by Andrew Fox
I glance over at the dresser, where my pill bottles are lined up next to the Elvis. How many doctors have flushed their careers and themselves down the toilet by dipping too deeply into the medicine cabinet? This is a one-time event, I’ve told myself. I requisitioned micro dosages, since I’ll be ingesting so many compounds at once. Elvis had built up an almost supernatural drug resistance by the time he died; my constitution isn’t anywhere near as robust as his was. Am I afraid? I’d have to be already drugged not to be.
“Everyone’s at least a little afraid of the unknown,” I say, trying to belittle my fears.
“I didn’t mean to make it sound bad, you being afraid. It doesn’t make me think any less of you.” She moves closer, kicking away the covers. “If you’d want… I could take them for you. My father was a doctor. There was always stuff in the house. I’ve taken some of the drugs you bought. I could try to have the vision for you.”
“No, Margo.” I pull her to me, tightly, feeling a tenderness so sudden and intense it’s almost painful. “No. You don’t know how much that means to me. But I have to take the pills myself.”
The solo buffalo kill. The initiation into the mysteries of the tribe.
Something I have to do myself.
One of the privileges of being a guest at the Castle Towers is a complimentary “character breakfast,” followed by an early admission to the park. So I carry the pills downstairs with me to the dining hall. I also carry the Elvis, nestled securely (and heavily) against my chest in a soft denim baby carrier. I wasn’t about to leave it alone in our room, and it wouldn’t fit in the hotel’s safe.
“Oh, look!” Margo squeals.
The characters are waiting for us when we step into the dining hall. The big-headed costumes are showing the combination of wear and neglect. But all of them remain instantly recognizable, particularly to someone my age. The Mouse is here, and the Duck, and the Mouse’s Wife, and the Mouse’s Dog. Even the Mouse’s Best Pal Who Might Be a Dog (or Might Not).
I wonder if Margo could name any of them? She was a baby when the old Disney empire was dismembered and MannaSantos grabbed up the theme parks (I’ve always wondered how this fit into their overall business plan). We get in line at the buffet tables. What’s truly striking is the lack of children. Only a third of the younger couples have a child with them. I don’t spot a single family with more than one youngster.
I load up my tray with orange juice and Leanie-Lean sausage and bacon, following Harri’s suggestion to stick to meats. Eggs, too, might not yet have been adulterated by Metaboloft, so I don’t object when Margo loads up her plate with fluffy yellow mounds. I haven’t told her yet about Metaboloft. I haven’t had the heart to. Who wants to tell someone they love the world is coming to an end? Particularly when there’s not a damned thing one can do about it?
Or is there? The weight of the Elvis drags on my shoulders, but it lifts me up at the same time. Ever since I regained it, I’ve felt a feeling I haven’t had for the longest time. Hope.
I eat my breakfast, not wanting to take all those powerful pills on an empty stomach. While assembling the elements of my Elvis cocktail on my plate, I sense bulky presences crowding behind me. The Duck and the Mouse’s Wife. Margo smiles wickedly, then reaches in her purse for a camera. “Daddy’s taking his heart medications,” she says. “He’s got so, so many pills to take. But he’s such a good boy about it.”
Furry arms reach around my shoulders. I reach for one of the pills. Now, with the Elvis resting on my lap, I’m not afraid anymore. Even though there’ll be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, everything, somehow, will be all right. I pop the Percodan into my mouth, then down it with a slug of Florida’s finest orange juice.
Margo raises the camera to her face. “Smile, Daddy!” she says.
By the time a hotel porter arrives with the wheelchair Margo had requested for me, one of my key questions is answered. I had wondered which of the three types of drugs I’d swallowed, downers, opiates, or speed, would kick in first. Not the speed, that’s for sure. I fall into the wheelchair like a sack of grain. It’s not that my legs aren’t capable of supporting me anymore, just that they aren’t of a mind to.
“The wheelchair was a good idea, wasn’t it?” Margo says, steering me out of the lobby.
“Def… definitely.”
