Last Ride to Graceland (14 page)

It landed at the feet of the rhythm guitarist. I think his name was John and I don't remember much about him, except for the fact he didn't like guns. He was the kind of guy who kept to himself, which was unusual, because we all tended to do everything together, and by “everything” I mean everything Elvis wanted to do. We ate when he was hungry and slept when he was tired and if he sneezed, twenty-five people put on a sweater. But John was the only one of us who didn't race golf carts or shoot rifles or practice karate, or eat and sleep along with everyone else's schedule. There were rumors he had even voted for McGovern. The guys said it was only John's extreme talent that allowed him to live like a loner and still stay in the fold. So of course the gun came straight to him. It was that kind of night. He just stood there looking down at it, with an expression of numb horror. It had left Elvis's waistband with enough force that it was still spinning, skidding its way toward the bass section like a bottle in a kid's kissing game. John, God help him, kicked the damn thing and it took off again across the stage in the other direction. Hit the bottom of the drum set and ricocheted off, and this time came to rest pointing straight at me.

But there was no time to think about the symbolism of any
of that, because Elvis had stopped his karate moves and returned to the mike. He was covered in sweat, and since he had thrown his scarf so early, he had nothing to wipe it with. He blinked his eyes, brushed his forehead with the cuff of his jumpsuit, and broke, a cappella, into “Jailhouse Rock.”

“Jailhouse Rock” was one of the few songs that required actual choreography, which we did as a tribute to the scene in the movie. All the girl singers stood between the microphone stands, with our hands gripping them like they were jailhouse bars and did an old sixties dance move, a sort of modified jerk. And while we scrambled into position, Marilee stooped down and scooped up the gun and slipped it, fast and easy, behind an amp. I felt the breath gradually begin to return to my body.

It seemed to take a million hours but eventually the show was over. The curtain was pulled. No finales tonight, even though we could hear the audience on the other side chanting, wanting more. Elvis turned, every part of him glittering with perspiration, and said, “Who has my Derringer?”

“You had no call bringing that thing onstage, Mr. Presley,” Marilee said. She was one of the few people who could talk to Elvis like that. She retrieved it from behind the amp and handed it over to him. “Honey Bear 'bout got her feet shot off.”

Elvis twirled the Derringer once, like a gunslinger, and stuck the gun into his pants. “Ya'll need to be more careful,” he said.

There was
a four-week break between the western tour and the southern tour. We went back to Graceland, supposedly to rest
and regroup, but everybody was tense because Elvis's behavior was getting stranger every day. One night at dinner he stood up and said he felt like recording, and so we all stood up too and headed for the studio, leaving our steaming plates of spaghetti behind us. But when we got there, that wasn't right either. We hadn't been at the mikes more than ten minutes when Elvis said, “Call Nunchucks.”

Both the karate studio and the recording studio were in the same building, out back from the main house, behind the garages and the swimming pool. None of us were dressed for karate. We'd come down to dinner in whatever we'd been wearing, bathrobes and bathing suits mostly, not planning to go out and sing, much less start rolling and kicking on those padded red mats. But Elvis gave the word, and someone picked up the phone and called Nunchucks. I'd never met him at that point. Had heard plenty of rumors, but had never actually seen the man until he walked in two minutes later, wearing only a pair of blue cotton judo pants.

“Well then,” said Elvis. “'Bout time.”

I had never felt lust before. I didn't know the word. Well, maybe I knew the word but I'd never been able to match it to an actual feeling. All I know is that I took one look at David Beth and my stomach lurched. There weren't any rainbows or unicorns. It was a sickening sensation, almost like someone had punched me, like I needed to sit down. But I was also aware that some whole new phase of my life was starting and that it was 'bout time. David's chest was long and slender, ropy like a ballet dancer's or a swimmer's.
Elegant,
I thought, the word rushing into my mind from nowhere.
What stands before me is an elegant man.

I knew what people said about him. They thought he was full of himself and they resented how much time he spent alone with Elvis. They called him a poser, which was really saying something at Graceland, where everybody was pretending, either trying to be something that they weren't or trying not to show what they really were. And even in that moment, as my stomach was falling and my knees were still heading south, I could see their point. I could see that he was learning as he went, that all his fine talk about martial arts and poetry and Asian philosophy was little more than bluster. He was starting to get a sense of what he could be, but he wasn't quite there yet, and maybe that's what I liked about him. He reminded me of myself.

Elvis turned and bowed to him. “Welcome, Master.”

