The New Elvis (25 page)

“You going to stare at that album all night, or are you gonna come with me?”

Logan looked up. Uncle Wendell had withered and grayed
.

He looked down at his own legs, but they were now clad in skinny jeans, and the Elvis album was on the dashboard
.

He looked back up at his fragile, aged uncle
.

“It’s time,” Uncle Wendall said
.

“For what?” Logan asked, knowing full well it had nothing to do with making use of the rest stop
.

Uncle Wendall stood at the open passenger door and waited for Logan to understand
.

“I know you said I could tell Ryan the truth, but he wants me to tell him.”

The old man turned his rheumy gaze up to the heavens. The stars were beginning to glint like sequins on the fabric of darkening sky, and the air was still
.

“You are safe. I am watching over you now. You can speak. All you need to do is try.”

Logan opened his eyes and looked across the coffee table at Ryan, who had been talking about loss. “Grief counseling,” he said. “It’s really helped me, listening to other people talk about about they’re going through. I attend a group that meets three times a week, and I’ve already processed some stuff. I’ve cried a whole lot, too, and wonder when I’m going to stop. I think groups are better than one-on-one therapy because there’s a different dynamic. Everyone starts out as strangers, but you become friends pretty quick. I guess you have to, when you’re bawling your eyes out in front of them.”

Logan took another sip of beer and Ryan broke into a lopsided grin. He sat up straight and leaned toward him. “Finish the bottle.”

Logan obliged, and a burp erupted, surprising them both.

Ryan jumped up. “Oh, my God! Your first word is
burp
!”

Logan was so startled he felt dizzy and saw sparks dancing in his field of vision.

Ryan ran over to where Logan was sitting and put his arm around him. “Maybe I can try some pre-performance stuff on you to get you to loosen up. Go ahead and try to cough. Take a deep breath and then push the air out of your lungs in a blast.”

Logan honked, and they both started laughing. Then Logan gasped. His honk of a laugh sounded like rusty hinges on a Radio Flyer wagon being scraped across metal.

Ryan was elated. “You need more to drink.” He ran out of the room and returned with another beer, which Logan drank in big gulps.

He felt faint but excited and ready to try again.

“Say A, E, I, O, U,” Ryan instructed, so close to Logan on the dark blue couch, he was nearly on top of him, ready to shake the vowels out of him.

Logan croaked like a frog. “A, E, I, O, U.”

They looked at each other, eyes wide.

“OK,” Ryan said. “Now tell me what you wanted to tell me.”

He sat back against the cushions, expectant, and waited.

Logan cleared his throat and sounded like a person with bronchitis trying to dredge up phlegm. He took another sip of beer. His voice might be hoarse, and he might sound peculiar, but his real voice would come back with practice. The important thing was that Ryan heard him. He scooted back on the couch so he could face Ryan fully and took a deep breath.

“Elvis is your father,” he said, daring to speak the words he’d written a thousand times in letters never sent.

Ryan looked at him, completely blank. “You mean my dad is an Elvis impersonator. I know, man. I always suspected it.”

Logan shook his head emphatically, determined to make Ryan understand him. “The
real
Elvis. The
real
Elvis Presley. The
famous
Elvis Presley.
He’s
your dad.”

The tables had turned.

It was Ryan’s turn to be speechless.

Because traffic was bad, it took a while for Ryan and Logan to make it back to the Logan’s apartment complex in the Hollywood Hills. On the way, Logan explained how he had sold his graphic arts school graduation Caddy to win an online auction for clippings of Elvis’s hair saved by Homer “Gil” Gilleland, The King’s personal hairdresser, just in case he had the opportunity to test it with Ryan’s.

Still in shock, Ryan mumbled something about DNA tests and followed him to Marilyn’s apartment, allowing Logan to lead him inside.

“We’re home,” Logan croaked.

Marilyn dropped the bowl of watermelon she was carrying and pieces flew across the white carpet. Tom rushed in, saw the spilled fruit, saw Marilyn’s astonished expression, saw Logan standing there with Ryan, and didn’t know what to make of it. He dropped to his knees and began to pick the pieces out of the carpet, reaching up toward Marilyn to retrieve the tipped bowl she still held in her hand.

