All Shook Up (11 page)

24. Blue Hawaii

The wrongness seemed to get worse as the weeks passed. My dad spent hours in his bedroom watching old tapes of Elvis concerts to practice the “moves,” as he called them: the body shake, the arm pump, the pinwheel, the karate chop. He would dance in front of a tall mirror that leaned against one of his bedroom walls. Lying in my bed at night, I could hear his feet moving on the floor right above my head, jiggling back and forth to
Elvis: The Great Performances
boxed set or who knows what else.

At the same time all of this was happening, I had plenty of things in my own life to be worrying about—namely the fact that my grandma wasn’t getting better as fast as my mom had hoped and my friends from Boston appeared to have completely forgotten about me. Well, that’s not quite true. Brian was still forwarding his usual stuff: pictures of goats born with two heads, or people who had gotten their arms stuck in public toilets. But nobody else from Boston had answered my e-mail messages in about a month. As the end of October arrived, it looked as if I’d be lucky if I ever got to go home.

When my mom phoned one Saturday afternoon, I tried asking her how much longer she thought it would be. It was her usual “check up on Josh” call. Every Saturday, and two or three times during the week, she’d call to see how everything was going in Chicago.

“How much longer will
what
be?” she replied in a harried-sounding voice. In the background, you could hear the whine of power tools as workers installed special railings and ramps in my grandma’s trailer, for whenever she was finally able to come back to Shadyside Villas. I had to repeat my question three times before my mom got it.

“You need to understand that somebody her age takes a long time to recover,” my mom said with a tired sigh. “I know it’s hard, Josh, but she’s making more progress every day, and we just have to be patient and wait. Okay? Everything will be back to normal soon, I promise.” And then I could hear the sound of a doorbell ringing and she had to hang up.

After my mom’s phone call, I decided to take a walk. Just to be somewhere other than my dad’s house in Chicago, even if being outside wasn’t much farther away than being inside. It was a start at least. My dad was in the kitchen working on one of his speakers that had started to buzz. He’d been focused on the speaker for two days. It was all he’d been talking about—was it a serious buzz, was it a minor buzz, was it a noticeable buzz, was it an expensive-to-fix buzz—and I was really sick of hearing about the buzzing speaker, so I didn’t bother to tell him I was leaving.

Outside, the sky was a gloomy gray color and the air was cold. It was the end of October, but it felt like January. Stuffing my hands deep into the front pockets of my jeans and holding my arms against my sides for warmth, I probably looked like some kind of frozen robot person as I walked stiffly up one side of the deserted street, past Gladys’s house and the other aluminum-awning houses. Then back down the opposite side.

A brown UPS truck drove past me, kicking up piles of leaves as it went by. I was surprised to see it turn and pull into my dad’s driveway. What was the truck delivering to us? When I got back about fifteen minutes later, I found out. As I closed the front door, my dad called out from the living room, “Hey, Josh, come in here. I’ve got something to show you.”

That was the moment when the wrongness got worse. Much worse.

Imagine walking into the living room to find your dad (who you had last seen crouched over a dismantled speaker in torn jeans and an old ’80s concert T-shirt) now dressed in a blinding white jumpsuit and cape, which are completely covered with gold stars and colored glass rhinestones.

“What the heck—” I said, totally shocked.

Note: It may not have been “heck” that I said. I’m not exaggerating, my dad looked like he had just flown in from the planet Krypton.

“Man, isn’t this something?” Dad held his arms out and turned around slowly so I could get the full rhinestone effect. The costume’s tall white collar came up to his chin. Blue and red glass rhinestones, hundreds of them, formed the outstretched wings of a large eagle on the front of the jumpsuit. Two rows of gold stars trailed down the white arms of the costume, and there was a line of smaller rhinestone eagles along each of the flared polyester pant legs, which ended kind of abruptly at my dad’s bare feet. “Have you ever seen an outfit like this one before?”

I couldn’t even get an answer out.

“It’s called the Aloha Eagle,” my dad continued proudly. “All the best impersonators have one. Elvis wore it for his 1973 television special from Hawaii. Get it? Aloha and”—he pointed to the large rhinestone bird stretched across his chest—“Eagle.”

The entire time my dad was talking, I could feel a sickening storm beginning to brew in my stomach. You know the feeling you get after you guzzle a 42-ounce soda and then get into a car and ride down a bumpy road in the backseat? That was the feeling I had as I looked at the costume. Because I knew exactly what he had gotten it for. And I had a pretty good guess it wasn’t free. But the feeling in my stomach forced me to ask, just to find out for sure.

