After Bathing at Baxters Read online

  Billy Ray wandered out of the hospitality tent then, wiping the walnut flakes off his chin with a big, scrawny forearm, and stood looking at me with a kind of puzzled wonder. He was out of his league, Billy was, and he knew it. Most of his protégés up until then had suffered from some fatal, disabling flaw: the John Wayne double reduced to abject terror by the sight of a horse, the Ella Fitzgerald replica – legs, hairdo, everything – compromised only by a husky baritone. Compared to Big John and Ella and all the others I was flawless, inviolate, unstoppable. ‘El,’ Billy confided after the show – I’d told him it was important for my self-confidence that he stopped calling me Vernon, but he could never bring himself to go the whole way – ‘get the feeling you’re going places boy.’ Well, I could have told him that, Billy Ray with his Lone Star baseball cap and his shy Texas drawl, and I wasn’t surprised when he hauled me into his office a day or so later to meet a couple of businessmen (‘Real important guys, El. Showbiz management’) who’d flown up from Tennessee on purpose to see me.

  I can recall that day precisely – better than the Vegas appearances, better than the time I got to meet Jimmy Carter on the lawn at the White House and even signed a couple of autographs for his grandchildren – the dusty sunlight falling over Billy Ray’s rickety pinewood desk, the far-off hiss of the cars on the interstate freeway, Billy Ray all nervy and flustered and sending out for cigars and pitchers of orange juice. When I walked into the room the elder of the two guys – who looked like a Southern grandee at around the time of the Civil War – whistled through his teeth and said: ‘Reckon you struck gold here Billy’, while the younger one – he was sweating into a three-piece suit and complaining about the air conditioning – smiled and cocked his eye, as if he’d finally figured out the answer to some nagging problem that he’d been concentrating on for years. Billy Ray chattered on in that shy, respectful way he had – he’d been a District Attourney’s clerk before the war and you could see it in the way he never sassed anybody – but it was mostly to the younger one. The elder guy just stared at me, while the smoke from Billy Ray’s cigar stole across the room towards us and hung over our heads until the fans caught it and whirled it away. Finally he said: ‘Don’t mind my asking this do you boy? That a wig you’re wearing there?’ I shook my head and he whistled some more and nodded. ‘Uh huh. And the teeth? I got a hundred-dollar bet with Eugene here says that’s a false set.’ I smiled. ‘Had them a matter of twenty-seven years, sir. Don’t know how you reckon on accounting for that?’

  Looking back I can see that it was then that my real life began, back there in Billy Ray’s thirty-dollar-a-month suite with the cigar smoke hanging in cotton wool clouds under the fans, and that the preceding years had been of no account when set against this smooth, inexorable destiny, a vague preliminary best forgotten in the reckoning up of sterner duties. I can remember shaking hands with Eugene and the Colonel, saying goodbye to Billy Ray, heading back to the rooming house to pack my two suits and my three neckties as if I were a kid who had somehow walked into a magical toyshop full of dazzling sempiternal light, where the dolls leaped up out of their boxes to shake your hand, whirl you round in an ecstatic waltz, leaving you draggled and confused but unswerving in your conviction that the dream couldn’t end.

  Flying in towards Memphis in a grey dawn, as the plane swooped low over the narrow ramparts of the tobacco fields and the Colonel twitched and mumbled in his sleep, Eugene filled me in on the daunting protocol of my new existence. ‘Now, I know your real name, and Colonel Tom knows it, but that’s as far as it goes OK? You ever hear a limo driver or a guy on the staff call you anything less than “Mr Presley”, then I’ll kick his ass. Fire him too, if I reckon he’s safe and won’t talk to the papers.’

  ‘And what about him? What does he call me?’

  Eugene’s shot grey eyes keeled crazily in their sockets. ‘Oh, you don’t ever get to meet him son. Noway nohow. Larry, kid who was doing your job a while back, now he got set on meeting him. Bust into his private annexe one night with a crate of beer figuring on saying hello. Now Elvis, he just yelled like it was his mother’s ghost. Had to get the medics in and sedate him. So no, you don’t ever get to meet him son. Unless he asks, that is.’

  The wheels hit ground, Colonel Tom came heavily awake, in the distance the Memphis rooftops glittered in the early sun, and a new life came swarming up to greet me.

