Nashville Chrome (34 page)

"Listen, Maxine," he said—a boy who believed that compassion was weakness, and that money, his desperate god, fled weakness. "You're yesterday's news. We're done with you. You're old hat." Then he turned and walked on, having said what was necessary to separate himself from her.

Nobody had ever said it before, but it was her deepest fear—that not only had the world around her abandoned her, but the world below. That she had been forsaken. And worst of all, that if she had done things differently, it would not have turned out this way.

She went back home and drank harder. She has no real recollection of the immediate years beyond that time. It was from this humiliation, however, that she would hit rock bottom, and from that wreckage, as always, she would be saved. She eventually joined AA, stopped drinking—though it was a long time coming—and began to crawl back up out of the pit, creeping inch by inch toward the shining light above, which she perceived to be the return of fame, but which, she begins to wonder now, might have been nothing more than the next day.

A
LL HIS LIFE,
he had been second fiddle, third fiddle, hidden, always invisible. Heard, certainly, in every song they ever did, but taken for granted. Utilitarian, durable, pleasant, he seemed always to be a side man, on or off the stage—secondary to Jim Reeves, in the beginning, when they rambled around in those awful shows of Fabor's, and secondary to Elvis, likewise, in the beer halls and dance halls of their youth.

Certainly, it was his fate to be second shadow to Maxine and even Bonnie, and over the years, where a gradual regret and resentment might have grown—one that in no way would have served the glide or the chrome—Jim Ed had instead developed an accruing gracefulness in the way he accepted and embraced his forever background status. The tree in the forest that never pushes up through the canopy but that lives all its long life beneath the shade of larger, older trees. No one can see that tree from above, and it is rarely a tree even a traveler moving through the forest notices.

Jim Ed was fully in love now. He had known hundreds of women, so many that he knew absolutely nothing about them—had become jaded, his senses dulled, his relationships a series of automatic gestures, as if long ago choreographed, with the conclusion, postcoital departure, long ago predetermined—but one day those old habits wore away, as if through the relentlessness of erosion, and love had appeared, interfering with the comfortable predictability of his life and his career.

Helen Cornelius was ten years younger than Jim Ed, and every bit as ambitious as Maxine—an energetic showstopper of a performer with a pleasant though not necessarily extraordinary voice. Listening to her, Maxine had described her voice as accomplished but somewhat predictable—and Maxine understood, grudgingly, that there could be a value in that. Yet unlike Maxine, Helen Cornelius was relentlessly upbeat, filled with excitement, marveling and exclaiming at all that she saw. Her happiness wasn't so much the deep quiet peace of Bonnie's, but instead almost an aggressive kind. She leaned into the world with eyes bright and a smile so wide as to look almost like her teeth were bared—as if daring the resistance of negativity or unhappiness. A force for happiness, a partygoer's insistence on continual exuberance.

It might have been exhausting for others to be around, but there was something about it that Jim Ed liked, and here, too, he was secondary, and he followed, quiet and steady in the slipstream of power. Not malleable, but instead, as ever, supporting, helping out, useful, dependable. The kind of person you could send to do any chore and know, a hundred times out of a hundred, that it would get done, and done right; no surprises would occur.

He couldn't have said what it was he loved most about Helen Cornelius. Certainly, he had never intended to leave his sisters. And as with any beloved thing or person, there was no one way to describe why or what he loved most about her—what he needed, and what he gave in return. Any enumeration or listing would have sounded abstract, cliched. Love is a rose, love is a breath of fresh air, love is a feast. He couldn't have said, but he followed it.

He felt different, singing duets with her; he knew that much. There was no tension or struggle to produce the sound, and when he sang with her, he sometimes felt what it was other audiences said they had been able to hear coming from the Browns in the old days: a stillness, and a cessation of worry. A calmness that, if not actually true peacefulness, was at least a place where everything was all right, everything was safe, and everyone was happy.

