Jungle Rock Blues, page 33
But Bob Dylan was not a singer he cared to listen to.
That sound of protest, the music where there was no funk, no blues, this he ignored. And why would you listen to someone called Lothar And The Hand People? When you could listen to Bobby Bland? No, they didn’t care for the love generation at Graceland. They had their guns, and their TV, and their fun. Caliban wasn’t making movies anymore, and the only records he’d cut for years now were movie soundtracks so there was no music that had to be made. Of course they still sang round the piano. Play that blues chord, Delmo. In Graceland, Caliban was still and always would be The King – Amen and pass the burgers.
But out in America the nation was changing. Love was the thing. Peace. Acid. Acid rock – Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead. The walls were falling, that’s what everyone thought, America was on the move, hear the hoofbeats, there was a frontier again, a wave, a new generation, led by barefoot kids and a notion so vague – “something more honest” – that it was bound to be dissipated, and corrupted.
San Francisco wear some flowers in your hair – far out!
And yet walls did fall. Here for example is an issue of Time magazine, the organ of official America in those days, dated June 28th, 1968. On the cover of that issue is a woman, and she’s black – huh. And the woman is Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul herself, making timeless music during that period. Inside the magazine you find official America questioning itself on every score. Is it okay to hold “girlie galas”? asks a piece on beauty contests. Should the FBI enter churches that have given sanctuary to those who will not soldier for their country? And in the heart of the issue, the long, desperate-to-be-hip piece on Aretha and recent black music, there is a chart: Have You Got Soul? This is a thoughtful list, divided into columns, the Have Souls and the Have Nots. Soul brother Holden Caulfield yes but sappy old Superman no. Sitting Bull okay but not Custer. Tonto but not the Lone Ranger. Yes for Robert E Lee but forget about it, Ulysses S. Grant. The Mona Lisa but not Nude Descending a Staircase – really?
And down at the foot of the column: Bo Diddley but not Caliban.
25
June McMay’s book, when it appeared in 1965, landed in Graceland like a bomb – blew the musical gates right open. Everything Caliban had grown beyond, here it was again, dragged back onto the stage, in the intimate detail that the tabloid heart of the nation had always hankered for. What was it like to live naked out in the rain? To eat leaves? To talk to the animals? Oh, the savage killer that you have made your pin-up! ... and when I saw his great jaws sink those strong teeth into the raw meat of the wild pig he had speared – when I saw the blood running down his chin, I remembered that I had loved with this creature and I looked inside myself and was afraid. Now I ask: afraid of what? That I wasn’t really civilised? That I had been civilised but was now regressing? That what I wanted was to regress? Yes, as I looked at him crouched there in the broken light of the bush, that is what I wanted. Oh, yes. To feel the rain on my back, to run clad only in my skin through the wet grasses. To clasp him to me and hold him as fiercely, as closely as I could. To go down into the dirt with him, to throw away my upbringing, to forget all books, all manners, all learning ...
Such sequences were invariably the ones chosen by interviewers for discussion, by chat show hosts and reporters, as June promoted her way across the country. Caliban was, all over again, confirmed as a sex god, a bulge in the nation’s pants. Following the Colonel’s clean-him-up campaign, featuring Caliban in good-timey movie roles, singing sentimental schlock, the jungle man had become as wholesome and American as Betty Crocker. Now the master salesman was outraged and schemed to get the book banned. This failed, and added to its cachet. But Coltom’s rage was so great that Skippy began to talk openly of a hit, to shut her up – not that Skippy minded the book, in itself, in fact he had found it fascinating, they all had, but he could hear what the Colonel was saying: “This threatens us all.” But then Caliban got word, and said, There will be no hit.
His reading, which had seen him slowly working his way through the Bible, was coming along, but it was still slow. His finger moved across the page beneath the words, his lips moved. A dictionary lay as he read on the bed beside him but a dictionary is only useful if you already know most of the words it uses. He struggled. But this kind of reading, though slow, goes deep. When June’s book appeared he asked Speed to buy him a copy and then laid the Bible aside, never to be returned to. In fact, My Wild Heart was the first book he read from beginning to end.
