Last Ride to Graceland (13 page)

“Do you live here?”

“My room's off the kitchen.” She gestures toward a hook on the railing, then another screwed in the side of the building. “But I've got a hammock you're welcome to, if you're not above sleeping outside.”

Sleeping outside sounds like paradise, especially here, at the end of this long pier stretched over the bay, with the steady breeze and the constant
schloop-oop
of the water. I don't know why she's doing this, any more than I know why the politician in Macon gave me four hundred dollars. I can only assume that my mother was a much-loved woman, although apparently loved in lots of different ways, some of them the kind it's best not to pause and consider.

“Ribs would be nice,” I finally say. Bruisers doesn't serve
ribs. I've eaten enough fried fish to last a girl a lifetime, but ribs would be a treat.

“Then there you go,” says Marilee, turning toward the door, and Lucy, who gets excited by any movement, made by anybody, for any purpose, leaps to his feet, tail wagging.

“I'm thinking you'll be shark bait before this day is over, Mr. Dog,” says Marilee, and then she adds, so casually that for a moment I think she's still talking to Lucy, “People like music. They like a bit of live music while they eat.”

“So they tell me.”

“That instrument at your feet. You know how to play it?”

“Since I was four.”

“You any good?”

I reach down and pick up the guitar. It's all a little awkward, because when Lucy chewed the strap and I retied it, it ended up too short, and now the guitar is sitting higher on my chest than I like.

I sing “Love Me Tender.”

I don't know why. I may have spent a whole career avoiding the songs of Elvis Presley, but I sing him here in Fairhope, gentle and true, half slumped down in the chair, thrown back at such a strange angle that I don't even have all my air. But it's a croon of a song and I croon it, and I remember every word.

When I finish, I put the guitar down. We wait, without either one of us saying anything, without even looking at each other face-to-face, but I can feel Marilee smile.

“Yeah,” she says. “Honey came back, all right.”

HONEY

August 18, 1977

E
lvis may have chosen the little girl who went sprawling at his feet with her white panties and knee socks and headband, but everybody at Graceland knew I'd have to grow up fast before I could come on tour. I'd have to learn how to glitter. So on my third morning after I was hired, the resident beautician came to the bedroom I shared with a handful of other girls.

Her first words to me were: “What color would you say your hair is now?”

“Brown?” I said. I figured it had to be a trick question.

“And do you see anyone else at Graceland with brown hair?”

No. No, I did not. Everyone in the room had shiny black hair, including the beautician herself. So I accepted right off the bat that my hair would have to be dyed to the same patent-­leather shade, but I begged her not to tease it, at least not into one of those weird Elly May Clampett styles, with the ponytail low and hanging to one side. That look was still popular within
the walls of Graceland, even though this was 1976. When it came to fashion, we were at least ten years behind the times. Twelve if you're talking LA or New York.

But it was an awkward situation. There's no nice way to beg a beautician not to make you look like her. Or to ask her not to make you look like all the other women in the room, especially when they're lined up on the bed staring at you, their identical ponytails curled over their shoulders like a row of question marks. It made me paranoid that so many people were watching my transformation, but I hadn't been at Graceland long and didn't yet comprehend the rules. I thought I was being monitored because I was there on approval and that someone—­probably Fred—had told the girls to keep an eye on me and report back. I would understand soon enough that wasn't what was going on at all. It was just that nothing ever happened at Graceland. Only a few people came in and nobody ever went out. The girls were lined up on the bed watching because me getting my hair done was the only thing going on that day.

And there's no nice way to say, “We look like a bunch of walking cartoons and people laugh at us, except maybe in Vegas and the deepest part of the South.” So I asked for an Afro, which the black girls were allowed to have. They stayed in a different set of rooms, on a different part of the property, and I hadn't even met Marilee at that point. But I'd seen her in the studio, with her hair radiating out in that proud halo, looking like an Ethiopian angel. I might not have known her name yet, but I knew she was what I wanted to be. Her bearing made her different. She stood up straight, even when she wasn't performing.

Of course, the very notion of little five-one, lily-white me
with an Afro got the other girls rolling on the bed, giggling so hard that I figured the only way out was to laugh too and pretend I'd been kidding. Marilee would later explain that the true purpose of the famous Graceland makeovers—which everybody got within a week of moving in—was to help us look as much as possible like him. Kings like mirrors. Kings crave nothing as much as their own reflection, and so no matter how they might've entered, everybody left the gates of Graceland looking a little bit like Elvis. Even the old black cook and the redheaded guy from Ireland who fixed the cars.