Now that was something. Elvis bowed to no one. Well, maybe the audience. I had seen him lower his heavy, corseted body to one knee at the end of the show, as if he were waiting for the audience to knight him, or accept his proposal, with all of us standing behind him with bated breath, hoping like hell he had the strength and the balance to get back to his feet. But bowing to the audience was an ironic thing, part of the act, and on that summer night that Elvis bowed to David Beth and called him “Master,” it felt completely different. The whole room went silent.

“You know everyone,” said Elvis. He didn't seem to pick up on the uncomfortable vibe around him. Elvis always had this ability to live entirely inside his own skin, utterly unaware of the wider world. That might have been the source of his power.

David looked right at me. “I don't believe I've met this young lady.”

“That's Honey Bear,” said Elvis. “You're going to teach her, right?”

“It will be my greatest pleasure,” David said, bowing low. So Elvis bowed to David and David bowed to me and when he looked up our eyes locked. For the first time since I got to Graceland, I wasn't just some South Carolina preacher's daughter swimming in waters that were way too deep for her. I wasn't just Laura Berry with dyed hair, trying to fit in, trying to keep up. For the first time in my life, I felt like Honey.

“She needs to learn some self-defense,” said Elvis. “Every girl here does. 'Cause I'll tell you something. This old world is full of bad boys.”

So it is,
I thought.
And I have the feeling I'm going to enjoy it.

Within the
week, I was turning everything I saw into a haiku.

Soap on the counter

It smells like rain in summer.

The girl washes away.

Open the closet

Only one hanger waits there.

Leaving again soon.

Okay, so I didn't say they were any good. I only said that I made them up, compulsively and mindlessly. But during that four-week break between the western and summer tours, I fell in love. Managed to convince myself that David Beth was a poet and a warrior and a philosopher and everything dark and
mysterious that I'd taken to the road to find.

“I don't want to be your first,” he told me one night after one of our long sessions of kissing and groping and tussling around on the red karate mat. “I would never invite such heavy karma.”

I didn't ask him how he knew I was a virgin just by looking at me, but the point is, he meant what he said. Whenever we were alone together, he was always able to pull back just before the point of no return and his control over his own desire only made me desire him more. Got me thinking that maybe, somewhere deep inside, he really was a spiritual creature.

“But somebody's got to be my first and I want it to be you,” I said, wiggling under him. Trying to drag him toward the same edge I fell over every time we were together. “I want you to make love to me.”

“This is making love.”

“You know what I mean.”

He smiled. He liked it when I begged. “Be patient.”

I was trying, but none of this was anything like the polite little dance I'd done in the backseat of Bradley Ainsworth's car. That had been thirty minutes of kissing, five minutes above the waist, one hickey given and another received, maybe thirty seconds below the waist before I'd sit up straight and declare, “It's time to go home.” But there was no sequencing to the lovemaking of David Beth—he would sometimes pull himself off me in the midst of our wild grinding and spend the next full hour simply tracing every line of my face with a fingertip. It was the first time I was the one who wanted something that was being withheld and it drove me a little bit insane.

“It is not my destiny,” he said, “to unlock this particular
door.”

I should have known that all this gobbledygook about destiny was just his way of saying he didn't love me. That I might have been his favorite distraction for the summer of 1976, but that's as far as it went. To be a girl's first implies something he wasn't feeling. That came with a certain sense of responsibility that he wasn't willing to take on.

That said, he made it clear he had absolutely no problem with being my second.

When we came back from the southern leg of the tour and my fateful stop at the Juicy Lucy, where Philip Cory had gladly shouldered the task that he refused, David sensed the change in me immediately. We got back to Graceland on a Tuesday, slept all day Wednesday, and were back in the studio by Thursday. Elvis was recording a cover of the Gary Puckett hit “This Girl Is a Woman Now,” the sort of melodramatic soap opera garbage that he kept working into the end of the southern tour, even though everybody but him knew that he was better than that. The Gary Pucketts of the world should be covering him, not the other way around, but when Elvis got to the part about “She's found out what it's all about,” David, who had come in late and was leaning against the wall, caught my eye and smiled.

It was tacky, I can see that now. I can see a lot of things now, even those I'd rather not. But in that moment, all I could do was flush red to the roots of my hair. Not with embarrassment, but with anticipation.

Here's the joke—one of them, anyway. I hadn't found out what it was all about. I'd lost my virginity in a café, behind a
bedspread hung as a curtain, half wedged into some sort of storage pantry that held beer and grits and hamburger buns. I'd been caught up in the moment, but when the moment was over, I'd stood up and caught a reflection of myself in the ice maker door. I looked utterly unchanged. So I told myself, “Well, that's done,” and I was relieved, relieved the way you are when you've taken your SATs or had a tooth pulled. And if the sex itself had been a letdown, I told myself it was because I didn't love Philip Cory. Not like I loved David Beth.

