Are You Loathsome Tonight? (19 page)

Elvis never listened. Well, maybe he did just a little. He'd always had a taste for things that made him feel endangered without truly being dangerous, movies with plenty of blood and guts, books by men who'd traveled through deserts or to the North Pole and written down every awful detail, snakes that weren't really poisonous but could still squeeze you to death.

After his Momma died, though, Elvis no longer cared so much whether things just
seemed
dangerous. For years now he has been edging closer to real danger in ways he can still deny from day to day. Pounds,
kilos
of bacon. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches fried in butter. Dilaudids and Seconals and Nembutals and Placidyls and Quaaludes ... the names themselves are soporific to him now, making the back of his brain seem to lubricate with anticipation, much as his mouth waters when he smells food.

There was never a time in his life when Elvis couldn't get all the drugs he wanted. But sometimes even he has to level off a little in order to enjoy the next ride down. When that happens, when he begins to crave his handful of pills, the desire is like a big white snake moving slowly in his gut.

He loves the pills so much that the man who supplies them, Dr. Nick, was recently able to talk him into lending the Presley name—previously unsullied by product endorsement—to a chain of racquetball courts. Even in his fog, Elvis can see the pathetic humor in that idea, which fortunately never came to fruition. He loves the pills so much that once, when a doctor tried to talk him into cutting down, he threatened to go out and buy his own damn drugstore.

***

Onstage in Vegas in 1974, Elvis told his audience, “In this day and time you can't even get sick—you're
strung out
! Well, by God, I'll tell you something, friends: I have never been strung out in my life except on music. When I got sick here in the hotel, from three different sources I heard I was strung out on heroin. I swear to God. Hotel employees, Jack! Bellboys! Freaks who carry your luggage! Maids! If I find, or hear, the individual that has said that about me—I'm gonna break your neck, you sonofabitch! That is
dangerous
, that is
damaging
to myself, to my little daughter, to my father, to my friends, to my doctor. I will pull your goddamn tongue out by the roots! Thank you very much."

Then he sang “Hawaiian Wedding Song."

***

These days Elvis spends most of his time in his bedroom and adjoining bath. When maids come in to clean these rooms, Elvis sits awkwardly in the chintz- and doll-filled chamber that is always kept ready for Lisa Marie's visits. The maid has to open Lisa Marie's windows afterward to get the lingering smell of him out of the pale pink room: a heavy smell of hair oil and sweat, for Elvis has a lifelong fear of water and hates to bathe. Often there is a faint chemical edge to his odor, the excess nostrums and toxins coming right out of his pores.

He is supposed to leave on tour tomorrow, twelve days, twelve shows without a night off. The list of cities alone would be enough to kill a lesser man: Utica, Syracuse, Hartford, Uniondale, Lexington. Fayetteville, Tennessee. And more. He doesn't want to be anywhere but this bathroom. He's told everybody he's not going, but nobody believes him. The Colonel says he can't afford
not
to go, and the hell of it is that this is true: Elvis spends so much, and his money has been so poorly managed, that he'll be broke within the year.

By the mid-seventies, the snarling voice that ripped through “Heartbreak Hotel” was gone, and there was only a touch left of the “Love Me Tender” croon. Now he has lost it all completely: no control of his breathing, a strain to hit the notes, a thick druggy glaze over the emotions that used to seethe just below the surface. He performs songs like “Unchained Melody,” songs he can just belt out from deep in his considerable gut. He talks to the audience, particularly when they are unresponsive, trying to win them over. He has given away thousands of dollars' worth of diamond rings and guitars to strangers in Vegas nightclubs, just trying to rekindle that look of unconditional love he used to see in all their eyes.

It's all Elvis has ever wanted, really, unconditional love from everybody in the world.

