Jungle Rock Blues, page 30
Later, sleep in his arms. Well, he would sleep. You might pretend, but after such excitement, no, it was better to lie there and look at him, to feel his hands on you and know that for the rest of your life you would have this, this, that no one could take away from you, ever.
You could if you wished keep the pyjamas.
How many mansions? He bought lots of houses but in fact there was only really ever one that mattered. Mrs Presley found it. Caliban had asked her to look, after sitting with her in the kitchen at 462 Alabama and hearing her sigh that she loved these old boards, this was fine for her, but he, surely he would soon be moving on – this was no place for a man of his stature, son, needing as he did all the guys around him all the time now ... So he bought Graceland, he could see it was the right thing to do, it cost $102,500, but money was no problem, Vernon was making sure of that, and it did look grand, there on its little hill, with the tall white pillars, and the driveway which curved to its portico, and ornate windows symmetrically distributed across its façade. A hired designer did a great job in there, splashing Caliban’s favourite colours around, hanging waterfalls and televisions, making each room like a little theme park, and he also managed to recreate Elvis Presley’s room, upstairs, in a back corner, where Caliban often visited and sat with Mrs Presley. But Caliban didn’t sleep there any more. He had his own room now, larger, the biggest, done in pink and black leather. Graceland, it was a kind of icon, even its name seemed designed to inspire wonder, it became the most famous house in the country. Gladys and Vernon moved into this slice of heaven with him, after all they were his parents, plus they were on the payroll – as were the guys. This was the point that everyone moved in, and stayed.
He said to the designer, “I want elegance, a place for people with distinction.” He had an idea in his head, the cool of white walls. But the designer knew better. He knew what the Caliban style was.
Only one Graceland. And in it, only one room. There he closed the door. In there, with the door shut, he would take his book and work away at the words. In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.
Graceland had all the mirrors a man might require, and a showroom for the cars, and a milkbar, where Caliban could hold court, directing which flavour each guy was to suck on. It was strange how, when you were bored, making them do things was almost interesting. You could make one of them, Speed for instance, go with the cutest girl – Speed never minded. In fact a special light came into Speed’s eyes, he looked at you as though you were the life-giver, the reason.
Caliban remembered how Terjick had sometimes made them do things.
But the best thing about Graceland, he discovered, was that it had an estate. There were grounds that flowed around it – a part that was outside. A football field was laid down, and a speedway track. And, in a far corner, Caliban found a little hollow that no one was interested in and it was here that he began on something that in time the guys referred to as his hobby.
When they first came to look he made them stand in a group just outside the hollow’s edge. He took a stick and dragged it behind him as he walked, making a line in the dirt. When he’d completely encircled the hollow he stood inside the line and looked pointedly at where the toes of their shoes – blue suede, patent leather – came close to touching. Everyone moved back. From ten metres away, he waved at them. They all waved back. He was the boss and if he waved, everyone waved. Caliban nodded. Then he flicked the air away with his hand and they understood that they were all to go disappear.
He sat in the middle of the hollow – it had patchy grass, mowed once a month – and listened. Nothing.
Perfect.
Returning to the house, he found the little room that Vernon called his office and stood in front of Vernon’s desk – there was no client chair; Vernon didn’t encourage visitors – with his arms folded and his frown prominent. This way, he had understood, he could make everyone understand that he meant business – it also helped to have your lower lip a little prominent. “Mr Vernon, please,” he said, “I want to talk with the man who had the hammer and all the other tools.” Vernon’s eyes searched up inside his memory. “He had a pencil on top of his ear.”
“Ah know the guy,” said Vernon, “who did the renovations. Shorty, Shorty, lemme see ... Shorty Pink. Is there a problem with the work he done?”
Eventually Caliban was able to have a meeting at the hollow with Shorty Pink, though it started badly. Skip, knowing that Shorty would come, had arranged for two chairs and a table to be placed at the centre of circle that Caliban had drawn, with beer and glasses. These items were thrown so violently in the direction of the guys that a leg of the table broke off. The guys retreated, and stayed retreated. Caliban never even had to glance balefully.
