Mesopotamia

by Arthur Nersesian

  “It isn’t all that bad.”

  “Easy for you to say, you’re a successful reporter dealing with exciting celebrities, breaking big stories and such.”

  “I’ve never met a celebrity who couldn’t be replaced by another one. As for success, yesterday I borrowed your accomplishments to make myself look better.”

  The first howls from the youngest child woke the others, breaking up our little pity fest. In all the towns and villages around Daumland, Elvis impersonators were popping amphetamines, forcing their congested hearts to beat a little faster. They were greasing up their tar-black pompadours and selecting the loudest, gaudiest costumes they’d ever wear—all getting ready for that great croon-a-thon that would establish their Elvis bona fides, so they could launch successful careers as wedding singers and novelty acts.

  I spent the morning practicing my songs and trying to pretend that I didn’t know I was pregnant. I needed one more day to not worry about anyone else’s life. In the middle of practicing “Viva Las Vegas,” my cell phone chimed for the first time in over a day. It was a rising young tabloid star, Hailey Page.

  “I heard the awful news about Gustavo Benoit and just wanted to express my condolences.” It turned out one of the funeral fund donors had posted his obituary on a journalist web site.

  “Thanks.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “We went to this dive for a drink but it was closed. While we briefly separated, a cop drove by and thought Gus was trying to break in.”

  “Why ever would he think that?”

  “It was pouring rain and Gus had this novelty umbrella that looked like a shotgun. When he drunkenly pulled it, they shot him.”

  “Poor Gus.” She paused. “You guys were working on the Scrubbs case, weren’t you?”

  “Everybody is. Why?”

  “I just thought maybe he’d been killed while discovering something.” There it was—Hailey had left her tasteful little gardening column in some Midwestern paper for a lot more cash in the tabloid compost heap. She must’ve smelled a story in our direction.

  “We didn’t find anything. What’s going on down on Beale Street?”

  “It’s overrun with reporters in search of news, and there just isn’t any. So are you upstate?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I just heard that Missy Scrubbs’s family was from upstate somewhere, but no one seems to know exactly where. And I thought Gus said you were from around these parts.”

  “I’m at a seismographic center in Purdue University.”

  “Oh my! Whatever for?”

  “Well, keep this to yourself, but they’re finishing a secret study for the U.S. Geological Survey on the New Madrid fault line,” I misinformed her.

  “Why is it a secret?” she asked softly.

  I explained that in 1811, a major earthquake that was estimated to have been above 8 on the Richter scale had struck Memphis, Tennessee, killing an unknown number of people.

  “Wow!”

  “The real story now is whether we’re prepared to handle it.” Before I could say anything else, pandemonium broke out. Two of the children had gotten into a donnybrook and others were joining in. Vinetta was outside, so I told Hailey I had to run, then broke up the fight myself. An Elvis competition was waiting.

  As I began final preparations for my performance, I thought about the new life inside of me. This was going to be an awful day to miscarry. Nothing stayed alive in me very long. I knew I should just stay home and take it easy, as I had those other times when I tried to have a kid with Paul. But they had all come to nothing. At least this time I’d miscarry with my boots on.

  Vinetta offered to fix me eggs and grits. Though I was hungry, I declined as I didn’t want to increase the likelihood of vomiting. Nervously, I rehearsed onward.

  After feeding the brood, Vinetta said that this was the only time left—between lunch and dinner, while the laundry was in its longest cycle—when she’d be able to help me get ready for my performance. Fine. She spent half an hour working on my hair, gluing on my sideburns, then fixing my cosmetics. Once we were done, she tended to her laundry while I pulled the Elvis Vegas wear back on.

  “Look, Ma, it’s Dad!” said Eugenia, vaguely remembering her father dressed like me.

  “My God, you’re a regular Elvira Presley,” Vinetta said as I slipped on my official orange-tinted Elvis sunglasses.

  Thankya very mush. Now here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go to the Blue Suede, meet this Carpenter character, and tell him he can have the hand for fifty thousand dollars. I’ll show him the photos and—”

  “What do I do?”

