23. Return to Sender
A few days later, the letter arrived at my dad’s house—or returned to it (depending on your perspective). But I have to say I was a little shocked when I got home from school and found my dad sitting in the living room, wearing a suit and tie. “Put on something nice,” he announced excitedly, jumping up from the sofa as I came through the door. “I’m taking us downtown for dinner tonight.”
“Us?”
“You and me.” My dad patted my back. “I’m in the mood for a celebration.”
I could feel a small prickling start in my scalp and make its way down the back of my neck. You know the feeling you get when you are caught in the middle of telling a big fat juicy lie to your parents? When you can’t decide whether to stop or keep going with your story?
“What are we celebrating?” I said, trying to appear clueless, even though I had already guessed.
“Just something good that happened to me today. You’ll see…,” my dad said with a secretive smile. “I don’t want to give it away just yet.”
As I stood in my bedroom pulling on a new pair of khakis that my mom had sent the week before with an update about my grandma, I had to admit that my dad’s reaction wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. I tried to decide how to act when my dad told me about the letter.
Surprised? Of course surprised. But since the contest wasn’t going to happen, I didn’t want to encourage him too much—especially since I hadn’t shown much interest in his Elvis gigs before. Maybe I needed to play it cool. Say something like, that’s great—but the competition will probably be pretty tough, won’t it? Mostly I just hoped the whole conversation would end quickly, because I wasn’t very good at any of this deep psychological stuff.
It took about forty minutes to get downtown from my dad’s neighborhood. We drove past the InterContinental Hotel with the Grand Ballroom on our way to the restaurant. Dad leaned toward my window and pointed out the white-gloved guy standing by the hotel’s gold-and-glass front doors. “Look, they even have somebody to open the doors for you at that place. Fancy-schmancy, huh?”
“Yeah, pretty nice,” I said, pretending to seem more interested in cracking my knuckles than in what was going on outside.
My dad had made reservations at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel, although, by the empty look of the place, he didn’t need to bother. It was kind of embarrassing to watch him march right up to the front desk with his slicked-back hair and his suit and announce, “Reservation for Denny—two people” when most of the tables didn’t have a soul sitting at them. The Chinese lady at the front pretended to take him seriously by spending a few minutes paging through a black book on the desk before saying, “Ah yes, Mr. Denny, we have a table for you. Right this way.”
We were taken to a white-cloth-covered table by a window facing a brick wall. It was a nicely made brick wall but not exactly what you would call a view. I don’t think my dad noticed the window or the lack of a view, though. After we sat down, Dad reached into his pocket and set an envelope on the table in front of me. “Guess what came in the mail today?” he said excitedly. “Open it up and look.”
I could feel the prickly needles creeping up the back of my neck as I slid the letter I had written out of the envelope. I could practically recite what it said, word for word, from memory: Calling All Chicago Elvises! A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity! You May Be the Next…
As I pretended to be slowly reading the letter, I wondered how I could possibly look up again without appearing guilty. This was the part of the plan that I hadn’t considered. I hadn’t expected my dad to be sitting two feet away, studying my face while I read my own words.
“This sounds pretty good,” I said, folding up the letter and avoiding his eyes.
“It’s the same day as the concert at your school, though.”
I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “So cancel the school thing. The contest is more of a big deal than coming to a school concert, right?” I was amazed at how smoothly these words came out of my mouth.
Note to self: Maybe you should consider a career in Hollywood.
A grin spread across my dad’s face and he leaned forward, jostling the table with his elbows. The lighted candle on the table flickered. “You and I must be on the same page. That’s exactly what I thought, too.” His voice dropped to a whisper, as if someone in the empty restaurant might overhear us talking. “This could be my big break, you know. If I win this competition and get to go to Vegas—man, that would be it!” His voice rose excitedly. “If people know you’re good, you can make big money traveling around the country being Elvis.”
