Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself

by Lewis Grizzard

  “What if you were a fish?” Stinky asked his irate camp-mates. “Would you want to be stuck on a stringer, or to be free to go back to your family in the river?”

  We realized there was no point in arguing with anybody who worried about fish being taken from their families, so we tied Stinky to a tree and went back to breaking up fish families for our evening meal. Stinky wouldn’t eat that night because he said it would make him feel guilty eating somebody’s father or mother.

  It wasn’t long afterwards that Stinky became the first vegetarian I ever met. At school they served him a special plate; nobody would eat with him and Stinky soon became known as “Bean Breath.”

  In high school, Stinky joined the Drama Club and wrote a poem for the school paper entitled “An Ode to Vegetables.” I remember the closing lines:

  “Just because I don’t eat meat

  Doesn’t mean that I’m not neat.”

  I suppose we were cruel to Stinky, which caused him to rebel against the norm even more. After he graduated from high school, we heard he went off in the mountains somewhere and ate a lot of roots and berries and lived on what he could earn selling the belts and Indian moccasins he still made.

  Next, we heard that he had broken his parents’ hearts by growing his hair long and taking up dope-smoking and running off to Canada to avoid the draft. He also was living in sin with a woman who didn’t wear shoes or shave under her arms. He had met her at a rock concert.

  I don’t have any idea what ever happened to Stinky, but I suppose he’s still out there in the hills somewhere, dressed like Cochise and munching on sunflower seeds.

  * * *

  It is odd — and beneficial, too — how time changes ideas and mends feelings. After the war in Vietnam ended, most of the hippies bathed themselves, cut their hair, quit wearing sandals, and quit picking their feet. Today most of them are stockbrokers or fertilizer salesmen.

  But they left their mark, and again it was the hair. Do you know who wears their hair long today? Good ol’ boys, that’s who. You can see it coming out from under their International Harvester and Red Man caps. Know who wears their hair neat and short? Gays and those men you see in clothing ads in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (although that may be a redundancy).

  As for my own hair, here’s the rest of the shaggy story:

  After the war, longer hair became the accepted fashion for men, and I followed suit. Sideburns even made a comeback. I had long hair and sideburns, and all of a sudden it wasn’t possible to go to a regular barber shop anymore. Men had to go to stylists, and where they once had paid three bucks for a haircut, it was now costing them $12.50 and they had to make an appointment.

  The first time I went to a hair stylist — it was around 1974 — I made an appointment with the renowned Mr. Phyllis.

  “What on earth have you been shampooing with, my dear boy?” asked Mr. Phyllis.

  “Soap,” I said.

  “Oh, God, no,” Mr. Phyllis recoiled in horror. “Soap dries the hair and splits the ends.”

  I started to say my end had been split my entire life, but I decided it would not be wise to talk about such while I was alone in the room with Mr. Phyllis.

  He immediately took charge of my hair. He shampooed it with an odd-smelling substance, put conditioner on it, and then “sculptured” it. Finally he put the blow dryer to me, and when it was over, I paid him the $12.50.

  I felt a little cheated. At the barber shop, not only had I been charged a mere three bucks, but the barber usually told me a joke, too.

  “Fellow had these two sows he wanted to get mated,” went my barber’s favorite joke. “He didn’t have a boar, but he knew a fellow who did. So he called him up and asked if he could bring his two sows up to his farm and let that ol’ boar have a go at ’em.

  “The fellow said to bring ’em on up, so he put the two sows in the back of his pickup and drove ’em to his neighbor’s farm.

  “That ol’ boar got real interested in his job and really did some work on the two sows. There was all sorts of gruntin’ and oinkin’ goin’ on, ’cause when you got three thousand pounds of pork in the heat of passion, you got something wild.

  “Anyway, when the ol’ boar was finished, the man asked his neighbor how he would know if the job had took. His neighbor said to look out at his hogs the next morning, and if they were layin’ up in the sunshine, everything was okay.But if they were still wallowin’ in the mud, he’d have to bring ’em back.