He stood in the middle of the circle with Shorty Pink, who was, ha ha, as tall as he was, and looked for a moment at the pencil behind Shorty Pink’s ear. He liked the way it stayed there, a little log, somehow suspended in the air. Some men kept cigarettes, he had noticed, and once a woman had worn a flower. Both men had their arms folded. “I want you to go on a ship,” he said to Shorty Pink, “on the ocean.”
Something about being inside the line made you cranky, he thought. It made you want to throw things. Then once you understood how to be cranky, you could be like that in other places. And once everyone understood just how cranky you could get, why, there was no need ever to be cranky ever again.
Not that that meant you never were.
Another possibility was to be demanding. “I would like a green shirt now,” he would say and even if they were on an airplane somehow a green shirt would appear. “I would like all the cars parked out front of the house. No, wait up – all the cars facing towards the house.” Thus it was eventually made clear to Shorty Pink that it was in his interest to go on a ship to New Zealand and to find the cabin that had been where Caliban once lived and to come back with all its measurements and details.
Shorty Pink was given a camera and instructed in its use, and the photographs he took are today an important part of the Archive.
He came onto the payroll, which by this time was a significant item. Once a month the Colonel’s limousine would pull up to the pillars of Graceland, to deliver the small envelopes with the pay in them – the emphasis here was on small – along with an envelope for Caliban, stuffed with cash. Otherwise Coltom, as the guys liked to call him, stayed away, he was too busy working to make Caliban rich, he said, for three-day parties. He had an office in Palm Springs, where he kept one of his wives, and a team of operators who made certain that Caliban was always number one. The guys liked to figure, who had the bigger team, the boss or Coltom – it depended on how you counted the hangers-on. During the parties they threw fat water-filled balloons into the guitar-shaped pool and shouted, Thar he blows! They imitated his waddle and the way he tapped with his stick to emphasise a point. Cheap laughs. But no one ever wanted to go one-to-one with the Colonel, it was hard on your dignity.
The Colonel liked to go out into America with Caliban, on tour or to sit in on recording sessions, in fact he insisted on it. He was always in visible attendance at any press conference or interview. On every occasion he seemed to make a point of wearing the wrong clothes – a dark suit for the studio, bulging out of loud Hawaiian shirts on any formal occasion. Once he arrived at a movie première sporting shorts, grinning and back-slapping as he turned up his nose. But he was scrupulous about never upstaging his star. The Colonel knew where the gold mine was.
From time to time Caliban would describe for the guys the place where the Colonel had once taken him, with the rooms and the white walls. Despite their desperate desire to please, when they said, “There’s nothing like that round here, boss,” this was only the truth.
Caliban studied; he was always studying – television for instance, or the movies: So this is what men do? But he never once believed. In him there was always the feeling that had grown in the gorilla valley, that out there somewhere there was something else.
When he asked the guys about this they would say, “Hey, no, boss, this is the life, boss, we’re at the centre of the world right here. Hey, let’s go down the Mardy Grass, whaddyasay?”
At the back of the Graceland mansion he had had a porch built, for Gladys, and he would sit with her on this porch in bare feet and try to remember. Try to understand. He had been to a few places now, had seen things – but America was full of things, and where did they all come from? A factory, the guys said. He had, he remembered, once been in a factory – in the early days with Sam there had been a visit to the plant where they were pressing his records. There he had seen the dark presses coming down, like jaws clamping, with a hiss, and then opening to reveal how the grains of vinyl had been transformed into a shiny black disk that nimble fingers snatched from the hub, just in time before the machine closed its mouth again. The smells there had been extraordinary, human sweat, tired-faced human people, who gave him broad, grim smiles, sweat rags round their heads, faces streaked, and close by them, as though in kinship, the great machines, so pungent smelling that they seemed also to be alive. He tried to take this in, to see how it worked. And the machines, how did they come into being? What about the people – where did they live? Did they like being in the factory all day? Their faces said both no and yes. They liked him, he could feel that, they liked him coming to see them – he was special in their eyes, which said that they themselves were not special. But they could understand these machines and he couldn’t. He had looked hard at everything and tried to see.
