Last Ride to Graceland (23 page)

HONEY

August 15, 1977

T
he next day, all the magic of our night in the jungle room is gone. The house comes rumbling slowly back to life, but everyone inside of it is edgy and out of sorts. Elvis had slept again after our recording session, and he must have slept long and hard, because it's late afternoon before he comes down the steps and heads straight into the media room. A bunch of us are clumped in the kitchen, but he doesn't say anything when he passes. He can be like that. He can plain ignore people, even when they're standing right in front of him. Sometimes it's like Elvis sees through your skin and into your soul, and at other times it's like he sees through your skin and straight through to whatever's on the other side.

“Take him a sandwich,” Wanda snaps at me. “I don't think the boy ate a bite all of yesterday.” She's short of temper, just like the cook before her and probably the one before that. I don't blame any of them. They're just a bunch of good Baptist women who are used to people eating breakfast in the morning
and dinner at night. They likely had no idea what they were signing up for when they came through the gates of Graceland.

So Wanda fries up a peanut butter and bacon sandwich, one of his favorite breakfasts, and sends me to take it to him. I call out that I'm coming as I head down to the media room, stomping as hard down the hall as 108 pounds of girl can stomp. Anything to make sure I don't startle Elvis. Whatever else you do, you don't want to startle Elvis.

I find him sitting in his white leather swivel chair with the TVs fanned out in front of him. The media room has three televisions going at all times, so that Elvis can see what's happening on every network at once. He heard that Lyndon Johnson watched TV like that when he was in the White House, and I guess he figured that if three televisions were good enough for the president, it was good enough for him. The evening news is on, so two of the screens have men dressed in tan suits with wide striped ties, and on the third there's the woman from ABC, Barbara Walters. Her face is strained, her brows pulled together in a slight frown, like she's giving the world bad news. “The Tower of Babel,” that's what my daddy would call the media room, but having the whole world talking to him simultaneously doesn't seem to disturb Elvis. In fact, I think it soothes him.

“Well, hey there, Honey Bear,” he says.

He isn't facing toward me, but that doesn't matter. Not only is the ceiling mirrored, but there's a whole wall of mirrors behind the TVs too. It's a good room for a paranoid man, because you can see everything, as it's coming toward you and leaving you both. Years ago someone had seen fit to decorate the place
like a disco, in bright blue and yellow, with a painted lightning bolt streaking across one wall, and shiny silver surfaces everywhere. So as I walk toward Elvis holding out the sandwich, I'm not only bombarded with three talking heads but I'm seeing all this times four, with Barbara Walters ricocheting at me off every wall.

“They're gonna let me ride in the car tonight,” he says with his eyes darting back and forth among the screens.

Let
him? Elvis doesn't require permission from anyone to do anything. But then I realize that this must be one of those nights when the Memphis cops have invited Elvis to do a ride along, probably on a drug bust. Elvis loves drug busts. I think on some level he realizes he's being humored by the local boys, that the uniform they give him is nothing better than another stage costume, that there's a reason they make him stay in the car when something real is going down. But he is still smiling when he tells me this, so I just put down the sandwich and say, “That's great.”

In a way it is great. Today is bringing us a bunch of good signs. That he's hungry and that he's excited about riding with the cops. His eyes flick away from the TVs and focus on the sandwich. If I thought for one minute that our recording session last night bought me any new status in his eyes, that idea is dying fast. He's lost interest in our conversation. I've been dismissed.

But just as I turn to go out of the room one sentence jumps out from the hubbub of voices swirling around me. One of the male TV anchors is saying something about “eighty-two seconds of extraterrestrial communication.”

“Did you hear that?” I ask Elvis.

He mumbles something, his mouth full of the sandwich, but for some reason I'm bold in the moment. I reach down and grab the remote control, even though I'm not entirely sure how to work it. It must have twenty buttons. It looks like the dashboard of an airplane. But I start punching one of the arrows and the volume begins to go up on one of the TVs. The wrong one. ABC with Barbara Walters. I punch her back down again and keep trying until the story about the alien finally rises above the rest of the Babel.

