Jungle Rock Blues, page 34
Outside, now, firecrackers could be heard. A skyrocket buzzed the window.
“I wish I could talk,” he said. “I can only sing, June. Someone else writes the words. Sometimes the words are too much for me, I feel like if I sing them I’ll die. I can’t stop myself going into them. It’s wonderful, to sing like that, it’s everything I ever hoped for. And then when you get to the end of the song you just have to start singing again or else you have got nothing to say and nothing to do.”
June wasn’t going to tell him anything.
She looked hard at him. He saw this hard look and it was a jolt to him. No one ever looked hard at him. The Colonel, true, but the Colonel had nothing to do with him, really. He saw that she was not going to take him out of this particular piece of bush – that maybe he’d been hoping for that. He saw that a wonderful softness, an open warmth that had been in her when they had met in the country of the gorillas, this was now gone. She was older, grown up, she knew the price of everything and felt that she had paid, and now was going to reap the rewards. He’d never felt so strongly before that he was a small man who wasn’t made of anything very important.
Now, wanting to know about her, he did turn her question back – was she happy? She steadied her head, full-face, and lowered her brow towards him, so that her gaze was tilted up – this was somehow comical. Yes, there was a smile on her lips, down there. She donked her head on his chest, twice, and then smiled right at him. “Don’t be a dope,” she said.
“I want to ask you things,” he said.
“What things?”
“I wrote to you.”
“Yes, you did.” She pulled his letter from an inside pocket and held it out to him.
What should he do? How did this work? If he took it, well, it seemed he had taken his message back, it was as though she wouldn’t receive it. But he couldn’t make her take it. This was typical. He could sing in the spotlight, but when it came to the little exchanges he struggled to grasp the rules.
It seemed he was taking the letter back.
Holding it, he said, “There is something about words that I cannot understand. Some people can say words that come out and they stand there and never go away. And other people can say them and there’s nothing! The same words!” From the distance, sounds could now be heard, hooters, frightened animals, shouting, perhaps a pistol shot. “The guys,” he said despairingly.
“But they’re on your side,” June told him. “They’re your mafia, the Memphis Mafia, everyone says so. They famously keep everyone away.”
“I can’t seem to tell them not to.”
Her gaze drifted upwards, away. Did she have something for him? She said, “When I wrote my book ...” She smiled at him, and then commenced upon a long explanation.
Now a mood settled into the room, it was made of the blue of the walls, and the farawayness of the sounds, maybe the gospel record could be heard in there, or just the knowledge that it was playing downstairs, and the television hum, and on the walls the shifting tones which the television pictures threw. Into this mood Caliban sank, he went swimming. He felt his body go far away and himself become just a small thing, a quiet thing that had an immense world around it, that he could watch and listen to. His place in the bush and June explaining, the mood contained both of these and it was more pleasing than anything he could remember. He reached out a finger and touched, very lightly, her moustache.
“When I wrote my book I was able to see what had happened and why. How one thing led to another. Someone said to me, So now you know, and they meant that I now had everything written down in the book and could look it up. But it wasn’t that. I never look at the book. To write a book, what you have to do is ...”
Caliban heard these words and a new idea began to form inside him.
“You seem to be making yourself,” she said.
She picked up the book, read to him. “And so I saw that he would be my project, my life’s work and that through him I would ...” Caliban there being filled by words, they were coming into him in great shoals, they were myriad like stars, he was getting what every day he longed for – but all at once June was jumping up and she led them out of there. Caliban in a daze, something was becoming clear to him, if she would only ... But down the hall they went, she leading him by the hand. Suddenly June was firmly in command, she knew that she had to be. He had nothing to do, nowhere to go – he was falling into her. She had to get a grip on herself, emerge from this with herself intact. Yes, she had a tour to do, a book to sell, she had a life she was going to go back to. This was madness. He was like a king without kingly duties, it was terrifying. It was like the mushy chair which had threatened to engulf her. All she had to do was get out of here with dignity – honour was satisfied, she could cry in her hotel room.
Caliban was distraught.
