Jungle Rock Blues, page 32
So I didn’t want to be exposed. But what was the risk? At Graceland not a lot of people were looking too hard at a wheelchair driven by an old dude in a towelling hat.
I joined the cluster at the musical gates, got my ticket punched. Crowds were down, I was sad to see. But it was the off-season; they still get half a million a year. His records still sell. He was last at number one in 2002 and don’t you forget it. Then we were shepherded up the curving driveway, the main cluster in golf carts and me like a duckling in my chair behind. If I’m honest I wasn’t overcome. My return to the gorilla valley, some years earlier, that had been a choke-fest, but here I felt old and dried out and suddenly I couldn’t go through with it. The chair has a German motor, it can hit a good clip on open stretches and I veered off to the left and took a path round to the side. I had a little map – did I really need a map? Lots of people do this, I was told, the emotion of going inside is too much for them and they just sit in the Meditation Garden and, you know, meditate. So I headed that way, except that I didn’t want to meditate either. Actually, I was starting to wish I hadn’t come. Graceland had never at any time been what Caliban was after. It was the home of the Caliban industry, its factory, and in it he had been the number one product. But I’d been touring the South and thought, You should.
Then I spotted the Automobile Museum. And I have always had a soft spot for class wheels.
Okay, starting with, up on a concrete plinth, a pink Cadillac Fleetwood 250 convertible with white-walls and looking here like an absolute dreamboat. A Cadillac Eldorado ’56, the purple of squashed grapes, with chrome enough to pipe a city. Ah, but he had good cars. Drooling over them, I felt my age and my immobility. But I didn’t like the smell of those monsters, all polish and no oil, they hadn’t any of them been out for an age and I rolled away, into the shade of the milkbar, which was where I found her.
The place was deserted, and silent, which is unusual for Graceland, usually his greatest hits are pounding out on high-rotate. But she didn’t have her apron on yet – she came bustling out of the back room in a 1950s summer dress, green and white stripes like a St Patrick’s Day peppermint, saying, “Excuse me sir, you’re early, you’ve caught me, I’m so sorry.” Ahm. “I’ll just turn ever’thin’ on.”
“Please don’t.”
Tumbling black hair, dark eyes, and curves – a goddess in a milkbar, it’s kind of a classic scene. If I had been fifty years younger ... Now, because I was in a chair, she sat down on the seat of a booth to take my order. The booths were red leatherette, with pale yellow Formica tabletops. She smiled at me, sweetly, and waited.
Maybe the old stamping ground had got the sap rising? Whatever, I refused to give an order. I held her there, used her politeness against her. I acted like I was someone. She accepted it, sweetly. But I didn’t want sweetly. “My name is Marshall Sturt,” I said, and I took off my shades as though this was an action of great significance.
Maybe, across the years, she connected with something? She says, now, that she did. But that might just be kindness to a vain old man.
“Loretta Russett,” she said, and I made her shake. Her lovely hand in my crabbed old claw.
There have been girls in my life. Hell, there’s even been women. For many years I travelled and had, as they say, one in every port. But nothing ever stuck.
I hung onto her hand, tightly. I figured I had about ten minutes, soon they would all arrive. What followed was, I guess, like that moment when the wannabe writer finds he’s sharing the elevator with the hot director: pitch your script but quick. “Now, listen to me,” I started. I guess I sounded a little like the Colonel. “You are maybe twenty-two years old and you’re here in the milkbar and minute by minute your life is going past. Tomorrow I will leave $20,000 in an envelope at Passenger Services at Memphis Airport with your name on it. You could collect it and come back here and go on pulling shakes, and nothing I can do would ever change that. I’ll be gone. In the envelope will be directions to my home in Australia: if you arrive there I will pass you another twenty thousand at the gate.”
The intoxication it gave me to say this!