  That was the last I saw of the Colonel, mostly. Sometimes early in the morning when I was skimming leaves off the surface of the swimming pool – it was in the shape of a guitar, too, just like all the magazines said – or at night when I was catching a late movie in the TV room – watching Jailhouse Rock, say, for the seventeenth time – I’d find him staring at me with a kind of queer, calculating intensity, like Uncle Sam on the recruiting poster, but though I’d nod and smile he’d never speak, just drift away as if I wasn’t there. So it was Eugene who got things settled, fixed me up with a bungalow at the back of the main complex, made arrangements for the plastic surgery – my nose needed a little straightening and the Colonel had expressed a slight reservation about the point of my chin – and the voice coach and looked over my schedule. I took things gradually at first. In my second month they put me on a radio show where I was discussing new record releases (‘Just say your favourite record’s “The Old Rugged Cross” Eugene instructed, ‘only El’s been having a little trouble with the Baptist Church just lately.’ A month later I went to a Grammy Award dinner and got to sit next to Diana Ross. Eugene was terrified about that, because he reckoned Elvis and her had met once before a couple of years back and really hit it off, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, and when either by chance or design she upset a glass of wine over my white pant suit I just murmered: ‘It ain’t nuthin’, ma’am.’ After that Eugene and the Colonel started to trust me. I did TV shows, a special film they sent out to the troops in Vietnam, and a Vegas walkabout. I got photographed trying on buckskin gear in Madison Avenue, on horseback with Roy Rogers, shaking hands with a candidate in the Republican primaries. ‘I’m just a plain country boy from Tennessee,’ I told him, ‘but I’d like to tell you sir that the Good Lord’s on your side.’

  Eugene enthused about this last touch. ‘Got to hand it to you boy, you’re a natural. Reckon we could put you live on the primetime network shows and nobody’d notice the difference. Don’t it worry you though?’

  ‘Why should it worry me?’

  ‘Think about it. You look like him. You talk like him. You goddamned sing like him. You could be him.’

  ‘No,’ I told him – truthfully, as it happened – ‘it doesn’t worry me.’

  Hectic, restless years. I have album upon album of stills photographs to remind me. All those dumb late sixties films, those monstrous TV shows, the pre-recorded Christmas messages for the fan-clubs, it was me, all of it. The real Elvis, meantime, was reduced to the status of a bit-parter, a walk-on, wheeled in on the rare occasions when I couldn’t make it. I got better and better, to the point where you couldn’t tell us apart. In fact, if anything I looked more like Elvis – he was getting fat now, apparently, and hitting the booze – than Elvis did. Still naive and credulous about my part in the whole Grace and set-up, I once questioned Eugene about this mounting role reversal.

  ‘So what does Elvis Aaron’ – we called him that to distinguish him from me – ‘what does Elvis Aaron actually do?’

  Eugene frowned. ‘He does the big Vegas sessions. He gets to meet the President. Leastways, when he’s sober he does.’

  ‘Eugene,’ I said, suddenly biting at the thought which had been crackling away in my head all these months. ‘You don’t need him. It’s me you need. Admit it.’

  Eugene flicked me that lazy, inscrutable smile of his. ‘You didn’t say that boy. You didn’t say that and I didn’t hear it.’ He paused. ‘Guess I can fix you a Vegas show, though, if that’s what you want.’

  I wanted it. I did seven nights in the Las Vegas auditorium and Variety talked about �
��a star reborn’. After that Eugene gave me everything I asked for. It was the mid-seventies’ by now, in any case, and the real Elvis wasn’t in any shape to protest – he’d got into drugs in a big way by this time, everybody said, weighed eighteen stone and mostly didn’t know who he was any more. Curiously, it was in these later days that I finally got to meet him. The limo had just delivered me back from the studio late one night – I was laying down some tracks for an album to be called Elvis Sings Gospel – and, coming into the wide Graceland foyer, there he was slumped in a chair, looking like a fat white ghost that was too old and too decayed to bustle out haunting. I hurried by – I was wearing my purple suit and carrying the sequined cape he used for his TV shows and I was afraid he’d be upset – but he just rolled an eye up from beneath the furrowed crevice of his forehead and muttered: ‘That’s a good-looking set of clothes you got there boy.’ He fell asleep again then and I tiptoed away.

  Elvis Sings Gospel sold half a million copies. Time magazine said it was ‘a welcome return to form by an artist whose decline had long been thought irrevocable’.