But they stepped out into the afternoon sun, waved and smiled again for the photographers. It’d been three hours, everyone looked for signs that her clothing was disarranged, and found them – Three Hours of Passion, one headline read. Eve was there, waiting quietly. From behind the house now a crackling sound could be heard, a tree had been set alight and smoke was rising into the sky. June saw Caliban’s face as he looked at the twisting, circling column – it was not a good face, that.
Coolly, she introduced Eve to Caliban – of course, Caliban knew her at once. Little Eve, grown dumpy now, grey eyes hidden behind dark lenses, took his hand, laughed, told him how suave he looked, stood back and spread her hands at the house, the cars. All this! But her every word, every gesture was a question and Caliban’s manner, always open and communicative, like a visitor’s book, acknowledged the trappings and also the trap. Several of the sharper reporters caught this exchange and above their pieces there were headlines like Jungle Man With Juju Blues? Eve’s own piece, commissioned by the New Yorker as a follow-up to the profile she had published in 1957, she held back, declined to publish. Of course the researchers have it now, it’s been in twenty biographies ... Watching his face as he poses out front of his many-roomed house you know that rooms are not where he wants to be. That he would rather be somewhere else, but he doesn’t know where, now. To go back is unthinkable. To stand still is to acknowledge that this is what he came to America for – fairground rides, the movies, TV with the guys. So he has to go on. But where to? Naturally, everyone that surrounds him can supply an expert opinion on this subject. But where are they going? When you hear them at his house, grown men, chasing each other with water pistols, you hear the terror in the word “fun”. That is why Luna Park wears such a huge grin, so that you don’t notice what big teeth she has. Half-naked girls running up the stairs. In fact the “mafia” are all ordinary, reasonable, patriotic Americans and I believe they are doing what they think is right for him. All of them good-looking, more or less, all endlessly enthusiastic – they’re living a teenage dream. But he is a unique individual and has other needs. This is what you feel every moment that you are with him. He could, he could – well, the temptation is overwhelming. For example, he could, I suspect, become the President with ease. But that would be terrible, for America, and for him.
Hand in hand, both of them back at work now, June and Caliban moved slowly down the curved driveway, waving, smiling. Caliban blew kisses to the girls, grinned. June looked up at him as though, oh, he was her hero. This seemed to work for everybody, and so June found a way to get into the waiting car, to wind down the window and wave, to look like who she was supposed to be, until they were well out of sight, just another diminishing speck on the long strip of blacktop which would one day be renamed the Caliban Highway.
He stayed at the gates, signing, grinning. In fact he liked the fans, they weren’t tiresome to him. He had something to give to them, they needed what he had. It was so easy to give the fans what they wanted.
In the months that followed Caliban tried without success to ring June. He chased her all over the country, running up the kind of bills that had Vernon knitting his brows to the point of rupture. One of these where-can-she-be calls went to Eve: did she know how June might be contacted?
Eve got him talking.
And so it began that Caliban would put a call through to Eve Kersting two or three times a week. No one knew about this – after all, who was she? It was as though he had a secret, a secret life. Eve listened to him read, long-distance, from whatever book he was labouring over – The Status Seekers, The Old Man and the Sea – and helped him to find things worth thinking about. But she would not tell him what to be. He had to find his own way. Maybe there was something parental in this? Watching your children grow, trying to stay out of the way so that they don’t turn into you. Worrying, trying to listen without steering. Eve, just a voice on the other end of a phone, did however prompt him. Even after June’s death in 1967 she continued to hear him, every week, and the path he eventually walked was, I believe, one that she helped him find.
It was Eve, for example, who had casually remarked that maybe the way to escape the movie-making he had so come to loathe was to gradually withdraw his talent. Whatever the reason, this is what happened, and whether it was a conscious policy or not, it worked. His on-screen presence, which had at first been intense, if uncertain, gradually became tired, mild, weak. He stood where he was required to stand, said the lines he had been taught. But you dial up Clambake and tell me what you see. A clam.
Thus the movie work gradually dwindled. He was not singing in public. He didn’t do TV. He hadn’t cut a record in anger for years. Mostly he stayed in his room, reading, or trying to find someone to talk to. He’d seen every movie that Hollywood released, twice, five times, followed every twist of every TV show from The Munsters to The Beverly Hillbillies. He did things, sure – “Let’s go fishing!” was often followed by, “Let’s go bowling!” He ate any hamburger that was passing. Sure, the world was full of things to do. In this spirit he married Priscilla.