She pulled her hand out of mine now, sat back and gave me an entirely different look. This was calculation. Her head on one side, she was trying to read me. Intense, her gaze swept over my shoes, my hands, my pouchy, saggy old face. I took off my hat and laid it on the table so she could get a better look. Her nostrils were pinched. There was a little stitch in her brow, she was trying by extending her senses to go into me, to get a reading on my stuff. Again, like the Colonel, I held myself open, I let her go in through my eyes and poke around. But I had nothing held out of sight.
“And then?”
I didn’t try to win her. She would, I knew, have to win herself. I said plainly, “I’m an old guy and I would like to have a pretty girl to dust my parlour. A pretty girl with her life in front of her and thinking at every moment: soon I’ll be out of here and getting on with the adventure of my life – I’ll enjoy that. I’ll pay a thousand US a week, in cash, to get my housekeeping done, no more, you’ll have cash money and I’m a slow coach in a wheelchair, you can run out on me any time you feel like it.”
Yes, she was astonished. But she was fighting that. She looked away now so as to not be under any spell I might be casting and I let her. Then, without warning, her hand came out and she took a piece of my cheek between her finger and thumb. She squeezed. This was no love-nip, she squeezed hard. She hurt me. I took it. She held me and her dark eyes, full of feeling, looked hard into mine. Her hands were strong from a life of work and with each moment now she was working harder.
When I resumed my tour of Graceland – I had missed the main event, but had had, you know, a main event all of my own – my old heart was soaring in my chest like a bird freed of the cage. My, how big the sky is! I was lucky I didn’t die right there of excitement. Now I could no longer hear the prattle of his fans. I shouldn’t say that, I love his fans, not when I am in fact his biggest fan, but prattle is prattle and there were people here who could only talk of how they just knew he was still alive, still around someplace. How they could just feel him, here. Well, maybe they had a point, except that I knew they said this stuff whether I was there or not.
I had thought I would roll around the grounds and that memories would come back. But who cares about memories if you’ve got some livin’ to do? When, over the loudspeakers, they played Tiger Man, well, right then I knew: they were playing my song.
So I never did get the memory fix I had planned on.
I had for some years been reconstructing the arc of his understanding, trying to enter and be inside the arrow of it as it flew through his life ...
His health was suffering. I see pictures of him from the Graceland years and I know what was happening inside. By this point his body was all around him, on him, he could feel it there, something attached to him, something that, on the worst days, hung from him. He wasn’t fat like Speed – but no one was fat like Speed. But he wasn’t the gorgeous hunk from the jungle anymore.
When he noticed that he was fat he complained to Skip and Skip would give him different pills, sweat him down so that he was fit to be seen in public.
But it wasn’t just his body. His mind wasn’t always inside his head, sometimes he looked around and saw that his mind had gone off somewhere, he wasn’t sure of what he was doing. When he saw this he was afraid. Afraid of himself, afraid of the life he was living. He was becoming something, he could tell that, but he couldn’t tell what. He would talk to Skip and Skip would look at him in amazement. “Boss, you’re the biggest thing in America! Take it easy. You’re a big winner, Caliban – not everyone is a winner. Hey, let’s go up the back and shoot somethin’.”
The guns ... The guns were a definite phase – this I can remember. Caliban had learned to shoot in the Army and at that time it had been a new skill, which was something he always wanted to acquire. But the guns – every now and then he would look at them and wonder at the intensity squeezed within.
First it had just been shooting at targets. Then they shot at a bird in a tree. Then they hit a bird on the wing – that was Skip, who could really shoot straight – and it fell from the skies and went thud at their feet. A dead duck, well, look at that. This was up the back of the Graceland property, west of the cabin, where there was some rough ground that had been kept for development, a movie house, maybe, or a fairground, they were always changing the plans. And then it came into its own as a shooting range, where they could hunt around and find things that needed shooting, a centipede or maybe a gopher – you had to sit and wait until they came up out of their holes. Then, blam! They got such a surprise when you blew their heads off.
