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen. Within a year they had a baby boy—my older brother, Billy Ray. My mom had me when she was twenty-six, and at twenty-seven she was gone.

  My dad had been living a humble workingman’s dream—a steady job with a few benefits, a beautiful wife, and a couple of baby boys. Suddenly that dream was smashed to pieces. I think that the only thing he could think to do was to keep working as hard as he could to provide for his kids. That meant taking extra shifts at the factory, which meant he couldn’t raise us on his own. My brother got sent off to a boarding school a couple hours away in Searcy, Arkansas—maybe my father figured it would be easier for him to be away from everything that might remind him of our mother. I was moved into my Mamaw and Papaw’s house on Leath Street in North Memphis, a neat little white clapboard home in a poor but well-kept neighborhood. For quite a while as a kid, I assumed I was an only child. I remember telling Mamaw that I wished I had a brother and she said, “Why, Jerry—you do. Billy Ray.” I hadn’t realized that the older kid who showed up for a week at Christmas was actually related to me.

  Mamaw and Papaw, who made his living as a housepainter, opened up their home to me as warmly and as lovingly as they knew how. Sometimes they barely had enough money to put any dinner on the table—white bread and sorghum molasses wasn’t an uncommon supper. But they let me, their little grandson, feast on all the donuts and sugared-up cinnamon toast my belly could hold.

  The people around us in the neighborhood were just as poor, and some of the homes weren’t much more than the classic Southern shotgun shack. But everybody seemed to take pride in the little bit that they did have. Pride in holding a job. Pride in having made it through to the other side of a depression and a war. Lawns were well tended, cars were washed and gleaming—nobody let their little house go too long without a fresh coat of paint. People on Leath Street didn’t have much, and knew they probably weren’t ever going to get much, but they tried to carry themselves with some dignity.

  I don’t ever remember thinking that I was particularly poor when I was little. I just felt out of place. Other kids lived with a mom and dad. I didn’t. I learned to make do with that feeling, though, because it just so happened that every single day, I had a looming vision of just how much worse things could be. At the end of Leath, just a stone’s throw from my Mamaw’s house, was the chain-link fence that marked off the grounds of the Porter-Leath orphanage. Across a wide field on the other side of that fence, I could see the big old, Southern Gothic orphanage building itself—looking like the kind of place Dr. Frankenstein might use to hide his laboratory. Way off in the distance you could see a bit of playground that the orphans used, and once in a while you might see a few of them out there. But in all the years I lived on Leath I never saw those kids playing out on the open field. An uncle would occasionally tease me, “Better behave yourself, Jerry, or we’ll send you over to Porter-Leath.” Other kids might have known that wasn’t a real possibility, but I always felt way too close to the edge of those grounds. I walked a couple blocks out of my way to get to Holy Names—avoiding Porter-Leath completely—so as not to take any chances.

  Mamaw and Papaw’s place on Leath Street was the closest I had to a steady home, but I also spent a lot of time bouncing around the homes of all my aunts and uncles—from little houses scattered through North Memphis, to an apartment over a bar and grill near downtown Memphis, to Aunt Jinky and Uncle Bernard’s place on Jackson Avenue, the busy thoroughfare that marked the beginning of the North Memphis neighborhoods.

  Attached to Jinky and Bernard’s house was one of my favorite places in the world—John’s Little Kitchen. John was Uncle John Gilkey, my mom’s brother, and his place was the finest hamburger joint in North Memphis, popular as an after-school hangout for the kids from Humes. The Little Kitchen was a tiny structure, with just a few tables and a counter inside. It had twinkling lights and a great jukebox, and always smelled of a heady mix of sizzling grease, the sour tang of empty beer glasses, and the whiff of Clorox off the well-scrubbed floor. John himself had tattoos up and down his arms and a great sense of humor, and when he had time out of the little kitchen area, he’d sit me on his lap by one of the few tables, sometimes drawing a tattoo or two on my arm with one of his pens. He’d also sneak me an occasional sip of beer along with my burger.

  John’s Kitchen was a place where I felt comfortable, even special. But there was one thing about the place that puzzled me: All his customers seemed to enjoy the hamburgers just as much, but the white ones got to come inside through the front door and eat at a counter or at tables, while the darker customers had to come thr
ough a side door labeled COLORED and could only eat standing up at their own little bit of counter. And for some reason, my fun-loving, good-natured Uncle John just always sounded impatient and irritated when he had to deal with those “colored” customers.

