Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  With all his clout and all his stardom, Elvis still insisted on driving every mile of these Memphis-to-L.A. trips, and he had dressed up for this bon voyage in full trucker’s regalia: leather gloves, leather jacket, Wild One–style motorcycle cap, and the kind of thin white scarf you saw on all the guys at the truck stop. He was almost certainly the coolest-looking long-haul driver in all of Memphis that morning.

  “I’m ready, Elvis.”

  “Yeah. Just wait until you live with these guys. That’ll get your nerves in the dirt.”

  There were a few laughs from the guys as they went about their work. I’d learn soon enough that one of the ways Elvis welcomed you into his inner circle was by needling and teasing. The teasing could sometimes have a mean edge to it, but it was also a guy’s-guy way of injecting some real camaraderie into what was a complicated living and working relationship between all of us.

  Near midnight, after hours of “last-minute” preparations, we were ready to pull out through the Graceland gates and hit the road. Elvis, myself, Mike Keaton, Billy Smith, and Marty Lacker were going to be riding in the Dodge mobile home. Richard Davis and Alan Fortas would follow in two cars, each pulling a trailer full of stuff Elvis wanted to bring to the house in California. With everything loaded up and engines revved, there was one final delay—Elvis took about another half an hour to say special, private good-byes to both Priscilla and Grandma (Vernon’s mother).

  When those farewells were taken care of, our hard-truckin’ leader bounded onto the bus, took his place behind the wheel, and put that road-monster into gear. We slowly pulled out, with the guys waving to the friends and family that had come to see them off. There was a crowd of fans outside the Graceland gates waving good-bye as well. I felt a rush of excitement as we passed those fans—they were waving to Elvis and here I was sitting right behind him on his California-bound mobile home. That excitement settled into a deeper sense of satisfaction just a couple of miles later, as Elvis helmed the vehicle over the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge—across the Mississippi River. Crossing that first state line, I took a deep breath and thought about what was happening: Elvis’s big ride was making its way toward L.A. And I was on it.

  “Jerry, listen to this.”

  We weren’t too many miles into Arkansas when Elvis started playing a reel-to-reel tape player he’d had Billy Smith rig up at the front of the bus. He fiddled with the volume knob and out of the small speakers boomed the unmistakable voice of Roy Orbison. For all of his long drives, Elvis would have one of the guys put together some tapes of his favorite music, and on this trip, Elvis wanted to listen to Roy over and over again.

  “Damn—you hear that?” Elvis’s features softened as he listened. He looked unconcerned by anything else in the world but the music he was soaking up. “Damn.” He shook his head gently to the music.

  After all those years of tuning into Dewey Phillips’s broadcasts, I could tell you what I liked based on how a particular piece of music made me feel. But I’d never really thought about what it was in the music itself that would create those feelings. I heard a basic beat, a catchy tune, and words that stuck in your head, but I didn’t have much idea at all about the craft and artistry that could be packed into a two-and-a-half-minute record. On this first night of the California trip, I was about to receive a musical education at the hands of Maestro Presley.

  “The voice, man, the voice. You hear what he’s doing?”

  “He’s singing great,” I offered.

  Elvis nodded. “Yeah, man. He’s singing great. But listen here…” He turned the volume up a little higher. “Listen to those high notes. Nobody else can do that. Most guys go up high like that, they back off the note, take it on softly. Or they growl it out—blues it up and cheat it a little. Roy takes it high and sings it stronger than he does in his natural voice. And keeps it clear. Clear as a bell. Nobody else does that. Amazing.”

  I’d always liked Roy Orbison’s music, without being a particularly avid fan. Now, through Elvis, I felt like I was hearing him for the first time. As the tape kept rolling, Elvis delighted in pointing out all the nuances of this music that he loved—the expert storytelling of Roy’s lyrics, the fine, understated support of the backing band, the emotion behind every vocal delivery. And after a while we were talking not just about Roy, but music in general, girls, family, sports, Memphis—anything two guys might talk about.