My throat began to feel like I had swallowed a mouthful of sand. I reached for one of the water glasses on the table and took a long drink. The glass wobbled in my hand as I set it back down and little splashes seeped into the tablecloth.
The Chinese lady came back with two menus. “Any questions—be back in few minutes,” she said, handing them to us with a polite smile.
“Get whatever you want,” my dad said, passing one to me. “I’m feeling lucky tonight.”
It got worse. All through dinner, he talked about how he was going to prepare for the competition. “My costume needs work, that’s the first thing,” he said, shoveling big spoonfuls of rice into his mouth. “My shoes aren’t the right color. Elvis wore white, so I’ve gotta find some white boots somewhere, and I need something flashier than the black leather costume I’ve been wearing. Something from Elvis’s later years. Gotta do a lot more practicing on the moves, too. I just can’t get the leg shake exactly the way he did it, no matter how much I keep working on it.”
And right there in the middle of Ho Wah’s nice, quiet (and fortunately empty) restaurant, my dad had to show me the secret of how Elvis jiggled his leg. “I’ll show you what I mean—”
“Dad, jeez, come on—”
“No, I’m serious. It’s a really simple move. Look how he did it.” My dad stood up. “It’s a heel tap, not a toe tap, see—” His heel began bouncing up and down on the red carpet as if he had suddenly stepped on a poisonous snake. Or a nest of ground wasps. “But whenever I’m performing, I always start tapping my toes instead, which looks completely wrong, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have the same leg jiggle, does it?”
I could not believe we were actually having a demonstration of “leg jiggles” in the middle of a Chinese restaurant.
As my dad’s shoe tapped one way and then the other on the thick red carpet, I could see the Chinese lady hurrying across the room toward us. Dad, who was totally oblivious to everything, slid back into his seat and picked up his white napkin, which had fallen on the floor. “So I’ve gotta get that move right before the competition,” he said, dumping another huge pile of rice onto his plate. “And I keep messing up the timing on the song ‘Teddy Bear.’ ‘Just wanna be’”—he tapped two fingers on the table and hummed in a low voice—“‘your Teddy Bear.’ See, that pause is tough.”
The Chinese lady came over, looking worried. “Everything okay?”
My dad nodded and answered through a mouthful of food that the meal was great. I could see the Chinese lady’s eyes glance toward my plate, where I had only made a few dents in my chicken fried rice mountain. A sharp throbbing pain had started right below my ribs.
Driving back in the car with my dad, I had a lot of time to think. Or at least the guilty side of my brain had a lot of time to think. As the lights of the city flashed past the car windows, I noticed how everything had a hazy, starburst kind of look—the streetlights, the neon signs, the crosswalk signals—as if I was seeing Chicago underwater.
Note: I knew this was an observation that shouldn’t be shared with any adult in my life because it might mean I would eventually need glasses.
Next to me, my dad hummed songs to himself and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, as if he was rehearsing his entire Elvis show in his head from start to finish. I could tell he was in a really good mood. This made the guilty voices in my
brain even louder. And the stomach pain sharper.
Even then, I sensed that something about my plan wasn’t working. Like the city skimming by the car windows, something, somewhere, seemed to have gone hazily wrong. I just didn’t know what it was.
24. Blue Hawaii
The wrongness seemed to get worse as the weeks passed. My dad spent hours in his bedroom watching old tapes of Elvis concerts to practice the “moves,” as he called them: the body shake, the arm pump, the pinwheel, the karate chop. He would dance in front of a tall mirror that leaned against one of his bedroom walls. Lying in my bed at night, I could hear his feet moving on the floor right above my head, jiggling back and forth to Elvis: The Great Performances boxed set or who knows what else.
At the same time all of this was happening, I had plenty of things in my own life to be worrying about—namely the fact that my grandma wasn’t getting better as fast as my mom had hoped and my friends from Boston appeared to have completely forgotten about me. Well, that’s not quite true. Brian was still forwarding his usual stuff: pictures of goats born with two heads, or people who had gotten their arms stuck in public toilets. But nobody else from Boston had answered my e-mail messages in about a month. As the end of October arrived, it looked as if I’d be lucky if I ever got to go home.