  “Next morning, he looked out his window and his hogs were wallowin’ in the mud, so he put ’em back in his truck and drove ’em back to see the boar again.

  “Same thing happened. His neighbor’s wife broke out in a sweat watchin’ them hogs, and the dogs got to barkin’ loud and they had to throw cold water on ’em.

  “Next morning’, though, it was the same thing. Them two hogs was still wallowin’ in the mud. Man took his hogs up there a third time. Next mornin’, he couldn’t bear to look out at his hog pen, so he said to his wife, ‘Honey, look out there and tell me if my hogs are sittin’ in the sunshine or wallowin’ in the mud.’

  “She looked out the window and said, ‘Neither one.’

  “The man said, ‘Well, where are they?’

  “The fellow’s wife said, ‘One of ’em’s in the truck ridin’ shotgun, and the other one’s blowin’ the horn.’“

  Mr. Phyllis didn’t know any jokes, or at least not any like that. He was always too busy talking about his cat or watering the plants in his salon to tell jokes.

  After I had gone to the trouble of having my hair styled, I thought it would be wise to take care of what my $12.50 had bought me, so I vowed never to wash my hair with soap again and went out to buy some shampoo.

  “Do you have any shampoo for men?” I asked a saleslady in the cosmetics department.

  “I think you will like this,” she answered, handing me a bottle of shampoo. “It has the faint aroma of apricot.”

  Apricot?

  “If you don’t care for apricot,” the woman continued, “perhaps you would like something with an herbal essence.”

  What I really wanted, I said, was something that smelled like soap. I didn’t want to go around with my head smelling like a fruit salad.

  I also purchased an electric hair dryer, of course. Previously, I had allowed my hair to dry naturally. When I was in a hurry, I would simply shake my head back and forth like a dog does when he’s wet. With longer hair, however, I was told that this was impossible, even though I knew I’d seen a collie dry itself off with just two or three good shakes.

  After purchasing the hair dryer, I also had to buy hair-spray. When I bought it, I said a silent prayer that my father wasn’t somewhere looking down upon his only son buying gook that sprayed out of a can to keep my hair in its original, upright and locked position after it had been blown dry and styled each morning.

  But it had been so much simpler for my father. He hadn’t needed shampoo or hair dryers or hairspray, because nobody else used anything like that when he was a young man about town. Men were men in his day. He would have hit Mr. Phyllis square in the mouth if that dandy had tried to sculpt his hair.

  The hair situation is even more confusing today. Mine is shorter than it was when I first allowed it to grow in the seventies, but it still covers my ears. I got rid of the sideburns, but now I’ve got a beard and a mustache. I’m not certain what my father would think of that.

  “Ain’t but two kinds of people who wear beards and mustaches,” he likely would have said. “That’s queers and movie stars, and I ain’t seen none of your movies lately “

  But if he’s concerned about my hirsute appearance, I wonder what he thinks about punk rockers who have their hair styled to look like the back of a horned frog. And I wonder what he thinks of people these days who dye their hair all sorts of colors, including orange and pink. My only hope is that heaven has mellowed him.

  But what of me? I’m still here trying to deal with all this cra
ziness. Hair and music have been a problem, but I have managed to cope with them after some degree of agony. But there have been so many other changes and dilemmas in the modern world. For instance, whose idea was it that men all of a sudden were supposed to be sensitive and enjoy fooling around with flowers and were even supposed to cry in front of women if they felt like it?

  Each time I thought I knew all the answers to modern-day questions, somebody would up and change the questions.

  And just when I thought there was nothing left to go haywire, I lost complete touch with the reality that was once men’s clothing.

  Excuse me for a moment, while I change into my leisure suit.

  8

  The Great Double-Knit Dilemma

  WHEN WE’RE YOUNG, we naturally attempt to dress as our peers do, lest we be ostracized and laughed at. My wardrobe in college, for instance, consisted of the traditional khaki pants and button-down Gant shirts, a couple of V-neck sweaters, a London Fog raincoat, and a pair of Weejuns.