  This was the first time I’d ever had a chance to speak like this with Elvis. As our conversation started to kick into high gear, however, it occurred to me that maybe I was making a bad impression with the other guys, monopolizing Elvis’s time this way. But as I looked around the bus at Billy, Marty, and Mike, I didn’t sense any resentment. In fact, I got the impression that these guys were sort of relieved. Billy and Marty had made this trip many times already and may well have felt all talked out. They actually seemed glad to have a new guy aboard who could go head-to-head with Elvis in conversation—not ever a task to be taken lightly—and keep the driver-in-chief happy. When Elvis was “on,” he was on all the way, and you had to give him full attention and keep up with him. I was eager and willing to do that, while Billy and Marty were just as happy to play cards, and Mike—the other “new guy”—seemed perfectly content to smoke cigarettes and quietly read his Bible.

  After about 200 miles on good old Route 66, Elvis pulled off at a truck stop. He parked a good distance from the gas pumps, where the truck-stop lights shined out over an expanse of dusty gravel beyond the parking lot. He told Alan Fortas and a couple of the other guys to fill up the bus, check the oil, and buy coffee and donuts for anybody that needed them. Then he reached behind his seat for a football, and nodded my way.

  “We got some business to take care of.”

  We walked out by the lights, and he suddenly smacked at the ball and said, “Go long, man.”

  I started out on the gravel at a tentative jog, apparently not running the pattern that my quarterback wanted.

  “Come on—run it out, Jack,” Elvis shouted.

  I went into my full, All-Memphis open-field run, and when I was about forty yards out into the middle of nowhere, Elvis reared back and fired one of his perfectly arced spiral bombs. I threw on the afterburners, adjusted my slant, and managed to get to the ball in time for an unpretty but successful completion.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Jack,” said Elvis.

  I sent the ball back his way, and he reeled it in for a catch. Then he called me back to our truck-stop line of scrimmage and gave me another pattern to run. And another. And another. Pretty soon, he called Billy Smith over to run some defensive coverage. Forty-five minutes later, my legs were about to give, my elbows were scraped from a couple of tumbles, I was huffing like a freight train and sweating like a pig. After one final long ball, Elvis gave us the all-aboard signal to get back on the road.

  Making time to L.A. was clearly not a top priority for Elvis, though, because we drove less than an hour before he spotted one of his favorite mom-and-pop burger joints and pulled off again so that we could have a meal. Alan and Marty headed inside to buy food for the group, while Elvis and I wandered down a small brushy trail off the side of the road.

  “You believe in coincidence, Jerry?”

  “I guess so, Elvis.”

  “I don’t think there’s any such thing. What we call coincidence is just life coming together. Takes us by surprise sometimes.”

  “Yeah. I suppose that’s true. What makes you think about that?”

  “Well, if I’m not mistaken, you caught the first pass I threw you back in Guthrie Park. If you hadn’t, maybe we wouldn’t have played so much ball together. And if you hadn’t caught the first pass I threw you just now, I might’ve sent you home. But it all worked out, didn’t it?”

  It felt OK to laugh—I was catching on to Elvis’s slightly wicked sense of humor. “We haven’t gone too far yet, Elvis. You want to send me home, I’ll walk it.”

  He let loose a laugh this time. “You
a long way from home already, Jack. Ain’t no walkin’ back now.”

  Our walks, talks, burger stops, and ball-playing set the leisurely pace for the whole trip. From the first night, this slow approach to cross-country travel was allowing me more one-on-one time with Elvis than I’d thought possible. For the other guys, this mode of travel was clearly a source of frustration and annoyance. For them, the excitement wasn’t in the drive, but in the destination, where girls, sunshine, and movie sets awaited. They would have preferred to make the Memphis-to-L.A. drive a three-or four-day trip. But for Elvis, road time was the only time now that he was completely free of demands and distractions, and he was never in a hurry. On this trip, he found enough reasons to stop that it was over a week before we reached Los Angeles.