***

Sam Phillips had Elvis's first Sun records pressed at Plastic Products, a vinyl plant and warehouse in a bleak part of Memphis. “That's All Right” was pressed there, backed with “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Thousands of black circles dripping with sex, menace, and magic rolled out of Plastic Products and into the clamoring world. Today the building stands vacant and derelict, humpbacked like a giant barrel half buried in cement, a footnote of corrugated steel behind high chain link.

***

When rattlesnakes convene for denning, they

first form a bolus—a ball-shaped cluster,

like a collection of rubber bands. Every

member of the bolus keeps moving, the pulsing

amalgam growing as more snakes arrive. One

man peered into a cave and saw a bolus more than

four feet thick. There are bigger claims, too,

if you want to believe them.

Writer J. Frank Dobie reported the story of a

hired man sent to bring in two grazing mules.

The man's boss heard a scream, then a fainter one.

He found the body in a gully amid hundreds of

rattlers. The snakes were forming a bolus. The

man, who must have stepped into the gully without

looking, was already dead.

—Gordon Grice,
The Red Hourglass:

Lives of the Predators

Elvis sleeps through the day (rising usually between four and eight p.m.) and cannot abide the least sliver of light, so his bedroom windows are shrouded in musty cloth. The bathroom, though, is a shag-carpeted chamber of light with a big black toilet, modular and low-slung, that Elvis privately thinks of as The Toilet of the Future. He spends a good bit of time leafing through girlie magazines on that padded throne, not masturbating—he hasn't had a hard-on in months—but just looking. He's sitting on The Toilet of the Future right now, reading not
Penthouse
or
Cheri
but a book about sexual astrology. Elvis is a Capricorn and supposedly likes to be aggressive. His worst quality is an inability to take “no” for an answer. And that used to be true, actually, back when anybody still dared to tell him “no."

Right now the only thing telling him “no” is his own bowels. He's been sitting here for hours, it feels like. Sometimes he has to take an enema or soak in a hot tub until his belly softens up. His digestive tract, slowed to a crawl by downers, cannot handle the massive amounts of soft processed food Elvis shovels into it each day.

He strains, feels something deep in his gut stirring but refusing to dislodge itself. And then the pain tightens around his heart and begins to
squeeeeeze
.

Elvis hopes there will be peace in the valley for him, but he fears there won't be.

***

The colon is approximately five to seven feet in

length in a person Elvis's size and should have

been about two inches in diameter. By [Shelby

County M.E.'s investigator] Warlick's estimate,

however, Elvis's colon was at least three and a

half inches in diameter in some places and as

large as four and a half to five inches ... in

others. As [pathologist] Florendo cut, he found

that this megacolon was jampacked from the base

of the descending colon all the way up and half-

way across the transverse colon. It was filled

with white, chalklike fecal material. The

impaction had the consistency of clay and seemed

to defy Florendo's efforts with the scissors to

cut it out.

—Charles C. Thompson II and James P. Cole,

The Death of Elvis

Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final

criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of

a plot but the creation of a given sensation.

—H.P. Lovecraft,
Supernatural Horror

in Literature

... And in Closing (For Now)

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Afterwords, by their very nature, come
after
you've already read the
words
, the stories themselves. In this case, after you've read Poppy Z. Brite's second short story collection. So it seems, and has always seemed this way to me, odd to prattle on about how good or skillful or transgressive (or
whatever
) the collection at hand might be, when the reading's already been accomplished. You know, by now, how you feel about seeing Zach and Trevor again in “Vine of the Soul” or the historical macabre of “Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz” (unless, of course, you're one of those perverts who skips ahead and reads the afterword first) and you surely don't need me, or anyone else, to assure you how you feel, one way or another, about these pieces. That's between you, the pages, and Ms. Brite. So, since I have been asked to provide an afterword, regardless of my feelings about those
words
which are meant to come
after
, I offer the following prattlings instead.

Poppy Z. Brite made her first fiction sale thirteen years ago, when she was eighteen and living in North Carolina, a story with the distinctly unhorrific title of “Optional Music for Voice and Piano,” which was published by David Silva in
The Horror Show
in early 1985. But you've probably read this part half a dozen times, at least; it's usually in the interviews.