  I also had a couple of pairs of socks, but I wore them only to funerals, weddings, or when I had to visit the dean. It was considered quite the fashion not to wear socks with Weejuns. I didn’t know this when I arrived on campus at the University of Georgia, but soon after pledging a fraternity, one of my brothers in the bonds, Wally Walrus we called him, took me aside and explained the business about the socks.

  The way we dressed on Deep South campuses in the sixties was, of course, quite different from the way students dressed at those schools where there was much dissent about all that was traditional. I’m happy the movement did not hit at Georgia until I was out of school; otherwise, I might have had to find a second-hand store to buy myself some blue jeans with patches and an old Army jacket, like the kids were wearing while they were taking over the administration building at Hofstra or some such place as that.

  The way we dressed back then, and the way I continued to dress for several years out of school, is now called the “prep-pie look.” This style of dress is yet the target of much derision from those who still don’t understand that it does make a difference what sort of animal emblem appears on one’s shirt. Some things, I would say to them, are simply the result of good breeding and cannot be explained to anyone who wears Hush Puppies.

  I would say that, but I won’t, because I admit there was a time when I became totally confused about what to wear, and there was a time when I also allowed myself to stray from tradition as far as my clothing was concerned.

  I blame all this on Richard Nixon, too. How could one not go off course a bit with all the disillusionment that came with Watergate? It was about the time they caught Nixon up to his ears in justice obstructing that I went out and did something entirely crazy. I bought a new shirt that didn’t have any buttons on the collar.

  This particular shirt was a dress shirt, and it was sort of a light brown, as I recall. Men not only had started wearing their hair longer, but they also were wearing colorful dress shirts with no buttons on the collars. Since my peers at that point were mostly a bunch of guys who hung around local taverns and belched a lot, I was without any sort of guidance as to what currently was regarded as proper attire for a young man nearing his thirties.

  It was about the same time, unfortunately, that the double-knit polyester craze hit full force. I’m not certain who invented double-knit fabrics, but rumor says it was first manufactured in a clothing plant in Fort Deposit, Alabama. This cannot be verified, however, because some years ago a mysterious fire erupted in the warehouse and 26,000 knit leisure suits were destroyed.

  The owner, Delbert Gumbatz, was last seen catching the bus to Montgomery. He was wearing a Big Orange leisure suit — a favorite among Tennessee football fans. The last person to see him was the insurance man who signed the check for the fire, which, incidentally, smoldered for nearly six months.

  Most everybody was wearing some sort of polyester or double-knit in those days, especially at bowling alleys and Moose Club dances. Such material was so popular, in fact, that several people were severely injured when they were trampled by a mob of shoppers in Good Sam, Ohio, who had just been informed, “Attention, K-Mart shoppers. On aisle seven tonight we have a special on men’s leisure suits — all you can haul out of here for $29.95.”

  After I bought my brown dress shirt with no buttons on the collar, I lost complete control and bought myself a double-knit shirt. It didn’t have any buttons on the collar, either, and it featured pictures of exotic-looking birds. To accent this outfit, I also purchased a pair of double-knit trousers. I looked like Marlin Perkins taking the afternoon off from hunting baboons in the wilds of Africa for Mutual of Omaha.

  It could have been worse, of course. I could have bought myself a Nehru jacket and one of those medallions on a chain that people who wore Nehru jackets wore around their necks. What stopped me was an experience I had with a friend on the way to lunch one day. He was resplendent in his white Nehru jacket, a pair of white pants, and white patent-leather shoes. His medallion had a picture of Art Garfunkel on it. I was thinking how sharp he looked when three kids stopped him on the street and wanted to buy Eskimo Pies from him. Then two teen-agers thought he was the leader of some religious cult and offered their week’s supply of marijuana and asked him to bless their headbands.

