Читать книгу Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself - Lewis Grizzard - Страница 8

I AM THIRTY-EIGHT years old — it’s approximately half-time of the promised three score and ten — and I don’t have any idea what is taking place around me anymore.

Lord knows, I have tried to understand. I have dutifully watched “Donahue” in an attempt to broaden myself into a creature adjusted to the eighties, but it has been a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.

How did Phil Donahue do it? He’s even older than I am, with the gray hair to show for it, but he seems to understand what people mean when they talk about the new way to live. Me, I feel like an alien in my own country. These new lifestyles seem to be in direct contrast to the way they taught living when I was a child. Back then, gay meant, “1. Happy and carefree; merry. 2. Brightly colorful and ornamental. 3. Jaunty; sporty. 4. Full of or given to lighthearted pleasure. 5. Rakish; libertine.” (That’s straight from my high school dictionary.) Pot was something you cooked in, and back then nobody ate mushrooms. Where did I miss a turn?

The first hint that the world was taking leave of me came after Elvis died. The women who mourned him were older and had beehive hairdos and children of their own. Their teeny-bopper, socks-rolled-down days were far behind them. They were my age and they were weeping not only for Elvis, I think now, but for the realization that an era and a time — their time — was passing to another generation. To know that Elvis had gotten old and sick and fat enough to die was to know that their own youth had faded as well.

Elvis, forty-two. Elvis, dead. The voice that sang for the children of the late forties and early fifties stilled, and in its place a cacophony of raucous melodies from scruffy characters playing to the screams of young earthlings of the modern generation, to whom happiness and normalcy was a computerized hamburger at McDonald’s and mandatory attendance at earsplitting concerts given by people dressed as dragons or barely dressed at all. Elvis may have shaken his pelvis, but he never by-God showed it to anybody on stage.

Why this gap between me and the younger generation? Why, in my thirties, do I have more in common with people twenty years older than with people five or ten years younger? Where is my tolerance for change and modernization? Why would I enjoy hitting Boy George in the mouth? Where did the years go and where did the insanity of the eighties come from? And why did I ever leave home in the first place?

Home. That’s probably it. I don’t seem to fit in today because it was so different yesterday.

Home. I think of it and the way it was every time I see or hear something modern that challenges tradition as I came to know it.

Home. I was born in 1946, the son of a soldier who lived through seven years of combat and then drank his way right out of the service, but who still stood and sang the national anthem to the top of his forceful voice at the several hundred ball games we watched together.

Home. It was a broken home. That came when I was six and my mother ran for her parents and took me with her. The four of us lived in my grandparents’ home. We warmed ourselves by kerosene, we ate from a bountiful garden, and our pattern of living was based on two books — the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog.

Everything came in black and white.

* * *

Moreland, Georgia, had perhaps three hundred inhabitants when I moved there in 1952. The population is about the same today, and Moreland still doesn’t have a red light.

Some other things have changed, however. There are two tennis courts in Moreland. Back then, we played baseball and dammed creeks, and that was enough. Cureton and Cole’s store, where the old men sat around the stove and spit and imparted wisdom, is boarded shut. I don’t know where the old men in Moreland spit and impart wisdom nowadays.

Perhaps spitting and wisdom-imparting around a stove have gone the way of ice cream cups with pictures of movie stars on the bottom side of the lids. I purchased hundreds of ice cream cups at Cureton and Cole’s, licking the faces of everybody from Andy Devine to Yvonne DeCarlo. I haven’t seen ice cream cups like that in years, but even if they were still around, I wouldn’t buy one; I’d be afraid I might lick away the vanilla on the bottom of my lid only to find John Travolta smiling at me. What a horrid thought.

Those were good and honest people who raised me and taught me. They farmed, they worked in the hosiery mill that sat on the town square, and some went to the county seat six miles away where they welded and trimmed aluminum and sweated hourly-wage sweat — the kind that makes people hard and reserved and resolved there is a better world awaiting in the next life.

We had barbecues and street square dances in Moreland. We had two truckstops that were also beer joints, and the truckers played the pinball machines and the jukeboxes. The local beer drinkers parked their cars out back, presumably out of sight.

