‘I’d love that, son,’ says Gladys, sitting on the edge of the tub to finish her Pepsi. ‘But it’d be wasted on me. I can’t drive.’
‘You’re forgetting. I can hire somebody to drive it for you.’
Gladys imagines herself sitting in the back, watching the high collar of a coloured man in a cap.
‘I’d like to sit up front while you drive,’ she says.
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Long as you don’t keep griping about my speed.’
She kisses him on the cheek, and he grabs her hand and holds it tight.
‘Thank you, Mama,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘Now, I gotta fix supper, and you gotta do the impossible, Elvie. You gotta sit still for an hour.’
‘An hour?’
She laughs. ‘It needs to develop. And then we gotta neutralise you … but that don’t take nearly so long.’
As she’s leaving the room, he says, ‘How much do I owe you, Mama? For the hairdo?’
‘Just a pink Cadillac,’ she replies.
At ten-fifteen, Elvis meets Red to walk to Beale. They march along North Main in silence, both concentrating hard on smoking their cigarettes. Red walks fast, head down, shoulders bunched, but Elvis is glad he doesn’t suggest riding the streetcar, because he needs every cent he has in his pocket for this evening.
They’re over halfway along before Elvis comes up with, ‘What music do you like?’
‘Anything Dewey Phillips spins is all right by me,’ says Red.
‘Dewey’s crazy,’ says Elvis. ‘Dee-gaw! Never miss a show. You hear it just now?’
‘Sure.’ Red launches into his own impression. ‘I’m as nervous as a cotton-pickin’ frog on the freeway with his hopper busted!’
Elvis laughs. ‘You ever go up to that coloured church in East Trigg to hear ol’ Reverend Brewster?’
‘Ain’t too keen on churches.’
‘Music there’s supposed to be real fine, though. Back in Tupelo, I used to hang round this coloured store. Heard a cat named Ulysses Mayhorn play his trombone.’ Elvis has never before used the word cat in this way – the way that Dewey uses it – and it feels good. Red flicks his cigarette butt into the road. ‘That right?’
‘He kinda liked me, too, you know? Showed me how to play, a little,’ says Elvis. ‘I miss ol’ Mayhorn.’
It’s not his first time on Beale, but it is the first time he’s been here after dark. As they walk, Elvis is tempted to pause and look in the windows and doorways of every pawnshop, drugstore, bar, restaurant and pool room, but he senses Red won’t stand for it, so he keeps walking, head down, until they get to Lansky’s, when he is compelled to look up. Slowing his feet, he takes in the lighted display: an electric-blue suit teamed with a pair of crocodile shoes, the colour of canaries. He almost expects to see the face of Mr Lansky peering out, inch tape curled about his neck, pristine shirtsleeves rolled neatly to the elbow; but, of course, it’s way after hours. The last time Elvis walked past, Mr Lansky noticed him gazing in the window and nodded in acknowledgement. After that, Elvis had felt an inch taller. Maybe next time, he can actually go in the store.
The sidewalk near the Palace is thronging with white people, all here to see the Midnight Ramble. Cars crawl along, some honking their horns. Most of the crowd are men, and almost all of them drunk. They holler to one another, daring their friends to risk going into the club known as ‘the Castle of Missing Men’. Elvis has heard the stories of shootings there. A few women in towering heels and bright lipstick cling to their men, and there’s a smell of lilac perfume, liquor, barbecued meat, and the fresh fish that was sold earlier in the day from the sidewalk. A warm wind blows up from the Mississippi, causing the women to clutch their companions tighter, and Elvis to reach once more for the comb in his pocket.
As they wait in line, Red talks in a low voice about the girls round the back of the Palace.
‘These girls are famous for popping white boys’ cherries.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Guy I know went there and blacked out cold, right between a hooker’s thighs! She brought him round at her chest, like she was nursing him, and he went and fainted again at the sight of her big brown titties.’
‘That’s crazy,’ says Elvis, looking over his shoulder to check if anybody has heard.
‘Plumb wasted five dollars!’ Red sighs. Then he leans close and whispers, ‘Could be you tonight, E.’
