After Bathing at Baxters (20 page)

I wanted it. I did seven nights in the Las Vegas auditorium and
Variety
talked about ‘a star reborn'. After that Eugene gave me everything I asked for. It was the mid-seventies' by now, in any case, and the real Elvis wasn't in any shape to protest – he'd got into drugs in a big way by this time, everybody said, weighed eighteen stone and mostly didn't know who he was any more. Curiously, it was in these later days that I finally got to meet him. The limo had just delivered me back from the studio late one night – I was laying down some tracks for an album to be called
Elvis Sings Gospel –
and, coming into the wide Graceland foyer, there he was slumped in a chair, looking like a fat white ghost that was too old and too decayed to bustle out haunting. I hurried by – I was wearing my purple suit and carrying the sequined cape he used for his TV shows and I was afraid he'd be upset – but he just rolled an eye up from beneath the furrowed crevice of his forehead and muttered: ‘That's a good-looking set of clothes you got there boy.' He fell asleep again then and I tiptoed away.

Elvis Sings Gospel
sold half a million copies.
Time
magazine said it was ‘a welcome return to form by an artist whose decline had long been thought irrevocable'.

And then he died. Sprawled out over the king-sized bed with his face turned purple, clutching a fistful of barbiturates. Eugene let on, confidentially, that he and the Colonel had been expecting it for some time, but I was devastated. At the meeting the three of us had before the death certificate was signed I grasped in vain at the only straw of at hope that seemed to offer itself.

‘Eugene. Colonel … He. He doesn't have to die, you know.' I looked appealingly from one to the other, got a faint gleam of recognition from Eugene – I could tell he was on my side – but Colonel Tom just stared at me. ‘I loved that boy,' he said – it was the first time I'd heard him speak for years – ‘and I intend to devote the rest of my life to his memory. I can tell you're suffering from shock, Vernon, and perhaps you ain't responsible for what you're saying, but if I were you I'd take a look at your contract.'

I took a look. There was a big paragraph under the
In the event of death
heading. For a time I wondered about selling my story to the papers or writing a book, but as Eugene pointed out no one would believe me. In the end, rather than follow the self-sequestration option, I went for ‘facial restructuring' as they called it: half an inch off the nose, reset cheekbones and a hair rethink. There's still plenty of money left – Colonel Tom settled up handsomely when he found out how upset I was – but the time hangs heavy down here in Florida. Sometimes the local bar and diner stages a talent night, so I put on the cape and the pantsuit and do ‘Hound Dog' or ‘Blue Suede Shoes' and occasionally, just occasionally mind, some drunk kid will holler out ‘Elvis Lives'. But he's dead now. And I'm dead too. I died a long time ago, back at the impersonators' convention, with Billy Ray cracking the walnuts between his fingers, and the proud fathers cheering, and the cigar smoke curling through the dead, empty air.

Flights

At weekends or on the long summer evenings when Francine went to her aromatherapy class or sat around the house sewing stitches into a fat embroidery sampler, Dorfman took the car and headed west: out beyond the point where the freeway slid on towards Des Moines and the state border, off through the low flat terrain of dust and scrub and the network of side-roads that led inexorably to the airport. At first no more than an incidental diversion, a change from the familiar tables at Schwab's or the cool subterranean rumpus-rooms of the country club, the journey had, he realised, assumed the status of a settled habit: as much a part of his routine, Dorfman thought, as the pink life-insurance forms that lay over his desk in the study back home, or the shiny jars of linseed oil Francine had bought the time they had vacationed in New Mexico, now forgotten and unused in the workroom, something fixed and irrevocable in his life. Occasionally, he had tried explaining this to Francine, never with success. ‘Standing out by the runway watching a plane take off,' Francine had reasoned. ‘What kind of a way to spend an evening is that?' ‘Just something I do, baby,' Dorfman had countered warily. ‘Just like you going to see Mrs Fogelberg. Isn't any harm in it.' Francine had resented this reference to the aromatherapy class, seeing in it lack of respect, a brazen male disregard for salutary feminine activities, and for a time Dorfman had tried to alter the pattern of his evenings, driving east to the marina at Dyersburg, going bowling at the big sports centre at Phoenix Rock. Such substitutes were, he quickly decided, an inadequate recompense. The white sail-boats, the ponytailed farmers' daughters gossiping in the sports centre bar – these were frail, insubstantial ghosts. It was the aerodrome, the control tower rising up to greet him from beyond the distant cornfields, the great metal birds like stitching in the sky above his head, that were real.