It's almost the end of the report. Just a few lines left. Apparently an observatory at Ohio State has picked up some sort of space signal. The transmission lasted just over a minute, and appeared to be coming from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. I look down to see if Elvis is listening. Normally this would be just his kind of news story. But he's still preoccupied with his sandwich.

“Aliens are trying to communicate with Earth,” I tell him.

“Shit,” says Elvis.

“No,” I say. “This is a real news channel reporting this and it was a real school that got the signal. A state university, a respectable place.”

But he sticks a finger in his mouth and starts digging around, pulling out wads of half-chewed bread. “Shit,” he says again. “What's in this fucking sandwich?”

“Bacon. What do you think they want from us?”

“I've lost a goddam filling,” Elvis mutters, spitting into his napkin. “You're going to have to call somebody.”

I nod, still staring at the TV screen. The news of the world
has moved on. Now the reporter is talking about the Panama Canal. It makes me wonder if I dreamed the whole thing. I back out of the room, the plate in my hand. The anniversary of Gladys's death has come and gone, but it would seem we're still in danger. The Memphis police have invited Elvis on a ride along. Aliens from Sagittarius are trying to contact Earth.

And my period is nine days late.

For whatever
reason, they decide that I should be the one to take him to the dentist. I guess because I was the one who was there when he busted the filling out. Otherwise it makes no sense. I'm not used to driving the cars, which are low and powerful, and anybody can look at me and tell I'm not suited to handle a man the size of Elvis if the dental work makes him woozy. So I ask Marilee to come too.

I expect her to grumble. Nobody wants to go to the dentist in the middle of the night. But she not only says yes, she says, “Of course.”

The dentist said he'd meet us at midnight so Marilee and I are waiting in the foyer at eleven fifty when Elvis comes down the stairs wearing a black silk shirt and pants. He's in a surprisingly good mood considering his ride-along got canceled, and we're even almost on time.

As he descends, I call up, “Can Marilee come with us?”

He smiles and says, “Now you know she can. How you doin' tonight, Miss Marilee?” He doesn't appear to be in any pain from the lost filling. I guess he self-medicated before he left his room.

The three of us head out to the garage, where someone has already pulled his newest Stutz Blackhawk out of the pack. It's sitting diagonally in the driveway, with both doors open, like it's on display. Even after a year at Graceland, I've never quite understood how the coming and going works—if Elvis called down tonight and asked for a certain car, or if Rusty, the mechanic, made the decision about what he would drive. Maybe they have some sort of rotation system to make sure all the cars get driven on a regular basis, the same way you have to exercise a horse. But the Blackhawk is waiting and Elvis waves Marilee over to the driver's-side door.

I scramble into the backseat first, getting in on the driver's side. There's a tuft of blue fur on the leather and I brush it off my pants. It looks like it came from a child's stuffed bear, most likely one of the carnival toys Elvis won for Lisa Marie and her friend a few days ago. His little girl was flying back to her mother in California soon and he was spoiling her big-time in these final days, in the only way Elvis knew how to spoil someone: with his large, silly, and over-the-top gestures, like having a whole amusement park opened up in the middle of the night, just for her and a friend. I wonder what that must have felt like for the child, if it was fun to run from ride to ride without ever having to stand in line and wait, fun to know you'd win every prize in the arcade, no matter how bad you threw or shot. Or if maybe it was sad and creepy to be the only two kids in a deserted park, the only two screams on the roller coaster, with both the cotton candy and the caramel apple coming right toward you the minute you glanced in their direction.

Too much
, that's what I sometimes think.
Too much sugar, too much salt. Too much noise
and too many toys.