Lucky for me, I had a head start. In that back room at the first wave of auditions, Fred had mentioned I resembled ­Priscilla—the shy, fresh-faced Priscilla who first came to Graceland when she was sixteen. Of course, saying I looked like Priscilla was just another way of saying I looked like Elvis, since she was his truest reflection, the perfect female version of his own face. I hesitate to put it that way. It makes him sound like a vain man, and he wasn't, not really. I think Marilee was right when she said Elvis spent a lifetime searching for his lost twin. From the moment of his birth, he'd felt like he was only half there.

In the end, the hairdresser compromised on the style, giving me a Gypsy cut with long layers of curls. It was the way Cher was wearing her hair at the time and she didn't tease it too much, no more than a couple of inches. I was made to understand that I didn't look quite like the others and that this was a risk. If anybody pointed out that I was spoiling the uniformity of the backup girls, then it was straight back to the styling chair for me. But when Elvis saw me the next day he just smiled and said, “Now don't you look pretty, Honey Bear?”

I knew I'd dodged a bullet with the hairdo, so I was an extra good sport all through wardrobe, submitting to the boots and capes and even to the makeup: the big, dark doll eyes and the shiny pearl lips. Between the glue on my lashes and the stickiness of the lip gloss, I could barely open my eyes or my mouth, and while there were those who claimed my transformation aged me ten years, I never once felt like a woman, not during the whole time I was at Graceland. I felt more like a stewardess on some movie airplane that's fixing to crash.

And I couldn't stand being fancy all the time. Once I talked one of the drivers into taking me out alone, muttering something about a “lady problem,” words guaranteed to silence any man. He drove me to Kmart and waited in the limo while I bought flannel pajamas from the children's section. I was small enough to wear a girl's size twelve and I got pink ones with unicorns, and then bought a jar of Noxzema, which my mother always swore by, because I was afraid all that makeup was ruining my skin. After that, I persuaded the driver to next take me by the library, a place I doubt the limo had ever stopped before. I had no Tennessee library card, so I gave them my daddy's street address back in Beaufort, just putting “Memphis” on the end of it, and figured that by the time they realized such an address didn't exist, I'd be long gone. If I was stealing the books (in a way, I was), I justified it by thinking of how much Elvis had donated to the city through the years. Surely in exchange they could give one of his backup singers four measly books. I would read them at night, over and over, under the blanket in my unicorn pajamas until I practically knew them by heart.

I was learning a lot. I was learning the sort of things there're
no words for. But what I would have welcomed, even though it was never offered, was instruction in the musical arena. I knew I was a strong singer, with gospel harmony in my blood, but I had virtually none of that elusive quality called stage presence.

“Teach me how to perform,” I said to Marilee. What I meant was, “Teach me how to be you.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, and as it would turn out, no stage presence was needed. We girls were rarely expected to dance around with synchronized moves—in fact, it was considered a major faux pas if any of the backup singers did anything to draw attention away from Elvis. The only time Fred ever yelled at me was a rehearsal where my eyes were itching from the false eyelashes and I kept rubbing my face.

“Nobody in Cleveland or Dallas is paying their hard-earned dollars just to look at you,” he barked, and after that I found a thousand ways to itch without scratching. It was a good thing I'd been raised in the front pew of a church. I had plenty of experience keeping my face blank no matter what was going on inside.

Elvis and Elvis alone was the show, and as for the army of people standing behind him? Our job was not to entertain. Our job was to come in on the notes Elvis couldn't hit anymore. The highest and the lowest parts of a person's register are the first ones to go, because people's range narrows as they age, especially someone who'd lived as hard as Elvis. There were eight backup singers, four black and four white, and we stood in the shadows while Elvis claimed the lights. I finally figured it out by studying Marilee. She would keep her eyes lowered every second she was onstage, like she was carried away in some ecstasy
of song, but through her eyelashes she was watching Elvis. The instant he began to fade, she would step closer to the microphone and increase the volume of her own voice.

And when she moved forward, we all did. Eight of us gradually rising as he declined, until the web of music was woven all around Elvis, virtually holding him up, shakes and tremors and stumbles and all.

San Antonio
was the fifth night of the western tour. Elvis had started out strong for the two dates in Los Angeles, had faded a bit in Phoenix, then bounced back to give them his best show yet in Houston. No one in the audience in any of those places had seemed to notice that we were using new, easier arrangements of the old songs or that he was talk-singing his way through half of them. He was pale and puffy, and he mumbled the familiar lyrics, but he still was Elvis. Just seeing him take the stage was enough for the crowd. Even the newspaper reviews had been kind.

But something was wrong in San Antonio. Fred had canceled rehearsal and the sound check, saying that Elvis had to rest. We were five days into a three-week tour and already his stamina was failing. No one said it in so many words, of course. The whole time I was at Graceland, I never heard anyone admit that Elvis had limitations in any category, or that the bad days were getting more frequent, and worse.