He and she had only two hits; one a duet, in their second year together—"I Don't Want to Have to Marry You," written, ironically, by Maxine—and, in the year before that, even before he and Helen Cornelius were together, a hit that was all his own, written and sung by him, performed by him, only him.

Called "Pop a Top," it became the greatest and most played jukebox hit of all time. At the time he wrote it, he was down to eight dollars in his billfold, and it was the one and only time in his life he could no longer afford to be second or third fiddle. As ever, he did what he had to do—stepped up and into the limelight—though after that one song, he quickly receded, with that one song guaranteeing him a comfortable living for the rest of his life.

"Pop a top again—I just got time for one more round." Every time the phrase "pop a top" was sung, there would be the Pavlovian sound of a poptop beer can being cracked open, thrilling a market of millions. Jim Ed pulled on all his experience, observations of his fellow troubadours and broken-down blue-collar bar-goers, confused by life if not quite beaten, or not yet realizing they were beaten. He drew on the only culture he had ever known, the legacy that Floyd and the landscape and the era had bequeathed to him—
When times get tough, start drinking harder
—and turned that misery on its head, celebrated it, made it an anthem. Made what should have been shame a source of pride. As ever, he did what he had to do, went out into the brilliance alone for once, then retreated.

As had Birdie, in her quiet and vague way, sensing possible trouble ahead for Maxine but not knowing the specificity of it, and, later, Chet, trying to warn her or even help her get back on a path that would be better for Maxine, if not necessarily for her music, Jim Ed likewise tried to give her counsel once, though only once.

He went down to see her in West Memphis by himself. He had gigs farther on, in Dardanelle and Texarkana, and came through a day early. He had told Bonnie he was going and what he was going to talk to Maxine about, but Bonnie declined to join him. Likewise, Helen Cornelius stayed home. It wasn't quite so much that she feared the wrath, but more a simple matter of emotional economics. You just about had to be blood family to be willing to sign on for that kind of duty. Such misery was definitely not something she wanted to be around, and she wisely recognized her limitations.

Once, but only once, Jim Ed left his place in the middle and went out to see her.

She had been drinking so hard then. It was 1973. She was drinking so hard that she didn't have a clue that was why he was coming out to see her.

As interventions went, it was unspectacular, and for the moment, ineffective, as Bonnie had predicted it would be. Jim Ed arrived right after the children had gone to school. His hope was to reach her before she got started, and in that he was successful, if at nothing else. She fixed him coffee—there was no food in the pantry to offer him, just a stale box of saltines, and she apologized, both of them remembering how Birdie would have received such a homecoming: the banquet that would have been prepared.

Still, it was good to see him. It wasn't what they had had as children, but it was good; it was a nice break from what the days had become. The coffee in their cups was steaming, and the crackers spilled onto his bare porcelain plate looked almost like communion. Maxine looked at the cups of coffee and was thinking how nice it would be to put a little something in the coffee, something to celebrate old times, and when she mentioned this to Jim Ed—rising before he could answer one way or the other—he said that he didn't care for that, no thank you, and that that was what he wanted to visit about with her.

She was confused, asked if he was feeling sick, imagining some dire medical procedure he might have waiting later in the day, to not be able to receive a splash. There might in that moment have been some first and dim alarm in the cunning of her subconscious, but at first she was neither offended nor suspicious, only befuddled, and concerned.

"Why the hell not?" she asked, and then as she studied the discomfort on his face she began to understand. Long accustomed to identifying the negative, spying the approach of trouble before anything else, she realized quickly, once she had gotten over the confusion of it, why he was there, and what he had come to say.

Jim Ed saw the disbelief cross her face—saw the onrush of outrage, her skin darkening in splotches, her shoulders squaring up, and he hurried to say it before she could attack.

Already she was stiffening her hands, chopping one of them in his direction like an ax. He could feel an inaudible hostility flooding from her, flowing directly toward him like a hiss of steam, and he labored to get his words out before hers, as if that might really make a difference.

