The New Elvis (2 page)

“You wouldn’t believe the tips some guys leave. But that’s just a job. I’m the understudy for Max Maverick’s assistant at the Riviera. After she leaves, I’ll step in. Someday, I want to have my own magic show on the strip.”

The doctor resumed writing. “Your date of birth?”

“January 8, 1965.”

Dr. Johns was startled. “Elvis’s birthday.”

Zella looked at the Mary and Joseph figurines. They gazed down at baby Jesus, who lay in his manger. “Funny you should mention Elvis. There’s a rumor floating around the Flamingo that Elvis donated sperm here three years before he died.”

“Where would someone get an idea like that?”

“One of the cooks is married to a woman who used to work here. Fay North?”

“Yes, Fay. Great bookkeeper. She retired last year.”

“I’ve talked to her at parties,” Zella said. “She’s very colorful.”

Dr. Johns laughed. “That she is. So, I need to know about your family.”

“I have none,” Zella told him. “I was an only child, raised by my mother. My dad had cancer and died when I was two. And mom died last year. Heart attack.”

Dr. Johns tapped his pen on the desk. No applicants had received Elvis’s sperm in the past thirteen years because all of them had been sexually experienced. But here was Zella, wearing a purity band gifted to her by her late fiancé, as pretty as a pin-up girl, and only twenty-two years young, looking to become a mother. And she shared her birthday with Elvis. Could it be a coincidence, or were the heavens conspiring to fulfill the late King’s wish?

“So, anything special you’re looking for? Blue eyes and dark hair like yours?”

Zella smiled. “I’m a sucker for blue eyes.”

Abercromby Chrome Shop was located near the beach on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, with a short, unpaved road leading to its garage. Out back, you could see the Pacific, the surfers and their surfboards colorful daubs against the cerulean wash.

Calder Baillie had opened his shop to cater to the beachfront motorcycle crowd and hired Jarrod Lockhart when Jarrod was thirty-seven.

One day, Jarrod took his seven-year-old son Logan to work and showed him the piles of re-chromed bumpers that looked like silver canoes stacked against the corrugated walls. A smaller pile of unchromed bumpers lay piled against a workbench where tools were scattered.

“So you make the old ones look shiny,” Logan remarked, getting the picture.

“Yeah, but do you know how we do it?” Jarrod asked.

Logan shook his head and hiked up his jeans. He needed a belt but couldn’t find one that morning under the piles of clothing in his bedroom.

“We etch it,” his father explained.

Logan had an Etch A Sketch, but he no longer knew where it was. He once drew a house on it that was so narrow, its rooftop looked like the conical nose of a spaceship. Its front door was tall and narrow, but there were no windows, which was strange, considering how much Logan loved them. “What do you draw with?”

Jarrod erupted with a thick, whiskey-laced, pack-a-day chuckle that nearly startled the boy, who seldom saw his dad in a good mood. “It’s not a toy, it’s a process. To etch a bumper, we dip it in sodium cyanide to prep the surface to accept a coat of something new.”

Logan pictured a bumper wearing a dandy coat with brass buttons and wondered why it would need one unless it was cold out. Maybe these bumpers were being shipped to Alaska.

Jarrod pointed at a large vat with his dirty, scraped index finger. “See that red stuff over there? That gets crushed into a powder, and when you mix it, it’s not red anymore, it’s just smoky.”

Logan shuffled his feet and gazed at the ocean through the large picture window.

A loud voice interrupted his reverie. “You’re boring the boy, Jarrod.”

Logan turned to see a skeleton of a man with tufts of brown hair patched on his scalp like clumps of grass. “This your son?” Out came a bony hand, and it pumped Logan’s tender grip with a ferocity that frightened the boy.

“I’m Mr. Baillie,” he said, “and I know who you are because your dad works extra hard to make sure you and your mom have everything you need. Especially your mom.” Calder’s glance slid sideways, and he winked at Jarrod. “Say you’ve got a skull and crossbones—not a real one, but a metal one you want to mount on top of the gas tank—but you want it fancy. You heat up sodium cyanide to one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, dip the skull and crossbones in, and the metal gets etched, which means the structure is changed so other metals will stick to it. Then you take that skull and crossbones to another vat full of something shiny like melted bronze or chrome or copper or silver, and you dip it in and take it out, and you’ve got a shiny skull and crossbones.”

Logan did his best to follow what Mr. Baillie said, but it was fairly complicated.