“One thousand five hundred bucks,” Dad said, leaning on one knee and demonstrating an Elvis arm thrust. “How’s that for a deal? The way I figured it, I had to take a chance in this business if I wanted to get ahead. And if this jumpsuit doesn’t put Jerry Denny in the running for a trip to Vegas, I mean, what else will?” He stood up and stretched out his arms. “Look at me, Josh, don’t I look like the King?”

A huge smile spread across my dad’s face as he stood there, absolutely convinced he was the perfect Elvis and he was going to win the trip to Las Vegas—and if there had been music playing, this would have been the point with the big, happy crescendo. But instead, there was just the silent sound of my brain screaming that all of this was my fault.

“It looks great,” I managed to say, and then I took off, because if I stayed one minute longer looking at my dad’s clueless smile and the fifteen-hundred-dollar rhinestone eagle glinting in the living room light, the storm in my stomach was going to come lurching out of me.

In my bedroom, I closed the door and flopped down in the middle of the old blue shag carpet. Pressing my arms across my face, I tried to decide whether it would be better to pack up my stuff and leave now or later. Should I call my mom and beg her for a plane ticket to Florida? No questions asked? Could I tell her it was an emergency? Could I leave Chicago that night?

Then I began to get angry at my dad, because, looking at it another way, the whole situation was his fault. Why did I have to feel guilty? Was it really
my
fault he’d decided to buy some Aloha costume? Or that he had believed every word of my letter? It hadn’t said to go out and blow a fortune on a new jumpsuit, had it? That was completely my dad’s own choice, wasn’t it?

The tug-of-war over who was more wrong—me for coming up with the whole idea or my dad for believing it—jerked back and forth in my head.
Dad. Me. Dad. Me.
Mostly, I think I kept focusing on who deserved the most blame because it was a good way to avoid worrying about the problem of what I was going to do next.

25. Ivory’s Advice

I ended up wimping out and calling Ivory. After spending an hour trying to come up with the name of somebody to call—like those phone-a-friends you can use if you’re on a game show and stuck on the million-dollar question—I couldn’t think of anybody else to ask for advice. How sad is that? Nobody back in Boston knew about my dad being Elvis, and the guys at Listerine thought I was Josh Greenwood, completely normal person. I even considered going down the street to talk to Gladys. But she had been acting kind of mixed-up lately, and I didn’t want to make her more confused.

So I dialed Viv’s Vintage with no idea of what to say to Ivory. Or how to keep her from hanging up. Ever since I’d blamed her for my dad being invited to the school concert, she’d been avoiding me. Going out of her way to avoid me, actually. For instance, if we happened to be passing through the hallway at the same time, she would cut across to the other side. It reminded me of that experiment where you put pepper flakes in a dish with some water and then stick a bar of soap in the dish and the pepper flakes zoom to the other side.

Ivory answered the phone with the usual overly cheerful, overly hopeful Viv’s Vintage greeting. Since it was Saturday afternoon, I figured the store was probably empty.

“How’s it going?” I said in a voice that was meant to sound friendly.

“Who is this?”

“Josh Greenwood.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “Do you want something?” Ivory’s sharp voice finally interrupted the silence. “Because I’m busy, even if you’re not.”

Right at that point, I had this insane desire to start laughing. Have you ever been in a situation where everything is tense and sad, like at a funeral, and suddenly you feel like this horrible laugh wants to come exploding out of you? Not a happy laugh, but a desperate, possessed kind of laugh you can’t stop? That’s the way I felt right at that moment, as if I was going to start insanely laughing, even though that was the exact opposite of how I felt.

“I need to talk to you about something with my dad.” I managed to get these words out of my mouth in one fast, mumbled sentence, without any hysterical laughter breaking out.

“About what?”

“He’s here right now. I can’t really talk,” I lied.

I think Ivory only agreed to meet with me because she thought it had something to do with our parents’ relationship. “I’ll meet you in an hour at the little park near the shoe store where your dad worked,” she said impatiently.

“The park?” I couldn’t recall any parks.

“It’s small. Look for the iron gate. And the bus shelter out front. If you can’t find it, ask somebody.” And that’s all the information I could get out of Ivory.

So for the second time that day, I headed down Oakmont—although this time I was smart enough to bring along a jacket. It took me about forty-five minutes to walk all the way to the park with Chicago’s arctic wind whipping my face.

Note to self: Learn how to ride the city bus.

The park turned out to be pretty close to Murphy’s Shoes. Squeezed along the busy street and surrounded by a spiked fence, it didn’t exactly cry out “environmental paradise,” however. Two rusted swing sets sat in the middle of a dusty bowl of dirt. There were a few of those riding animals for little kids—the ones on those big metal springs that sway back and forth. One of the springs was missing an animal, as if it had decided
the heck with this
and taken off.