... I climbed the hill behind him, aware always of the play of light upon his skin, the way his muscles moved. I was always aware of him as a physical being. This was only partly because of his remarkable physique, the way his body was so completely inhabited by him. That emphasis was also produced by his silence. I had to look for ways of knowing what he was thinking that did not involve words. He was an expressive man, he could communicate what was in his head – this was one of the marvels of him, and those of you who have seen him performing will know what I mean. Something inside the man comes out and touches you.
Now the land was falling away and you could see down the bush-covered slope to the valley where his gorilla family were presently encamped, and, looking across, pick out the bright vertical line of the waterfall. We headed along the back of a spur and came at its end to a point which hung in the air. This was a place of winds, the broad-winged hawks circled, rising slowly on the updrafts, tilting, sliding, passing close. My skin was cold, I wrapped my arms around myself. Glancing across to the south I saw the cabin in its clearing, tiny, and, to the east, the dip between the seaward hills through which I had come. The ridgeline was above and behind us, but this spur was like a seat in the circle – you could look down on everything in the valley. We were standing amid scrubby bush and bracken and now Caliban was indicating that I should look into a long opening which had been made there in the ground cover. And I saw what he had brought me to.
There was a rounded stake, perhaps a branch of the tree called manuka, that had been driven into the ground. The manuka has stout, unbending limbs, ideal for walking sticks, and this stake, though it had clearly been here for many years, stood as firm as a rock. Attached to it by means of a bolt was a short crosspiece. Both these wooden parts were covered in lichen. I knelt down and, with a glance at him to ensure that it was okay, began to scrape the lichen away. But there were no letters, no marks, no dates. I said this to him but at that point he was, I think, unable to understand enough of what I meant. Then I said, “Your mother.”
This he seemed to grasp. Perhaps not the actual words so much as the idea. He had been here before, and thought. I do not think he had known the meaning of those two crossed sticks – this was a recognition that was awakened in him when, a day before, I had made a similar cross to mark the place where we buried the bones of the creature I was sure had been his father. The father, I was sure now, had killed himself. The nearly empty bottle of whiskey, the rat poison I found nearby, the smell of vomit which, even after many years, could still faintly be detected in the cabin – it was speculation, but these elements did seem to make a coherent picture. His wife had succumbed, victim perhaps to the isolated life they had chosen – perhaps it was he who chose? – and had been unable to endure. Was that it? But would a man kill himself, leaving his son to survive, to die alone? Caliban will tell you that he has no memory of anyone before the gorillas. He thinks of the gorilla called Nudu, whose bones lie high in a tree, as his mother, though he understands that in fact she cannot have been. So his parents were gone from him by the time he was one year old at the latest. Who would leave a baby of one to fend for itself in the wild? The kind of man, perhaps, who had brought his wife out to the dark edge of the world, armed only with his wits and something to prove.
These thoughts went through my mind as I knelt there by the cross. I found it hard to look at him. He was so healthy, so vigorous, and yet anyone could sense the yearning inside him, feel the tug born of so many years of living without kin, without like kind. Should I comfort him? But I have never been a mother, and never wanted to be. I want a man I can stand beside, who has his own comfort inside, who can be my mate. I didn’t want to pick hairs from his collar, darn his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.
But Caliban was long used to his condition. Yes, it was true he was thoughtful as we descended from that place, and for several days I noticed that there was an even greater silence around him than usual. But he had grown up hard in this hard country, had fended for himself and survived. He had grown into this thing that, though only about seventeen years old, was as fierce-spirited and capable as any city-bred “man” I had encountered at any time in my life ...