When my mom phoned one Saturday afternoon, I tried asking her how much longer she thought it would be. It was her usual “check up on Josh” call. Every Saturday, and two or three times during the week, she’d call to see how everything was going in Chicago.
“How much longer will what be?” she replied in a harried-sounding voice. In the background, you could hear the whine of power tools as workers installed special railings and ramps in my grandma’s trailer, for whenever she was finally able to come back to Shadyside Villas. I had to repeat my question three times before my mom got it.
“You need to understand that somebody her age takes a long time to recover,” my mom said with a tired sigh. “I know it’s hard, Josh, but she’s making more progress every day, and we just have to be patient and wait. Okay? Everything will be back to normal soon, I promise.” And then I could hear the sound of a doorbell ringing and she had to hang up.
After my mom’s phone call, I decided to take a walk. Just to be somewhere other than my dad’s house in Chicago, even if being outside wasn’t much farther away than being inside. It was a start at least. My dad was in the kitchen working on one of his speakers that had started to buzz. He’d been focused on the speaker for two days. It was all he’d been talking about—was it a serious buzz, was it a minor buzz, was it a noticeable buzz, was it an expensive-to-fix buzz—and I was really sick of hearing about the buzzing speaker, so I didn’t bother to tell him I was leaving.
Outside, the sky was a gloomy gray color and the air was cold. It was the end of October, but it felt like January. Stuffing my hands deep into the front pockets of my jeans and holding my arms against my sides for warmth, I probably looked like some kind of frozen robot person as I walked stiffly up one side of the deserted street, past Gladys’s house and the other aluminum-awning houses. Then back down the opposite side.
A brown UPS truck drove past me, kicking up piles of leaves as it went by. I was surprised to see it turn and pull into my dad’s driveway. What was the truck delivering to us? When I got back about fifteen minutes later, I found out. As I closed the front door, my dad called out from the living room, “Hey, Josh, come in here. I’ve got something to show you.”
That was the moment when the wrongness got worse. Much worse.
Imagine walking into the living room to find your dad (who you had last seen crouched over a dismantled speaker in torn jeans and an old ’80s concert T-shirt) now dressed in a blinding white jumpsuit and cape, which are completely covered with gold stars and colored glass rhinestones.
“What the heck—” I said, totally shocked.
Note: It may not have been “heck” that I said. I’m not exaggerating, my dad looked like he had just flown in from the planet Krypton.
“Man, isn’t this something?” Dad held his arms out and turned around slowly so I could get the full rhinestone effect. The costume’s tall white collar came up to his chin. Blue and red glass rhinestones, hundreds of them, formed the outstretched wings of a large eagle on the front of the jumpsuit. Two rows of gold stars trailed down the white arms of the costume, and there was a line of smaller rhinestone eagles along each of the flared polyester pant legs, which ended kind of abruptly at my dad’s bare feet. “Have you ever seen an outfit like this one before?”
I couldn’t even get an answer out.
“It’s called the Aloha Eagle,” my dad continued proudly. “All the best impersonators have one. Elvis wore it for his 1973 television special from Hawaii. Get it? Aloha and”—he pointed to the large rhinestone bird stretched across his chest—“Eagle.”
The entire time my dad was talking, I could feel a sickening storm beginning to brew in my stomach. You know the feeling you get after you guzzle a 42-ounce soda and then get into a car and ride down a bumpy road in the backseat? That was the feeling I had as I looked at the costume. Because I knew exactly what he had gotten it for. And I had a pretty good guess it wasn’t free. But the feeling in my stomach forced me to ask, just to find out for sure.