  The Gilkeys had a great sense of family, and a lot of the aunts and uncles would often get together at the end of the workweek to enjoy a dinner of Uncle John’s burgers and then watch the Friday-night fights on Bernard and Jinky’s TV. I spent less time with my dad’s side of the family, and was a little less comfortable in those homes. Looking back, I realize that both sides of the family lived within a couple miles of each other, and everybody was working hard to make ends meet. But the Schillings had made it up to solid little brick houses with the fancy three-pillar porches, while the Gilkeys lived in little wood houses with cement slab porches. To my eyes, that seemed like the difference between mansions and shacks.

  I was generally treated well throughout my childhood, but I think I also knew that all that shuffling from home to home wasn’t quite right, and I could sense that I didn’t really belong in any one place. I was always sharing someone else’s room and someone else’s toys. I remember one night, as I was falling asleep at Mamaw’s house, I heard her out in the kitchen talking to one of my aunts.

  “I love Jerry like he was one of my own,” she said.

  I felt a shiver go through me, and I curled up a little tighter in the blankets. I’d thought I was one of her own.

  My insecurities weren’t helped by the fact that I was a sickly little kid. Maybe it was all those donuts and cinnamon toast, but I just never seemed to be healthy for any decent stretch of time. I had headaches, earaches, and stomachaches so bad that there were weeks when I just didn’t get out of bed. My dad had signed me up to start first grade at Holy Names after I turned five (there wasn’t any kindergarten back then). But I was so sick and missed so much school that first year that I ended up having to do the grade again. I was little, but not so little that I didn’t understand that I had flunked first grade. My first experience with academics was an experience of failure, and that didn’t do anything to boost my low levels of self-confidence.

  So, on Leath Street, I spent a lot of time by myself, listening to Mamaw’s great big Zenith floor-model radio. I couldn’t get enough of The Lone Ranger. But unlike a lot of kids who listened, I didn’t imagine myself to be the one with the silver bullets. When the show was over, I’d go out in Mamaw’s backyard, draped in ceremonial battle washrags, pretending to be Tonto. I’d climb up in the big apple tree there and sit for hours, staring out at North Memphis and wondering which direction the Lone Ranger was going to ride in from.

  Throughout my childhood, I sometimes stayed with my father on weekends and through the summers, but in that summer of 1954, I moved in with him for good. It wasn’t an easy transition. At my grandparents’ and aunts and uncles’ houses I’d been allowed to do as I pleased, but Daddy had rules he expected me to follow. Chores had to get done and vegetables had to be eaten. My father wanted to do everything in his power to get me strong enough and smart enough to make something of myself but, at the time, I didn’t appreciate that kind of concern at all. I was angry that my dad was the sort of guy who would waste my Saturday morning to take me to the dentist. Years later it dawned on me that, in a part of town where there were plenty of crooked, toothless smiles, he was the sort of guy who would give up his own day off to get his kid’s teeth taken care of.

  My father worked at the nearby Firestone factory, a place with smokestacks that towered over that part of town. He worked a lot of double shifts, but off the factory clock and on his own time, he was a sharp dresser and a great dancer, and being able to get out on the town on Fridays and Saturdays was a big deal for him. On weekends, he and his younger brother, my Uncle Joe, headed out to the local nightclubs, where they might find some pretty girls to dance away their worries with for a while. So, when I’d stayed at my father’s house in the past, I’d often ended up with the house to myself. Back then, in that part of town, hiring a babysitter for a boy my age would have been an unthinkable waste of money—the kind of thing rich people did. After I turned nine, my father had considered me old enough to be left alone while he went out. I liked being given that responsibility, but the truth was that, at nine, it didn’t take much to put me in a state of fear.

  There’d be strange creaks in the floorboards, loud knocks from the pipes, and shadows in the hallway, all of which could get the worst parts of my imagination working. Even the breeze rustling the bushes and trees outside could start to sound a little spooky. With a few rumbles from the occasional thunderhead rolling up the Mississippi River, and a flash of lightning or two, I would end up just plain terrified. Deep down, I always knew that if there were any kind of real emergency, help was close by. Wayne Martin, his mother, and his Aunt Bea lived right next door, and I had relatives a few blocks away in almost every direction. And no matter how loud the floor creaked, and how hard the pipes knocked, I always eventually fell asleep and lived through the night.

  At age twelve, living at my daddy’s house full-time, I wasn’t so easy to scare anymore, and I’d discovered something that made my nights alone in that little house something I looked forward to. In my bedroom, on the dusty chest of drawers, right by the side of the heavy wooden bed, was the one thing in that plain little room that really sparkled—the only thing that hinted at a world of excitement outside: my bright white, plastic, battery-powered Silvertone radio.