Guns were a new thing to buy. There were gun dealers who would make house calls – soon, everyone had at least two. Guns with pearl handles, guns with your name done in diamonds on the butt. Cute guns, unusual guns, household and table guns, guns for every occasion.
Caliban shot one of the hens – Gladys had been dead for some years now and there was no one to growl at him about this. He shot snakes, frogs and lizards. Down at the river they tried to shoot a fish but, underwater, bullets just didn’t seem to work. Caliban wanted to go below, hold his breath, see what the bullets looked like as they broke the surface, see what happened down there, but Skip talked him out of it.
Then one morning they were up the back, just Skip and Caliban, they had a tommy gun and had been blasting away at an old tree – making patterns with the bullet holes, a heart, Caliban’s initials. When the ammo ran out they sat together on a log and looked up at the Tennessee skies.
“Phew,” said Skip. “Man.”
“No shit, man,” said Caliban.
“That tommy is no shit, man,” said Skip. They were both full of pills, Skip had pills in his pocket, mixed with bullets of various sizes for the assortment of weapons. Caliban had three different guns in his belt, a Luger, a Colt .45 and a little Derringer. Then without really planning anything he had this little gun in his hand, lying on his hand, warm from his skin, dark metal, and he imagined the bullets waiting there inside it. He looked at Skip.
“You know what I’ve been thinkin’, man,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to know what a bullet does to a person. What does it do, Skip? Does it like really hurt, or does it hit you so fast that it’s happened and then you try to understand it but your mind can’t go so fast and you feel it later?”
“To waste somebody,” said Skip.
“Yeah,” said Caliban, “exactly, man. To waste somebody, that would be interesting. To shoot a person – what would that be like?” He had the gun in his hand and was looking at Skip.
“Hey, man!” said Skip. But he wasn’t really worried.
Now they looked around – stumps, old gopher holes, but nothing moving. Up here everything was already dead.
Then Caliban took the gun and, looking down, carefully shot a bullet through his left foot. His foot was bare and the bullet passed right through, leaving a puckered pink puncture mark on the top and something similar on the bottom – like a little arsehole, as Speed remarked later. It turned out that the pain was immediate.
Several appearances had to be cancelled and this brought the Colonel on a mission of investigation. Contracts were brandished, harsh words were spoken. Vernon took the opportunity to gripe about money that lately had been just thrown away. Caliban limped about, chastened. For a few days everyone kept quiet, it was as though there was an older person in the house who was sick.
Then one night he saw something on the television which displeased him and, drawing a Colt from under a cushion, blew the screen out. After that things quickly returned to normal.
Meanwhile, in the sanctuary of the hollow, Shorty Pink doggedly proceeded with his carpentry. The trees that Caliban had commanded stood now in a protective semicircle, screening the construction from the eyes of the world. Little animals, woodchucks and snakes, had to Caliban’s great satisfaction taken up residence among them, along with spiders, worms and flies. The cabin had a ceiling and windows – Caliban struggling with Shorty to understand how glass might be produced from sand. By heat, Shorty said, through melting – the same as the nails. Hearing this, Caliban remembered how June had once told him that at the centre of the earth there was a great fire, and how all of life on the surface of the earth was made possible by the blaze of the sun. He stood in the dirt of the hollow in his bare feet and felt warmth coming from below; took off his shirt and felt his skin being charged. Was this, he wondered for the thousandth time, the force that made everything go? That had made him the one?
He was the one but he still couldn’t see why.
Everything in the cabin was of course brand new and Caliban didn’t know how to solve this problem. But he told himself that the original cabin must have once been new and that the people who had lived there – he didn’t know how to think of them as his mother and father – must have once lived in it when it was fresh-made and strong-smelling.
He had talked to Shorty about the smell. “I want it to smell like the cabin I lived in, how can you do that?”