The blue, cloudless sky looks hyper-real. I feel my head tumbling forward. I arrest its fall just before my nose would’ve flattened against the top of the Elvis jar. Jesus. Have the barbiturates locked out the other drugs? Will I pass out? Or will I spend my day awake but helplessly drooling, every muscle in my body absurdly relaxed, including, possibly, my bladder and bowels?
This last thought hits me like ice water. “How’re you doing?” Margo asks.
“Hanging in there,” I say. My mouth feels like it’s jammed with toffee. What I heard myself say was Hann. Ging. Giin. Thairr.
We roll past the entrance to Cinderella’s Castle. I stare up at the highest spire, my mouth involuntarily flopping open. Rumor has it that Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen body resides in a penthouse apartment at the top of the castle, waiting for the day when medical science can return him to the fast-vanishing children of America.
As if she’s read my mind, Margo looks up and asks, “You think he’s still up there? Walt Disney? Or did MannaSantos take his body away?”
“May… maybe still there.” Or maybe MannaSantos took him away, like they removed his name and likeness from this park he built. Did they ever meet, Disney and Elvis? Elvis would love Disney; Elvis loved nearly everyone. But would Elvis be welcome in Disney’s world? Maybe certain incarnations; the movie Elvis, the pasteurized Elvis of G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii. But the other Elvises? Disney would take a horse-whip to them.
Margo begins rolling me down Main Street, U.S.A. It’s time travel on the cheap, a small-town commercial thoroughfare lined with Victorian and Edwardian storefronts.
“I always wondered why this was here,” Margo says. “What does any of this have to do with movies or fairy tales?”
“Re-creation… of Disney’s Midwestern… hometown.” Actually, it has a lot to do with fairy tales. Hitching posts, but no horse shit. Saloons, but no puking drunks.
“So this is Disney’s ideal America?” Margo says. “It’s Dullsville, U.S.A., that’s what it is.”
As she directs us toward some other land, I realize what the street is missing — if it aspires to be America, all of America, it needs the Warner Brothers characters. Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck. Wile E. Coyote. The ying to the Disney cartoons’ yang. The Disney characters were the modest, quiet ones, Midwestern as their creator. Rural, family oriented, mild as milk. The Warner Brothers characters, on the other hand, were big-city types, even when their backdrops were barnyards — immigrants, climbers, wise-guys. Braggarts, never averse to using a stick of dynamite to make their point. If the Disney characters were older-vintage Americans, then the Warner Brothers characters were Jews and Italians, Mexicans and maybe even blacks, immigrants who came later or who didn’t start making their mark on the culture until the turn of the twentieth century.
As Margo wheels me into the outskirts of Frontierland and Liberty Square, I sense an awakening of the Dexedrines. I’d wondered whether the speed and the downers would simply cancel each other out. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead of diluting each other, the two types of drugs have layered themselves. The downers are on top, dulling my reflexes, slowing my sense of time. But just beneath them, the speed simmers. One good shove, and my interior world will flip over, the two drugs inverting themselves like a pair of wrestlers.
Ahead of us, a paddle wheel steamboat plays its calliope on an artificial lake. Puffs of smoke rise from the chimneys of rough-hewn log cabins, spreading a kind of frontier perfume. I pull the wheelchair’s hand brake, reaching down into the seething Dexedrine for coherence. “Muh-Margo. I’ve got a question for you. Elvis — is he a Disney character or a Warner Brothers character?”
Thank God for pirated vid-9s. “Yes, that’s them. The other pantheon of American animation.”
“So you’re asking me if Elvis was more like Mickey Mouse or like Bugs Bunny?”
“Sort of. Try to keep all the other characters in mind, too. Donald Duck. Daffy Duck. The Road Runner.”
She purses her lips. “That’s easy,” she says, a satisfied smile on her face. “Elvis was a Warner Brothers character. Mickey Mouse wouldn’t do the things Elvis did. Daffy Duck would. What do you think?”
A warmth appears at the base of my spine and begins spreading. “Elvis,” I say, smiling, “is both”.
“How do you figure that?”