Some of the biographies argue that Priscilla starts with the Army, that he got stuck on her when he was out of his home waters, swimming through the unknown over there in Germany, but I think, looking back, that it really begins with the death of Mrs Presley, just before he went in, in 1958.
That was back in the crazy years, when his future was getting bigger by the minute, and Mrs Presley had been a still point, a point of reference. The one who sat at his kitchen table and talked like family to him. And then, quite suddenly, Gladys Presley was gone. He’d felt the weakness inside her but, like everyone, had assumed it was grief.
He stood beside the pool at Graceland with Vernon – Vernon who had his arm reached up so that it would go around Caliban’s shoulder – and watched the wobbling shapes down in the water. Vernon was sobbing, long wailing cries were coming out of him. They walked. Do you know sad, Caliban? He didn’t know this sad. The death of Nudu came to his mind. Now Vernon, hand extended, was sobbing. “Lookit them chickens!” They were up at the chicken run, the pecking heads were busy. “Mama ain’t gonna see them chickens no more, Caliban.” Caliban thought of June, of the sadness inside her. The wailing that came from Vernon touched him, he found a sadness in himself and he sobbed too. He remembered Mrs Presley coming into Elvis Presley’s room, talking to him in the night. He remembered the smell of her neck in the old Lincoln. Together they sank to their knees in the dirt, and howled.
But later when he reflected upon this moment he found that he had been sad for himself. Whereas Vernon ... Vernon had had something torn from him.
Vernon never really recovered. In time he found other women and, eventually, a new wife. But this was all just something to do. Elvis gone and then Gladys, and that was the end of life. Caliban saw that the humans allowed things to grow in them until it was pain to the point of death when they were lost. He had allowed nothing like that.
However, Mrs Presley had been the woman in his life. The rest were all girls, all floaters who thought they might get close, touch him, become special. And of course, they all were, they all did – the Kathys and Barbs and Suzies and Anitas, little Nancy, and Patsy, and cute Stacey – but they were all cute. It’s a strange word, that, it used to have an “a” at the beginning, and be acute, and it meant sharp. That quality is still buried in the word – these cute girls were sharp, they had sliced their way through the crowds, through the barriers, now they were here, in the same room as him, close, getting really close now. There was excitement, hope, determination. You might say it was tawdry and who would argue? But all that energy in one place, and somehow available, somehow unprotected – it was a clear temptation. Not that he liked worldly women. No, the diggers all found themselves on the outer, contemplating a night with Speed, who was a degenerate, or maybe a late-night taxi. Caliban seemed to go for those who most closely ran his own path – who were somehow surprised by the world, still finding it.
This was a quality most readily found in the young and in the late 1950s Caliban sometimes dated girls that needed chaperones – actual girls, not much more than children, who were simply thrilled to be in his company. He loved giving that thrill. You could see them shiver with delight – actually shiver. In their little frilly party frocks, their best patent leather flats, they would sit beside him in his latest vehicular acquisition and, rather than thinking about getting naked with him, they were storing away things to tell their classmates. Often, as he drove, he would sing to them – like a scene from one of his movies. He bought them soft toys. The guys hated these “kiddy-dates”, they had to mind their language, and the sex went out of the atmosphere, but Caliban always went his own way where women were concerned.
In this way he picked out the daughter of an American airforce captain stationed in Germany, who came to the barracks where Caliban was encamped, at Bad Nauheim, near Frankfurt, in the company of her older sister, Sylvia. Sylvia had wangled an introduction through a guy from his company that she’d dated, and now they were in the mess hall – the radio up loud, Caliban’s stuff but also the latest from Stateside, Miss Peggy Lee swingin’ in with Golden Earrings. Caliban lounging, trim in his fatigues, Sylvia just goggle-eyed that she had managed to pull off this thing, being cool, but highly flushed, her face blotchy with excitement, sat up on a bar stool, sipping a long Coke. And beside her, aged fourteen, was an angel.