‘I ain’t got five dollars.’
‘She’ll do it by hand for one-fifty. Or, you know, the other way’ – Red opens and closes his mouth, like a fish – ‘for three.’
Elvis snorts.
‘Ain’t it about time you got broke in?’ says Red. ‘You seventeen now, ain’t you? That’s a man, near about.’
‘How you know I ain’t already broke in?’
Red draws back and smiles widely. ‘You ain’t.’
‘Maybe I wanna keep myself clean for a white girl.’
‘Man,’ says Red, ‘don’t you know nothing? These coloured girls are for practising on. They love it. And no white girl will mind you knowing a few things. In fact, she’ll thank you for it.’
‘Move it along, boys,’ says a voice from behind, and they follow the pack into the theatre.
Inside, Chinese lanterns hang from the smoke-stained ceilings. There’s a smell of roasted peanuts and whiskey, and the purple carpet sticks to Elvis’s shoes.
They take their seats – the cheapest, at the back of the balcony, behind a group of guys who are passing a flask of something along the row and already whooping, even though the lights are still up. Taking a look around, Elvis sees that he and Red are the youngest there. Red’s orange crew cut stands out from the crowd, as always, but everyone is too excited to pay them much mind.
Red says, ‘So what you done to your hair now?’
‘Nothing,’ says Elvis.
‘Looks different to this morning.’
‘Just fixed it up again, is all.’
‘Lookin’ good for the ladies, after.’
‘Them ain’t no ladies.’
The lights go down and a drum roll starts.
A stout black man wearing thick eyeglasses and a green velvet tux strides out. ‘Well, yeeeessir-eee, it’s Nat Dee!’ he announces, and a great cheer goes up.
‘That the guy from the radio?’ Elvis asks Red, who nods, not taking his eyes from the stage.
‘… and have we got a show for you tonight! A Midnight Ramble to end all rambles and all midnights! Now let’s warm y’all up with a taste of those Vampiiiiiin’ Babies!’ He leaves the stage, clapping, and the band launches into ‘Beale Street Blues’.
The curtain draws back to reveal a line of black women wearing silver skullcaps decorated with bursts of feathers. Through their short silver gowns, the outlines of their underclothes are visible. For the first few bars of the song, they do nothing but stand on their silver heels, one stockinged leg in front of the other, hands on their hips, smiling knowingly.
The theatre erupts into whistling.
Then, as the singer begins, the whistling subsides and the audience grows focused.
At first, Red nudges Elvis’s knee repeatedly, sniggering as one of the girls shakes her ass at the band. But he soon settles into silence, and, like everyone else, leans forward in his seat, clutching his thighs. Elvis does the same, trying not to blink. One of the girls, the tallest one whose ironed hair hangs to her shoulders, seems to be looking right at him as she comes to the edge of the stage, dips her knees, winks and blows a kiss. Joining the rest of the line, her hips fly this way and that and her shoulders shimmy towards the audience, as if she is longing to touch them, or perhaps to be touched by them.
When the girls remove their gowns, throwing them into the pit in one swoop, the men around Elvis stand and make barking noises. Elvis stands too, his eyes glued to the tall girl, noting the way she holds one hand elegantly aloft before swinging it in a circle, while somehow managing to unclasp her bra with the other han
d. Then, as one, the girls turn their backs to the audience and, casting a glance over their shoulders, let their brassieres fall to the floor.
Unable to bear the tension, Elvis begins to laugh.
The barking and whistling becomes louder; so loud that he can’t hear the music.
When the girls finally turn around, ten pairs of black nipples bob into view, like a line of cherries on a one-armed bandit.
At this, Elvis doubles over, absolutely hysterical.
1953
One Saturday afternoon in spring, a loud honking coming from the street has Elvis rushing to the window of his family’s new apartment on Alabama Avenue. An old car draws up and the horn sounds again in four short bursts.
‘What’s going on down there?’ asks Gladys, without moving from the couch.
But Elvis is already out of the door.
He’s been borrowing Vernon’s car for a while now, using it to go across town with Red to McKellar Lake or K’s Drive-in. He’s saving for his own automobile, but so far he’s managed to amass only ten dollars.
