All Shook Up (15 page)

35. Just the Two of Us

My dad didn’t turn back into Jerry Denny until we were halfway home. Since Viv’s car was so crowded, I decided to ride back to Chicago with him. At least I had more legroom. And something told me Ivory and Digger might try to hold hands in Viv’s car, even with me sitting next to them, and I definitely didn’t want to witness that stomach-churning sight.

As we drove through the darkness, it was strange to watch the transformation from the King back to Jerry Denny—how with each mile my dad looked less like Elvis and more like himself again. Hunching over the steering wheel, staring tiredly into the darkness, he seemed to grow quieter and smaller the farther away we got. “Hand me one of those throat lozenges,” he said after a while, pointing toward the glove box. “My throat is killing me.” The sharp smell of lemon filled the car as he crunched them loudly between his teeth (which is a habit of his that drives me crazy).

Elvis was definitely gone.

“So….” He cleared his throat after nobody had said anything for a few miles. “I know we haven’t been getting along very well these last couple of weeks, and I wanted to talk about some things with you.”

Great.
I sunk deeper into my coat. This was what I had been afraid of when I’d agreed to ride back with him. That once he had me trapped in his car in the middle of nowhere, he would try to have his serious dad-to-son talk with me.

“You know why I like being Elvis?” he asked, glancing over at me. When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “Because it lets me be somebody different than who I usually am. You know what I mean? When you’re Elvis, people notice you. You’re important for a little while. People don’t look at you the same way they did before.” He shifted in his seat. “Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m not Elvis. Nobody can be Elvis—the real Elvis. Elvis was Elvis. There’ll never be another person like him. But when I’m up there onstage, pretending to be him, wearing his outfits and singing his music, I’m a different person. I can make people laugh and smile and kiss their girlfriends and fall in love again—”

“Dad, jeez.” I gave him a look.

He kept talking. “For years I’ve been trying to figure out who Jerry Denny is and what he’s good at doing. I know I drove your mom crazy sometimes. There were days when I was working in the shoe store, listening to people talk about their ingrown toenails and their foot fungus, when I would think to myself—what in the heck am I doing here?”

His eyes glanced at me again. “I know I’ve gotta understand where you’re coming from, too. That’s what Viv says. You’re thirteen and you just want to fit in. You don’t want a nutcase for a dad.” He reached for another throat lozenge and popped it in his mouth. “Heck, when I was thirteen,” he said, crunching loudly, “I remember being completely humiliated by my dad’s grease-stained hands. He was a mechanic and I never wanted him to pick me up after school because I didn’t want my friends to see those hands and know what he did for a living.” My dad laughed.

“So I understand why you sent that letter.” His voice grew more serious. “Don’t get me wrong, it upset me at the time—it got my hopes up about going to Vegas and everything—but that wasn’t all your fault. It was partly mine for not seeing how you felt about what I was doing and how it was messing up things for you at school.

“I’m gonna make it a goal to tone down the Elvis stuff the rest of the time you’re here. And I’m gonna try to pay more attention to you and not be so caught up in it all.” He thumped his hands down on the steering wheel for emphasis. “So that’s my speech. Not another word. Have I put you to sleep?”

“No,” I mumbled. Trying to figure out what I was supposed to say next, I added kind of awkwardly, “The show was good tonight. People really liked it.”

“Yeah, it was a good crowd,” my dad replied. “I had fun.”

I know there were a lot of other things I should have said—how I was sorry, how he was way better as Elvis than I had imagined, how I’d go to another show if he wanted me to—but that was the best I could do right then. There’s only so much you can say when you’re sitting next to your dad in a car, just the two of you, driving through the dark and the snow in the middle of Illinois.

It was one o’clock in the morning when we finally pulled into the driveway of my dad’s house. After we got inside, he went around turning on all the lights as if he wasn’t planning on going to bed anytime soon. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” he said, tossing his coat on the living room couch. “You know what Elvis would say? A nice fried peanut butter and banana sandwich would taste just great right now.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’m gonna change out of my costume and then we’ll start cooking.”

We stayed up for another hour making sandwiches in the kitchen. While the rest of the world was snoring away, we were slathering butter on slices of white bread, adding large quantities of peanut butter and mashed bananas in the middle, and frying them to a nice golden brown. (Okay, so we burned one side of them, but that was not my fault.)

When they were done, we ate them straight out of the pan. “No plates for real men,” my dad said. So we sat on the countertop and ate the sandwiches with our fingers. Blobs of banana ended up on our shirts and the floor. We were even wiping banana off our socks at one point. It was pretty humorous.