  “Do you have any kind of weapons around here?”

  “I have Floyd’s old possum gun stored away and I’m a pretty good shot.”

  “Actually, I was hoping you might have a pistol that I could borrow. I thought maybe you could take the kids and spend the night at your cousin Edwina’s.”

  “Guess I can do that.”

  “If you don’t hear from me by midnight, don’t go home.” I scribbled a number on a piece of paper. “Call here and ask for Special Agent Ron Wallace at the Memphis field office of the FBI. I left a message for him yesterday. Tell him you’re in immediate danger and give him this letter.” I placed it on the table in front of her. “You tell him I’m missing and give him the hand. The letter explains everything.”

  She solemnly nodded.

  “Also,” I took out another letter, “if anything should happen, I want you to mail this to my sisters. Can you do that?” In this letter I explained that I didn’t actually have seven kids, I was only the babysitter, but I was still grateful for their kindness and sorry we had grown apart and that I behaved so childishly.

  “Sandra, don’t do this.” The gravity of the situation seemed to suddenly hit Vinetta. “You’re taking an unnecessary risk.”

  “Before coming here, I was drinking myself to death, avoiding so many things, and just feeling worthless. I probably would’ve finished myself off if I had left here after Gustavo died. Instead, I haven’t touched the bottle in a week. I might’ve broken a multiple murder case. I got to briefly say goodbye to my mother and reconcile with my sisters. I even got a big helping of motherhood. Not to mention I learned to sing Elvis like a pro. Everything I’ve done turned out to be a necessary risk. I’m not stopping now.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEN

  If I can get the kids to bed early and Edwina feels comfortable, I’ll go over and see you. How’s that?” Vinetta asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m still gonna try to come by later,” she swore.

  After I packed what I needed, she gave me a hug, the children all wished me good luck, and I left. Roughly a mile shy of the Blue Suede, traffic started slowing down. It was bumper-to-bumper for the last ten minutes before I finally reached the tavern and saw what was up. On the crabgrass in front of the Blue Suede a makeshift stage had been hastily erected. Would-be Elvises were lining up and performing their audition songs. A series of beer booths had been tossed up around the grounds. Shiny kegs were sitting in large tubs of ice. When I drove past I could see that the parking lot had been closed and converted into a second stage. Traffic cops were waving people through into town. I was lucky to find a tight spot just a couple of blocks away.

  Considering we were in a small town equidistant from Memphis and Nashville, the crowd of two to three hundred folks milling outside the bar was a regular Lollapalooza. Elvis had died and come back as merchandise: Elvis shirts, Elvis lamps, Elvis statues, Elvis hats, Elvis books, Elvis crap of all variety was packed onto tables, going for top dollar.

  As I walked from my car to the check-in wearing my Elvis costume—the only Asian she-Elvis around—I found myself being targeted by amatuer photographers. Initially I tried dodging them, but desperate shutterbugs dashed around and got me from ugly angles, so I finally just posed for them. It was the first time I had ever gotten a taste of m
y own tabloid medicine.

  At the registration table, I was given the number twenty-eight on stage two. I had to perform my best song—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—at the stage on the parking lot. I thoughtlessly bought a sudsy beer, but remembering that there was an outside chance I might actually have a baby, I left it on a table and found a caffeine-free soda instead. Taking out my printed photo of Rod East I tried to imagine him years older and looked for the man in the crowd—to no avail.

  In all shapes and styles the Elvises strutted forth: there was an Elvis wearing a dark green uniform complete with a duffel bag over his shoulder, harking back to when he was discharged from the army; a bearded Hawaiian Elvis was ringed with a variety of colorful leis; the multiculti Elvises included several black and Latino variations. Soon I spotted a few other Asian and a couple Native American Elvises. Among the white-caped and gold-laméd standouts was a nervous, overweight Elvis covered in pimples, a twitchy Elvis tweaker, who kept running his fingers along his lips. I also counted five surgically enhanced Elvises. To my comfort, I spotted one other female Elvis, a voluptuous blonde who someone said was named Thelma Presley. Locating a small bottle of cranberry juice at a concession stand, I just stood in the back of the crowd and watched the back-to-back auditions while waiting for my name to be called.