"Maxine, I'm worried about you," he said, as if reading from a note-card, a rote preparation. "We all are. We—"

She chopped at the air so savagely that she nearly upended the coffee cups. "Who is
we?
" she demanded. "Where is everybody else? Why aren't they here, if it's such a problem? There is no
we;
this is just something you've decided," she said. "I don't have a problem, and if I did, who do you think you are, to be telling me I do?"

It certainly wasn't an original defense, but Jim Ed made the mistake of pausing and trying to answer, and to defend himself. Sure, he drank—not as much as in the old days, but some—didn't everybody?

"Maxine—" he began, but she was laying into him now, terrified and yet seeming also to welcome the opportunity for a fight. What had he been thinking? He looked around at the solitude of the house—the ridiculous plate of crackers—and realized how foolish he had been.

"You're so pious!" she said. She didn't know whether to go ahead and get the rum or not—was afraid at first of conceding any scrap of territory with any small gesture, but then chose rebellion over victory and went for the rum anyway; poured two, three, four big glugs. Fire in her veins, fire in her brain. She saw Jim Ed's face go pale, saw it shut down and withdraw the way Chet's had so long ago, when he'd tried to ask her how she was doing; and as if delighted by this observation of weakness, she poured two or three more glugs into her coffee, to help aid in his retreat.

The scent of it filled the room, sweet and thick, and reminded them both of things that were not altogether unpleasant.

She was just warming up. "
You just got lucky.
You and your damned big hit, and your damned big house, and your pretty young wife, with her own damned big hit," she shouted. "You all just got lucky. You're the worst kind of hypocrite," she said, "hell, it was you and Jim Reeves who
taught
me to drink! Don't tell me to stop. Don't you
dare
tell me to stop."

She can't remember now, but she thinks she might even have taken a gulp of her coffee then, and another, and that she might even have said something along the lines that she knew how to handle her liquor. She thinks she might have said some other things but can't remember them.

It was sad, and still is sad; there was a distance in Jim Ed after that. He argued a little with her, but never raised his voice—more of a wan disagreement—and shrugged finally and rose to leave, told her he loved her and hoped she'd think about what he'd said.

Later, after she finally did stop drinking, she would write him the requisite note, would thank him for having the courage and compassion to speak to her about it—to attempt to come to her rescue. She would thank him for his love. But even then, there was still a distance in him. As if even love, like fame, could be eroded, its moth dust finally wing-worn, wind-scoured, forgotten.

Now and again she touches the thick scar tissue of the memory, the new slight distance, the widening distance, the space that neither love nor family can quite fill. She wishes that things had been otherwise, had gone a different way, but then shrugs. That's just what happens, she tells herself, if you live that long. She remembers the boy he once was, and the girl she was, but moves on. Moves forward, into the darkness.

She did stop drinking, she tells herself. That's what matters. She survived.

W
HAT SHE REMEMBERS
is pretty close to the facts; what she remembers is pretty close to the truth. She doesn't recall much from those days, when she was having so many various cancers cut out of her—always, the cancers were discovered just in time—and not much memory transcends the decades-long alcoholic haze after her career went away.

Even her receipt of the news was muted. Bonnie took it hardest, but they all three had to agree, he wasn't Elvis anymore, hadn't been for a long time—but of the funeral itself, the spectacle and pageantry, her memories are piercing.

Had she been drinking that day? She can't imagine that she hadn't been, but perhaps not. She drank afterward—she knows that.

She remembers the throng as if it were a holy experience: a hundred thousand mourners, all clawing at the wrought-iron fence or prostrate in the road, in the August heat; she remembers the crowd's lamentations as the mule-drawn hearse passed by, which is what he had wanted, though the King himself was in the long white Cadillac in an open casket on ice, his insides baking, they said, decomposing faster than those of most normal people, falling apart, riven by violent internal chemistries, the simmerings of errant prescriptions and unsustainable excess.