Maybe because he was so full of carbs and sugar, Dad started talking about Viv and how much he liked her. “I know she’s different,” he said through a thick mouthful of peanut butter. “With that reddish hair and all that makeup. Do you know she has a tattoo?”

Note to Dad: I don’t really want to know, to tell you the truth.

“Yep. She’s got a big daisy tattooed on her shoulder. I mean it’s this big.” He pointed to his palm. “Your mom would die if she knew—God, she would just die.” He shook his head. “But Viv’s got a good heart and she’s a hard worker. That business of hers makes nothing, I’m telling you, but somehow she keeps it together. She’s a good person inside.” He looked at me anxiously. “Do you like her so far from what you’ve seen?”

I shrugged. “Sure, she’s nice, I guess.” Which was the most I was ever going to say about anybody who wasn’t my mom. I didn’t feel like I knew that much about Viv yet—not enough to have an opinion at least. She was a good driver. She was nice to Gladys. She had a weird store where nobody bought anything. That was about it.

My dad took another bite of sandwich and nodded. “You seem like you get along with her anyway.”

It was a strange feeling to hang out in the kitchen with my dad at one o’clock in the morning, eating fried banana sandwiches and talking about his girlfriend. Strange, but good. Like I could see us doing this again as we got older: the two of us hanging out together in our old T-shirts and boxer shorts, sharing a pizza or whatever, and talking about guy stuff.

36. Separate Ways

One of the biggest problems with being a divorced kid is that the minute you get used to one place, one parent, one life—you get yanked back to the other. It’s Murphy’s Law for Divorced Kids. Just when you start thinking,
I could stay here,
it’s time to pack up and leave. Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised when my mom called a week later to tell me it was time to head back to Boston.

The phone rang at ten on a Saturday morning. I’d been to another Elvis show with my dad the night before. (Well, not really a show, more of an off-key sing-along with a lot of senior citizens.) He’d performed at a place called Stonebridge Estates, which was like Shadyside Villas only with apartments instead of trailers. All my dad needed was for somebody to push a track button every time a new song was supposed to play, but he claimed this was an important job. “Would you mind coming along and giving me a hand with this gig?” he’d asked me. “I could really use the help.”

At the end of the show, he introduced me to the audience as his new sound guy. “Didn’t Josh do a great job tonight?” From the way the old people clapped, you would have thought I was directing Elvis’s band instead of pushing a few buttons on a machine. The rest of the night, I couldn’t get the songs out of my head. I could still hear the words to “Hound Dog” (track number two on my dad’s playlist) in my sleep.

When the phone rang the next morning, my dad picked it up. I could tell it was my mom. As I was lying in bed, I heard Dad stumble down the steps from his bedroom to find the phone, which was probably stuck somewhere in the living room sofa. “Hello?” he shouted. And then, in a lower voice, “Sorry, couldn’t find the phone.” As he walked down the hallway toward my room, I could hear him curtly agreeing to whatever was being said. Everything was a short answer: “Good. Yes. Sure. I understand. No problem. Fine. I’ll do that. I’ll get him.” By then I had already guessed what my mom was calling about.

My dad knocked softly on my door, as if he didn’t want to wake me. I thought about just rolling over and pretending to be asleep.

The doorknob turned and Dad peeked in. “You awake?”

“Sure.” I reached reluctantly for the phone and my dad slipped out of the room.

“Well, I’m finally calling with some good news,” Mom chattered, in a voice that sounded breezy and relaxed for the first time in a long time. “Your grandma is doing much better and she’s scheduled to come home sometime in the next few days.”

Of course this was good news. I wanted my grandma to be okay again and for everything to go back to the way it used to be, right? The news at six-thirty. The walk-abouts. The card games.

“I’ve hired a nice lady to help her around the house, so if all goes well—fingers crossed—she’ll be home by next weekend and we can be back in Boston sometime after Thanksgiving. Just in time to start decorating for Christmas,” my mom joked. “I thought you’d be excited to hear the news. I know it’s been a long time to be away from your friends.”

While Mom kept talking, I tried to convince myself how great it was to be going home. In a week or two, I’d be back with Brian and the other guys. The basketball season would be starting. There would be folded socks in my drawers again (yes, my mom even folded the socks) and my dinners wouldn’t come from either the microwave or the local takeout.

“Do you have a pencil and paper handy?” Mom asked. “I’ve got a list of things I don’t want you to forget in Chicago.”