  Occasionally we’d hear on a local radio station that there was an “Elvis Watch”—fans knew he was headed west to make another movie and knew he’d be on Route 66. But we managed to keep things very quiet and under the radar—eating on the bus, getting Elvis in and out of his motel rooms without any interactions he wasn’t looking for. If the owners of the motels or burger stands or truck stops ever knew that Elvis Presley was sitting in a Dodge mobile home on their property, they were also smart enough to keep it quiet—they didn’t want to lose the nice chunk of money that came their way several times a year with Presley caravan visits.

  We drove through the nights, with Elvis pulling over almost every time he spotted a truck stop that seemed a good spot for more work on our passing game. Then, no matter how many or how few miles we’d covered, just before each dawn, Elvis and Alan and Marty would decide on a suitable motel for us to crash in. Rooms would be selected and paid for in advance, and, with Elvis still on the bus, we’d all work to set up his room just the way he wanted it. Elvis had learned early on in his travels that the blinds and shades on motel windows often didn’t do a very good job of blocking out morning sun, so he’d come up with the idea of covering the windows with tin foil to darken the room and allow him some uninterrupted sleep. We had an extensive supply of the stuff to cover up all the windows on the way to L.A., and that was always the first thing taken care of in Elvis’s room. Then we’d cart in just about all his clothes, so that he’d have a full selection of wardrobe to pick from for the next night’s drive.

  We’d also frequently set up some of his state-of-the-art videotape equipment. Even though the first “home video” players were just becoming available in 1964, Elvis had gotten a prototype machine through RCA, and he’d put together a just barely portable reel-to-reel videotape deck system that he could hook up in his motel room. He’d had the system put together at Graceland, where he had already accumulated a private library of favorite TV shows and a few films transferred to tape. At first it seemed like a lot of trouble to cart this stuff around, just so Elvis could watch something when we checked into a place after the regular TV stations had signed off. But I soon learned that within his small collection of tapes he had a few very special ones that one or two girlfriends had made for him. These weren’t talked about openly, and nobody else in the group ever saw who or what was on these tapes, but at least we understood why this back-straining gear was an Elvis-room priority.

  The odd schedule and off-hour sleeping arrangements were hard for me to get adjusted to at first, and it was just a day or two into the trip that one of the guys let me in on the secret of staying up all night—prescription dexedrine tablets. Elvis was using those to stay up and stay attentive behind the wheel, and would then often use prescription sleeping pills so that he could get his rest. Now, up until those first dexedrine tablets, I hadn’t had any experiences with drugs. My nickname around Graceland had been “Mr. Milk,” because I was seen as the clean-living jock who rarely took a drink of alcohol (and, in fact, the couple of times that I’d overindulged in booze, I hated the temper and the foggy head that it gave me). But Elvis was a smart guy, and was in great physical shape. Why wouldn’t I take the same pills he was taking?

  I got into the same “better living through chemistry” rhythm, and pretty soon those football-tossing stops weren’t just a fun way to stretch the legs—they were a required method for burning off all that amphetamine energy. And by the time we finally got to motel rooms in the morning, a sleeping pill started to feel entirely appropriate. Although it’s quite clear to me now that the cycle of pills eventually took a toll on all of us, I still say I was playing the best football of my life on that trip, racing, diving, and rolling around those truck stops, fiercely proud of every scrape, cut, and bruise I got on the way to another end-zone reception.

  The first indication that a sleep-cycle induced by pills could have a harsh downside for me came during our stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when we happened to check into a motel with a circular layout. After we all got Elvis checked in and taken care of, I was handed a key with a number on it, but no matter how hard I tried to concentrate and how many circles I walked, I could not find my room. I think I was about to just lie down in a hallway when Alan Fortas spotted me and walked me to the right one. I remember lying on that motel-room bed, frightened by the fact that I seemed to have lost control of myself. But I must have eventually slumbered deeply enough to ease those fears away, because when I woke up later that day and peered out the window, the vista I took in looked amazing to me. Spread out in the distance, like some unbelievable postcard picture, were these huge, majestic New Mexico mountains. I’d never seen a more imposing or beautiful sight, and if heart-to-heart talks with Elvis Presley hadn’t made it clear enough, these mountains slammed it home: I was truly living in another world now.

