by Lewis Shiner
This is pretty typical. It can go on for weeks. One time last year she drove me and my little brother Ricky to Houston for a speech tournament. Everybody was there, my best friend Gail, even this guy Ryan who I’m not really interested in, but is as close to cute as they get in Tomball, Texas. So my Mom dresses up in a clown costume. I’m not kidding. Purple wig, red ball nose, big net collar, the works. And in case there isn’t anybody in the entire city who hasn’t already noticed that I came with her, she pulls out this three-foot bicycle horn and honks goodbye to me with it.
My Dad’s not any better. He doesn’t carry around itching powder and Chinese finger traps, but he’s never serious either. What kills me is he won’t ever admit to anything. He’ll like leave a Playboy centerfold around and there’ll be something really gross written to him on it, like it was from the girl in the picture. Mom yells at him and he just shrugs and says, “Well, somebody did it.”
Gail has been my best friend since I was three years old. She lives on the other side of the highway from me. We’re totally different people. I’m kind of big-boned but I have a pretty okay face, just wear a little eye shadow and lipstick. Gail is short and blond and dresses to the max every day. All she really wants out of life is to marry some cute guy in Houston with a lot of money and a fast car. But that’s okay. She’ll be my best friend until I die. How can I make new friends when I don’t dare bring them home? Gail is at least used to whoopie cushions and plastic ice cubes with flies or cockroaches inside.
When I sat down to eat with Gail today I found a note in my lunch that said, “I fixed your favorite, peanut butter and maggots. Love, Mom.” I peel my banana and it falls apart in sections. Gail’s seen it a hundred times but it still makes her laugh.
“Your Mom is so weird,” she says.
“No kidding.”
“At least you’ve got your hearing left.” Gail’s Mom plays this sixties music at unbelievable volume all day and night. Gail’s absolutely most shameful secret is that she was originally named Magic Mountain. I’m not kidding. Her first day at school she told everybody she was named Gail. Only she didn’t know how to spell it, and wrote it G-A-L. I had to take her aside and explain. Anyway, she kept on her Mom about it until her Mom finally made it legal. Nobody else remembers all that, but I do.
Everybody’s parents seem to think the sixties were this unbelievably wonderful time. They even have TV shows and everything about it now. What I can’t understand is, if it was so wonderful, why did they stop? Why don’t they still wear long hair and bell-bottoms and madras or whatever it was? I don’t think it was the sixties. I think they just liked being young.
Which is more than I can say. “Mom’s into the plastic vomit again,” I tell Gail.
“Oh God. Geez, you know, I can’t come over this afternoon after all. I just remembered this really important stuff I have to do.”
“Thanks, Gail. Thanks a lot. That means I’ll be stuck at home alone with her.”
“What about Ricky?”
“He’ll spend the night at the Jameson’s. At the first sight of novelty items he’s out the door, and Dad with him.”
“I saw him this morning, did I tell you?”
“Ricky?”
“Your dad.”
“No. Where was this?”
She looked sorry she brought it up. “Oh, it wasn’t anything. I just saw him when Mom drove me to school.”
I wanted to say, if it wasn’t anything, then why did you bring it up, dork-brain? But she looked embarrassed and a little scared so I let it drop.
When I got home Mom was already in the kitchen. You can imagine my nervousness. Among the delights she’s cooked when she’s in a mood like this are: lemon meringue enchiladas, steak a la mode, chili con cookies, and banana pizza. The pizza was actually not too bad, but you understand what I’m saying.
We all sit down at the table. Mom brings out this big aluminum tray with a cover over it, like in the movies. She takes the cover off with a big flourish and goes, “Ta da!”
It’s a casserole dish with what looks like overcooked brownies inside. We all stare at it.
“Eat,” Mom says. “Come on, eat!”
No one wants to go first. Finally Ricky breaks down and pokes at it with a fork. It makes this nasty grinding sound. “Oh gross,” he says. He looks more tired than really disgusted. Not like the time Mom walked around with the plastic dog mess on a Pamper, eating a piece of fudge. I lean over for a look myself.