There was even, Dorfman thought, thinking it now as he stowed the convertible away in its familiar parking space and stood in the car park letting his feet make little rivulets and runnels in the gravel, something vaguely proprietorial about his obsession, a sense in which his own personal development had mirrored the wider traffic of the skies. Dorfman had grown up with the aerodrome. He remembered in fifth grade taking time off from helping his dad with the car showroom – old man Dorfman had had a Pontiac franchise for thirty years – to cycle over and watch as the bulldozers shovelled humps of tarmac this way and that over the dusty amphitheatre of the site, returning a little later as a high school student to stare at the inaugural ceremony, where a state senator stepped gallantly into a rickety Cessna trainer and was flown off to a convention in Sioux City. And then on through the late teens and twenties, the place lay anchored deep in his consciousness, a kaleidoscope of memory twisted together and given a single point of focus: standing in the metallic reception area watching his mother come back alone through the checkout the year his dad had got sick and died on vacation in Florida; seeing the first of the giant DC10s come in to land, a silvery scrap of metal growing larger by the second; the time the airport company had fixed a deal with Pan-Am and got made a stopover point on the coast-to-coast routes. They'd started building the motels then, and the vanilla-painted shopping arcade. Ten years on, Dorfman didn't recall a time when the airport hadn't been there, the phantom, impersonal city in which it reposed rising up to meet the pallor of the surrounding scrub, the naptha beacons streaking the pale Iowa sky with artificial light, couldn't remember in fact what previous entity it had managed to supplant. He had tried asking Mr Kopechnie, indisputably the oldest person he knew, but without satisfactory results. ‘Used to be a golf course or something,' Mr Kopechnie had suggested, eyeing Dorfman's executive briefcase and his shiny salesman's suit with practised caution. ‘Anyhow, what sort of a question is that?' And Dorfman, avoiding Mr Kopechnie's eye and hefting the executive briefcase out of one hand and into the other, had been forced to admit that it was no sort of question at all.

It had started raining as Dorfman got out of the car, and he backed instinctively into the concrete shelter at the rear of the park where there were cigarette machines and Seven-Up dispensers and a strew of cans and aluminium fast-food trays lying over the asphalt floor. Two kids, a boy and a girl in leather jackets, broke apart as they heard him approach and stared frostily at him. Dorfman glared back. The girl's jacket had a stencilled motif on the back that read WHOMP THAT SUCKER. He watched it recede beneath the overhang of cement and breezeblocks, hearing a gust of fugitive chatter blown back on the breeze. Dorfman hated kids. It was one of his special prejudices, something for which he reserved a rare, intense hatred, which Franchie – disloyally, Dorfman thought – declined to abet. ‘Asshole kids' he would murmur, standing rigidly by the downstairs window as some gang of high school desperadoes loitered purposefully by. ‘But honey,' Francine would insist, looming up through the grey early-evening light to tug at his wrist, ‘they ain't doing anybody no harm.' ‘You wouldn't understand,' Dorfman told her, proud in spite of his irritation. ‘But honey,' Francine would demur. ‘All they want to do is to have a little fun, just like the rest of us.' There was no arguing with such indulgence, Dorfman thought, no way of compromising with this gross intrusion into the security of the suburban man. He lit a cigarette and smoked it for a while, kicking at the detritus around his feet, willing the serenity he had felt as he steered the car along the approach road twenty-minutes back to return.

There were, Dorfman knew, a number of ways of spending time at the airport, each of which harboured its own particular satisfactions. He could go and talk to the guy who ran the security desk, a grizzled ex-cop who remembered Dorfman from the days when he drove a patrol car and would occasionally volunteer details of abstracted contraband or mid-flight delinquency. He could take a wander down the shopping mall, empty now and gaping in the mid-evening shutdown, and stare at the racks of Fox Brothers suits and the rows of pale Reebok trainers, or go and stand in the arrivals lounge and trade back-chat with the limousine drivers waiting to meet the 1900 flight from Denver. The weighing up of these possibilities, each one glimpsed momentarily in his head like frames cut from a reel of film, brought easy consolation. Appeased, his resentments damped down and anaesthetised, he moved on through the wide corridor, the sight of his short, stubby body caught suddenly in one of the big wall mirrors oddly reassuring, the confirmation of an identity that the sight of the two lickerish teenagers had somehow called into question. Halfway into the mall, a queer sense of resolution forming in his head, he stopped at the McDonald's concession and bought a frankfurter so he could loiter for a while in the big, gleaming lounge, where cigarette butts lay piled up in the massive iron ashtrays and there were pictures of ancient, flat-bellied Dakota transports lining the walls. The old negro who worked the cashdesk looked up sleepily as he passed. ‘That's right Mr Dorfman,' he nodded, and Dorfman nodded back, the familiar clink of the fifty cent piece he tossed into the empty saucer acting on him like the sight of a final jigsaw piece slotted neatly into place. By the time he emerged again into the mall, silent now except for a skinny, white-coated janitor scooping up dirt with a broom, the sense of resolve had hardened into something sharp and tangible. Emboldened, Dorfman set off through the tangle of side-alleys and high NO ENTRY doors that led to the hostesses' lounge.