But as she recited her list, my mind began to drift off. I started thinking about all the things I wouldn’t forget in Chicago—fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, for instance. Closely followed by: seeing my dad covered in black hair dye, the Elvis show in Winona, the home run I hit in gym class, Ivory’s weird clothes—

“Are you writing this down?”

“Sure,” I told my mom.

37. Elvisly Yours

On my last day at Listerine, my locker was plastered with blue and orange streamers and balloons and handwritten signs with the words
GOOD LUCK, JOSH
on them. When he saw the decorations, the guy next to me thought I had made it on the Listerine basketball team. “Congratulations,” he said, chomping on a huge wad of gum and tugging his books out of his locker. I told him I wasn’t on the team, I was moving back to Boston. His eyebrows rose. “Bummer.”

The vending machine crowd hadn’t been much different when I told them, either. Actually, I told Dave in gym class first. We were doing our stretches before class one morning and I said, “I’m gonna be moving back to Boston next week, so this is my last week at Listerine. I’m just trying to let everybody know.”

Dave kept swinging his body in half circles—first to one side, then the other. “You flying?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good” was all he said. I don’t know what I expected Dave or anybody else to do. Guys aren’t going to boo-hoo over you and tell you they’ll miss you forever. But I guess I thought they’d at least take up a collection for an honorary bag of M&M’s for me. You know, send one flying down the table:
This one’s for Josh!
Or smack me on the back and say,
See you around, Boston dude.
But my last day at the vending machine table wasn’t much different than my first one. I sat at the end of the table and the guy next to me drank his usual five cartons of milk. I caught two bags of snacks. And when the bell rang, everybody got up and left. The next week, some new home run hitter was probably sitting in my seat.

The locker decorations surprised me a little, though. I wasn’t sure who would have done it until I noticed the little smiley faces, stars, and peace signs scattered around the edges of the signs. Later on, Ivory told me how she and Digger and a few of their friends had come in before school started to put up everything. “Did you see the ones that said
ROCK ON, JOSH
and
DON’T GET ALL SHOOK UP
?” Ivory asked, with a fake innocent look. “I put those up because I figured it doesn’t matter if people know about Elvis now, right? I mean, you’ll be a million miles away, so who cares?”

My dad invited Gladys, Viv, and Ivory (who brought along Digger, of course) to come over for a going-away lunch on the Saturday I was leaving. He ordered fried chicken and mashed potatoes from KFC, and Viv brought a homemade chocolate cheesecake. We ate on
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
paper plates in my dad’s living room.

Even though my suitcases were sitting in the hallway, everybody tried to avoid talking about how I was leaving for Boston in a few hours. I don’t think Gladys even realized I was going away. We were sitting next to each other on the couch with our plates balanced on our legs and she said, “What a nice birthday party this is, Josh. Thank you for inviting me.”

“It isn’t my birthday,” I tried to tell her.

She looked up, confused. “Well, whose is it?”

“I’m going home to Boston.”

“Oh, don’t leave just yet,” she said, reaching over and patting my hand. “The party’s just getting started.” In some ways, I felt like maybe Gladys was right.

“Time for opening gifts,” my dad announced when we had run out of cheerful and upbeat things to keep talking about and when the food was gone.

“We’ll start,” Viv said as she reached for a square package sitting next to her purse. “This is a gift from Ivory and me.” She handed me a package wrapped in silver paper that I was fairly sure had been reused. Maybe everything in their lives was reused, who knows?

The gift turned out to be
A Year of Horoscopes and Sun Signs.
Inside, they had written:
Good luck in Boston, Josh. Elvisly Yours, Ivory and Viv.

“You’ll be surprised at how often those forecasts are right,” Ivory insisted. “It will change your life.”

“Thanks. That’s great.” I politely paged through the book, even though I didn’t plan on believing in the predictions of the stars and planets anytime soon.

“And this is just something small from me.” Digger reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled package that had been taped together with masking tape. “Sorry for the bad wrap job,” he said with a smile. Inside was a small brown leather band with shiny silver rivets and a snap fastener. I tried not to wonder if it was a dog collar for a poodle.

“It’s to wear on your wrist,” Digger said proudly. “I made it.”

I was pretty surprised to find out that Digger actually
made
the pieces he wore. Even though Ivory had said Digger was an artist, I figured his collars and stuff had come straight from the local pet store. Not that he made them himself.

“He makes belts and wallets and all kinds of things,” Viv explained to my dad and Gladys. “He’s a very talented young man.”