Jarrod spoke up. “Say you’ve got a piggy bank full of nickels. You could melt them down, put an etched object into the melted nickels, and the object would have a shiny coating of melted nickels.”

“Why would I want to melt my nickels?”

The men laughed at that and allowed Logan to wander away so they could talk.

“You gonna meet Skeet tonight?” Calder asked.

Jarrod answered quietly, quickly. “Yeah, at eight.”

“Make sure you count it before you leave.”

Jarrod nodded and glanced over at Logan. Abercromby Chrome was not only in the business of re-chroming bumpers, it made the meat of its money from a tidy little meth lab Calder ran in the basement of the shop. Chemicals and chrome shops went together like sugar and bakeries. No one suspected that large orders for chemicals used to produce his product were used for anything but legitimate reasons. The extra income insured the longevity of not only the establishment but also Jarrod’s marriage to Ramona, a hoarder. She spent most of her husband’s paycheck as soon as he brought it home. Without drug deals on the side, there would be nothing to put away for any of life’s little emergencies.

With this as his rationalization, Jarrod made sure most of Santa Monica had all the ice it needed, even if he wasn’t a tweaker himself.

Two things happened to Zella on her twenty-third birthday in 1988 that would change her life forever. First, she discovered she was pregnant, and second, she met Eugene Wyatt, a real estate agent from Los Angeles. Twenty years her senior, Eugene looked exactly like she imagined Glenn might in his forties, with a touch of gray in his dark brown hair, crow’s feet at the corner of his azurite eyes, and a slight gut pooching out over his belt. He was alone, seated at the Munster nickel slots, three stools down from an old lady who had chain-smoked her way through most of a pack of Eve Lights.

He ordered a vodka tonic, which was Glenn’s drink, and asked for olives on the side. When Zella delivered his complimentary drink, and he tipped her five dollars, she couldn’t help herself. She noticed he did not wear a wedding band, so she lingered, hoping to find out more about him. He introduced himself, told her he was there for a realtors’ conference and would be in town ‘til Tuesday, then asked her out. It was atypical of Zella to accept dates with strangers, but she felt lightheaded when she looked at him and couldn’t say no.

She wrote her home phone number on a cocktail napkin, which he tucked into the pocket of his blazer. Zella had Mondays off. Eugene called at noon, and they met at one o’clock at the entrance to the Paradise Garden buffet. It was a gorgeous day, and the large windows made them feel as though they were in a terrarium, looking out at the wildlife, waterfalls, and palms that filled the preserve.

Eugene laughed. “Are they watching us, or are we watching them?”

“I think it’s a little of both,” Zella decided. Dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and a flouncy dress, she felt carefree, impulsive, and ravenous, eager to take full advantage of the salad bar before adding snow crab legs, prime rib, glazed duck, and mussels to her plate. Eugene concentrated on sautéed clams and fried chicken, with only a smattering of salad and veggies to round out his meal. After ice cream sundaes, they pushed back their chairs and gazed outside at the flamboyant flamingos and parleying penguins in contented silence.

“I love a woman who can eat as much as I can,” Eugene noted.

“I love a man who doesn’t care how much a woman eats,” she replied.

They discussed Bugsy Siegel’s affiliation with the Flamingo and how he named it after his girlfriend, Virginia “Flamingo” Hill, who had long, slender legs. Zella recounted a story about the hotel and casino’s grand opening the day after Christmas in 1946, when Jimmy Durante, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford danced to the music of Xavier Cugat’s band. After three hours had melted away, it was time to part, but they couldn’t. Zella followed Eugene up to his room and sat on his king-size bed.

She was perfectly candid with him and admitted she was still a virgin, holding out her left hand and showing him the promise ring she still wore. “Glenn and I were waiting ‘til marriage.”

Eugene sat down at the secretary desk. “I’m sorry you lost him.”

Zella looked thoughtful. “It’s strange, but the only time he crossed my mind today was when I realized again how much you look like him.”

Eugene sounded rueful. “An older him.”

“True,” she laughed. “But still…”

“We’re bound to be a little different, he and I.”

“Well,” Zella said. “I’ll just have to find out what makes you
you
.”

“Sounds good.” Eugene moved from the desk to the bed. He took Zella in his arms and kissed her, tossing her hat toward the pillows, running his fingers through her long, dark hair.

“Have you ever been married?” Zella asked.

“Yes, and divorced. My ex-wife remarried, moved to Sherman Oaks, and seems much happier now. We met in high school and married young. No kids.”