But the important thing is that the deed was done and David knew it. He stared at me all though the song, so intently that I got flustered and came in late, ruining the harmony on the chorus. I'd never done that. When it came to the recording studio, I was meticulous. If we needed a second take, or a third, I always made sure it wasn't because of Honey Berry, and now even Elvis turned and looked at me, lifting his lip just a little in that way he had, that knowing little smirk.

“You feeling all right, Honey Bear?” he said.

But I'll
have to give David this. Philip Cory had been all smoke and mirrors, all blinking lights and pulsing bass. But David Beth knew how to make things romantic. A few days after we got back from the southern tour, he took me outside, to a checkered tablecloth at the very edge of the property, and he'd brought a disc of Gouda cheese and a bottle of wine. A bright pink wine called Almaden that came in an earthenware crock. The wine was so cold that I shuddered when I tasted it. Trembled as it rushed across my tongue, but I swore to him that it was glorious, even
though all the preacher's daughter in me could think was
This is the blood of Christ spilled for you
.

Needless to say, there was poetry for the occasion—poetry and wine and a canopy of trees, and if afterward I still didn't feel quite as changed, quite as transformed as I wanted to be, this time I knew that I only had myself to blame. I don't know much about sex, even now, but I do know it isn't magic. It can't take you anywhere you don't know how to get to on our own. And when David hovered over me, in that moment I'd been waiting for since June, he looked deeply into my eyes and said, “You did what you needed to do, right?”

“Everything,” I told him. I was talking about that night in Macon, on the gritty floor of the Juicy Lucy, when I'd submitted myself to a stranger posed just above me, in this same position. “I did it all.”

It didn't occur to me until six weeks later that I had completely misunderstood his question.

CORY

I
work through both lunch and dinner and that long Sunday afternoon stretch in between. Not just singing and playing, but also hopping off the stool to bus tables when it was called for, and scooping Marilee's red vinegar slaw into little plastic cups. An astounding array of people have passed through the Bay Restaurant in the course of this particular Memorial Day weekend, so I've tried to make myself useful wherever I could. At one point, carrying in a tray load of empty beer glasses, I saw the Doozy's sign, which blew away in the hurricane, now mounted over the bar, just as Marilee claimed. So I can mark two items off my list. The Juicy Lucy and Doozy's, both down.

But I feel good. It was a day full of the sort of mind-­numbing work that makes you strangely happy. The kind of day when you're too busy to worry or doubt or even think.

Eventually, all the customers clear out. The old lady working the register has gone, along with the half-witted waitress who I suspect accidentally gave away a lot of beer for free. It's
just me and Marilee back on the deck, in the same two chairs, only now the sky above us is navy.

I feel better about taking her hospitality after my afternoon of hard labor, more like I've earned something rather than just taken it. Marilee has brought Lucy another bone, kicking a couple of his little turds off the deck without comment, and she's also carried one of those big, blanket-style Mexican hammocks out and dumped it in the corner. My bed for the night, I guess, and God knows, I've had worse.

“So,” she says, settling back in with the same stein of tea and picking up the conversation as if we'd never paused it. “Did you like the ribs?”

“Best ever,” I say, which is the truth.

“I learned how to make that dry rub in Memphis,” she says. “People down here soak their barbecue to death in sauce.”

“People back home soak it to death too.”

“There's a hundred ways to do barbecue,” she says. “Just like there's a hundred ways to praise the Lord. You ever been to a Renaissance fair?”

It's another strange shift in conversational direction, but luckily the last few days have disenchanted me with any former value I might have put in linear thought. Besides, I was one of the people whom the waitress kept bringing beers to, so I'm pleasantly buzzed. Looking out over the water with my dog, and my sixth—maybe seventh—beer of the day, I feel fine enough that I don't care that this conversation doesn't make any particular sense.

“I've not only been to a Renaissance festival,” I say, “but I've been hired on as a troubadour. Worked them in Savannah and Charleston.”

“Well, that's what Graceland was like,” she says. “A traveling fair. Did your mama ever tell you?”

I shake my head. “She didn't like to talk about Graceland.”

“Elvis was the king,” Marilee says, “which goes without saying. And there was only one queen and she was gone and that hurt him bad. Real bad. So bad nobody was allowed to talk about it. There were other girls—some of them stayed for years—but they were never more than . . .”

“Concubines?” I venture when she runs out of steam.