‘Daddy!’ he calls, bursting onto the sidewalk. ‘Daddy!’
Vernon is leaning against the driver’s door, arms folded. ‘What do you reckon to her, son?’
Elvis skips around the car, letting his fingers trace its smooth outlines. It is pale green, with rounded fenders and lamps like bug’s eyes, and not a little rust around the doors and hubcaps.
‘She’s just about the best-looking automobile I ever laid eyes on,’ he announces.
Vernon opens the door. ‘Hop in,’ he says, sliding across to the passenger side. ‘Let’s take her for a spin.’
Elvis glances up at the apartment. From the window, Gladys stares down without waving.
‘What about Mama?’ he asks.
‘What about her?’ says Vernon, tossing him the keys.
Since they moved to Alabama Avenue, his mama hasn’t seemed eager to leave the apartment. She didn’t want to move again, but because their combined incomes were over the limit set by the Housing Authority, the family had no choice. The apartment is older and shabbier than the one at the Courts; the kitchen is tiny, the bathroom has no shower, and each night Elvis takes the couch. But their landlord, Rabbi Fruchter, who lives downstairs, is friendly enough and doesn’t seem to mind when they use his telephone. Elvis knows this private apartment is, in fact, an important step up for their family, even though Gladys does not appear to care that they have escaped the public-housing system.
The car smells of tobacco and oil. He guns the engine.
‘Hear that?’ says Vernon. ‘That’s a Lincoln engine all right. Real low and smooth.’
It sounds pretty growly to Elvis. He rests his elbow in the place where the side window should be. Seeing him looking at the hole, Vernon says, ‘We can get her fixed up with some cardboard there.’
The steering wheel is slippery beneath Elvis’s fingers as he guides the car along the street.
‘You think Mama’s OK, Daddy?’
‘She took the move hard, is all.’
‘She can quit her job just as soon as I graduate.’
‘Amen.’
They turn onto Poplar Avenue. Vernon and Elvis both notice two pretty girls on the sidewalk, their hair scraped back into identical swinging ponytails, but it is Vernon who leans over to sound the horn. The girls give the car a glance but offer no other reaction.
‘So you got your own car,’ says Vernon, grinning.
‘Say what?’
‘She’s all yours, son.’
Elvis gapes at his father. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Keep your eyes on the road. It’s high time you got your own vehicle. A young man needs his own mode of transportation.’
‘I’ll give you the money I got saved—’
‘You bet you will. Now all you need’s a girl to go in it, huh? Got anybody of special interest at the moment?’
During his last months at Lauderdale, Betty McMahon stopped showing up in the laundry room, leaving Elvis to watch his own reflection in the washtub and run through his expanding repertoire of songs about lost love.
‘No, sir,’ he says.
‘Well, good. Play the field, that’s my advice. And never fall for an older woman, ’cause they never, ever get any younger.’
Elvis steps on the gas.
It’s not a girl he wants in the car, though. It’s Red.
That evening, Elvis is determined to take his friend with him on a journey. After his shift at Loew’s Theater, he removes his uniform, puts on his green shirt and blue jacket (which he feels complement the car), re-sculpts his hair, and drives to K’s in the hope of finding him.
It’s busy on the lot, with car-hops weaving in and out of vehicles and groups of kids sitting on their hoods to talk loud and drink colas. Elvis spots Red with a gang of football guys. He has one foot up on the fender of Jerry Bryson’s car, which, Elvis notes, is newer and shinier than his own. Driving up as close as he can, Elvis sounds the horn and yells Red’s name. He has to yell several times before Red screws up his burger wrapper, tosses it to the asphalt, and saunters over.
‘Nice wheels, E. You pay extra for the rust?’
‘Get in. We’re taking us a little trip.’
‘Kinda late, ain’t it?’
‘I wanna show you something.’
Red laughs. ‘You oughta take a date, boy.’
‘That’s for tomorrow night,’ says Elvis.
‘You ain’t gonna to sing to me, are you?’
‘You coming or not?’
Red glances back at the group, who have stopped talking and are watching Elvis’s car. Then he opens the door and climbs in.