  After an hour, most of the Kings blended into one another. Rubbing elbows with these pretenders to His throne, I soon got a sense of two key psychological profiles. Most were raven-haired, benign guys who never got very far on their own music careers and through Elvis they tried to find a way to pay their mounting credit card bills. The other type of Elvis impersonators were just plain nuts. These were lonely, functionally insane guys who had completely transferred their egos to the romantic ideal of the King. Their height, weight, hair color, and body shape didn’t matter. In fact, nothing else mattered but their pathological fixation on Elvis or, more particularly, their wish to blur into him until there was a fused Elvis identity.

  After one 1950s Elvis finished his hackneyed “Hound Dog,” one of the three preliminary judges, a tall, beef-jerky guy who looked nothing like Rod East took the stage holding a clipboard and called out my name. When I went up the wooden steps, I got an unusual blast of applause. Apparently, my sex and race worked to my advantage. Down before me was a table with three lecherous-looking older men. One of them, the barfly who I thought was named Irv, winked at me.

  Taking the mike, I introduced myself as the illegitimate daughter of Elvis and Don Ho, which got a polite laugh, and then I executed a fairly smooth “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” By the end of the song, staring into each of the judges’ eyes, I softly performed my best impersonation of the King: “The stage is bare, I’m standing there, with emptiness all around, and if you don’t come back to me, they’ll bring the curtain down …” An explosion of applause and even some sniffles followed.

  “Thank you—next!”

  Over the next twenty minutes another six auditions followed, then the preliminaries were complete. The other stage had also wrapped up its auditions. It took an hour for our judges to make and break so many dreams, by posting their results on the door of the pub. Emotions ran high as some Elvises shouted joyously while others grew mournfully silent. Of the fifty-two contestants, ten from each of the two stages were picked to perform inside the Elvis palace for the final round. One older Elvis tributer who had supposedly made it into the finals every year since the Sing the King contest first began, was cut this time. I watched him weep inconsolably, sitting in his customized van out back.

  I was amazed to see that I had made the cut, though I was the second from the bottom. Another Elvis impersonator explained that the list was compiled in the order of appearance, so the Elvis at the bottom had simply been the last to perform.

  “There’s the best damn Elvis I’ve seen all day!” I heard a hoarse voice call out. Turning around, I saw Jeeves—who was the right age, but looked nothing even remotely like Rod East/John Carpenter. Yet there was still something about that broken-down old geezer that made me blush and giggle like a schoolgirl.

  “Did you see me sing?”

  “Sure did, and I’ll tell you right now, Elvis shoulda been imitating you.”

  “If I can only convince everyone else here.”

  “Girl, are you lonesome tonight?” he sang to me softy, imitating me imitating the King. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t lonesome tonight because he had impregnated me, but I didn’t want to scare him off. I still refused to believe that I could possibly bring a fetus to full-term, but I couldn’t bring myself to end the pregnancy either. Only God could abort this particular life.

  “You gonna watch the finals?”

  “Don’t have a choice,” he said. “I’m tying an apron on and clearing tables.”

  “Let me ask you something.” I figured that he might be able to help me with my investigation. “Do you know Rod East?”

  “Sure do,” he said, “you’re looking right at him.”

  “Come on.”

  “If you want to know God’s honest truth, that’s his car right over there.” He pointed across the parking lot to an old pink Cadillac that was in the process of backing out onto the road.

  “You kidding?”

  “Swear on my mother’s grave I’m not.” He crossed himself.

  Bumping into people as I traversed the lot, I raced over to the vehicle just as it swung out onto the street. Though I didn’t get there in time, I managed to spot the decal of Elvis’s pompadour on the back window, confirming it was the car that the electrician had seen Missy Scrubbs leaning out of in the Murphy County Mall. All roads pointed to Rod East.