Judgement Day was like a voice inside him – Welcome, Caliban, and what did you find out on the afternoon of June 6th, 1962? It was all known, how he spent his time, what he learned – he had always to be getting ready for that.
All the guys seemed to have completed the learning part of their lives.
So could he work in a factory? Frowning, struggling, in the shade of the porch, trying to find a way. It never seemed, these days, that there was any new thing he should be going to. There was just more.
Shorty Pink was, it transpired, a doer, not a talker. Sure, he could build a cabin like the one down there in Noo Zealan, in his sleep, but then he had this guy, who you had to take serious, in his loud shirt and bare feet, this guy on his shoulder like some big dumb kid, wanting to know everything. Shorty got riled and walked off the job. But his wife, Bitsy, spoke to him, explained what building the cabin might mean to a person like Caliban, from the jungle and all, and so Shorty came back, with his pencil behind his ear and tried to give satisfaction. Especially since, which Bitsy also explained, Mr Caliban was paying triple.
So here they are at the cabin, mid-morning, beneath a wide, sun-pummelled Tennessee sky: the foundations have been whumped into the ground and now Shorty is hefting a hammer with which he is proposing to drive the first nail of the floorboards. In it goes, tap, tap, bang – Shorty hits that thing smack on the head. Caliban’s nose close to the action and then he asks.
“Why is it called a nail?”
“Well,” says Shorty, “I don’t rightly know that, son.” He takes a shiny four-incher, looks at it contemplatively, then deals to it with the hammer. “I guess I don’t know about the names of things. For that you need a professor.”
Caliban remembers Prof Hingle who he met with June. Should he have paid him more attention? But Prof Hingle, a dried-up man, only knew about dried-up things.
“Where do the nails come from?” he asks.
“Hardware store.” Then Shorty stops, remembers what Bitsy told him, wipes his brow, sighs. “Hardware store gottem from the mongery dealer. Mongery dealer got ’em from the factory.”
“A factory,” says Caliban. “I have seen a factory.”
“Good,” says Shorty Pink, and whacks another nail home. Now one length of floorboard was anchored at one end – at this pace the cabin should be up by, oh, turn of the century, easy.
“Everything is made in a factory,” says Caliban.
“Yes sir.”
Caliban squats, feet in the dirt, and remembers. Was there a factory near his cabin in the bush? He doesn’t imagine. But somehow the nails and tools necessary had come to that place and been wielded, by someone, had been used correctly by someone who knew how. That’s it: he looks at Shorty hammering and thinks, Yes, in the gorilla valley, someone did what he is doing.
“The nail is made of iron.”
“Right again,” says Shorty.
There is a pause and then Shorty says, “And where does the iron come from? Okay, lemme see: the iron comes from the ground, it’s like a rock that they dig outa the ground an’ they dig it up and melt it – in a factory – and they make, it’s called pig iron, out of it, and the pig iron comes on a train to another factory and they melt it again into these nails. I guess that’s how they do it. Son, you orta hire yourself a school teacher.”
“No, this is the right way,” says Caliban, and he motions for the work to recommence.
It feels strange to sit here doing nothing while the other man sweats, but Caliban has become used to this particular strangeness. It is a thing he dislikes, to always be the one, but he knows now that this is his situation and he tries to accept it – because he can sing, and because of his body, and because of his history, which he can’t understand but which according to the eyes of everyone he meets he always has with him. Now his gaze runs slowly round the perimeter of the hollow, seeing where he will command for trees to be placed and where the windmill should go. Will he come and live here? That is unclear; everything that will happen next is unclear to him. What he has to do, he has discovered, is try to stay inside whatever moment he happens to be in, and not worry. It can be done. But what is strange about that is that is the way he was when he lived in the valley. He considers this: you have come all the way here to learn to be how you were there.
