Mesopotamia (6 page)

“My sexy own Jayson Blair,” he called the young reporter, referring to the fraudulent
New York Times
writer. The problem was that Gustavo had an affair with the youth, and the series was selling a lot of papers. So he covered it up. But all scandals are eventually revealed and this one was no exception. Everything, including Gustavo’s indiscretions, was discovered and it cost him his job and reputation. The anguish of his failure was directly related to the vertiginous height to which he had risen.

After losing his post, he drank his way down. Like me, he rarely got too messy when drunk. We were just never really sober anymore.

At the Inn & Out I exited my room in search of the countrified concierge. I needed some coffee. Rose, the desk clerk, gave me a short list of local eateries which included the Blue Suede Shoes.

“I was there last night,” I explained. “They had a murder. The victim was dressed like Elvis.”

“Goodness gracious,” she said. “Another dead Elvis?”

“Huh?”

“If I ain’t mistaken this makes their second.”

One Elvis impersonator killed during a break-in did not a tabloid story make, but two was a whole different ballgame.

“Was the first Elvis impersonator also breaking and entering?”

“No, he done got himself blown up. Must’ve been about three months back. He didn’t even make it to the Ding-a-ling singing contest.”

“Is someone named Major the organizer?”

“Yeah, he started it with this other guy, years ago.”

“Who?”

“Not sure of his name, I think it was Carpenter. A rich businessman from Memphis. He took over the old Daum estate about twenty years back. The mansion and the dilapidated barnhouse at the base of the hill. They converted it to the Blue Suede Shoes tavern. It brought a lot of money into the county. That Elvis contest is the biggest thing in these parts.”

“I heard. It’s next week, isn’t it?”

“In two weeks,” she explained, “August 16, held on the anniversary of Elvis’s demise.”

“Ever been to it?”

“I don’t much go in for that sort of thing,” she said in her twangy Southern accent.

Returning to my car, I got my Dell out of the trunk and brought it back to the hotel room. There I plugged into the phone jack and dipped into the virus-filled river of cyber sewage. I typed
Dead
+
Elvis
+
Impersonators
into Google and found no mention of the recent death Rose had told me about.

After surfing through dozens of pages of references to Elvis, I did locate one mention of a John Carpenter who was a coowner of the Elvis tribute saloon, the Blue Suede Shoes. There was also surprising news about the freshly deceased Pappy East. Apparently, along with his brother, he had cowritten a scandalous tell-all entitled,
Elvis, Why?
The book was published roughly a month before the King’s accidental overdose and reached the top of the
New York Times
best-seller list.

On the Elvis tribute web site, All the King’s Men, I came across an obituary of one Floyd Loyd who did work on the impersonator circuit. He had only Elvised publicly for a few months—this was the man who Rose had mentioned. The detail that surprised me most was that his primary job had been private investigation. He had died a little more than three months ago. His death was listed as an accident. The piece concluded:
He left behind a young wife and seven kids
.

I called information and found four phone numbers in the area with his last name. The third name down, one Wilma Loyd, turned out to be sister to the deceased.

“Floyd’s wife Vinetta now goes under her maiden name, Compton, cause Loyd’s credit wasn’t too good,” Wilma said. “Why you want her anyways?”

After I explained that I was investigating his death, she said, “Vinetta always insisted he was murdered but no one believed her.”

“I’d like to help her.”

“All she has is that old trailer park, and once the pig farm reclaims it … Well, let me give you her number.”

When I called Miss Compton, I introduced myself as an investigative reporter, and said that I was looking into her husband’s untimely demise.

“I told Sheriff Nick that he was killed,” she said, “but he’s just a lazy old bastard.”

I let her know where I was staying and she gave me directions to her house: “Drive straight down Makataka Road till you pass the church. A few minutes later you’ll see Tornado Alley Trailer Park.”

This was close to the western edge of the Appalachians and as I bumpily drove along an old fence line, the wooden posts stitched together with rusty barbed wire, past dented old vehicles and dilapidated homes, I began descending into that great gulch of entrenched rural poverty.