It was Mrs Presley who had introduced Caliban to the existence of angels. She introduced him to evil, she used to say that to her kitchen cronies: “I introduced that boy to evil, ha ha ha,” and then catch herself, and frown. Caliban’s soul was something she had felt it her duty to tend. So, in her kitchens, first at 462 Alabama and then in the larger, brighter kitchen at Graceland, she would also explain to him about angels. This topic, like Judgement Day, caught his imagination, and he would often work her around to it. Mrs Presley explained that the best place to look for an angel was at the end of your bed. Just at that time, she said, when sleep is coming, when finally you’re about to go under, right then you are at your most open, and vulnerable. And if you happen to be at risk, if your life is in the balance and you could go either way, up or down, why, then the good Lord might send a messenger and as you faded you would know as you slept that you were accompanied. If you woke refreshed, if you had no recall but were strangely lifted free of your troubles and felt able to do those right things which had, the night before, seemed too hard, why then you had enjoyed an angel-sleep, and were blessed.
Caliban, sitting at the table, quite upright above his bacon and five eggs, would ask, “So what does an angel look like?”
Mrs Presley rarely sat down, she liked to work while she talked, it drove the help crazy – what were they supposed to do? “You never see an angel, Caliban,” she would say. “You only remember. You don’t see her clearly, but she’s inside you, like just the hugest light that you must have seen or else how would you have the memory?”
“So you don’t see her?”
“Of course you see her – how could she do you any good otherwise?”
And Caliban would nod, and go back to his eggs.
But, to a hungerer like Caliban, this description was not satisfying and so, when the chance presented itself, he would introduce the subject into a conversation and then ask what an angel might look like. Now this was the late 1950s, in the South, and while people might makes jokes about evil, they were uneasy jokes. And angels – no one made jokes about angels. He got all kinds of answers. He began to expect wings, lots of white light, a beautiful face that shone, shimmering robes. Big chords on an organ, maybe, with a choir. But nobody really seemed to have any details. Then he fell one day into a conversation with Delmo McMullins on this subject and Delmo proved to have superior information.
Usually they discussed music. Delmo, with his big ears, for listenin’ good, he always said, and his slicked-across hair, was not a leader among the guys, but he had always earned his place by providing Caliban with his musical bumps. The angel conversation took place in a car, they were going to Nashville to buy a new guitar pick, Caliban was at the wheel of course, and the topic came up out of the landscape, like a billboard which slowly comes into view, during a conversation where Delmo was describing his musical roots. His father was, at the piano, a three-note plonker, he said, but his mother, well, she had the touch of an angel. Caliban saw the billboard. He asked, “What is the touch of an angel like, Delmo?”
Dear Delmo, not always given to seeing all sides of a question, began talking about his mother’s playing. But Caliban persisted. Ah ... Now Delmo replied, in high seriousness, “I never felt that. But you know my brother did.”
“He felt the touch of an angel?”
They were driving through deserted country, the long dividing line of blacktop shimmering in the sun. Caliban reached across and snapped the radio off, right in the middle of a song. Delmo was still nodding to the beat. “We used to go bird nesting – we’d blow the eggs, we had a collection in our tree house. This one time Eddie went out by himself, cain’t remember why, and he got himself out on a branch which broke, and had to hang on, you know, just dangling there by his hands, he was way up high, and out over a drop, the nest he was after was bouncin’ around out there on the end of the branch and in fact it bounced so much that one of those eggs bounced right out and fell down and smashed, he could see it, way down in the ground, all smashed and yellow and he said to himself, hangin’ there, I am going to be just like that egg. Anyways, there was this one branch which was over to the side, he had to let go a hand to reach it, he’d tried, he just couldn’t reach that thing, and was just hanging there, he was just waiting to get tired and drop – an’ there’s this voice in the air. Not in his head, he said. The voice was all around him. It was an everythin’ voice, that’s what he said – it had everythin’ in it, anger and promises and his mama and the whole history of the whole world – an’ it said, Will you always look for me? Well, Eddie said, Yes. I mean, he would have said yes if it had been, Would you pick your ass and wipe it on the dean, but this voice, it was the kind of voice you would always be looking out to hear again.”