  And then he died. Sprawled out over the king-sized bed with his face turned purple, clutching a fistful of barbiturates. Eugene let on, confidentially, that he and the Colonel had been expecting it for some time, but I was devastated. At the meeting the three of us had before the death certificate was signed I grasped in vain at the only straw of at hope that seemed to offer itself.

  ‘Eugene. Colonel … He. He doesn’t have to die, you know.’ I looked appealingly from one to the other, got a faint gleam of recognition from Eugene – I could tell he was on my side – but Colonel Tom just stared at me. ‘I loved that boy,’ he said – it was the first time I’d heard him speak for years – ‘and I intend to devote the rest of my life to his memory. I can tell you’re suffering from shock, Vernon, and perhaps you ain’t responsible for what you’re saying, but if I were you I’d take a look at your contract.’

  I took a look. There was a big paragraph under the In the event of death heading. For a time I wondered about selling my story to the papers or writing a book, but as Eugene pointed out no one would believe me. In the end, rather than follow the self-sequestration option, I went for ‘facial restructuring’ as they called it: half an inch off the nose, reset cheekbones and a hair rethink. There’s still plenty of money left – Colonel Tom settled up handsomely when he found out how upset I was – but the time hangs heavy down here in Florida. Sometimes the local bar and diner stages a talent night, so I put on the cape and the pantsuit and do ‘Hound Dog’ or ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and occasionally, just occasionally mind, some drunk kid will holler out ‘Elvis Lives’. But he’s dead now. And I’m dead too. I died a long time ago, back at the impersonators’ convention, with Billy Ray cracking the walnuts between his fingers, and the proud fathers cheering, and the cigar smoke curling through the dead, empty air.

  Flights

  At weekends or on the long summer evenings when Francine went to her aromatherapy class or sat around the house sewing stitches into a fat embroidery sampler, Dorfman took the car and headed west: out beyond the point where the freeway slid on towards Des Moines and the state border, off through the low flat terrain of dust and scrub and the network of side-roads that led inexorably to the airport. At first no more than an incidental diversion, a change from the familiar tables at Schwab’s or the cool subterranean rumpus-rooms of the country club, the journey had, he realised, assumed the status of a settled habit: as much a part of his routine, Dorfman thought, as the pink life-insurance forms that lay over his desk in the study back home, or the shiny jars of linseed oil Francine had bought the time they had vacationed in New Mexico, now forgotten and unused in the workroom, something fixed and irrevocable in his life. Occasionally, he had tried explaining this to Francine, never with success. ‘Standing out by the runway watching a plane take off,’ Francine had reasoned. ‘What kind of a way to spend an evening is that?’ ‘Just something I do, baby,’ Dorfman had countered warily. ‘Just like you going to see Mrs Fogelberg. Isn’t any harm in it.’ Francine had resented this reference to the aromatherapy class, seeing in it lack of respect, a brazen male disregard for salutary feminine activities, and for a time Dorfman had tried to alter the pattern of his evenings, driving east to the marina at Dyersburg, going bowling at the big sports centre at Phoenix Rock. Such substitutes were, he quickly decided, an inadequate recompense. The white sail-boats, the ponytailed farmers’ daughters gossiping in the sports centre bar – these were frail, insubstantial ghosts. It was the aerodrome, the control tower rising up to greet him from beyond the distant cornfields, the great metal birds like stitching in the sky above his head, that were real.