The moon is full, hanging heavy and golden in the sky. It looks to Elvis like it might burst. They drive along Lamar Avenue towards the highway. From the sidewalk comes the occasional laughter of girls, the shouts of men, the smell of fried chicken, and the sound of music as they pass the juke joints that become wilder towards the edge of town. Elvis steers with one hand, a faint smile on his face, remembering how he’d longed, as a boy, to have the freedom his daddy had, driving that truck through the darkness from one mysterious place to the next. Now he is on the road for real, with a friend beside him, and a journey to complete.
Red is talking about a girl named Wendy Snipes.
‘Swear to God, E, she’s the best-looking gal I ever seen.’
‘Even better than them Vampin’ Babies?’ asks Elvis.
‘Funny guy,’ says Red. ‘Your cherry popped yet?’
There’s a short silence.
‘Now, you gotta give me more information than that,’ says Red.
Elvis flicks a look over at his friend. ‘I’m working on it.’
To distract Red from this conversation, Elvis turns on the radio. They’re out of town now, and the highway stretches blackly ahead. They pass water towers, cattle farms, grain silos, pine forests, churches. He relaxes into his seat. Driving into the night with Kay Starr’s voice coming over the airwaves is much better than trying to sleep on the couch, especially after a shift at Loew’s, when the pictures from the screen seem to flicker across the insides of his closed eyelids. Those times he can’t turn off the pictures, he’ll slip out of the apartment and sit on the porch, gazing up at the windows of the buildings across the street. There’s always a light on somewhere, and Elvis finds it comforting to imagine the folks behind the glass, still awake, living their lives after dark.
‘We could just keep going,’ he says, ‘all the way to the end of the road.’
‘Where we headed, anyways?’ asks Red.
‘Tupelo, Mississippi.’
Red sits up straight. ‘What in the hell for?’
‘It’s where I’m from.’
‘Jesus, E! I figured you was taking me to some roadhouse—’
‘Don’t you wanna see where I was born?’
‘—reckoned on shooting some pool, maybe scoring us a couple of hot gals.’
‘It’s a shotgu
n shack. Two rooms. My twin brother died in there.’
Silence. The signposts along the highway seem to have run out. On either side of the car, thick forest rises up.
‘E, that’s real tragic and all,’ says Red in a low voice, ‘but it’s Friday night, man. Don’t you wanna get a little fun?’
‘I figured you’d wanna see it. It’d mean a lot to me.’
Red sighs, and, resting his forehead on the dashboard, pretends to sleep.
Elvis slaps him across the back of the neck. ‘Wake up, man!’
Red continues to snore theatrically.
‘Suit yourself,’ mutters Elvis. ‘But we are going to Tupelo.’
Red lifts his head and settles back into his seat. ‘If you say so,’ he says, before going to sleep for real.
The road gets rough around Pontotoc and Red stirs but doesn’t wake. It’s two in the morning before they reach Tupelo. As he drives along North Green, Elvis finds his fingers tapping at the wheel with increasing speed. After they first moved to Memphis, he and his mama would regularly ride the bus here to visit friends and family, but he hasn’t been back to town in a couple of years, and he’s suddenly afraid that the whole place will have changed. Perhaps he’ll look around and recognise nothing and nobody.
Then he spots Mayhorn’s store, and his old house, and Sam’s place, and the goods train lets out a long wail almost as if to greet him. He cruises down a deserted Main Street just to check off the stores: the Black and White, Hall’s Café, Weiner’s Jewelry, TKE’s. Crossing the tracks, he points the Lincoln towards East Tupelo. Here the night is blacker than in Memphis, and louder, too: the bullfrogs, cicadas and katydids all welcome him with rising chants as the car rumbles slowly along the Old Saltillo Road.
Elvis pulls up beside the house where he was born. Closing his eyes, he breathes in the air, smelling the damp earth, listening to the night music.
Red stretches and yawns. ‘Where we at?’ he mumbles.
‘East Tupelo, Mississippi,’ says Elvis.
Red rubs his eyes. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he says. ‘Guess you weren’t kidding, then.’
Graceland Page 18