She frowns.

“Serving wenches?” I try again, and this time she nods.

“Closer,” she says. “Do you understand what I'm trying to get at?”

I don't but I take a stab. “Elvis was constantly surrounded by people but he was still lonely?”

To my great surprise, that's exactly the answer she's looking for.

“Yes,” she says. “He was lonely in that way that only the best kind of people are. The people who care and can't stop themselves, the ones who can't kill the nerve no matter how hard they try . . . they all live lonely.” She pushes to her feet and goes over to the corner of the deck, where she begins to sort out the tangle of my hammock, all the ropes and cords. I could help her. I should help her, but I'm afraid it will break the spell.

“He had everything,” she says, looking down at the snarl of cloth. It's getting dark. Someone somewhere should go and turn on a light. Marilee fastens the top part of the hammock to the corner of the deck and then adds, more to herself than to me, “Had everything in the world, but it still didn't add up to enough.”

“Do you ever miss Graceland?”

She shakes her head without looking up.

“Do you ever miss singing?”

“There are lots of ways to sing,” she says. “Cooking's singing. I like to say I'm making music in people's mouths.”

I nod. I can't vouch for her fried seafood, but the barbecue of Marilee Jones is a holy thing, some combination of a Memphis dry rub and an Alabama soak and the last of Doozy's secret recipe, plucked from the bay.

“Best barbecue I'll ever have,” I say again, which is an outrageous thing for a southerner to claim, the equivalent of standing up on an altar in front of God and everybody and promising to be true to one man until the day you die, even knowing that the possibility of better barbecue will always await you five miles down the road.

She finishes attaching the hammock to the deck and drops back down in the chair.

“How did you and Honey get the car?” I finally ask when enough peaceful time has passed that I think it's safe.

“He gave it to her.”

“Elvis?”

She gives me a pained little nod.

“When I called Graceland they put me on the phone with some guy named Fred. He said Elvis gave away a lot of cars, but he'd never give away a Blackhawk.”

She laughs, takes a swig from the stein. “Fred's still alive? I bet he and I are the only two left who remember the old days.”

“Not quite. I met a man in Macon, Georgia. I knew to go there because I was following the trash in the car. You know,
trying to find all the restaurants where Mama must have stopped for food on her drive home. There was a cup from a place called the Juicy Lucy. This man found me sleeping in the parking lot and it turns out he used to own it.”

Marilee nods, still not surprised, and I'm beginning to wonder if anything I could say would shock her or at least shock her bad enough that she would let it show. “That would be Fantasy Phil. Yes, ma'am. If a girl was following a line of trash, it would take her straight to him.”

“He said he used to be the cook.”

“That's one word for it.”

“He's a politician now. I saw his picture on a billboard. Just a glance. But when I met him, I said, ‘You're running for office, aren't you?' and he didn't deny it.”

“That doesn't surprise me. Hamburgers and promises. Phil was always feeding the people one thing or another.”

“Well, he gave me four hundred dollars, out of a clear blue sky. I didn't ask him for it. But when I told him I was Honey's daughter, he pulled out a pocketful of money and handed every bit of it to me. Do you have any theory as to why a man I'd never seen before would do such a thing?”

“I'd imagine you're the one with the idea.”

“I think he thinks he's my daddy.”

Marilee leans back and sighs, but for once it's not the sigh of someone who's exasperated with me. It's the sigh of a woman who's worked a hard day, who has sawed ribs and boned fish and dodged wave after wave of grease splashing out of the hush puppy fryer. The sun is going down over the water, a rare sight east of the Mississippi, and she pauses for a minute to take in
the final smear of gold and rose across the horizon, even though she's presumably witnessed thousands of gulf sunsets during her years in Fairhope. This slow, silent contemplation of ­nature . . . taking the time to really stop and look . . . it's the first time she's done anything that remotely reminds me of my mother. I guess Marilee's also trying to make up for all those days she spent in the dark.

“Just for the record, money or not, I don't think I'm itching to claim that man as my daddy,” I say, after the silence has stretched past the point of comfort. “He made me a little bit uneasy, and by the way you called him Fantasy Phil, I'm guessing he might have been a drug dealer.”

“Now why would any of us need to know a drug dealer?”

“A band on tour might—”

“Because Elvis didn't cotton to drug dealers,” she snaps, and I wonder whose reputation she's still trying to protect after all these years.

“I know,” I say. “I read about it. He got the local police force to deputize him and he liked to ride along on vice busts. And President Nixon made him head of some sort of enforcement agency. An honorary post, just an excuse to give him medals, but I've seen the pictures.”