But I pick a few strands of the blue fur off my white pants and make up my mind right here and now that when I have a child—whether it is eight months from now or eight years—it'll be raised much differently than Lisa Marie. Because it seems to me that having everything must be sort of like having nothing. Elvis's daughter will never know the pleasure of choosing the one from among the many, the pleasure of waiting, of dreaming and planning. There's a deep joy in yearning. Maybe it's the deepest joy in life, and I feel sorry for the child, even though I know it's a silly thought. Most likely Lisa Marie doesn't resent the difference between her life and that of other little girls because she doesn't know there is a difference. She's been rich and famous since the day she was born.

Marilee is driving slowly down the driveway and through the gates, which swing open as we approach. The movement excites the clump of people waiting outside it. I look out the backseat's small triangular window to see the photographers jostling and the tourists with their cameras too. Elvis lifts a hand in greeting, gives a smile and a wink to a couple of the women. I'm not sure how much they actually see. It is pitch-black here at the end of the driveway and the windows of the Blackhawk are tinted dark too. But he makes the gesture and maybe they do feel it, felt the vibrations of the King's power reaching through the hard metal walls of the car. Because they surge toward us as Marilee hesitates, as we pause just that one little second before she pulls the Blackhawk onto the main road.

Marilee says something to Elvis and he answers. They're
talking softly and the engine of the Blackhawk is loud enough that, sitting in the back, it's hard to hear. But once she pushes in an eight-track and the music starts, it isn't hard to hear at all.

Smart girl,
I think.
No wonder you wanted to come. And aren't you slick as butter, using this rare time alone to remind him of our song? When did you get it converted to an eight-track?
You must have been out in the recording studio the whole time I was sleeping.

I lean forward and strain to listen as we drive through the dark and deserted streets of Memphis to the dentist's office, with Elvis slapping the back of his hand against the side of the car door. When we get to the dentist office, a building Elvis does not appear to recognize, even though we'd all been there before, Marilee cruises the Blackhawk around the block a couple of times just to make sure he has plenty of time to hear out the whole tape, all our versions, to the very end. The music stops just as she's finally rolling the car into the parking lot and Elvis says, clear as day, “Now I'm gonna tell you something, girls. The three of us need to get this pretty little song on the radio.”

Three people
are waiting inside the office. They're lined up like a military troop and probably have been standing just that way for twenty minutes or better. Because, as usual, we're late. The dentist escorts Elvis down the hall, and both the hygienists are all set to follow when Elvis abruptly stops and jerks his thumb toward me and Marilee.

“Do somethin' for them too,” he says. “Clean them up or somethin'.”

So the hygienist who is last in line whips around and directs me toward a second office. I don't want to have my teeth cleaned and I doubt she wants to clean them. But I climb into
the chair anyway, and she starts setting up. She doesn't make small talk. She drops the metal instruments to the tray with a clatter. She's pissed and I can't say I blame her. She was probably home for the night when she got the call to come back in. Making dinner, watching TV, or sleeping beside her husband. Who knows, maybe she has kids who need to get up and start getting ready for school in just a few hours. But then the word goes out across Memphis that Elvis Presley has lost a filling.

So this girl gets up and gets dressed and drives back to work just before midnight, only now she finds out she's not going to be attending Elvis at all. The other hygienist gets the important gig and she's been cheated out of a good night's sleep to clean the teeth of two nobody backup singers who just happened to come in with him.

She takes her disappointment out on my gums, gouging at them with that little curved pick thing and talking hateful about plaque and flossing and how it was clear I'd been rushing things when it came to good oral hygiene. Rushing things, or maybe even skipping steps entirely. “Sloppy,” she mutters, scraping away in the back of my mouth, hurting me so bad that at one point I pull my feet up to my butt and close my eyes. “Yes, I'm going to say that somebody's been very sloppy indeed.”

By the time she finally releases me, my white cotton bib is splattered with blood. I walk back into the lobby with a balled-up Kleenex in my hand, bleeding into that too. Enough so that Marilee raises her eyebrows when she'd looks up from her
Cosmopolitan
magazine and sees me coming toward her.