  It was a beauty, with a molded grille over its speaker, two great big knobs for the tuning and the volume, and a giant slash of a red needle to tune in your station. Sometimes, in the afternoons and evenings, I moved the needle around to pull in broadcasts of The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, or The Fibber McGee and Molly Show. But six nights a week, from nine to midnight, that needle was locked into place at the far left side of the dial at 560, WHBQ. Dewey’s station.

  Dewey Phillips was a half-crazed, speed-talking wildman of a disc jockey who had become the hottest thing on late-night radio in Memphis. His show Red, Hot & Blue, played an inspired mix of R & B records, country boogie, hard-core blues, pure gospel, and a few love songs from the silkiest of harmony groups. For good measure, he might toss in a lesser-known tune from a big pop act of the day. Spend a night with Dewey and you might hear Ruth Brown’s “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a new cut by the Clovers, then Johnny Ace singing “Pledging My Love,” followed by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters knocking out “Work with Me Annie.” You might even get a Dean Martin B-side followed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day.”

  “Heeeee gaw!” Dewey would holler. “You just roll a wheelbarrow full of—full of—full of mad dogs, just wheel it right up through the big front doors over there; you get down on the floor and kick your legs up in the air—AND TELL ’EM PHILLIPS SENT YA!! You hearin’ me out there? Ahh—I know you are. Just ain’t no three ways about it—ain’t that right, Myrtle?”

  Myrtle, an imaginary cow who served as Dewey’s sometime side-kick, would respond with a low, forlorn “Mooo.”

  Wayne next door had tipped me off about Dewey’s show, but when I first started listening to him I could barely understand a thing he was saying—unlike other radio guys, he didn’t seem to be trying at all to smooth out his backwoods Tennessee twang. But when he played the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man,” I was hooked. Neither Wayne or I knew precisely what the man of the title was doing for sixty minutes, but the song had such a feel of crazy fun and happy secrets, and the way the guy with the low voice sang “Fifteen minutes of blowing my top” was such a kick, that I couldn’t wait to hear it again.

  By that summer of 1954, whenever I had the house on Breedlove to myself, I was listening to Red, Hot & Blue. Slowly, I got a little better at figuring out what Dewey was talking about. And man, did he talk. He talked right through some of the songs, fumbled his way through adlibbed advertisements, shouted out updates on local concerts, and d
ispensed a constant stream of cracked, countrified wisdom (“Hey, good people—Saturday’s just around the corner and don’t you forget now—that’s payday AND bath day!”). On the regular popular music radio shows, the DJs sounded so smooth, so calm, so dull. Dewey got all worked up and banged his equipment—you could almost hear him breaking a sweat. He was a grown-up, but he was just barely under control. Dewey, and his music, seemed fun and dangerous at the same time. And if a kid wanted to hear something other than the unexciting flow of hits like those on the Your Hit Parade TV show—if you wanted to hear LaVern Baker, the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, and laugh all the way through, Dewey’s show was the show you tuned in to. That is, it was the show you tuned in to if you were a white kid.

  Memphis was also home to WDIA, the first station in the whole country to have a black on-air staff (though the station itself was white-owned). You could also hear some of the same songs Dewey played on some of WDIA’s shows, which were jockeyed by the likes of a very young guitar player named B. B. King, and bluesman Rufus Thomas. But that was a black station meant for black listeners, and for a white kid—for any white person—to turn that radio needle to 1070 would be doing the unthinkable. In the unquestioningly segregated South, you were never, ever supposed to step over the very clear lines of color. And I knew color was serious business. As a little kid, I’d been spanked for drinking from COLOREDS ONLY water fountains, and had been punished for making the mistake of shooting marbles with some black kids during an outing to Moon Lake.

  That didn’t stop me from listening to WDIA—a lot of the songs were just as great as what was on Red, Hot & Blue, and you could hear them in the afternoon, well before Dewey was on. But even as a kid I could sense there was something very different around the music—a language I didn’t quite understand describing a world I didn’t quite recognize. It was, I know now, simply black voices talking about black Memphis—discussing church events, employment opportunities, or putting out “calls for action” that helped people in trouble find the groups or agencies that could help them. You might even hear a DJ like the Reverend “Gatemouth” Moore talk about how crazy it was that the local ambulance companies were separated by race: He’d seen a white lady die because the black-run ambulance that got to her first wasn’t allowed to handle her. Listening to WDIA, I didn’t understand the logic behind the color lines in my town any better, but I couldn’t help but be aware of them.