Ivory was nowhere in sight. I began to wonder if sending me to sit in a deserted park was her idea of a cruel joke. But then I spotted somebody pedaling quickly down the street on a bicycle. From a distance, she looked like she had a white squirrel draped across her shoulders, but as Ivory got closer, I could see the squirrel was actually a fur-type collar attached to an old leather coat. Close up, her jacket reminded me of something Amelia Earhart would wear to fly across the Atlantic. All she needed was a pair of goggles.

“Hey,” Ivory said, bumping her bike across the uneven ground and stopping in front of me. “You found it.”

“Yeah.” I stuffed my cold hands in my pockets, feeling uncomfortable.

“Where do you want to talk?”

I shrugged. “Wherever. Your choice.”

Looking around at the choices—(a) swing set, (b) giant metal spring animals, or (c) benches in need of a good paint job—Ivory picked the benches. She perched on the end of one and I sat on the end of another. There was a small canyon of dirt and leaves and people’s discarded cigarette butts between us.

“So,” Ivory said, crossing her legs and giving me a frown. “What’s up?”

Honestly, I still hadn’t figured out how much I was going to tell her. I started by explaining how I was having some problems with my dad (without going into any specifics)—how I’d written a letter that had made things a lot worse. “Now I’m kinda stuck about what to do next,” I finished.

Ivory squinted at me. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

Glancing at the old tree above us (which might have been prettier earlier in the fall, but now its leaves were a sad yellow-brown color), I decided I really couldn’t stand keeping the whole story to myself one minute longer. Even if the person who heard it turned around and told a hundred other people. Even if the person was Ivory.

So I just spilled my guts right there in the middle of that empty, freezing cold park. I told Ivory everything: about the letter, the Grand Ballroom, the five-thousand-dollar prize, even the Aloha Eagle. After I was done, she didn’t say a word at first. Shaking her head, she finally said, “Wow, that is really twisted.”

“Thanks.” I looked up and glared at her. “That helps.”

Ivory picked up a leaf from the bench and twirled the stem in her hand. “I just can’t believe you would do something like that. I mean”—she paused and shrugged—“your dad seems like such a cool person to have for a father. I wouldn’t even think of doing something like that to my mom…,” her voice trailed off.

“Thanks. That helps more.”

After that, it was quiet for about five minutes. You could hear the cars zipping by the front of the park and a jet going overhead. “So do you have any ideas,” I mumbled finally, “about how to get out of this?” Trying to ignore the stinging sensation starting in the corners of my eyes, I pretended to be interested in watching the cars passing by on the street.

“Other than telling your dad what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“Not that I can think of, no.”

“So what do I say? ‘Sorry you blew fifteen hundred bucks on a costume, Dad’? He’s been practicing for weeks. He really believes he’s going to Las Vegas.” My voice rose and fell in odd, uncontrollable ways like a squeaky instrument. “He’s gonna hate me for the rest of his life when he finds out what I did.
God
”—I kicked at the patch of dirt and stones under my feet—“everything in my life is such a total freaking mess right now.”

Ivory stood up suddenly and brushed the scraps of torn leaves off her jeans. “I can’t stay and talk any longer. I’ve gotta get back to the store and help out my mom.”

I looked up, kind of surprised by her sharp tone. “What?”

“No matter what you talk about, it’s always about you, isn’t it?” Ivory glared at me. Her voice grew louder and more impatient. “What if your dad hates you, what if you have to pay him back for his costume, what if he embarrasses you, what if people find out he’s Elvis, what if your popular jock friends at Listerine don’t let you hang out with them anymore—everything is always about you, isn’t it?”

Ivory yanked her bike up from where it lay on its side. “Maybe you should spend some time walking around in other people’s feet for a while,” she snapped over her shoulder, and then she abruptly headed out, with her wheels wobbling across the sparse grass and through the iron gate.

Note to Ivory: The saying is “walk around in somebody else’s
shoes
”—not feet.

Although the idea of walking around in somebody else’s feet kind of cracked me up the more I thought about it. A fat gray pigeon was pecking for food around the park benches, which made me wonder how it might feel to walk around on a pigeon’s skinny red feet. Or metal park animal springs:
bo-ing, bo-ing.
Or even—as a dog trotted past the park gate with its owner—fuzzy brown dog feet.

Of course, deep down, I knew what Ivory was trying to say. I just wasn’t ready to admit to myself that maybe she had a point about seeing things from somebody else’s eyes—or feet—sometimes.

But I figured she was right that it was time to tell my dad the truth about the letter. Before he bought another Aloha costume or blew his
entire
life savings because of me….

Still, it took me another day just to get up the nerve to talk to him. Even then, I probably should have waited a little longer and not rushed in, because nothing came out the way I had planned.