Of all the airport's vagrant diversions, the sense he sometimes got of roaming along a corridor full of agreeable rest rooms, it was the hostesses' lounge that Dorfman found most beguiling. No clue to this emerged from its decor or contents. It was a narrow, L-shaped room, staffed by a single tired barman, with a neon sign above the door saying NO PUBLIC ACCESS, though no one, Dorfman reflected, had ever questioned his presence there. The girls clustered at one end of the chromium-plated bar, chattering to each other and lighting their cigarettes off a patent cigarette lighter that the barman had left to one side of the soda pump, or occasionally sauntering over from their stools to jam dimes into the fake Wurlitzer jukebox. Hunched over his can of Budweiser in the far corner of the room, Dorfman had conducted an exhaustive survey of the hostesses. At an early stage he had divined that they weren't local girls. They came from Eugene and San Francisco, spoke in unfamiliar West Coast accents and flicked mock insults like ‘airhead' and ‘space cadet'. Dorfman, who had once read a disparaging newspaper article about social life in California, surmised that these were Valley girls. He regarded them warily but with fascination, like exotic migrant birds blown off course to land in some meagre downtown garden. Occasionally, in the intervals of complaining about the shortness of their shift-breaks or venturesome cabin staff, they made vague acknowledgments of Dorfman's presence. ‘Hey Dorf!' they would say. ‘Give us a cigarette will ya?' Or ‘Hey Dorf! Next flight to Seattle leaves in an hour. Why don't ya come with us hey?' And Dorfman, conscious of the dense, ketchup-coloured stain spreading across his face, would smile his slow, mock-grimace, unsure if he was being made a fool of or not.

There was a new girl in the hostesses' lounge that night. Dorfman watched her out of the corner of one eye as he plundered complimentary pretzels out of the hospitality bowls or glanced out of the window at the big long-haul jets taxiing on tarmac strips near the perimeter fence: small, oriental-looking, with one of those level eyebrow-nudging fringes that made him think of
The World of Suzi Wong
. Hearing odd fragments of chatter skimming back over the bar, he noted her habit of sticking an interrogative ‘no?' on the end of questions:
We have time to go shopping in Dallas, no? That boyfriend of Laraine's is bad news, no
? Filipina? Thai? Dorfman couldn't differentiate Eastern speech patterns. He surmised that she was a Filipina. Francine, who staffed affirmative action committees and stitched solidarity blankets for the street children of Third World dictatorships, disliked Asian women. ‘You're not gonna believe this hon,' she had told him, ‘but none of them have pussy hair. Can you imagine that?' Dorfman, who had browsed his way around a certain school of pornography categorised by the hardcore stores as
Asian Babes
, wasn't inclined to argue the point. Staring grimly down at his drink, the noise of a circling 747 suddenly drowning out the conversation and rattling the windows in their frames, Dorfman broke open a packet of Merits and started feeding them into his mouth. The Asian girl was smoking too, he registered, thin cigarettes like bird bones he had once seen on the beach at Nantucket. For a moment Dorfman thought about Mr Kopechnie and his fierce blue eyes, the stacks of inky proposal forms, the arc of Mr Kopechnie's sprinkler which always drenched the calf of his pants however prudently he sauntered up the path. Then he dismissed the image from his mind. The barman was having a telephone conversation that could have been drugs. In fact, listening to the worried undertone, the precise situational details, Dorfman was sure it was drugs. Embarrassed, he stared stonily in front of him, the way he did when commanded to watch one of Francine's public service channel docs on female circumcision in the Yemen or read a
Newsweek
article on testicular cancer. The girls were beginning to disappear now, gathering up their vanity bags and then cigarettes, peeling off in ones and twos to secret recesses in the drome where even Dorfman had never penetrated. He had a vision of himself, spectral and unseen, stalking the airport at night, prowling the deserted corridors, peeking into the empty franchise huts in the mall, listening at the door of the women's comfort rooms where the only sound would be the noise of a dripping tap. Their leisure over, the girls grew sharp and professional once more, whipping up sagging lipsticked smiles with the aid of hand mirrors, pinning up drifts of vagrant hair. It was in this general redefinition of spirit and costume – like some medieval raiding party, he thought, easing on their hauberks and chain mail while pageboys scurried and the womenfolk gnawed their knuckles – that he got to meet the new hostess. ‘This is Dorf,' one of the girls said, as Dorfman hovered halfway between his Jack Daniels and a three-quarters empty schooner of cashew nuts. ‘He hangs out here whenever he can get the old lady's teeth out of his ass.' And Dorfman smiled unreliably, not sure whether he desired this limelit introduction or whether anonymous skulking better suited a purpose about which he was still undecided. But the girl smiled back, bobbing her head so that the fringe, sweeping upward and then returning to its vantage point like a line of filings obeying the magnet's call, assured Dorfman of the existence of about ninety dollars' worth of designer haircare. ‘And do you work here Mr Dorfman?' she asked. There were further gusts of merriment. ‘You wanna watch Dorf,' her companion loudly advised. ‘Sure,' someone else chimed in. ‘Fucks like a rattlesnake with a firehose dick.' Head lowered, Dorfman watched them go, out through the white door, stout shoes clattering on the metal carpet (it was only in movies that hostesses got to wear high heels), not sure whether to be cheered by the intimacy of this kind of joshing or marvel at the weird, lopsided vision of himself that it conjured up. Dorfman the stud, Dorfman the terror of the boudoir. According to Francine. Dorfman had ‘a negative attitude to female sexuality', whatever that meant. Alone in the silent room, the barman disappeared into some remote and unguessable closet, he cherished his glass while behind him the white fuselages bounced and shimmied into the darkling sky.