Performers are a superstitious crew, who like to do things in a certain sequence, every time. We were used to the sound check, then the rehearsal, eating, then dressing, then the vocal
warm-ups and the prayer. But on this particular night, none of that was happening. Nobody had seen Elvis all day. Fred paced around backstage with a face like thunder, muttering about how we just had to get him onstage and keep him upright. They'd brought in chicken and three-bean salad and chocolate silk pie, but nobody was touching any of it.

The opening act, a girl group called the Belle Tones, would generally perform from eight to eight forty-five, with Elvis showing up backstage sometime in the middle of their set. But in San Antonio eight forty-five came and went with no Elvis, and Fred had sent word to the Belle Tones that they would have to stay onstage. The rest of us whispered even harder among ourselves. Was Elvis even there yet or was he still in transit? Had he somehow gone missing entirely?

He finally showed up at nine fifteen, with the crowd out front growing restless and the Belle Tones so desperate for material that they were singing church hymns. He seemed steady enough on his feet, but he blew past us all, including Fred, without any explanation, striding straight onto the stage and sending the crowd into a frenzy.

“Come on,” said Marilee, grabbing my hand, because there was nothing for the rest of us to do but scramble onstage behind him, with the band members dragging their instruments and amps and the singers moving the microphones around as fast as we could. Elvis walked into the spotlight and slipped his arm around Ruth, the lead singer of the Belle Tones, and then he joined her in the chorus of “Love Lifted Me.”

The crowd was roaring. Everyone in the audience was not only on her feet—for the Elvis faithful, at this point, were al
most exclusively female—but pushing toward the stage like they thought this was Woodstock. The abruptness of Elvis's arrival and the fact he sprung himself upon them without any of the usual fanfare and introductions seemed to have whipped them into more than the usual fervor.

“We didn't pray,” I whispered to Marilee. Normally the white girls stood on one side of the stage and the black girls on the other, but that night in San Antonio, we'd all just grabbed the nearest microphone and set up wherever we could.

“What?” she said. She was the only one among us who didn't seem to be in a complete panic.

“We forgot to pray for the show,” I whispered again. Elvis and Ruth were singing beautifully together, although as far as I knew they had never rehearsed any sort of duet, and it seemed like this might be one of those nights when he was intact. Spectacular, even. Because there were times when Elvis could still effortlessly fill the biggest room in the world with his personality.

The song ended and he wiped the sweat from his brow with the long silk scarf that was dangling from around his neck. He almost always did this, making a great ceremony out of dabbing his forehead and then flinging the scarf into the audience; pretending to be surprised every time when all the fifty-­year-old women would trample one another half to death trying to get to it. But maybe it was a bad sign that he was sweating already, after his very first song. We were all looking back and forth at one another, trying to figure out what it meant that he was singing well but acting crazy. The Belle Tones all but ran off the stage, without any bows or good-byes,
and the rest of us huddled closer. We were circling the wagons like a bunch of pioneers.

It didn't fall apart all at once. Evidently inspired by the energy of the audience and the success of his opening number, Elvis went into a sequence of gospel songs. All the musicians were knocking their sheet music around, looking for the score, and Marilee hissed at the backups to just moan the word
Jesus
over and over. But Elvis's voice was sweet and strong that night, and he gave the crowd plenty of the “yes, ma'ams” and “thank ya'll very much” stuff they'd come to expect. And then, after finishing up “How Great Thou Art,” he suddenly threw in a few karate moves.

The karate was a sore point between Elvis and Fred. Fred thought it was foolish, but Elvis said the crowd expected it, which was probably true—and even that they insisted on it, which probably wasn't. But Elvis had forty-two years' worth of experience in doing exactly what he wanted to do while convincing himself it was all for the sake of someone else. The second night in LA he had kicked high and then screamed. The audience thought it was part of the act. A warrior cry. But he had really torn a muscle. The next night in Phoenix he had dropped to one knee and been unable to get up. Two of the guitarists had moved in and yanked him to his feet, throwing in enough air chopping and yelling to make it seem like a staged fight and not a rescue. The audience had once again roared their approval.

So karate was always a risky addition to the show, and that night in San Antonio, we were already off our usual game. We'd started late, we hadn't prayed, and we were singing the songs all
out of order. As he went into the first karate sequence, everyone onstage was holding their breath. One of the bassists laid down his guitar, just in case he'd have to catch him. Marilee got all us girls going in a sort of background doo-wop, ready to sing over the top of whatever happened next. But as prepared as we all were, it was still a shock when Elvis spun and kicked, both of his feet actually leaving the floor for a split second, and a pistol came flying out of his waistband and sailed across the stage.