“One thousand five hundred bucks,” Dad said, leaning on one knee and demonstrating an Elvis arm thrust. “How’s that for a deal? The way I figured it, I had to take a chance in this business if I wanted to get ahead. And if this jumpsuit doesn’t put Jerry Denny in the running for a trip to Vegas, I mean, what else will?” He stood up and stretched out his arms. “Look at me, Josh, don’t I look like the King?”
A huge smile spread across my dad’s face as he stood there, absolutely convinced he was the perfect Elvis and he was going to win the trip to Las Vegas—and if there had been music playing, this would have been the point with the big, happy crescendo. But instead, there was just the silent sound of my brain screaming that all of this was my fault.
“It looks great,” I managed to say, and then I took off, because if I stayed one minute longer looking at my dad’s clueless smile and the fifteen-hundred-dollar rhinestone eagle glinting in the living room light, the storm in my stomach was going to come lurching out of me.
In my bedroom, I closed the door and flopped down in the middle of the old blue shag carpet. Pressing my arms across my face, I tried to decide whether it would be better to pack up my stuff and leave now or later. Should I call my mom and beg her for a plane ticket to Florida? No questions asked? Could I tell her it was an emergency? Could I leave Chicago that night?
Then I began to get angry at my dad, because, looking at it another way, the whole situation was his fault. Why did I have to feel guilty? Was it really my fault he’d decided to buy some Aloha costume? Or that he had believed every word of my letter? It hadn’t said to go out and blow a fortune on a new jumpsuit, had it? That was completely my dad’s own choice, wasn’t it?
The tug-of-war over who was more wrong—me for coming up with the whole idea or my dad for believing it—jerked back and forth in my head. Dad. Me. Dad. Me. Mostly, I think I kept focusing on who deserved the most blame because it was a good way to avoid worrying about the problem of what I was going to do next.
25. Ivory’s Advice
I ended up wimping out and calling Ivory. After spending an hour trying to come up with the name of somebody to call—like those phone-a-friends you can use if you’re on a game show and stuck on the million-dollar question—I couldn’t think of anybody else to ask for advice. How sad is that? Nobody back in Boston knew about my dad being Elvis, and the guys at Listerine thought I was Josh Greenwood, completely normal person. I even considered going down the street to talk to Gladys. But she had been acting kind of mixed-up lately, and I didn’t want to make her more confused.
So I dialed Viv’s Vintage with no idea of what to say to Ivory. Or how to keep her from hanging up. Ever since I’d blamed her for m
y dad being invited to the school concert, she’d been avoiding me. Going out of her way to avoid me, actually. For instance, if we happened to be passing through the hallway at the same time, she would cut across to the other side. It reminded me of that experiment where you put pepper flakes in a dish with some water and then stick a bar of soap in the dish and the pepper flakes zoom to the other side.
Ivory answered the phone with the usual overly cheerful, overly hopeful Viv’s Vintage greeting. Since it was Saturday afternoon, I figured the store was probably empty.
“How’s it going?” I said in a voice that was meant to sound friendly.
“Who is this?”
“Josh Greenwood.”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “Do you want something?” Ivory’s sharp voice finally interrupted the silence. “Because I’m busy, even if you’re not.”
Right at that point, I had this insane desire to start laughing. Have you ever been in a situation where everything is tense and sad, like at a funeral, and suddenly you feel like this horrible laugh wants to come exploding out of you? Not a happy laugh, but a desperate, possessed kind of laugh you can’t stop? That’s the way I felt right at that moment, as if I was going to start insanely laughing, even though that was the exact opposite of how I felt.
“I need to talk to you about something with my dad.” I managed to get these words out of my mouth in one fast, mumbled sentence, without any hysterical laughter breaking out.
“About what?”
“He’s here right now. I can’t really talk,” I lied.
I think Ivory only agreed to meet with me because she thought it had something to do with our parents’ relationship. “I’ll meet you in an hour at the little park near the shoe store where your dad worked,” she said impatiently.
“The park?” I couldn’t recall any parks.
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