Alone in his room, or in the company of a wide-eyed girl, Caliban read this stuff to himself. He was used to mirrors, now – he saw images of himself everywhere he looked, in the photographs that the Colonel sold, on the sleeves of records, on movie posters, in the movies themselves. Has anyone ever been so reflected? The pharaohs, maybe. But this book contained something different. This was an informed account of who and what he was, what he had been, lovingly made, full of feelings and impressions recorded at first hand by a trained observer. This was, he understood, all the bible he was ever really going to have. He read certain passages over and over, trying to be sure of their meaning.
He understood that she had loved him.
In fact the whole book was a kind of love letter. Perhaps not to him. Perhaps to the thing he had been. Perhaps to the life that he and June might have had. He also felt the sadness in the book, because it was also plainly stated. If June had not spared him neither had she spared herself. You could feel the way he had opened her up, brought her into her womanhood, her selfhood, and then decided that the inclination of his heart led him elsewhere. This troubled him the most. Feelings he had successfully managed for years began to bubble up in him. He became visibly moody, withdrawn. And it was then, or soon after, that he finally made a commitment, of sorts, to Priscilla, who for some time had been floating ambiguously within his circle.
I can see now that I will have to deal with Priscilla.
June’s promotional tour carried her across the states and grew, expanded in scale as her publishers increasingly saw the possibility of turning a bestseller into a monster. Within Graceland a kind of “June-watch” developed – at one point Speed had a map stuck to the wall of the Ocean Room with coloured pins to indicate her progress, but Skip, sensing Caliban’s irritation, had him relocate it to the hut out the back that the mafia used as a hangout. There it joined the girlie pictures and trophy photographs (Speed with Tuesday Weld!) that covered every surface. But June was still a presence – her face talked on one or other of the televisions which ran continuously in every corner of that many-roomed house. Closer and closer to Memphis June came. Anyone could know what inevitably would occur.
And so it was that when finally June appeared in person Graceland had steeled itself to welcome her. After all, there were going to be cameras. The gates were thrown open. The Colonel, who made an art of exploiting the inevitable, had shifted ground – had worked his contacts, and so his cameras were there too. Behind the cameras were the fans. They formed a huge semicircle bounded by the lines which the police had established under the direction of George Sprule, who was, by that time, more or less the personal policeman of the Caliban clan. The fans had flowers, which they threw. There was confetti – as though she’d come to marry him. Some of them, the women mostly, cried, from happiness, and also from jealousy. Emotion was in the air, the lines surged, invisible forces were at work. Through all this June walked, head held high, chin perhaps a little to the fore, her eyes flashing dark. Caliban, who had dressed for the cameras, looked spiffing, his wave of black hair offset by a red neckerchief and a lime-coloured jacket. When June extended her hand there was cheering, but Caliban, used to girls and cameras, drew her close and kissed her, and then turned, his arm around her shoulders, to wave for the crowd – a victory wave. June had no choice but to wave too. As the clips from that time show, she was fighting tears – so many years’ hard work upon her heart undone in just a few moments.
Then the big musical gates of Graceland were wheeled back into place and the couple, hand in hand, began slowly to make their way up to the house. They were trailed by just a couple of photographers, the Colonel’s favoured few, and by the guys, again culled especially for the day, and by June’s offsider, whom at first Caliban didn’t notice, in headscarf and darkened glasses. This was Eve Kersting.
This is where Eve reenters his story.
Graceland had been cleared of hangers-on and was looking its best, white and rather grand in the mild, warm sunlight. Caliban chatted casually, as he had done with the starlets out in Hollywood. He was used to adulation, it made things easy. But this was all a pose, and anyone who knew him could see it. He was struggling. It wasn’t that June was so pretty. Well – pretty enough, but he had for many years now been exclusively in the company of women who made their lives with their faces. June had, he was shocked to notice, something of a moustache on her upper lip, quite a growth for a female. And while her profile was noble, classical even, face-to-face suddenly it seemed that her eyes were perhaps slightly too close together – was that it? There was something crossed in her gaze which was nevertheless compelling, as though you should go in there and find the focus she herself was searching for.