“Mare, what is it?”

“He—he talked.”

Ryan and Logan laughed.

“Go on in,” Logan told Ryan. “Take a seat on my bed. I mean, the couch. Jeez, I think I need some water.”

Logan left Ryan with Marilyn and Tom and went into the kitchen.

Marilyn and Tom stared at Ryan.

“Hey, you’re the kid from
It Factor
. You remember, Mare. The one who I said looked like Elvis.” Tom went over to sit beside him. “I bet you get that a lot.”

Before Ryan had time to reply, Logan returned with his water and sat down on the carpet to finish cleaning up the spilled watermelon.

“Oh, let me get a wet rag,” Marilyn said. “I’ve got to scrub those spots out.”

“Actually,” Logan said, taking a sip of water and inspecting a square of watermelon like it was a precious gem, “there’s a whole lot more to the story than you think.” He felt his throat. “I think I’ve got to rest my voice. It’s a little hoarse. You tell them, Ryan.”

Marilyn returned from the kitchen and sat down on the carpet beside Logan. “How did you get your voice back?”

Logan pointed at Ryan, who leaned back into the cushions and looked around the room at Logan’s Elvis artwork. “Actually, he had something important to tell me, and I told him he had to
tell
me if he wanted to tell me. As in,
speak
. And I guess it was important enough that he did.”

Marilyn put her hand on Logan’s arm. “What did you need to say?”

“Well, to start at the beginning, I’ll have to take you back to when I found out I was a sperm donor baby,” Ryan said.

Marilyn put the rag down and listened.

“I had just gotten back with my girlfriend Bea after years apart due to
my
stupidity when my dad called to say my grandparents were in town. I’d never met them because they retired to Thailand before I was born. It was typical and awkward, with them going through my baby album and whatnot. They started to discuss who I looked like and agreed I looked like my mom, but then my Grandma Katherine said something to the effect, ‘Of course Ryan doesn’t look like Gene’, and then my dad quickly interrupted her and tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. My mom left the room to check on dinner, and I followed her and asked her if my dad Gene was my real father. She put me off, and I got angry. Before I made it back to the living room, though, I overheard my dad talking to my grandparents and found out that my mom received a ‘donation’—my grandmother’s polite term—and that it happened in Vegas, she never found out who the father was, and that the doctor who helped her was named Wendall Johns, a guy who liked to keep things confidential.

“My girlfriend and I figured that since I looked so much like Elvis and my mom went to a fertility clinic in Vegas, there was a good chance my dad was an Elvis impersonator. We started watching tons of movies about Elvis, including documentaries done on impersonators, and tried to see if we could find him that way, and then we watched feature films where Elvis was played by an actor and tried to see if one of those guys might be my dad. One thing we thought was likely was that the guy could probably sing, since I can, and my mom can’t—at least, not very well.

“We put together a cover story for our parents, and Bea and I convinced our friend Noah to drive us to Vegas. I had found Dr. Johns’s business address and phone number in a calendar my mom kept from 1988, the year I was born. The phone number had been transferred to someone new, so that left going to the fertility clinic and hopefully finding him. When we got there, we found out the clinic had turned into a tanning salon, but a neighbor told us we could find Dr. Johns in Rolling Hills Estates a few miles away. Once we got there, a neighbor pointed out his house, so we went to the door and rang the bell. Logan here answered the door and told us his uncle was out.”

Tom was amazed. “Dr. Johns was your uncle?”

Logan nodded, and Ryan continued.

“We went to Bar Fifty-Six, a new lounge a block off the strip. They had a show featuring Elvis impersonators, concentrating on The King’s first big year, 1956, followed by karaoke. After that, we went back to Logan’s house and met his uncle, who couldn’t stop staring at me. We all thought he knew something, but he denied it, so we gave up and left.”

Logan finished his glass of water and raised his hand. “I feel better. I can take it from here.”

Ryan nodded and made a palms-out gesture to let him know the floor was his.

