All Shook Up (13 page)

29. Hurt

Ivory may have believed there was hope for me. But my dad didn’t. That was pretty clear. We didn’t talk to each other again until supper the next night. After about fifteen minutes filled with nothing but the sound of our silverware clattering on our plates and the clock on the stove ticking, my dad finally cleared his throat and said, “Could you explain a few things to me, Josh?”

No, I couldn’t.

But my dad continued without waiting for my answer. “This letter you sent”—he pushed the letter across the table toward me—“everything in it was made up?” He ran his finger along the words at the top. “There’s no Chicago Elvis competition in the Grand Ballroom—or anywhere else?”

“No, not really—”

“Not really?”

“No, there isn’t.” The words stumbled stupidly out of my mouth.

“And the Las Vegas part was made up, too? There’s no trip to Las Vegas for Elvis impersonators? There’s no five-thousand-dollar prize? Anywhere?” Just by the tone of my dad’s voice, I could tell he desperately wanted something, anything, to be true about my letter. Only there wasn’t. Not one speck of truth. That’s what made it worse.

I tried telling him I’d repay him for what he’d spent on the Aloha costume, even though I had no idea how I would actually do that.
Mow lawns until I was eighty?
I also said if he wanted to go ahead and perform at my school, I would understand. “I’ll just deal with it,” I told him. “You can call the music guy back if you want to.”

My dad sighed loudly and pushed his chair away from the table. “It’s not about the daggone costume or the daggone show, Josh.” His silverware and dishes banged together loudly as he dumped them into the sink. “For cripes sake, I can get rid of the costume if I want to.” My dad’s voice rose. “I can sell it in the classifieds. Or put it in Viv’s store. It’s not about the costume or the letter or any of that other stuff, Josh. That’s what you’re not seeing. What really bothers me, what really hurt me about what happened yesterday, is what it shows about you and me,” he said angrily, and stalked out of the room.

30. Why Tell Elvis Everything?

A few days later, I found a message from Ivory stuck to my locker. When I first saw the note as I came out of math class and glanced down the hall, my heart started hammering nervously. Who had left it there? What had they written? Of course, once I got closer, I could see the familiar scrawling letters in orange marker and the smiley face, which could only have come from—who else?

I tugged the note off the locker and read it:

I have an idea about your dad. Stop by my locker at the end of school.

Ivory was the only person who’d been able to tell me anything about my dad. For the most part, Dad and I had still been avoiding each other. We went out of our way not to end up watching TV together in the living room or eating dinner at the same time. I made excuses about being too busy with homework or not being hungry at dinnertime. My dad stayed in his bedroom with the door closed, practicing and watching tapes of his shows.

But Ivory knew a lot more of the details because of her mom. It was like being in a giant game of Telephone, where the message is passed from one person to the next. My dad poured out his feelings to Viv, who told some things to Ivory, who passed them along to me.

Note to Dad: Do you know Viv is not very good at keeping secrets?

The day before, Ivory had told me my dad was trying to decide if he should quit being Elvis. “He had a long talk with my mom last night about looking for a new job,” she said before classes started. “They made a lot of lists together.”

“Lists?”

“Pros and cons. Being Elvis versus not being Elvis,” Ivory continued. Then she dropped the bombshell that my dad was considering calling a therapist.

“What?” I said, loud enough for two kids in the hall to glance over at us.

“He told my mom he wants to work on improving your relationship with each other. He feels like he’s been a bad father to you over the years, living so far away and everything.”

I told Ivory the
last
thing I wanted to do was sit around in some therapist’s office talking about my innermost feelings with my dad. “Can’t you do something?”

Ivory said she’d try to get the message across to her mom. And if the Telephone game was working right, hopefully her mom would pass the word along to my dad, who would drop the whole idea.

“But we still need to come up with a way to get both of you to
talk
to each other at least. I mean, he’s your dad, right? You can’t keep being here…and there.” She spread her arms out as if to demonstrate how far apart we were. I didn’t bother to tell Ivory that we had always been that far apart. With about four states between us. I was used to it.

After getting Ivory’s note about my dad, I waited for her at the end of the day. Just in case any of the vending machine guys happened to pass by, I stayed across the hall and pretended to be studying a row of old photographs showing Lister sports players from the 1950s (who all seemed to bear a vague resemblance to Elvis).