  I think Elvis was making a somewhat special effort on that trip to make me feel comfortable—he really did appreciate the fact that I was leaving work, school, home, and essentially everything I knew to become part of his crew. And on the home stretch of our drive, the talks with Elvis got both deeper and more relaxed. Elvis seemed to enjoy stretching the mental muscles as much as he enjoyed working out his throwing arm. I’d spent a lot of time around guys who thought the best way a book could be used was to prop up a wobbly table. But Elvis was a voracious reader, always thrilled to talk about whatever book he was in the middle of and always eager to get started on the next one. Hearing him talk, hearing him work over topics from the most mundane questions of sports and girls to the meaning-of-life explorations of spirituality and philosophy, I felt I was getting the chance to give my own mental muscles a workout. It was fun to run a pass pattern for the guy, but it was even more satisfying to go head-to-head in a discussion or debate.

  At one of our last stops, somewhere out by Barstow, we’d gotten Elvis into his room and the rest of the guys had gone off to find some breakfast. Elvis wasn’t eating much—he was just days away from having to be on the film set and was already trying to diet off any extra pounds he’d picked up from Memphis home cooking. And I wasn’t eating anything—the dexedrine and sleeping pills had virtually erased my appetite (Elvis would be at his trim “fighting weight” on the first day of shooting, but I ended up dropping twenty pounds off a frame that was pretty spare to start with: Elvis would keep looking at me, laughing, and asking “What happened to that big guy I hired?”). We usually left Elvis alone as soon as his room was set up—that was the way he wanted it. But this night, after the others had left, he flicked on the TV and told me to sit down with him. In that little motel room, with dawn not far off, Elvis and I just kept talking, like we’d been doing on the bus.

  We talked a lot about karate—he was still an eager and enthusiastic student of the sport, which at the time still seemed a highly unusual and mysterious discipline. I remember that as we stretched out in that little room, Elvis started telling me about his admiration for the mix of spiritual philosophies and practical concepts behind karate—the significance of inner strength, the preciousness of the chi life force, the power of restraint, the secrets of using your opponent’s force against him. He talked about the power of stillness and concentration, and how he was
able to apply that to his acting and his recording work. It was a serious talk for a while, but eventually things got looser, as they usually did. The talk of concentration got us talking about hunting, and pretty soon Elvis was sharing some of his field-tested secrets for snake hunting (“You just let the snake slither right into the bullet”). And before long, he was sharing what he saw as some of the crucial differences between California girls and Memphis girls.

  I think we’d finally worked our way through to some laughing reminiscences of nights at the Rainbow Roller Rink in Memphis, when Elvis suddenly sat up on his bed and stared at the TV with a strange, intent expression. I looked over at the screen to see an image of a group of jet fighters climbing into the sky. It didn’t look like a scene from a movie, and I guessed from the late hour that it might be the station’s way of signing off. This was a little unusual—I’d stayed up late enough to see plenty of sign-offs in Memphis, and they generally consisted of footage of the flag and a playing of the national anthem. But there was no anthem now. Instead, the images of the soaring planes and sunlit skies were accompanied by a poem that I’d never heard before. But Elvis—after so many nights in so many motels—knew these strange words by heart, and he intoned them dramatically along with the voice from the TV:

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of

  sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things…

  I thought at first he was doing this for another laugh, but as he went on I could tell that these words meant something to him. Through Elvis, I really focused in on the words coming from the screen, and, though I was hardly a poetry expert, I too began to pick up on their power. Elvis, exhibiting the very stillness and concentration he’d just told me about, brought his voice down to a whisper as he got to the final lines of the poem.