“That night, I listened to
Elvis’ Christmas Album
, which I always did before I went to sleep. I must have still been full of adrenaline from going out, which I never did, and it was hard to get settled. I heard Uncle Wendall downstairs, and I snuck a peek into the living room. He buried a folder in a bin we kept next to the fireplace that we used to hold old papers to start fires with. I went back upstairs and waited to hear my uncle’s bedroom door close. I waited, and then I went downstairs and dug the folder out of the pile. I found Ryan’s mother’s medical records and a slip of paper with Elvis Presley’s name on it with a number and the date, August 19, 1974.

“I knew Uncle Wendall kept matters confidential and never told clients who their babies’ fathers were, and this case was no different. I took the slip of paper and left the folder with most of Ryan’s mom’s paperwork in the burn bin. After I graduated from graphic arts school and came here, I found out I could score some of Elvis’s hair from the guy who used to cut it, so I sold my Caddy to pay for it.”

Ryan interrupted. “Where is it? Can I see it?”

Logan got up, went to his desk, opened the top drawer, retrieved the bottle and the signed certificate of authenticity, and handed both to Ryan with all the reverence of a priest handling sacred items. Ryan glanced at the certificate and stared into the amber vial at the clump of dark hair. “I’ve got a friend named Seth who can have this tested against mine pronto.”

Up on her knees, kneeling like she was in church, Marilyn gasped. “You’re Elvis’s biological son.”

“Probably,” Ryan and Logan said simultaneously.

The DNA test comparing Ryan’s hair to a sample from the vial won at auction from Elvis’s hairdresser confirmed paternity, and the day Logan’s first story as a tabloid reporter came out, Tom booked the night of August nineteeth at the LVH for a blowout party.

The afternoon Marilyn and her crew joined Peter Corcioni and Ryan in the Tuscany Sky Villa marked the thirty-second year anniversary to the day Elvis called down to the front desk with a special request, and it was lost on none of them that the villa Tom picked for the party had encompassed Elvis’s suite when the hotel remodeled and expanded it to a whopping 13,200 square feet in 1995.

Logan found the fireplace in the living room where Elvis’s bed had once been and called Ryan over to see it. Like he once clutched
Elvis’ Christmas Album
, Logan now held on to his issue of
DC
. The cover ran the headline, “Elvis has a son,” and a photo of Elvis from the late fifties, dressed in a light blue, green, tan, and red striped shirt, a light blue cardigan, tan pants, and blue suede shoes, looking off to the left, faced the mirror image of Ryan, dressed nearly identically, looking off to the right. To celebrate, Ryan wore that same outfit today, but Logan stepped up his game, discarded his old suit, and wore a brand new tux that made him feel like royalty.

Tobias joined them. “Great story, man.”

Ryan and Logan simultaneously said, “thanks,” and they all laughed.

Tobias was in full beatnik garb, even wearing love beads. “I’m telling you, Logan, for your first story as a reporter, you don’t mess around. It’s better than any of mine, better than any of Dan’s, better than any of Kevlar’s.”

Logan was amazed. “But you set the bar. It was your Helen Hester story that helped me realize just how great a reporter you are. I worship you.”

Tobias bowed down, his beads clacking against the studs on his vest. “You have surpassed me, sir.”

Logan blushed and looked at the issue of
DC
again. He had to admit it was pretty good, but then again, he didn’t have to go out and find the story. It had been with him all along. All he had needed was the opportunity to tell it.

Someone in the next room was clinking a glass to get everyone’s attention. Tobias, Logan, and Ryan walked toward the sound and found Peter Corcioni standing on a chair, beating his water goblet mercilessly with his spoon, while Ron stood nearby, spotting him in case he wobbled.

Ryan looked around at the murals covering the ceiling and walls and felt like he was in Northern Italy.

“We initially tripled our production run, but we’ve sold out everywhere,” Corcioni cried, slipping a bit and regaining his composure with Ron’s help. “I’m in touch with the head of production back in Chicago. An investor in Nagoya wants us to translate the issue into Japanese and run a million copies exclusively for him. He’s already wired the money, so it’s a done deal. We brought in the top translators who are working on the copy now. And since his call, we’ve gotten similar requests from Germany, Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom, so we’re in the
big
money now, folks.”

A cheer went up throughout the room.

Dressed in a heavily beaded aqua gown, Marilyn was beaming.

“Are you ready to go?” Tom asked her. He, like Logan, was in a tux.