The religion in town was either Baptist or Methodist, and it was hardshell and certainly not tolerant of drinking. The church ladies were always gossiping about whose cars had been spotted behind the truckstops.

There was one fellow, however, who didn’t care whether they saw his car or not. Pop Towns worked part-time at the post office, but the highlight of his day took place at the railroad yard. The train didn’t stop in Moreland, so the outgoing mail had to be attached to a hook next to the tracks to be picked off when the train sped past. It was Pop’s job to hang the mail.

Every morning at ten, when the northbound came through, and every evening at six, when the southbound passed, Pop would push his wheelbarrow filled with a sack of mail from the post office down to the tracks. There he would hang the mail, and we’d all stand around and watch as the train roared by. Then Pop would get in his car, drive over to one of the truckstops, park contemptuously out front, and have himself several beers.

One day the ladies of the church came to Pop’s house in an effort to save him from the demon malt. I wasn’t there when it happened, of course, but the word got around that when Pop answered the door for the ladies, he came with a beer in his hand.

Hilda Landon began reciting various scriptures regarding drunkenness. Pop countered by sicking his dog, Norman, on the ladies, and they scattered in various directions.

Pop, they said, laughed at the sight of his dog chasing off the ladies of the church, and once back inside his house, he had himself another beer, secure in the fact that he and Norman would never be bothered by another tolerance committee.

They found Pop dead one morning after he failed to make his appointment with the mail train, and the ladies of the church all said the Lord was getting even with Pop for all his sinful ways.

I sort of doubted that. Pop always had a good joke to tell and always was kind to his dog, and although I was no expert on the scriptures, I was of the belief that a good heart would get you a just reward in the afterlife as quick as anything else.

We also had a town drunk, Curtis “Fruit Jar” Hainey, but the ladies of the church figured he was too far gone to waste their efforts on. Curtis walked funny, like his knees were made of rubber. Somebody said it was because he once drank some rubbing alcohol when the local bootlegger left town for two weeks and Curtis came up dry and desperate. I figured the Lord could have had a little something to do with this one.

Although Moreland was a small town, not unlike so many others across the country in the early 1950s, we still had plenty of scandal, intrigue, and entertainment.

It was whispered, for example, that Runelle Sheets, a high school girl who suddenly went to live with her cousin in Atlanta, actually was pregnant and had gone off to one of those homes.

Nobody ever verified the rumor about Runelle, but they said her daddy refused to speak her name in his house anymore and had threatened to kill a boy who lived over near Raymond. That was enough for a summer’s full of satisfying speculation.

For further entertainment, we had a town idiot, Crazy Melvin, who allegedly was shell-shocked in Korea. Well, sort of. The story went that when Crazy Melvin heard the first shot fired, he began to run and when next seen had taken off his uniform, save his helmet and boots, and was perched in his nakedness in a small tree, refusing to climb down until frostbite threatened his privates.

They sent Crazy Melvin home after that, and following some months in the hospital, the Army decided that Melvin wasn’t about to stop squatting naked in trees, so they released him in the custody of his parents.

Once back in Moreland, however, Crazy Melvin continued to do odd things, such as take off all his clothes, save his brogans and his straw hat. They finally sent Melvin to Atlanta to see a psychiatrist. When he came back, the psychiatrist had cured him of squatting naked in trees. Unfortunately, Melvin had ridden a trolley while in Atlanta and returned home thinking he was one. Every time you were walking to the store or to church and crossed paths with Crazy Melvin, you had to give him a nickel.

“Please step to the rear of the trolley,” he would say, and then he’d make sounds like a trolley bell. The church later got up enough money to buy Melvin one of those coin-holders bus drivers wear, so it was easier for him to make change when you didn’t have a nickel.

* * *

Those were the days, when young boys roamed carefree and confidently around the streets of Moreland — Every-town, USA.