  There was even, Dorfman thought, thinking it now as he stowed the convertible away in its familiar parking space and stood in the car park letting his feet make little rivulets and runnels in the gravel, something vaguely proprietorial about his obsession, a sense in which his own personal development had mirrored the wider traffic of the skies. Dorfman had grown up with the aerodrome. He remembered in fifth grade taking time off from helping his dad with the car showroom – old man Dorfman had had a Pontiac franchise for thirty years – to cycle over and watch as the bulldozers shovelled humps of tarmac this way and that over the dusty amphitheatre of the site, returning a little later as a high school student to stare at the inaugural ceremony, where a state senator stepped gallantly into a rickety Cessna trainer and was flown off to a convention in Sioux City. And then on through the late teens and twenties, the place lay anchored deep in his consciousness, a kaleidoscope of memory twisted together and given a single point of focus: standing in the metallic reception area watching his mother come back alone through the checkout the year his dad had got sick and died on vacation in Florida; seeing the first of the giant DC10s come in to land, a silvery scrap of metal growing larger by the second; the time the airport company had fixed a deal with Pan-Am and got made a stopover point on the coast-to-coast routes. They’d started building the motels then, and the vanilla-painted shopping arcade. Ten years on, Dorfman didn’t recall a time when the airport hadn’t been there, the phantom, impersonal city in which it reposed rising up to meet the pallor of the surrounding scrub, the naptha beacons streaking the pale Iowa sky with artificial light, couldn’t remember in fact what previous entity it had managed to supplant. He had tried asking Mr Kopechnie, indisputably the oldest person he knew, but without satisfactory results. ‘Used to be a golf course or something,’ Mr Kopechnie had suggested, eyeing Dorfman’s executive briefcase and his shiny salesman’s suit with practised caution. ‘Anyhow, what sort of a question is that?’ And Dorfman, avoiding Mr Kopechnie’s eye and hefting the executive briefcase out of one hand and into the other, had been forced to admit that it was no sort of question at all.

  It had started raining as Dorfman got out of the car, and he backed instinctively into the concrete shelter at the rear of the park where there were cigarette machines and Seven-Up dispensers and a strew of cans and aluminium fast-food trays lying over the asphalt floor. Two kids, a boy and a girl in leather jackets, broke apart as they heard him approach and stared frostily at him. Dorfman glared back. The girl’s jacket had a stencilled motif on the back that read WHOMP THAT SUCKER. He watched it recede beneath the overhang of cement and breezeblocks, hearing a gust of fugitive chatter blown back on the breeze. Dorfman hated kids. It was one of his special prejudices, something for which he reserved a rare, intense hatred, which Franchie – disloyally, Dorfman thought – declined to abet. ‘Asshole kids’ he would murmur, standing rigidly by the downstairs window as some gang of high school desperadoes loitered purposefully by. ‘But honey,’ Francine would insist, looming up through the grey early-evening light to tug at his wrist, ‘they ain’t doing anybody no harm.’ ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Dorfman told her, proud in spite of his irritation. ‘But honey,’ Francine would demur. ‘All they want to do is to have a little fun, just like the rest of us.’ There
was no arguing with such indulgence, Dorfman thought, no way of compromising with this gross intrusion into the security of the suburban man. He lit a cigarette and smoked it for a while, kicking at the detritus around his feet, willing the serenity he had felt as he steered the car along the approach road twenty-minutes back to return.

  There were, Dorfman knew, a number of ways of spending time at the airport, each of which harboured its own particular satisfactions. He could go and talk to the guy who ran the security desk, a grizzled ex-cop who remembered Dorfman from the days when he drove a patrol car and would occasionally volunteer details of abstracted contraband or mid-flight delinquency. He could take a wander down the shopping mall, empty now and gaping in the mid-evening shutdown, and stare at the racks of Fox Brothers suits and the rows of pale Reebok trainers, or go and stand in the arrivals lounge and trade back-chat with the limousine drivers waiting to meet the 1900 flight from Denver. The weighing up of these possibilities, each one glimpsed momentarily in his head like frames cut from a reel of film, brought easy consolation. Appeased, his resentments damped down and anaesthetised, he moved on through the wide corridor, the sight of his short, stubby body caught suddenly in one of the big wall mirrors oddly reassuring, the confirmation of an identity that the sight of the two lickerish teenagers had somehow called into question. Halfway into the mall, a queer sense of resolution forming in his head, he stopped at the McDonald’s concession and bought a frankfurter so he could loiter for a while in the big, gleaming lounge, where cigarette butts lay piled up in the massive iron ashtrays and there were pictures of ancient, flat-bellied Dakota transports lining the walls. The old negro who worked the cashdesk looked up sleepily as he passed. ‘That’s right Mr Dorfman,’ he nodded, and Dorfman nodded back, the familiar clink of the fifty cent piece he tossed into the empty saucer acting on him like the sight of a final jigsaw piece slotted neatly into place. By the time he emerged again into the mall, silent now except for a skinny, white-coated janitor scooping up dirt with a broom, the sense of resolve had hardened into something sharp and tangible. Emboldened, Dorfman set off through the tangle of side-alleys and high NO ENTRY doors that led to the hostesses’ lounge.