“Hey.” Ivory bumped my back with her armful of books. Her hair was in two long braids and she was wearing a blouse that looked like it had come from an old
Brady Bunch
episode. Pink, white, and brown zigzag stripes. Like spumoni with a headache. “Why are you standing over here?”

“I’m trying to find a picture of someone I know.”

Ivory rolled her eyes. “Right.” She nodded toward her locker. “So come over here while I unload my stuff and I’ll tell you my great idea.” Keeping an eye on the hallway, I waited while Ivory put her books away. Other girls had mirrors and message boards and pictures in their lockers. Ivory had an embarrassing collection of stick-on stars and glow-in-the-dark planets.

“Okay,” she said, tugging a large jeans purse over her shoulder and slamming the door shut on her mini universe. “Before I tell you my idea, you have to promise you’ll do something to help me.”

With Ivory, this could be a very dangerous promise to make, but I was getting desperate. I needed somebody (besides a therapist…
jeesh
) to give me some good advice for dealing with my dad. Or at least a plan for getting out of the mess I was in.

“Okay,” I told Ivory cautiously. “What is it?”

“I want you to help Digger win in gym class.”

“Win?”

“Hit a home run, or catch a ball.” Ivory gestured at the air. “Something like that.”

“We’re playing volleyball. It doesn’t have home runs.”

Ivory glared at me. “You can think of something to let him win.”

“I’m serious. He’s really hopeless in gym.”

“Do you want my help with your dad or not?”

I told Ivory I couldn’t make any promises. “I’ll try,” I said.

“All right, here’s my idea for your dad.” Ivory dug around in her large purse. She pulled out a skinny blue ticket and held it toward me. In black type were these words: Jerry Denny as the King. Friday, November 12, at 8 p.m. Sponsored by the Winona Lions Club. Tickets: $15 at the door. $10 in advance.

I had to read it twice to realize that the ticket was referring to my dad. Jerry Denny. As the King.

“We’re going to see one of his shows next week,” Ivory said proudly, pushing the ticket into my hand. “Isn’t that a brilliant idea?”

No,
I wanted to say,
it isn’t.
Because I didn’t see how going to one of my dad’s shows would change anything, other than making him really angry with me for showing up and upsetting him in front of a live audience. “How’s this going to help?” I said, shoving the ticket into my back pocket.

Ivory didn’t answer. She just kept babbling on about the show. “The tickets are already paid for and not returnable. My mom got them for us, so we can all go and see him. And besides, it’s for a good cause. To raise money to help kids in hospitals. My mom will pick you up.”

“Does my dad know anything about this?”

Ivory squinted at me as if I was the world’s biggest moron. “Of course not, that’s part of the surprise. He won’t know we’re there until he sees us in the audience.”

“And what are we supposed to do then?”

“I don’t know.” Ivory’s voice rose impatiently as she began to head down the hallway without waiting for me. “What do you usually do at concerts? Clap. Tell him it was great. Whatever you want to do.”

“What if it’s terrible?”

Spumoni Shirt didn’t even turn to answer that question.

31. Hit or Miss

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person who got tickets from Ivory and her mom.

“I’m going to see Elvis,” Gladys chirped the minute I stepped into her house.

I had stopped by to visit her on my way home from school on Friday. It had been a day or two since we had checked on her, so I thought I’d see how she was doing and say hello. When she told me she was going to see Elvis, I figured maybe she was a little mixed up about my dad or confused about something else. She often seemed to be lost in the past these days. But her eyes were bright and she did a shuffling dance in her pink rose slippers after she told me the news.

“Elvis?” I repeated.

Gladys reached for an envelope sitting on the doily-covered table by her front door and pulled out the same type of blue ticket Ivory had given me. I know I must have looked completely shocked. Like mouth-open, eyes-bugged-out shocked.

“You probably don’t know the Mahoneys,” Gladys began slowly, “but Vivian runs a little clothing store in town. Years ago, right after my husband died, I used to help out in her store on the weekends and do little sewing projects and clothing alterations for them. Just for my milk and bread money.” Gladys gave a small laugh. “I can’t do that kind of thing anymore, of course, but Vivian and her daughter still come by every once in a while to check up on me because I’m so”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“old. When they came by to visit yesterday, they brought me this ticket to see Elvis. Imagine that!” She waved the ticket in the air again.