We were Baby Boomers all, born of patriots, honed by the traditional work ethic. That meant you worked your tail off and never quit until the job was done, and you saved every penny you could and never spent money on anything that didn’t have at least some practical value. You kept the Word, never questioned authority, loved your country, did your duty, never forgot where you came from, bathed daily when there was plenty of water in the well, helped your neighbors, and were kind to little children, old people, and dogs. You never bought a car that was any color like red or yellow, stayed at home unless it was absolutely necessary to leave (such as going to church Sunday and for Wednesday night prayer meeting), kept your hair short and your face cleanshaven. You were suspicious of rich people, lawyers, yankee tourists, Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to sell subscriptions to “The Watchtower” door-to-door, anybody who had a job where he had to wear a tie to work, and Republicans.

We were isolated in rural self-sufficiency for the most part. Television was only a rumor. We kept to ourselves unless we went to the county seat of Newnan to see a movie or to get a haircut or to see the little alligator they kept in a drink box at Mr. Lancaster’s service station.

I never did find out how the little alligator got into a drink box at a service station in Newnan, Georgia, but rumor had it that Mr. Lancaster had brought it back from Florida to keep people from breaking into his station after he closed at night. In fact, Mr. Lancaster had a handwritten sign in front of his station that read, “This service station is guarded by my alligator three nights a week. Guess which three nights.”

In such a closed, tightly-knit society, it was impossible not to feel a strong sense of belonging. Even for a newcomer.

When I first moved to Moreland at age seven, I was instantly befriended by the local boys. In those idyllic days, we molded friendships that would last for lifetimes.

There was Danny Thompson, who lived just across the cornfield from me, next door to Little Eddie Estes. Down the road from Danny was where Mike Murphy lived. Clyde and Worm Elrod lived near the Methodist Church. Bobby Entrekin and Dudley Stamps resided in Bexton, which was no town at all but simply a scattering of houses along; a blacktop road a mile or so out of Moreland. There was Anthony Yeager, who lived over near Mr. Ralph Evans’s store, and Charles Moore was just down the road from him.

Clyde Elrod was a couple of years older than his brother Worm, who was my age. Clyde had one ambition in his life, and that was to follow his father’s footsteps into the Navy. Clyde often wore his father’s old Navy clothes and regaled us with his father’s Navy stories. Clyde’s father apparently single-handedly won the battle for U.S. naval supremacy in World War II.

Worm got his name at Boy Scout camp one summer. There is only one thing worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm, and that’s biting into an apple and finding half a worm, which is what happened to Worm Elrod and is how he got his nickname. Clyde and Worm did not get along that well, due to a heated sibling rivalry. Their father often had to separate them from various entanglements, and Worm invariably got the worst of it. Only when Clyde graduated from high school and left to join the Navy was it certain that Worm would live to see adulthood.

Anthony Yeager joined the gang later. He was the first of us to obtain his driver’s license, and his popularity increased immediately. As teen-agers, we roamed in Yeager’s Ford and slipped off for beer and to smoke. Once we went all the way to Fayetteville to the Highway 85 Drive-In and saw our first movie in which women appeared naked from the waist up.

Funny, what the memory recalls. The movie was Bachelor Tom Peeping, and it was billed as a documentary filmed at a nudist camp. At one point, Bachelor Tom was confronted by a huge-breasted woman who was covered only by a large inner tube that appeared to have come from the innards of a large tractor tire. As she lowered the tube, we watched in utter disbelief.

“Nice tubes you have, my dear,” said Bachelor Tom.

Yeager was the first total devotee to country music I ever met, and he is at least partially responsible for my late-blooming interest in that sort of music. Yeager owned an old guitar that he couldn’t play, but he tried anyway, and common were the nights we would find a quiet place in the woods, park his car, and serenade the surrounding critters.

Yeager’s heroes were Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. His favorite songs were Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — later butchered by B.J. Thomas — and Ernest’s classic, “I’m Walking the Floor Over You.”

Hank was dead and long gone by then, but one day Yeager heard that Ernest Tubb, accompanied by picker-supreme Billy Byrd, was to perform at the high school auditorium in nearby Griffin. Me and Yeager and Dudley Stamps and Danny Thompson went. It was our first concert. Ernest slayed us, especially Yeager.

“I’m walkin’ the floor over you.

I can’t sleep a wink, that is true.

I’m hopin’ and I’m prayin’

That my heart won’t break in two.

I’m walkin’ the floor over you.”