“He was born Disney. English and Scots-Irish ancestors, Protestant, raised in a small, rural town. In some ways he stayed Disney all his life. Revered his parents. Adored singing with gospel quartets. But the thing that set him apart, that made Elvis Elvis, was that he was always reaching across the line, seeking to encompass the other America, the Warner Brothers America. Even as a teenager, he dressed with a style as way out as Little Richard’s. He spent years studying the great Italian singers. Half his best friends were Jewish — in Memphis, of all places! On his mother’s side, he had a Jewish great-great-grandmother and Cherokee ancestry. Disney and Warner Brothers — do you see it now?”
Margo nervously glances at the small crowd nearby lined up for keel-boat rides, some of whom stare openly at me. “What I see, Doctor Louis,” she says with good-humored sternness, “is you not making much sense. How about we go see a show? Maybe afterward I’ll take you on a water-flume ride. Cool you off.”
She rolls me toward the Hall of Presidents. That spreading, angelic warmth I’ve been feeling has to be the Dilaudid kicking in. The experience — it’s not just lying on a warm, gel-filled waterbed — it’s being the warm, gel-filled waterbed. Inside, the hall looks just like Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Solemn-faced robots of our fifty-one presidents sit quietly on stage. The lights come up, and the robots jerk to life, clearing their throats, coughing, muttering like old men with bad prostates. Andrew Jackson pretends to notice that an audience has gathered while they were dozing, and Gerald Ford waves hello. Then Washington, Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt begin bickering over who has the handsomest carving on Mount Rushmore, with Abe Lincoln remaining above the fray. And so it goes.
They all look so damned Puritan sitting up there. Even John F. Kennedy, lover of pneumatic Marilyn Monroe, even he has the dead whiff of asceticism about him.
I feel like I’m suffocating. Like there’s a horrible weight on me, not physical, but spiritual. This Puritanism — it’s what’s been suffocating this country for the past twenty-five years. Pleasure hating, judgmental. Where’s William Taft? Where have they hidden roly-poly William Taft, our fattest president ever, the counterweight to all this goddamned pinched uprightness?
He sits quietly in the back row, pushed off to the side like a class dunce with William Jefferson Clinton, who also has a noticeable paunch and jowls. The two Slick Willies, slick with the grease of juicy hamburgers running down their chins. The forgotten presidents of Fat America.
Fat America! Yes, there was a Fat America once. Americans drove the biggest cars in the world. They lived in the biggest houses, launched the biggest rockets, ate supersized restaurant meals. They listened to the music of Fats Waller, Fats Domino, Fats Navarro, Al “Jumbo” Hirt. And Elvis. What was the frontier for, after all? The American frontier, ever expanding to make room for all our stuff, our superhighways, our franchises and mega-malls and theme parks. And, yes, our expanding bodies.
Fat America dreamed it, and Thin America designed it, and together they built it and lived in it. Maybe they didn’t really like each other, but together, the ascetics and the gluttons, the Calvinists and the Mardi Gras Catholics, they made America the dreamland for the rest of the world, the place where streets were paved with gold.
But the partnership between the two Americas cracked apart. Thin America consumed Fat America, but it achieved no fullness. We’ve been shrinking ever since, withering and shrinking. The incredible shrinking dreamland…
Margo touches my shoulder. “Are you seeing anything? Are the drugs working?”
Am I seeing anything? I’m seeing Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jerry Ford trade quips about their golf games as if nothing’s the matter. And still William Taft sits in the back, silent, a husk.
My vision clouds with tears. If only he’d say something! If only he’d take command of the stage, assert himself, it might make a difference —
“President Taft!” I struggle to rise from the wheelchair. “Speak out! Don’t let them silence you! A shrinking America is a dying America!”
Heads turn. Struggling with the weight of the Elvis, I gain a visceral new appreciation for Elvis’s own struggles with his weight, how the once lean, hungry boy, now saddled with a sagging paunch, must’ve wrestled with the changes in his body and the smirks of the national media. The hell with them! He overcame, he learned to bear up under his weight like Atlas carrying the world, dabbing his sweat on hundreds of scarves that he threw into a sea of outstretched hands, to those who’d loved him thin and fat, boyish and middle-aged, angelic and devilish both.