  When I returned to where I had left Jeeves, he was gone. The Quasimodo of Daumland had returned to his bell tower—or the kitchen. With some time to kill, I walked away from the crowds to a relatively empty lawn across the road where a big-top tent had been erected. Inside they were holding an Elvis epic: a three-hour movie montage consisting of most of Elvis’s movies had begun at noon. In chronological order it showed the best parts of Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, GI Blues, Flaming Star, Wild in the Country, Blue Hawaii, Follow that Dream, Kid Galahad, Girls! Girls! Girls!, It Happened at the World’s Fair, Fun in Acapulco, Kissin’ Cousins, Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, Girl Happy, Tickle Me, Harum Scarum, Frankie and Johnny, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Spinout, Easy Come, Easy Go, Double Trouble, Clambake, Stay Away, Joe, Speedway, Live a Little, Love a Little, The Trouble with Girls, and, finally, Change of Habit.

  I once read that if all of Christ’s words were calmly spoken aloud, they’d only come to about one hour of play time. The King had made over forty hours of motion pictures. Though they weren’t exactly Citizen Kane, it was still an impressive body of work considering the short span he had lived, only nine years longer than Jesus.

  In his first flick, Jailhouse Rock, young Elvis played an ex-con who learned to sing in the clink. Presley played an impressive bad boy. For a moment I actually forgot I was watching the future King of Rock and Roll. Soon, though, I drifted off to sleep. When I opened my eyes, Elvis was a few years older, in some other film, crooning to a new beautiful girl on his arm. A moment later he was racing with some bad guy. Then I closed my eyes again and pondered whether—if I couldn’t find Rod East—I dare approach-Snake Major, as Floyd probably had, or just leave?

  Watching Elvis at some 1960s luau, I decided that I had already invested far too much. If I didn’t find this chimerical man tonight, I was going to risk a confrontation with the venomous Major.

  Feeling strangely disconnected from my former life, I had this sudden urge to speak to someone from back home in New York. Gustavo was dead, so I decided to try calling my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Paul. Even though I dreaded the conversation, I simply didn’t make friends easily and there was no one else left.

  I dialed his cell, only to have my call go straight to voice mail. I boldly called him at work. Unfortunately, it was too close to the news hour so I wa
s trapped in his voice mail there too. I left a message saying that if he wanted to talk, now would be a great time, and hung up.

  Then, in the distance, I saw mass movement and realized that the Blue Suede was finally opening. It was my time to shine.

  CHAPTER SIXTEN

  Several news vans were parked outside with large satellite dishes on long retractable poles that plugged the Blue Suede into the rest of the world. Unlike the outdoor stages where standing space was free and limitless, inside the numbered seats had all been sold in advance. Even the standing room was sold out.

  My performance slot was second from the last; number nineteen of the twenty performers who had made it into the finals. All of us clones were ushered into the rear entrance, then led to a large rectangular dressing room that had two long benches in front of two lines of mirrors. Elvises sat in both directions as if it were the galley of a Las Vegas slave ship. With the two rows of mirrors facing each other, it looked like an endless room with hundreds of Elvises fading in the eternal distance. I seemed to be one of only two she-Elvises, though there were three other Asians and four African Americans (or perhaps they were just two who had been reflected). Most of them seemed to know each other. I listened as they talked, exchanging jokes, gossip, and other Elvis-related news. Some of them spoke with a kind of indelible Elvis twang that made me wonder if they had lost traces of themselves in their commitment to their role.

  A short, red-faced man with a gin blossom nose let out an incredibly loud whistle, compelling everyone to listen up.

  “Okay Elvises, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m the emcee and y’all’ll go in the order that you got picked.” This meant I was second from the last. “When all the patrons are seated and the judges are ready, I’ll come back here and call out your number and you’ll go onstage. You’ll do your three songs, take a bow, and come on back inside quickly. No dedications, no speeches, no shenanigans. We have to be quick about this as we’re figuring about four or so performances per hour in order to be done by eleven-thirty and ordain this year’s King by midnight.