Whenever Ernest Tubb would call in Billy Byrd for a guitar interlude, he would say, “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd,” which Yeager thought was a nice touch. For months, Yeager would say “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd” for no reason whatsoever. Later he began saying, “Put a feather in your butt and pick it out, Billy Byrd,” again for no reason except that it seemed to give him great joy to say it.

Like I said, it’s funny what details the memory recalls.

Dudley Stamps. He was the crazy one. He once drove his father’s truck into White Oak Creek to see if trucks will float. They won’t. There was not a water tower or a forest ranger tower in three counties he hadn’t climbed. When he was old enough to get a driver’s license, his parents bought him a used 1958 Thunderbird with a factory under the hood.

I was riding one night with Dudley when the State Patrol stopped him. His T-bird had been clocked at 110 MPH, according to the patrolman. Dudley was incensed and launched into an argument with the officer. He insisted he was doing at least 125.

Mike Murphy. He had a brother and sister and his father was called “Mr. Red.” Mr. Red Murphy was the postmaster and helped with the Boy Scouts. With the possible exception of the Methodist and Baptist preachers, he was the most respected man in town. Mike had to work more than the rest of us. Mr. Red kept all his children busy tending the family acreage.

“You don’t see Red Murphy’s children out gallivantin’ all over town,” the old men around the stove used to say down at Cureton and Cole’s. “Red keeps ’em in the fields where there ain’t no trouble.”

This was the late 1950s, when “gallivanting” meant doing just about anything that had no practical end to it, such as riding bicycles, roller-skating on the square, and hanging out at the store eating Zagnut candy bars and drinking NuGrapes or what was commonly referred to as “Big Orange bellywashers.” Gallivanting, like most things modern, seems to have grown somewhat sterile and electronic. Today, I suppose when children gallivant it means they hang around in shopping malls, playing video games and eating frozen yogurt.

The day Mr. Red died was an awful day. It was the practice at the Moreland Methodist Church to return to the sanctuary after Sunday School for a quick hymn or two and for announcements by Sunday School Superintendent Fox Covin. Fox would also call on those having birthdays, and the celebrants would stand as we cheered them in song.

That Sunday morning, Fox Covin announced it was Mr. Red’s birthday and asked his daughter to stand for him as we sang. As everyone in church knew, Mr. Red had been hospitalized the day before for what was alleged to be a minor problem.

Soon after we sang to Mr. Red, another member of the family came into the church and whisked the Murphy children away. Something was whispered to Fox Covin, and after the children were safely out of earshot, he told the congregation that Red Murphy was dead.

We cried and then we prayed. Mike was no more than twelve or thirteen at the time. He had to take on a great deal of the responsibility of the farm after that, so his opportunity to gallivant with the rest of us was shortened even further.

“Mike Murphy will grow up to be a fine man,” my mother used to say.

Bobby Entrekin. I loved his father. I had secretly wished there was some way my mother could have married Mr. Bob Entrekin, but there was his wife, Miss Willie, with whom to contend, and a quiet, soft, loving woman she was. I decided to remain content with spending my weekends at the Entrekin home.

Mr. Bob worked nights. Miss Willie worked days at one of the grocery stores in the county seat. The Entrekins, I noticed, ate better than the rest of us. While my family’s diet consisted mostly of what we grew from our garden or raised in our chicken coops, the Entrekins always had such delights as store-bought sandwich meat and boxed doughnuts, the sort with the sweet, white powder around them.

The standing contention was that because Miss Willie was employed at the grocery store, she was given discounts on such elaborate foodstuffs others in the community would have found terribly wasteful to purchase.

Whatever, as much as I enjoyed the company of my friend Bobby Entrekin, it may have been the lure of the delights of his family refrigerator and his father that were the most binding seal on our friendship.

Bobby’s father was unlike any man I had ever met before. He had a deep, forceful voice. His knowledge of sport was unparalleled in the community. He had once been an outstanding amateur baseball player, and on autumn Saturdays, Bobby and I would join him at radioside to listen to Southeastern Conference college football games — as comforting and delicious an exercise as I have ever known. My own father, having split for parts unknown, had shared Mr. Bob’s affinity for sports and other such manly interests, and Mr. Bob stood in for him nicely.