When he looks at Shorty Pink’s sweaty face – rubbery, deep-cut by lines – he tries to imagine if the same thoughts are occurring to him. Shorty Pink works hard, with never a break, and Caliban sits and watches – and yet Caliban is the one who has more money than Shorty Pink.
This will be why, Caliban thinks, Shorty Pink has a bad feeling in him towards Caliban. Many men have this bad feeling towards him.
“I would like to hit a nail.”
“I was afraid of that,” says Shorty Pink.
Caliban was not good at driving nails. Well, he had an eye, and he had good muscles, but he was no carpenter.
Nor could he write a letter, nor tell you if Abraham Lincoln was a man, a car, or a highway. He couldn’t do most of the things that every human being can do. Any kid could teach him a thing or two.
Of course, he could sing. In a jam, he could always sing.
But quite suddenly, without him really grasping that it was happening, Caliban found that he was not singing in public any more. His last concert was in 1957 and then, apart from two charity concerts in Hawaii, he didn’t sing before a real audience until the live sequences of his 1968 Comeback Special. He couldn’t even sing on TV, the Colonel had banned that, just as he had banned the concerts – all too risky. Too many random elements. No, movies were his thing now, just look at the money he was making.
“Hollywood is the biggest stage in the world, Caliban – you’re the biggest star on the biggest stage in the world.” This was the Colonel talking. “When you sing into that movie camera, that’s when you’re connecting. Go visit any movie house, all over the world, people are singing along with you.” It was a tough logic and Caliban couldn’t crack it. He retreated to his room to study his lines.
Of course, he kept making music.
24
Okay, maybe I was hasty there at the end of the wharf. The moonlight gets to you. You get carried away. Once that feeling of disgust about the past comes, the desire to be free of it is too powerful.
America too was pleased to be rid of Caliban. Not just his music. His ever having existed appeared to be an embarrassment to the nation. After his death in 1977 the official recorders of significant American events threw Caliban Presley away entire. He was tipped into the garbage by post-hip critics wearing face masks and disinfectant. Holding their noses, they buried him in the mass grave which contains Lawrence Welk, Liberace, Grand Funk Railroad, all the millionaire talent that always played to packed houses. A millionaire in that great nation was, fortunately, only a millionaire, the continent was knee-deep in them – making a million was nothing special. Forget him. He’s a part of the country we should strive to forget.
Like poverty.
Meanwhile in little America, in the shabby houses and the trailer parks, in the laundromats, in the lonesome rooms, the diners and the dim-lit bars, in these lowly places the common people mourned. They came in their thousands, when he died, to file into his home, and left a mountain of flowers. They rent their clothes. Several of them died outside the Graceland gates, in the heat and hysteria. Even though he hadn’t had a hit for years they bought his old records all over again, to be intimate with him through the thrill of purchase. They couldn’t live without him and so they declared he was living still – that he would never die. He wasn’t a millionaire to them. He wasn’t an entertainer. He was the one who had come up from under to speak their language back to them. He brought their lives out into the sun. For them, he connected back, to every dream they’d ever been sold: that in America everything was possible. To every dream that had failed them. To every dream that was, as he proved, nevertheless true. They kept playing his records. In little America he was no entertainer. He offered deliverance. In little America they kept his music alive.
The music Caliban made after he no longer had Sam Phillips to guide him is strange, strange. For a start, there’s so much of it – and it’s so varied. Caliban would sing anything. If you gave him the back of the cereal box and a microphone he wouldn’t hesitate. So chock full of goodness, yet the taste is mighty fine – and here’s the thing, this would be given the full thunder of emotion that its copywriter hoped a breakfast eater might find in it. That is what’s so hard to take about his RCA catalogue – the big emotion of it. You want so often to say to him, “Guy, I’m more sophisticated, I can’t be that big-hearted.” Pumped up, muscle-bound, told he has to perform, Caliban belts out the emotions that we are now too worldly to admit to having.