Shorty and Caliban squatting on their heels on the stoop. Shorty drew a figure in the dust with his finger. Caliban looked hard but it was only a squiggle. Then he said, “Son, the situation is: this here is no real cabin. And down there in Noo Zealan, that ain’t no longer your cabin either. The real cabin ... I reckon that’s in your mind. That’s what we’re doin’ here, we’re making a cabin in your mind. Ain’t it so?” Then he stayed there, squatting beside Caliban while this idea was allowed to settle. Caliban liked this about Shorty Pink, the way he knew when to delay a piece of work because he knew that Caliban would want to be there to see how it was done – the construction of the chimney. That he knew about the right order of things.
Caliban went through the guys’ quarters until he found two old toothbrushes – it was hard to find old things at Graceland – which he sprinkled with salt before hanging them in the toothbrush stand that Shorty mounted above the basin.
Shorty cheated on the radio, and on electricity. Electricity was not his skill, he said, and he had the cabin wired so that it was connected to a cable that ran juice out from the big house. No, he said, the radio could not be made to play the songs that Caliban used to hear. If Caliban was able to arrange that, well, good.
But he threw himself wholeheartedly into the construction of the windmill.
It stood in the corner of the hollow that was most distant from the house, where the estate ended. If you climbed it, you could see back country, running for miles, open Tennessee, its wooded hills and valleys, and Caliban liked to be up there. The feeling he got had nothing to do with the valley of the gorillas. Instead he saw a land where roads ran and trees grew. Where a single man might be a small thing and not be remarked upon.
On the day when Shorty was finally ready to connect the turning vanes to the gear-works, they climbed up; Shorty gave Caliban an oilcan and had him liberally spread its contents on the ridged teeth of the cogs. “I don’t reckon I have told you enough about oil,” he said. They were up high, the roof of the cabin could be seen and, as though they were in an airplane, the pattern of the land around them. Immediately at hand the great vanes were turning and this was somehow maddening, this and the gear-works, which, when Shorty eased the clutch lever finally to Engage, made the driveshaft turn. Together Shorty and Caliban leaned in to look down into the long, strut-encased interior of the windmill where the length of the driveshaft rotated. There was a faint vibration.
They stared and stared, and got dizzy. “That’s it, I reckon,” said Shorty Pink, lifting his gaze. “That is what is taking place inside your head, son. Somethin’ like that. You are spinnin’ in there. That shaft is churnin’ out power, ah niver bin close to a body like you for power an’ ah reckon that somewhere in there is the best answer to ever’ question you ever have asked yourself.”
Caliban up in the windmill, Caliban sitting, dreamy, in the cabin – these are scenes I can see. Sitting on the Graceland porch with Mrs P, which must have been when she was still alive, Caliban barefoot and being given the good word. The driveshaft in his head and listening to how she talked. Mrs P didn’t talk gone, she was just a normal person, there was no showbiz in her, none of that desire to speak impressively so that your words stood in the air. Caliban could speak okay, now, because most of the time you didn’t have to say that much, not if you put enough gone into it. You could if you put enough into it say Hey, baby! in reply to just about everything.
Minutes, hours, with no particular place to go.
Days coming and then going. Nights that were days, no one had any sense of the clock, impulses were followed until they ran dry. Hey, now everybody should be wearing fringed trousers, Indian-style.
Outside in the world – beyond the musical gates of Graceland, beyond Memphis, north of the Mason-Dixon and especially out in California – America was changing. Caliban, who had never really been clear what America was like in the first place, only noticed this change in the way that it changed the way he looked. Now he wore his hair longer at the back. He had thicker sideburns – so did all the guys. And there were different things on TV, the Beatles and, later, bombs, raining down on villages in somewhere called Vietnam. Skip had explained that the skinny people with their hands tied were Communists, who wanted to take everyone’s money away. There was some cool action on those TV shows from Vietnam, villages of sticks definitively blown to splinters – and the guns! Far-out guns. Caliban also liked the Beatles, he played their records every day.