Mr. Bob also had more dimension to him than any other man I had known. He had educated himself. He had traveled a bit. He sent off for classical records, and when I spent the weekends with Bobby, his father would awaken us on Sunday mornings for church with those foreign sounds.

As Beethoven roared through the little Entrekin house out on Bexton Road, he would say to us, “Boys, that is what you call good music.” How uncharacteristic of the time and place from which I sprung, but how pleasant the memory.

Bobby was a con man from his earliest days. He slicked classmates out of their lunch desserts, and by schoolday’s end, he usually had increased his marble holdings considerably.

Only once did he put an unpleasant shuck on me. Mr. Bob had driven us into Newnan, where the nearest picture show was located. The Alamo Theatre sat on Newnan’s court square, across the street from the side entrance to the county courthouse. Admission to the movie was a dime. There were soft drinks for a nickel and small bags of popcorn for the same price.

As we walked toward the Alamo, we came upon a bus parked on the court square.

“Boys,” said a man sitting outside the bus, “come on inside and see the world’s fattest woman.”

“How fat is she?” Bobby asked.

“Find out for yourself for only fifteen cents, kid,” said the man.

Bobby started inside while I did some quick arithmetic. I had twenty cents. That was a dime for admission to the picture show and a dime for a soft drink and popcorn. If I paid fifteen cents to see the fat lady, I couldn’t get in to see the movie.

I mentioned this bit of financial difficulty to Bobby.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll loan you enough to get into the show.”

We each dropped fifteen cents into the man’s cigar box of coins and stepped inside the bus.

The smell got us first. A hog would have buried its snout in the mud to have escaped it. Then we saw the fat lady. She was enormous. She dripped fat. She was laid out on a divan, attempting to fan away the heat and the stench. We both ran out of the bus toward the movie house.

When we arrived at the ticket window, I reminded Bobby of his offer to stake me to a ticket.

“I was only kidding,” he said, as he pranced into the theater. I sat on the curb and cried. Later, when I told his father what Bobby had done, Mr. Bob played a symphony upon his son’s rear and allowed me to watch. I took shameful pleasure in the sweet revenge.

Charles Moore. His mother called him “Cholly,” and he eventually achieved some renown in high school when The Beatles hit in 1964 because Charles, even with his short hair, was a dead-ringer for a seventeen-year-old Paul McCartney. Charles was never able to make any money off this resemblance — that was before the imitation craze, e.g., the Elvis impersonators after his death and the three or four thousand young black kids currently doing Michael Jackson — but he obviously took a great deal of pleasure from standing in the middle of a group of giggling girls who were saying things like, “Oh, Charles, you look just like Paul.”

What I remember Charles for most, however, is the fight we had in the seventh grade over a baseball score. I was a fierce and loyal Dodger fan. Charles held the same allegiance to the Milwaukee Braves.

I arrived at school one morning with a score from the evening before, Dodgers over the Braves. I had heard it on the radio.

“The Dodgers beat the Braves last night,” I boasted to Charles.

“No they didn’t,” he said.

“I heard it on the radio,” I continued.

“I don’t care what you heard,” he said. “The Braves won.”

The principal had to pull us apart.

When I went home that afternoon, I called Mr. Bob Entrekin, who subscribed to the afternoon paper with the complete scores, and asked him to verify the fact that the Dodgers had, indeed, defeated the Braves so I could call Charles Moore and instruct him to kiss my tail.

The Braves had won, said Mr. Bob. I feigned a sore throat and didn’t go to school the next two days.

Danny Thompson. We were best friends before high school. Danny was the best athlete in our class. At the countywide field day competition, he ran fourth in the potato race. A potato race works — or worked, since I doubt potato racing has lingered with everybody throwing those silly frisbees today — this way:

There were four cans (the kind that large quantities of mustard and canned peaches came in) spaced at intervals of ten yards. The boy running first can dashed the first ten yards, picked the potato out of the can, and raced back and handed it to the boy running second can.

He then dropped the potato into the team can at the starting line and hurried to the second can twenty yards away. The team that got all four potatoes in its can first won the medals.