I grab hold of the seat ahead of me. I will rise. I force my legs to straighten. Icy hail cascades from my hips down to my feet. I’m blind, my sight clouded by a whirlpool of colors and pinpricks of exploding light.
And when it clears, I see, I see —
I see a valley with great mountains on both sides, and the valley is split by a growing fissure. It’s the Continental Divide, and it’s growing wider, deeper, more terrible. The foothills of the mountains are beginning to tumble in, chunks of granite falling into an abyss that stretches to the earth’s core.
And then Elvis comes. His head is high as the clouds. Somehow he’s all the Elvises at once, Sun Studios Elvis and Army Elvis and Hollywood Elvis and Vegas Elvis, his face and body and costumes changing faster than my eyes can follow. He straddles the chasm, planting a colossal boot on each side. And then he begins flexing his mighty thigh muscles, straining to pull the two crumbling faces of the fissure closer together. He won’t let this happen. He won’t let us be pulled apart. But despite his groans and golden sweat, the chasm continues to grow wider, spreading his feet farther apart. Wider and wider, and wider still, until Elvis’s pants begin to split and the cataclysm sounds like the fabric of the Milky Way being torn asunder.
But then there is another sound — (impossible, unbearable, rapturous) — all of Elvis’s Top Ten Hits being sung at once by the same voice. And the face this sound emerges from — Elvis’s face — it’s red and jowly and shining with sheets of sweat, eyes staring heavenward for new sources of strength. And the earth quakes, for with a mighty thrust of his pelvis, Elvis halts the growth of the chasm. And then, as the hundred commingled songs grow louder and louder, yet ever more sweet, Elvis begins reversing the outward flight of tectonic plates — he’s bringing them together, bringing us together, Disney America and Warner Brothers America, Thin America and Fat America —
“He’s saving us! He’s saving the country! He’s healing the rift, binding up our wounds —”
Hands push me back into the wheelchair. Margo is arguing with someone in a Minuteman costume. “Can’t you hear it?” I ask the Minuteman. “Can’t you hear him singing?”
The final vibrations of Elvis’s voice buzz around my cranium, petering out like the fading fragments of a meteor shower. He’s going away. It’s all going away.
“I’m very sorry, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to exit the attraction —”
“What is this,” Margo snarls at him, “Liberty Square or Fascistland?”
“No,” I say, waving weakly, “no, it’s all right. We’ll go. Let’s just go.”
I take one last look at William Taft, still sitting quiet as a med
icine ball, but possibly with the tiniest of smiles peering out from beneath his walrus mustache. Then Margo, muttering angrily, wheels me back out into the sunlight.
“Those assholes,” she says. “You weren’t bothering anybody. It’s just a bunch of dumb robots in there. If anyone missed any of that amazingly clever dialogue, they could’ve just sat through it again —”
“It’s all right,” I say, reaching up to pat her hand. Her skin is as warm as a winter campfire. The distant January sunlight wraps everything in a fine mesh of translucent gold.
She parks the wheelchair facing a bench, then sits. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
Its sheer overwhelmingness is already dimming in my brain. Losing the realness of it, the sense of presence, is immensely sad. “Yes. I want to tell you, I want that very much, but —”
She leans in closer. “But what? What’s the matter?”
“But…” I feel squeezed, tight. There’s a pressure inside me, pushing, insistent. Then I remember my own body. All that Florida orange juice I drank. “But first you need to get me to a men’s room.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Priorities. Even Elvis himself was known to walk out on a concert when the call of nature became too insistent. Liberty Square shifts to Adventureland before we spot a sign for a men’s room. Margo looks at me questioningly. “So how do you want to do this?” she asks. “Do you want me to, uh, you know, go inside with you? Help out?”
My pride, assaulted by images of my father, dependent on nursing aides for the simplest of personal tasks, rebels at the notion. Actually, I’m no longer a bowl of overcooked noodles. “I think I’ll be all right,” I say, rising without a stumble from the wheelchair.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She stares at the rounded burden hanging on my chest. “Won’t that kinda get in the way? I’ll hold it for you.”
Let go of the Elvis? The last time I let go of it, I was cursed with twenty-six years of unhappiness.