I fastened the band on my wrist. It wasn’t something I’d ever wear under normal circumstances, but it was okay for the moment: for my dad’s living room in Chicago anyway, for a going-away party. “Thanks,” I said, glancing over at him.

Digger nodded. “No problem.”

“Last present,” my dad said as he leaned forward to hand me a small, flat package about the size of a deck of playing cards. I tore off the wrapping to find a blue silk scarf signed
Jerry Denny, your Elvis dad
in black marker.

“Gladys sewed the scarf and I signed it,” my dad explained proudly. “We wanted you to have a little Elvis souvenir to take back to Boston with you.”

Most of the people I knew in Boston, including my mom, would have no clue what it was. She still hadn’t heard about my dad being Elvis. “I’ll tell her when the time’s right,” my dad kept saying, but that hadn’t happened yet. So the gift wasn’t exactly something I could take back to Boston and hang up on my wall for everybody to see. But my dad didn’t need to know all that. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s cool.”

Reaching behind the couch, I pulled out the round, tissue-paper-wrapped package I’d been waiting to give to him. It had taken a lot of planning to get the gift from the window of Viv’s Vintage to Ivory’s house to mine. Ivory had brought it to school and I had kept it on the top shelf of my locker for a few days before smuggling it home in my backpack. “I’ve got one more present,” I said, handing it to my dad, who gave me a surprised glance.

From the outside, the gift looked like a large white bowling ball because of all the tissue paper and tape I had used. As my dad began unwrapping the layers of paper, everybody leaned forward to catch the first glimpse of what was inside. Finally, after one last tug of paper and tape, it appeared: a plaster head with a chipped nose and rosy cheeks and black-painted sideburns.

“Elvis!” my dad shouted.

It was the perfect gift for him. Seriously, it was.

After the party, I left Chicago. It was snowing when the plane landed in Boston that night and everything looked different than when I’d left. Even the airport seemed strange, as if I had just landed in some foreign country where I didn’t know a soul and where everything felt unfamiliar.

My mom met me at the Arrivals gate. She had gotten there an hour early, she said. “But it gave me time to make up my grocery list for next week.” She held up a list written on the back of an envelope, and I had to admit it was kind of a relief to see my mom hadn’t changed—except for having a completely sunburned face.

“I realized I’d been in Florida for almost four months and I had barely seen the sun because I’d been so busy with Grandma,” she explained. “So the day before I left, I sat outside in one of Grandma’s lawn chairs with a magazine and fell asleep. Wasn’t that a crazy thing to do?” She gave an embarrassed laugh.

Post-it note #5 on the dashboard:
BUY SUNBURN CREAM
.

Once we got in the car, it wasn’t long before the whole story about Elvis and my dad came pouring out. I could hide things from my mom over the phone, but I couldn’t hide them from her in person. It started with a comment about my sneakers, which weren’t looking great after several months of being worn around Chicago—and hadn’t looked good before that, either. “Your dad couldn’t get you a deal on a pair of shoes while you were there?” Mom said, noticing them as soon as I stepped out of the snowy slush into the car.

“They’re okay,” I replied, trying to shove my feet farther under the dash.

“How’s business going at the store?”

“I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably. “Dad’s doing some new stuff now.”

“New stuff? He isn’t working at Murphy’s anymore?” As she backed out of the airport parking space, my mom’s eyes darted from the rearview mirror, to me, and back. “What’s he doing instead?”

I could tell I was trapped. There was no good way to say it. At least none that I could think of. And really, how was I supposed to talk about living in Chicago without ever mentioning Elvis?

“He’s doing some singing,” I said. “As Elvis.”

“What?” From my mom’s shocked expression and tone, you would have thought I’d just told her my dad had shaved his head and become a Buddhist monk. “Elvis? With the jumpsuit and the sunglasses? That kind of Elvis?”

“He has his own singing business,” I tried to explain. “Going around as Elvis.”

Her voice was incredulous. “Your dad dresses up as Elvis?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“And people pay him to sing? That’s his job now?”

“Yeah.”

My mom shook her head. “I can’t believe that. I really cannot believe that….” She kept on shaking her head for about the next twenty-five miles. I don’t think she got the idea at all. How my dad was just trying something different. How he wasn’t the same old Jerry Denny she knew. How he was pretty good at being Elvis and how people actually lined up for his shows. But right then, as we were speeding along a Boston freeway, I didn’t really feel like getting into some deep discussion about it. So I kept my mouth shut. Let Elvis stay in Chicago and my mom in Boston. Some things (like the divorce plants, for instance) couldn’t be moved from one place to the other.