At the grand doorway they posed one last time, between the pillars, then turned, and went in, leaving the rest of the party outside. Eve didn’t complain – when had she ever? She took a seat on the steps and began waiting, put her head in a book, but the guys took it hard. They raced around to the back of the house, and commenced to make a noisy party in their outbuilding.
The Colonel and the publisher’s flack shook hands.
From the entrance area Grandma, Vernon’s mother, could be heard scolding one of the maids in the kitchen, and Vernon, never to be turned out, was most probably in there too. Caliban wished the scolding would stop. Not showing the house, simply steering her through it, he got them into the Music Room, always the place he sought under pressure, and got the big doors closed. He guided her to a seat, a huge soft thing that threatened to enclose her in mush. He drew up a low wooden stool that Delmo liked to sit on when he picked guitar. Then, across the heavy oak coffee table, he settled to look at her.
The room had half-columns set into the walls, standing vertically like sentries. There was a fireplace but never a fire – Caliban liked the house to be chilly-cool. A grand piano, gold, and an assortment of guitars which stood on stands in a semicircle, waiting like courtiers. Seven flower arrangements. Twenty-eight ashtrays. Forty-five ivory drink coasters – all freshly cleaned and waiting. Caliban’s chitchat had stopped. Now it was his turn to have tears in his eyes. He looked at her and wasn’t able to speak. She had a little confetti in her hair, he wanted to pick it out, but wasn’t close enough. After a moment, when hard things settled into a final shape inside his chest, he got onto his knees and came to drop his head in her lap. It was a big head. She stroked his neck, ran fingers through the black hair at the nape. “So this is where you live now,” she said.
They had very little to say. In the distant rooms, footsteps could be heard, agitated voices, dying away – this was the Presley relatives, who, at times, seemed to outnumber even the guys. Caliban rose, put a gospel record onto the spindle, then returned to where he had been, crouched awkwardly, his arms around her now, though, in the mush of the seat, she was hard to find. Gradually the use of his senses was returning to him. He could smell her – this was the smell he had always known, the smell of the first human he had ever been close to. The womanly smell of her. It was all so familiar, so historic – very powerful for a man with no history. In his head words were forming but he was not able to find a way to say them. He wanted to see the three moles on the underside of her arm but her sleeve was buttoned at the cuff. He felt unsettled. Caliban was not used to sexual tension. There was never anything tense about sex for him, he always just had any sex he felt like having.
Eventually he gathered himself and offered to take her on a tour. Well, this at least was something to do. The Jungle Room, the Trophy Room, the Waterfall In The Bush. They climbed the mirrored stairs, made their way along past the Elvis Presley Room, past the Grand Wardrobe, through the Little Lobby, to the chamber, three rooms made into one, at the end of the hall which was the area Caliban kept for himself. Here the ceiling was naugahyde, studded with televisions. Most of the room was empty – there was a table with a record player and records, all in their sleeves, leaned against the walls. The walls were powder blue, Caliban’s favourite colour, as was the coverlet of the great bed, at the head of the room, where they sat. Overhead a cluster of three televisions, set at an angle so that he could study up at them without straining his neck, cast a jittery light. They emitted a faint hum but no voices. Outside, the guys could be heard, Caliban was tempted to shout down but instead he closed the smoked-glass windows.
Across a corner of the bed they sat and held hands. She said, “Are you happy?” and he sighed. He didn’t ask her this question in return. Instead he showed her his copy of her book and told her that he had read it. This information was redundant, the book was dog-eared, passages were marked in pencil. It lay between them, with his picture on the cover, one she had taken in the bush, with a blur where his groin should be, and then a jagged-edged photo of June, torn down the middle, looking at him. “Did it upset you?” she said.
“No.” He shook his head. “It made me remember. It made me think. I can’t stop thinking, June. They give me pills and the pills make you think you’re thinking and inside your head everything comes running, you know, all the ideas come at once but they all just go round in there, you can’t get anything out so you can look at it.”