“Glenn and I met in high school.”

Eugene rested his forehead against hers. “You’ve got to stop talking about him.”

Her words were barely louder than a murmur. “Yes, please make me forget.”

The first hint Logan had that his father was involved in something shady came on a warm spring day when Logan was eight and his dad picked him up from school before driving to Culver City. There, behind a small bookstore on Overland Avenue, he watched from the passenger seat as his dad got out of his beloved vintage Chevelle SS 396, its shiny black paint job polished to a high sheen, and approached a small gray car with darkened windows.

A man in the other car lowered the passenger window, and an envelope was passed from a gloved hand to his father. Then Jarrod reached inside his pocket for a small packet, which the gloved hand accepted. The window stayed open a crack, but the men did not speak. Jarrod waited, ran a cut and bandaged hand back through his dark hair, and seemed to examine his Levi’s jacket for lack of anything more useful to do.

Finally, the window closed and Jarrod nodded. The car jerked into reverse and then forward, careening out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Jarrod turned and walked back to the car. Logan thought he had never seen his father look wearier. His clothes were dirty from work, and there was a new crack in the leather of his work boots, which, when new, had seemed indestructible with their steel toes and soles as thick as sponges.

As swiftly as the dark car had vanished, a new car rushed into the parking lot, this one a sickly green with white scrape marks along its side. Before the vehicle stopped, a tatted man in a torn undershirt and baggy pants leapt out of the back seat. He ran up to Jarrod and stood so close, their faces were inches apart.

“What you doing here, man?” The guy was impossibly loud.

Jarrod stepped back. “Just—” He glanced backward toward the car, nervous, and Logan instinctively crouched down below the dashboard.

“You have no business here, OK? You don’t deal in Culver. Got it?”

Jarrod was quiet. Baillie told him the transaction would be hassle free, but he’d been wrong before. If he made any moves or said anything, this guy was prepared to take it to the next level.

“Tell Baillie to keep it in his own backyard. If I see you around here again, I’ll kill your wife and kid first, then come after you and tell you how it all went down.”

Jarrod flashed another glance toward the car and didn’t see Logan.

The man wiped a hand across his brow, then stuck his hand into his pants and pulled out a revolver. “Yeah, you think I didn’t notice the boy? What kind of dad brings his kid to a drop? Asshole. So, what are you supposed to do?”

Jarrod spoke quietly. “Stay out of Culver City.”

“That’s right, Pops.”

Close enough to kiss Jarrod, the man spit on him, daring him to start something, but Jarrod refused. The man went back to his car, jumped in, closed the passenger door, and gave a sign to the driver. They peeled out of the lot. It was only then that Logan sat up again and saw his father, who had crumpled to his knees in the gravel.

Zella and Eugene Wyatt fell in love, were married at Wee Kirk of the Heather in Las Vegas in March of 1988, and settled into his home in the Beverly Hills flatlands after honeymooning in Barbados. That Zella had been a virgin yet was pregnant courtesy of Dr. Johns’s sperm bank was not something they discussed with friends and neighbors. When Zella’s water broke the morning of October third, Eugene rushed her to Cedars-Sinai. Ryan Bryan Wyatt, situated in the breach position with his legs-crossed Indian style, was delivered at three that afternoon via Caesarean section.

Growing up amidst luxury in Beverly Hills, little Ryan attended Page Private School as soon as he turned five, entering pre-kindergarten at the same time his neighbor, little Beatrice Edwin, did. Beatrice loved playing at Ryan’s house because Zella had decorated the Spanish courtyard style home in bright colors that would later, when
SpongeBob Squarepants
debuted on television, remind everyone of Bikini Bottom. Rooms were painted plum, mottled with lighter purple; lime, mottled with evergreen; and turquoise, mottled with light blue. There were Tiki carvings and aquariums, a modern, pop art Tiki bar with stools, retro sectional sofas and low-slung chairs, boomerang-shaped lamps, glass tables, wall-to-wall shag carpeting, stone and brick walls, and freestanding, globe-shaped fireplaces. There was an ocean mural in Ryan’s bedroom, complete with fishermen, ships, jumping porpoises, whales, and mermaids. Even his toys were kept in fishing nets suspended from ceiling hooks and adorned with starfish, shells, and plastic lobsters. Outside, in the courtyard, there was a sandbox, slide, swings, a pond, and a pool frequented by Nana, the family’s black Newfoundland, named after the kind-hearted canine in J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan
.