“Mom,” I say, “this is a mud pie.” I sniff at it. It really is mud. Dried, baked mud now. “This is like not funny.”
“If you don’t eat every bite, you don’t get dessert.”
“You’re slipping, Mom,” Ricky says. “You’re losing it. This is not even remotely funny. I’m going to the Jamesons’. If I hurry, maybe I’ll be in time for supper.”
Dad is just staring off into the corner, holding onto his chin. It’s like he’s not really there at all.
I went into the den and put on MTV. If there was a God it would have been Al TV, but it wasn’t. I think Weird Al Yankovic is the greatest thing in the world. He plays the accordion and does goofed-up versions of songs, in case you’ve never heard of him. I saw him in concert in Houston and broke through his bodyguards so I could hug him.
I watched TV for a while and then Mom came in dressed in a maid’s costume and started dusting. She has this huge feather duster, a joke feather duster, so big she can hardly move it around without knocking things over. Dad comes in and says to me, “Let’s go for a burger.”
I was glad to get away. That mud pie business was just too weird. We got in his pickup and headed for the Wendy’s just down the highway. Outside the pickup is Tomball, Texas in all its glory. Flat, except for the gullies, brown except for the trash. In a little over a year I go to college and I won’t ever look back.
“Gail said she saw you this morning,” I tell him.
“She could have, I suppose.”
“She was real weird about it. She acted like she shouldn’t have told me. Do you know why that is?”
He rolls his window down with one hand, and makes a big deal out of scratching his head, real casual, you know, with the other. He’s pretending not to pay any attention to the road, only he’s really steering with his knee.
“Were you doing something you weren’t supposed to do, Dad? Were you with somebody? Is that why Mom’s acting weird? Because it’s really hard to be in this family, you know? I mean, at any minute it could hit me. I could get this irresistible craving for an exploding cigar. It could be like diabetes. One minute I’m fine, the next I’m filling up my pockets with plastic ants. So I want you to tell me. Did you do something?”
He cranes his head out the window and drives for a while that way, then settles back into his seat. He shrugs. “Somebody did.”
Mystery Train
For Bruce Sterling
As he climbed the stairs, Elvis popped the cap off the pill bottle and shook a couple more Dexedrines into his palm. They looked like pink candy hearts, lying there. He tossed them into the back of his throat and swallowed them dry.
“Hey, Elvis, man, are you sure you want to keep taking those things?” Charlie was half a flight behind, drunk and out of breath. “I mean, you been flying on that shit all weekend.”
“I can handle it, man. Don’t sweat it.” Actually the last round of pills hadn’t affected him at all, and now his muscles burned and his head felt like a bowling ball. He collapsed in an armchair in the third floor bedroom, as far as possible from the noise of the reporters and the kids and the girls who always stood outside the house. “In three weeks we’re out of here, man. Out of Germany, out of the Army, out of these goddamn uniforms.” He untied his shoes and kicked them off.
“Amen, brother.”
“Charlie, turn on the goddamn TV, will you?”
“Come on, man, that thing’s got a remote control, and I ain’t it.”
“Okay, okay.” Elvis lunged for the r
emote control box and switched on the brand-new RCA color console. It was the best money could buy, the height of American technology, even if Germany didn’t have any color transmissions to pick up with it.
Charlie had collapsed across the bed. “Hey, Elvis. When you get home, man, you ought to get yourself three different TVs. I mean, you’re the king, right? That way, not only can you fuck more girls than anybody and make more money than anybody and take more pills than anybody, you can watch more TV than anybody, too. You can have a different goddamn TV for every channel. One for ABC...” He yawned. “One for NBC...” He was asleep.
“Charlie?” Elvis said. “Charlie, you lightweight.” He looked around the edge of the chair and saw Charlie’s feet hanging off the end of the bed, heel up and perfectly still.