It was three o’clock when I drove by the old church, then made a sharp left turn onto the dirt road of Tornado Alley Trailer Park. The place was covered with various types of debris, large and small, scattered upon cracked tracts of weed-strewn concrete slabs. Toward the rear of the property there appeared to be a very large breadbox, which I realized was a grouping of antique recreational vehicles.

A clearing of yellow grass was encircled by an old wooden fence and inside were a slew of youngins. Crawling in the mud, running in the high grass, swinging from trees, kicking each other, sneezing all over, climbing on a broken jungle gym, and dangling from a rusty bar that once held a swingset—kids. The place was like a human puppy mill. As I pulled up, two floppy-eared dogs came galloping up to my car and started barking.

I sat in my vehicle and waited for the dog’s owner, checking out this strange improvised domicile. Up close, it appeared to be winched and rigged together from the salvaged parts of several old trailers.

The wheels had been replaced with cinder blocks and the seams of the trailers were hammered and wrapped together with duct tape. Two small shacks that resembled outhouses were tagged onto each side of the place. It sort of looked like two aluminum railroad cars that had slammed into each other, with square wooden barbells at either end. Parked out front was a weathered pickup truck.

“Buck! Henry! Down!” I heard a young woman shout from afar. The two dogs, which turned out to be quite sweet, meandered back to the children.

Vinetta was edging out behind the trailer frantically engaged in some activity. It took a moment to realize she was hastily plucking laundry—diapers, colorful onesies, and little jumpers—from the zigzagging line that seemed to snare every tree within the property. With a long blond ponytail that came down past her butt, Vinetta Compton was photogenically adorable. She was also surprisingly slim considering all the babies that had shot out of her.

Setting her large blue laundry basket down just inside her front door, she finally came over. As she moved across the crab grass, she mindlessly plucked toys out of children’s mouths, collected garbage, and snatched up a couple of bawling babes on the way—a multitasking parent machine permanently stuck on high-speed autopilot.

CHAPTER SIX

T
he batteries of my handheld digital recorders were long dead, which was fine as I didn’t want to make her nervous. I grabbed a pen and pad as I stepped out of my car.

“Hi, I’m Sandra Bloomgarten, the reporter.”

“Oh cheesewhiz! Not Cass-andra Bloomgarten, the gossip columnist!”

“Well I never had a column—”

“Reading celebrity rags is one of the few joys I got left.” She led me into her house and pulled an old tabloid off a small stack. Flipping through it she pointed to an ancient story I had written about the early hints of romance between Angelina and Brad while on the set of their film
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
.

“I didn’t know anyone noticed the bylines of tabloids.”

“With a name like Cassandra Bloomgarten, how could I not remember it? My god, I got a telescope to the stars right here in my living room!” she said, compelling me to chuckle. Instantaneously, an adorable little girl behind me started crying.

“Ohhh! What’s da matter?” Mama asked in a playful voice.

“He stole my dolly doll!” She pointed to a darling little blond boy right behind her. He was dressed in a bright purple jumper with a shiny black belt, and was holding a cloth doll by its head.

“Sterling, can this even be true?”

“No ma’am …” He casually dropped the evidence behind him.

“Is that yours?”

“No, but …” He looked down at the dolly doll.

“How would you like it if she stole your Tonka truck?”

“I wouldn’t,” he responded earnestly, then picked up the tattered Cabbage Patch rip-off and shoved it back into her sticky little fingers.

“Okay, Evil Elvis, give me a ‘Hound Dog,’” she said dolefully.

Suddenly the little boy, who couldn’t’ve been older than four, silently started mouthing something.

“Do it loud so the nice lady can hear you.”

In his tiny whiny voice, he yodeled: “
Ainnotin buttahunda, cryin allda-tine, aintnotin buttahunda, cryin alldatine. Ain caughtna rabid anya ainno frena-mines
.” Even at that slight age, he was able to ham it up with pelvic gyrations and air guitar strumming. Upon completion he took a deep bow, and in a perfect juvenile Elvis, he said, “Thankya very mush.”

“Now leave the building,” sexy Mama said, even though they were already outside. The child dashed off.

“What the hell was that?” It was the most entertaining form of child humiliation I had ever witnessed.

“When I was growing up, when we did something wrong, we used to have to say Our Fathers and Hail Marys. They were kind of our timeouts. But since the church has become a haven for hypocrites and pedophiles, I make my kids do Evil Elvis instead. The girls do Evil Elviras.”