“That's not exactly right, but close enough.”

“If you don't mind me saying so, him being so antidrug, fraternizing with the vice cops. It seems like the ultimate in hypocrisy. I mean, when you consider how he died.”

“Most lies are nothing more than people telling you how they wish things had been.”

Now that's something I'm going to have to remember. It's a
kind view of the world, and one I might shortly be able to use to my advantage.

“I know Elvis had no tolerance for street drugs, and that he used legally prescribed pharmaceuticals,” I say. “I understand that he died on the right side of the law.” Marilee looks mildly pained by my word choice but I soldier on. “All I'm saying is that there was such a big entourage that traveled with him. You said yourself it was like a Renaissance fair. A bunch of musicians and dancers and roadies and security, and they might not have all had the same scruples.” Or the same obliging doctors either, but there's no need to add that part. I have to tread carefully with Marilee. She seems to be one of those people who leads you right to the door of something, but gets mad when you step over the threshold. “So I'm thinking that maybe Fantasy Phil supplied people like them during the tours? I saw the Juicy Lucy. He took me inside. The whole thing looked a little suspect. And it was a regular stop, I figure? Phil made it sound like the
Lisa Marie
had flown through Macon more than once.”

“Well, now, isn't that head of yours slammed full of thoughts?” Marilee drains the last of the tea from her stein. “Does your dog eat corn bread?”

“He eats whatever I give him. Sometimes he eats things I don't give him.”

“What made you name a boy dog Lucy?”

“It's a long story.”

“Aren't they all?” She stands up and disappears back into the restaurant, returning within seconds with a basket of cold hush puppies, which she sets in front of Lucy. She can't seem to sit still. Maybe I'm making her nervous. Or maybe she's just
one of those compulsive workers, one of those people who can never rest as long as there's one more thing to do. She's a mother to the world, that much is clear to a blind man, and I'm surprised she didn't take Mama under her wing. I'm surprised that she instead cast her out onto the long and heartless highway. Of course, Marilee claims she didn't know Mama was pregnant, and I guess she didn't. If she'd understood how deep the girl's well of desperation truly was, this whole story might have had a different ending. I might have been born in Fairhope. I might have grown up right here on this half-rotted pier.

“Phil had an eye for the young ones,” Marilee says when she settles back into the Adirondack chair. “So it wouldn't surprise me to hear he tried his luck with Honey, but trying ain't getting. I thought your mother was pure as the driven snow when she headed out of here back in 1977, but you've done the numbers and nobody can argue with numbers. She must have laid down with somebody, and I guess it could have been Fantasy Phil.”

“He told me she was wild.”

“She wasn't wild. If he said something like that, it's just proof of how little he knew her.”

I'm relieved. He may have given me four hundred dollars, but I don't like the idea that the man in Macon, hereafter to be known as Fantasy Phil, could truly be my father. Not to be a snob or anything, and heaven knows I've made my own selection errors throughout the years, but I don't like the notion I was conceived in a kudzu-choked pot palace, spray-painted with pastel mushrooms, located behind the airport of a middling southern town. Conceived by two people too stoned to
know what they were doing. Such a scenario fiddles with my sense of destiny.

“I don't suppose there's any chance . . .” I say, but then I can't think how to finish the question.

“Any chance of what?”

“That Elvis himself might have—”

“No, girl, not a one. He was too sick by that time and his mind was running in directions . . .”

“He was only forty-two.” Forty-two is young. I'll be forty-two in five years.

“So that's why you came here?” Marilee says softly, her words coming out of utter darkness. Night has fallen, just like it so often does, without me noticing. “Because there's a part of you that's been thinking all these years Elvis Presley was your daddy? Thinking if it's true, your whole life will start to make sense?”

“It's possible.”

I hear her shake her head. Actually I hear her earrings rattle. Two big hoops, silver and hanging halfway to her shoulders, the only ornamentation Marilee Jones chose on this particular day.

“He was too broken,” she says, “and besides, Elvis had lines he did not cross, and even if they didn't make any sense to other people, they made sense to him. He had his own religion. He made it up in his head as he went.”

I guess some of those lines were like riding along with cops to drug busts
, I think,
even when he was likely stoned himself at the time.
But I don't say it. Marilee's still trying to protect something and I guess I am too.

“It's possible,” I say again, more for myself than for Marilee.

“Anything's pos-si-ble,” Marilee says, breaking the word into
as many syllables as she can. She thinks I'm silly. Thinks I'm eighteen years older, but still just as silly as my mama was, passing through here from another direction, a lifetime ago.