I met Poppy on October 24th, almost five years ago, at a cozy and now regrettably deceased bookshop in downtown Athens, Georgia. A mildly blustery Friday evening, and I was in town for a Concrete Blonde show the next night, and Melanie Tem and Poppy were passing through on a book tour double-bill for Dell Abyss: “Madames of Horror,” as the bookshop advertised the reading and signing, little red handbills with Poppy's photocopied eyes peering mischievously past a rose and ferns. It'll probably embarrass her to find out I still have one of those handbills, tucked inside the copy of
Drawing Blood
I bought that night. But she knows I'm a sentimentalist and, usually, she forgives me for that.

We sat very still in the little bookshop (which smelled like dust and old pages, as a proper bookshop should), our butts by turns aching and numb from the uncomfortable metal folding chairs, and listened while she read to us by candlelight, read to us about Zach and Trevor in the ghosted old house on Violin Road.

That was the night I met Poppy.

But I'd known her, as an author, since sometime two summers before, when a friend read me a review in which Linda Marotta listed
Lost Souls
as one of the ten best vampire novels ever (
Fangoria
#116, Sept. ‘92) even though the book wasn't even due out for several months. I was living in Birmingham then, working as a dancer and typist, trying to finish my own first novel, hardly making enough money for food and rent, much less new hardbacks. So, that November, when
Lost Souls
finally showed up at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks (or some other such mallspawn that definitely did
not
smell the way a bookshop should), I shoplifted a copy. I read it fast, and then promptly dumped my own manuscript in the kitchen trash, where it stayed for at least a couple of hours before a roommate rescued it.

At the time, I think I wanted very badly to hate her: for that book, for those words. For that beautiful sad story told in the lush and prickling sort of voice that so very rarely speaks from horror (Bradbury did it, but I can think of no one else offhand). That she'd been the one to say those things and not me.

And not just the simple quality of the voice, but the world it spoke from, and spoke
to
: I knew I'd never find Missing Mile on any road map, but knew, also, how much of my life I'd spent there, that Poppy had distilled something essential about growing up Southern. Growing up
weird
and Southern, more precisely, more importantly. That she'd tapped into the stickywarm, kudzu- and whiskey-scented days and nights of those of us who did not just survive our misfit Southern adolescences, but somehow thrived despite the Sunday School and playground hostilities in a world that, never mind what you might have heard, was seldom so simple as black and white.

Like any writer worth his or her weight in the trees cut down to print her or his work, Poppy has attracted her share of criticism, especially, it seems, from
within
the “horror community.” There has, from the publication of
Lost Souls
on down to
Exquisite Corpse
, been no shortage of authors, small press critics, and fanboys/girls willing to bend your ear (and patience) with an accounting of the many threats she poses to the future of dark literature. Or to the youth of America. Or whatever. Take your pick; the list is as long as the insecurities and fears of her detractors. She's been accused of rampant amorality, promoting irresponsible and unsafe sex, serial acts of bad taste, advocating the use of illegal drugs, attempting to capitalize on the self-immolation of a racist arsonist, jumping on the “homosexual bandwagon,” and sleeping her way into a career. I suspect that she wears most of these as badges of honor, evidence that she must be doing
something
right. Authors rarely upset and draw so much flack from their peers unless they're perceived as a threat to the
status quo
.

After her strength as a stylist, I'd count Poppy's choice of themes and characters as the secret of her power (and, of course, the source of so much of the unrest). In the last half of this century, so much of horror has been given over to the business of defending middle-class Suburbia from its own guilty nightmares, sitcom Good and Evil, Stoker's Company of Light on riding lawnmowers. The protection of a way of life as vampiric and ultimately soulless as anything that Irishman ever imagined, and a world that, when she has even chosen to acknowledge it, Poppy has steadfastly insisted must be judged not by its words, but by its actions. Especially its actions against its children.