“You must get sick of hearing ‘Hound Dog’ all day.”

“Each of them have a different Elvis number. That way I can tell them apart. And unless I’m drunk or entertaining I make them do it at a whisper so I don’t have to hear it anymore.”

“Well, you should call Colonel Parker, because if each of these kids can do that in an Elvis onesie, you could definitely get on the
Tonight Show
.”

“Much as I could use the money, the only thing worse would be a half a dozen little prima don and donnas.”

“I’m here about your late husband’s death,” I said, getting to it.

“Of course,” she said, leading me through the house as kids seemed to be tumbling out of the woodwork. The place reminded me of a story I did on exploited Asian illegal aliens who were packed into a barrackslike basement in Chinatown.

Elvis was the single motif running through that never-ending trailer: an Elvis wall clock, two Elvis lamps, velvet Vegas Elvis needlepoints. Although the place looked sufficiently childproofed, I could see she was living under obvious duress. The three electrical outlets I could see—though located six feet above the ground, beyond all their little reaches—were octopussed with what looked like more plugs than the circuits could handle. Yet that was the least of her problems. Vinetta, the nonstop mother-machine, was clearly on overload herself. Another girl, little Eugenia, suddenly earned an Evil Elvira for roping her face in her mother’s bright orange lipstick and was told to perform her act of contrition—a soft and abbreviated “Fallin in Love wit Yous.”

“Gosh, even at a whisper that can be annoying.”

“You have to zone them out. Particularly when a group of them misbehave.” She paused a moment. “Earlier today I had five of them doing Elvis songs at the same time. What a screechfest that was.”

“What is this place exactly?”

“Used to be a trailer park till a tornado struck last year. Everyone moved out except for us. We couldn’t afford to, so we’re alone here now.”

“How can all these kids be yours ?” She looked no older than twenty-five.

“I got two rows of nipples and drop them four at a time,” she said with a straight face.

When I widened my eyes thinking of what a great story it would make, she let out a cackle. It was then that I looked up and spotted something in a small plain frame. It looked simply like a fine line, and the frame was placed high on the wall, almost up near the ceiling.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A lock of Elvis’s hair,” she said. “I put it up there so that none of the youngins can ever get to it.”

“Elvis Presley’s hair?”

“Yes sir-ee,” she said. “It’s the only holy thing that Floyd left me. We got into a big fight over it, cause we really couldn’t afford it. But he bought it off the Internet with a letter of authenticity and I ain’t never selling it.”

A duet of giggles pulled us to a distant corner of her human puppy mill. She introduced me to her adorable pair of twins who were watching TV. “Rufus and Cotton, say hi.”

“Hi,” they chimed in perfect unison without removing their twinkling eyes from the fourteen-inch black-and-white screen.

“Come on, boys, sing Mama a tune,” she said, then turned to me. “This one does ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and that one does a powerful ‘Burning Love.’”

“But we didn’t do nothing wrong, Mama,” one of them responded.

“TV’s on,” the other added.

“I’m asking you, not telling you. For the nice lady.”

Too focused on their cartoon, they weren’t taking requests.

“First Floyd had two from a prior marriage. His first wife, a tweaker, ran off on him, dumping him with the seven-yearold, Urleen, and eight-yearold, Floyd Jr. Then we had three of our own—the twins and their older brother. Then my dear sister passed with lupus earlier this year so I got her two, Sterling and Eugenia, who are two and three … Give me a moment,” she said, as she began putting together some kind of just-add-water gruel for her many hungry mouths.

“Do you work?”

“Every waking moment,” she replied tiredly. “Unfortunately, I don’t get a salary, but between my sister’s life insurance, my husband’s Social Security checks, and modest savings, as well as clothes from the donation bins and food from the local church pantry, I scrape by.”

A boring adult commercial must’ve come on the TV because both twins looked up at the exact same time. Probably confounded by the first squinty-eyed Jewess they had ever seen, they stared for another moment, then smiled. It took me a moment to recognize that I was feeling a strange form of maternal envy. About a year ago, giving birth to just one little premature baby would’ve saved my marriage.