Danny ran fourth can because he was the fastest boy in our class. We probably would have won the county potato race, had I not stumbled and dropped my potato as I tried to depart from the second can.

Danny was also rather possessive about his belongings. He received a new football for Christmas one year. It was a Sammy Baugh model, and it had white stripes around each end. We were perhaps ten when Danny got the football.

We gathered for a game of touch a few days after Christmas, but Danny didn’t bring his new football.

“I’m saving it,” he explained.

When I would visit Danny, he would pull his new football out of his closet and allow me to hold it. He would never take it outside, however.

“I’m saving it,” he would say again. That was nearly thirty years ago. We never did get to play with Danny’s football.

One morning in the fifth grade, I looked over at Danny and his face was in his hands. He was crying. I had never seen Danny cry before. The teacher whispered something to him and then took him out of the room.

Word travels fast in a small town. Danny’s mother and his father had separated. He and I were even closer in our friendship after that. We shared a loss of parent uncommon to children then, but we rolled quite well with our punch, I suppose. We spent hours together deep down in the woods behind his house. He talked of his mother. I talked of my father.

Danny wanted us to become blood brothers. He had seen two Indians on television cut their fingers and then allow their blood to mix. I wanted to be Danny’s blood brother, but I was afraid to cut my finger. I suggested that we swap comic books instead.

* * *

It was a simple childhood, one that I didn’t fully cherish until I had long grown out of it. Only then did I appreciate the fact that I was allowed to grow into manhood having never once spent a day at the country club pool, or playing baseball where they put the ball on a tee like they do for children today, or growing my hair down over my shoulders, or wearing T-shirts advertising punk rock bands, or smoking anything stronger than a rabbit tobacco cigarette wrapped in paper torn from a brown bag and, later, an occasional Marlboro Dudley Stamps would bring on camping trips from his father’s store.

It was a most happy childhood, because the only real fear we had was that we might somehow find ourselves at odds with Frankie Garfield. Frankie was the town bully who often made life miserable for all of us, especially any new child who moved into Moreland. There was the new kid with the harelip, for instance.

The afternoon of his first day in school, the new kid rode his bicycle to Cureton and Cole’s, where Frankie was involved in beating up a couple of fifth graders for their NuGrapes and Zagnut candy bars.

The new kid parked his bicycle, and as he walked to the entrance of the store, he reached down to pick up a shiny nail off the ground. Frankie spotted him.

“Hey, Harelip,” he called, “that’s my nail.”

Nobody had bothered to inform the new kid about Frankie Garfield. The rest of us knew that if Frankie said the nail was his, the best move was to drop the nail immediately, apologize profusely, and then offer to buy Frankie anything inside the store he desired.

The new kid, however, made a serious, nearly fatal, mistake. He indicated, in no uncertain terms, that Frankie was filled with a rather unpleasant substance common to barnyards. Then he put the nail in his pocket and began to walk inside the store.

He didn’t make it past the first step before Frankie began to beat him unmercifully. At first, I think Frankie was simply amusing himself, as a dog amuses himself by catching a turtle in his mouth and slinging it around in the air.

Then the new kid made another mistake. He tried to fight back against Frankie. Now Frankie was mad. When he finally tired of beating his victim, Frankie left him there in a crumpled heap and rode off on the new kid’s bicycle.

I suppose Frankie did have some degree of heart about him. He let the new kid keep the nail.

We were involved in some occasional juvenile delinquency, but nothing more flagrant than stealing a few watermelons, or shooting out windows in abandoned houses, or pilfering a few peaches over at Cates’s fruit stand.

We went to church, didn’t talk back to our elders, studied history in which America never lost a war, and were basically what our parents wanted us to be. Except when it came to Elvis.

* * *

Whatever else we were, we were the first children of television, and it was television that brought us Elvis. He would prove to be the first break between our parents and ourselves. That disagreement seems so mild today after the generational war that broke out in the late sixties, but those were more timid times when naiveté was still in flower.

Elvis was a Pied Piper wearing ducktails. He sang and he moaned and wiggled, and we followed him ... taking our first frightening steps of independence.