In the game of Solitaire, this would have been the moment when a column of cards suddenly fit together, from the king at the top to the lowest card at the bottom. As Gladys talked, I remembered Ivory’s story about the retired lady who’d helped out in their store. The one who had played “Chopsticks” on the piano when they had no customers. The one who had suggested the name Ivory.

That lady must have been Gladys.

And so Viv was the person who had introduced Gladys to my dad when he was looking for someone to sew his Elvis scarves. The whole time, of course, I had been under the impression that Gladys was just a lonely old lady living all by herself, but now it seemed Ivory and Viv (and probably half of Chicago) had been keeping her company, too.

“The two of them were nice enough to give me this for free.” Gladys held the ticket toward me. “Look at that. It cost ten dollars—my stars, can you believe it? Why, when I saw Elvis at the Chicago Amphitheater in 1957, it was only a dollar or two.”

“You saw the real Elvis?” This was getting more and more bizarre.

Gladys nodded. “He was gold—all gold. I’ll never forget it. He looked like”—she closed her eyes as if she was trying to picture the scene again—“a king, or a movie star…or somebody like that.”

A gold Elvis?

“His suit was gold lamé,” Gladys explained. (Which didn’t really clear things up for me.) “And now, all these years later, I’m going to see him again. Who would have guessed that?” She did her shuffle dance on the carpet again. “I’ll have to try and behave myself, won’t I?”

In my opinion, the whole plan had disaster written all over it. My dad didn’t know we were coming. Gladys didn’t know she was going to see Jerry Denny instead of solid-gold Elvis. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I found out Digger was coming along, too. Ivory called to tell me she had invited him to be her date. That’s what she told me—her
date. Jeesh.
I didn’t even want to visualize that.

“Remember what you said about helping Digger in gym class,” Ivory reminded me on a daily basis as the day of the show approached.

Watching how badly Digger played volleyball, I believed it would probably be easier to turn my dad into Elvis—the
real
Elvis—than to turn Digger into a good volleyball player. Every single one of his serves nailed the net. If he was on your team, you could forget about making any points. He would completely miss the ball or smack it foul every single time. I had no clue how I was going to help him win anything.

My chance finally came on a day when Digger and I were on opposite sides. Dave Ernst was my captain and we had a pretty good team, but we were losing by two points when I moved up to the front. “Comeback time,” Dave yelled from the back, where he was serving for our team.

Of course Dave served the ball straight at Digger, who was in the middle of the second row on the other side of the net. Easy point, right? However, by some kind of divine intervention, Digger actually hit the ball. It soared back over the net toward me. As my hands reached up to smack the ball, my head remembered my promise to Ivory—so as my hands were going for the ball, my brain was screaming that I should let it go.
Hit it. Let it go. Hit it….
In the middle of this complete brain freeze, the ball dropped to the gym floor.

While Digger’s team cheered and pounded him on the back, Dave stared at me in total disbelief. His arms pumped up and down in the air. “What were you doing?” he shouted. Even though it was only one missed hit, we ended up losing the game after the other team got the ball back and scored the winning points.

I don’t know what winning the game did for Digger, but I know what losing it did for me. It cost me a bag of chips and one can of soda at lunch because Dave said he wanted payback for my boneheaded play in gym. “You owe me,” he said, smacking the back of my head as he walked past me at lunchtime. “I’ll take some chips and a Pepsi.”

The rest of the week, I had to put up with being barked at every time I sat down for lunch. I’d get to the table and the other guys would start barking and goofing around. “Don’t hit the ball at me, Dog Face,” they’d say, pretending to flail wildly at an invisible ball in the air.

It kind of surprised me to get treated like that.
Over one stupid play.
A play that I could have made with my eyes closed if I hadn’t been holding up my end of the deal with Ivory. In the back of my mind, I wondered if maybe that had been Ivory’s real plan all along. Maybe it hadn’t been about Digger at all. Maybe she’d been hoping to turn Dave Ernst and the vending machine guys against me. Maybe she was under the delusion that I’d come over and join her table if it worked? Right.

The whole experience reminded me of the afternoon when Gladys and I had played Go Fish and trying to lose had been a lot harder than trying to win.