To hell with it, Elvis thought, flipping through the channels. Let him sleep. They’d had a rough weekend, driving into Frankfurt in the BMW and picking up some girls, skating on the icy roads all across the north end of Germany, hitting the booze and pills. In the old days it had annoyed Elvis mightily that his body couldn’t tolerate alcohol, but ever since one of his sergeants had given him his first Dexedrine he hadn’t missed booze at all. Charlie still liked the bottle, but for Elvis there was nothing like that rush of power he got from the pills.
Well, there was one thing, of course, and that was being on stage. It was not quite two years now since he’d been inducted—since Monday, March 24, 1958, and he’d been counting the days. The Colonel had said no USO shows, no nothing until he was out. Nobody got Elvis for free.
The Colonel had come to take the place of his mother, who had died while Elvis was still in basic, and his father, who had betrayed Gladys’s memory by seeing other women. There was no one else that Elvis could respect, that he could look to for advice. If the Colonel said no shows then that was it.
Something flashed on the TV screen. Elvis backed through the dead channels to find it again, ending up with a screen full of electronic snow. He got up and played with the fine tuning ring to see if he could sharpen it any.
Memories of his early years haunted him. Those had been the best times, hitting the small towns with just Scotty and Bill, the equipment strapped to the top of Scotty’s brand-new, red-and-white ’56 Chevy. Warming the audience up with something slow, like “Old Shep,” then laying them out, ripping the joint with “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Getting out of control, his legs shaking like he had epilepsy, forgetting to play the guitar, his long hair sticking out in front like the bill of a cap, taking that mike stand all the way to the floor and making love to it, shaking and sweating and feeling the force and power of the music hit those kids in the guts like cannon fire.
He gave up on the TV picture and paced the room, feeling the first pricklings of the drug. His eyelids had started to vibrate and he could feel each of the individual hairs on his arms.
When he sat down again there was something on the screen.
It looked like a parade, with crowds on both sides of the street and a line of cars approaching. They were black limousines, convertibles, with people waving from the back seats. Elvis thought he recognized one of the faces, a Senator from up north, the one everybody said was going to run for President.
He tried the sound. It was in German and he couldn’t make any sense of it. The only German words he’d learned had been in bed, and they weren’t the kind that would show up on television.
The amphetamine hit him just as the senator’s head blew apart.
Elvis watched the chunks of brain and blood fly through the air in slow motion. For a second he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, then he jumped up and grabbed Charlie by the shoulder.
“Charlie, wake up! C’mon man, this is serious!” Charlie rolled onto his back, eyes firmly shut, a soft snore buzzing in his throat. No amount of shaking could wake him up.
On the television, men in dark suits swarmed over the car as it picked up speed and disappeared down the road. The piece of film ran out, hanging in the projector for a moment, then the screen turned white.
He went back to the chair and stood with his hands resting on its high, curved back. Had he really seen what he thought he saw? Or was it just the drugs? He dug his fingers into the dingy gray-green fabric of the chair, the same fabric that he’d seen by the mile all through Europe. He was tired of old things: old chairs, old wood-floored houses, Frau Gross, the old woman who lived with them, the old buildings and cobbled streets of Bad Nauheim.
America, he thought, here I come. Clean your glass and polish your chrome and wax your linoleum tile.
The TV flickered and showed a hotel room with an unmade bed and clothes all around. On the nightstand was an overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle. Elvis recognized the Southern Comfort label even in the grainy picture. A woman sat on the floor with her back against the bed. She had ratty hair and flabby, pinched sort of face. The nipples of her small breasts showed through her T-shirt, which looked like somebody had spilled paint and bleach all over it.
Elvis thought she must be some kind of down-and-out hooker. He was a little disgusted by the sight of her. Still he couldn’t look away as she brought a loaded hypodermic up to her arm and found a vein.
Static shot across the screen and the image broke up. Diagonal lines scrolled past a field of fuzzy gray. Elvis felt the Dexedrine bounce his heart against the conga drum of his chest. He sat down to steady himself, his fingers rattling lightly against the arm of the chair.