  I chilled on the Nehru suit.

  Later, I considered buying myself a leisure suit, maybe a baby blue one to wear with my Marlin Perkins jungle shirt. I went as far as going into a men’s store and asking to see their selection.

  “I would like to see a leisure suit,” I said to the clerk, who was chewing gum and wearing enough polyester to start his own bingo parlor.

  “And what color did we have in mind?” he asked me between chomps on his Juicy Fruit.

  “Blue,” I said.

  “Navy, midnight, morning sky, or baby?” he asked.

  “Baby,” I said.

  He brought out something from the newly-created Tennessee Ernie Ford line, perfect for a night of dining and dancing in the Billy Budd Room at the local Holiday Inn.

  “It’s you,” said the clerk.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a conventioneer from Nebraska sipping a pina colada and trying to get up the courage to ask a fat girl with a beehive hairdo to dance.” I left the store and never considered buying a leisure suit again.

  Soon, however, I was once again faced with a dilemma concerning men’s fashions: Would I, or would I not, buy myself a neck chain?

  Neck chains were big in singles bars in those days. I suppose that was because women were changing, too, and they had shamelessly indicated that the sight of men’s chest hairs made them tingle in places they used to deny they even had, until their husbands pressed them on their wedding nights. So men quit wearing undershirts and started leaving their shirts unbuttoned to their navels, and I suppose neck chains and medallions were a way for men not to feel their chests were totally naked.

  I happen to be blessed with a great deal of chest hair, and I readily imagined myself at singles bars covered with young women who wanted to run their fingers through it. So I put on my jungle shirt, buttoned only the bottom button, and went out amongst the night.

  Not a single young woman expressed a desire to run her fingers through my chest hair, but I did scare off a dog in the parking lot when he saw my shirt.

  I decided a neck chain was what I was missing, so I went the next day to a jewelry store.

  “Do you have chains for men?” I asked the clerk.

  “You kinky devil,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon,” I replied.

  “Didn’t mean to insult you,” the clerk went on. “I like a little S and M myself occasionally.”

  “S and M?” I said, completely puzzled.

  “Don’t kid with me,” the clerk said. “We don’t have any chains here, but I know where you can get a great deal on whips and leather underwear.”

  I decided that perhaps I wasn’t ready for neck chains just yet. Luckily
, however, a friend of mine had just returned from California and had the answer — a string of beads. At first, I was a bit wary of them.

  “What’s that around your neck?” I asked him.

  “Beads,” he said. “Everybody in California is wearing beads.”

  “Isn’t that a little, well, sissy?” I asked.

  “Get off my back with your macho trip,” said my friend. “This is 1974.”

  Macho. What was this macho? Some sort of Mexican dish he had eaten in California? My friend explained.

  “What macho means,” he began, “is a man trying to be like John Wayne all the time — aggressive, insensitive, a slave to old traditions and old hang-ups. If a man wants to make a statement about himself, if he wants to wear a string of beads to say he is caring and sensitive and secure within himself, then he can today without fear of being stereotyped. These beads are my way of saying that I am laid back, man.”

  The entire conversation was far over my head. “Laid back?” I asked.

  “Where have you been?” asked my friend. “For years, men have been taught that it’s not okay for them to cry, it’s not okay for them to enjoy flowers or to dress colorfully or to wear ornamental jewelry. Men who did that were — what was your term? — sissies. Well, we don’t have to be like that anymore. Now, we can do our own things. Women really go for guys who can feel, who can share their thoughts, who like poetry and art and antiques and don’t mind admitting it. It’s even okay for a man to have a cat now.”

  I was taken aback by all this. True, I had been taught that a man was supposed to be strong and aggressive, and I had always despised cats.

  I vowed to change my ways. I borrowed my friend’s beads, bought a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and took a girl out on a date to the art museum and later to an antique store, where we browsed and looked at brass beds and old pictures of somebody else’s grandparents. I thought that was very sensitive of me.