“Man,” Elvis said to the room, “I am really fucked up.”
A new voice came out of the TV. It must have originally belonged to some German girl, breathy and sexual, but bad recording had turned it into a mechanical whisper. Another room took shape, another rumpled bed, this one with a black man lying in it, long frizzy hair pressed against the pillow, a trickle of vomit running out of his mouth. He bucked twice, his long, muscular fingers clawing at the air, and lay still.
Elvis pushed the heels of his hands into his burning eyes. It’s the drugs, he thought. The drugs and not sleeping and knowing I’m going home in a couple of weeks...
He wandered into the hall, one hand on the crumbling plaster wall to steady himself. He tried the handle on the room next to his but the door refused to open.
“Red? Hey, Red, get your ass up and answer this door.” He slapped the wood a couple of times and then gave up, afraid to deal with Frau Gross when he was so far gone. He went into the bathroom instead and splashed cold water on his face, letting it soak the collar of his shirt. He wouldn’t miss this screwy European plumbing, either.
“I feel so good,” he sang to himself, “I’m living in the USA...” He looked like shit. With his green fatigues and sallow skin he looked like a fucking Christmas tree, with two red ornaments where his eyes were supposed to be.
He went back to the bedroom and sat down again. He needed sleep. He’d find something boring, like Bonanza in German, and maybe he could doze off in the chair.
As he reached for the remote, another film started. It was scratched and grainy and not quite in focus. Some fat guy in a white suit was hanging on to a mike stand and mumbling. It was impossible to understand what he said, especially with the nasal German narration that ran on top. Elvis made out a lot of “you knows” and “well, wells.”
The camera moved in and Elvis went cold. Despite his age and his blubber and his long, girlish hair, the guy was trying to do an Elvis imitation. A band started up in the background and the fat man began to sing.
The Colonel had warned him this might happen. You don’t drop out for two years and not expect somebody to try and cut you. Bobby Darin with all his finger-popping and that simpering Ricky Nelson had been bad enough, but this was really the end. Elvis had never heard the song that the fat guy was trying to sing. He was obviously being carried by the size of the orchestra behind him. Pathetic, Elvis thought. A joke. The fat guy curled his lip, threw a couple karate punches, and let one leg begin to shake.
Dear God, Elvis thought
.
It wasn’t possible.
Elvis lurched out of the chair and yanked Charlie out of bed by the ankles. “Wha...?” Charlie moaned.
“Get up. Get up and look at this shit.”
Charlie struggled to a sitting position and scrubbed his eyes with his hands. “I don’t see nothing.”
“On the TV, man. You got eyes in your head?”
“There’s nothing there, man. Nothing.”
Elvis turned, saw snowy interference blocking out the signal again. “Get a chair,” Elvis said.
“Aw, man, I’m really whacked...”
“Get the goddamn chair.”
Elvis sat back in front of the TV, his heels pounding jump time against the hardwood floor. He heard Charlie dragging a chair up the stairs as the screen cleared and a caption flashed below the singer’s face.
Rapid City, South Dakota, it said.
June, 1977.
Elvis didn’t know he was on his feet, didn’t know he had the service automatic in his hand until his finger went tight on the trigger.
Huge white letters filled the screen.
ELVIS, they said.
He fired. The roar of the gun seemed make the entire building jump. The picture tube blew in with a sharp crack and a shower of glass. Sparks hissed out on the floor and a single breath of sour smoke wafted out of the ruined set.
Elvis felt the room buzz with hostile forces. He had to get out. Charlie stood in the doorway, staring open-mouthed at the ruins of the set as Elvis shoved past him, letting the gun drop from his nerveless fingers and clatter across the floor. It wasn’t until he was downstairs and the cold air hit him that he realized he’d left his shoes and coat inside. The sidewalk was slick with ice and a mixture of sleet and rain fell as he stood there, eyes jerking back and forth, fingers twitching, legs tensed to run and go on running.