Stories (2011) (67 page)

And how old was he?

Christ! He was almost convinced he was too old to be alive,
and had to be dead, but he wasn’t convinced enough, unfortunately. He knew
where he was now, and in that moment of realization, he sincerely wished he were
dead. This was worse than death.

From across the room, his roommate, Bull Thomas, bellowed
and coughed and moaned and fell back into painful sleep, the cancer gnawing at
his insides like a rat plugged up inside a watermelon.

Bull’s bellow of pain and anger and indignation at growing
old and diseased was the only thing bullish about him now, though Elvis had
seen photographs of him when he was younger, and Bull had been very bullish
indeed. Thick-chested, slab-faced and tall. Probably thought he’d live forever,
and happily. A boozing, pill-popping, swinging dick until the end of time.

Now Bull was shrunk down, was little more than a wrinkled
sheet-white husk that throbbed with occasional pulses of blood while the
carcinoma fed.

Elvis took hold of the bed’s lift button, eased himself
upright. He glanced at Bull. Bull was breathing heavily and his bony knees rose
up and down like he was pedaling a bicycle; his kneecaps punched feebly at the
sheet, making pup tents that rose up and collapsed, rose up and collapsed.

Elvis looked down at the sheet stretched over his own bony
knees. He thought:

My God, how long have I been here? Am I really awake now,
or am I dreaming I’m awake? How could my plans have gone so wrong? When are
they going to serve lunch, and considering what they serve, why do I care? And
if Priscilla discovered I was alive, would she come see me, would she want to
see me, and would we still want to fuck, or would we have to merely talk about
it? Is there finally, and really, anything to life other than food and shit and
sex?

Elvis pushed the sheet down to do what he had done in the
dream. He pulled up his gown, leaned forward, and examined his dick. It was
wrinkled and small. It didn’t look like something that had dive-bombed movie
starlet pussies or filled their mouths like a big zucchini or pumped forth a
load of sperm frothy as cake icing. The healthiest thing about his pecker was
the big red bump with the black ring around it and the pus-filled white center.
Fact was, that bump kept growing, he was going to have to pull a chair up
beside his bed and put a pillow in it so the bump would have some place to
sleep at night. There was more pus in that damn bump than there was cum in his
loins. Yep. The old diddlebopper was no longer a flesh cannon loaded for bare
ass. It was a peanut too small to harvest; wasting away on the vine. His nuts
were a couple of darkening, about-to-rot grapes, too limp to produce juice for
life’s wine. His legs were stick and paper things with over-large, vein-swollen
feet on the ends. His belly was such a bloat, it was a pain for him to lean
forward and scrutinize his dick and balls.

Pulling his gown down and the sheet back over himself, Elvis
leaned back and wished he had a peanut butter and banana sandwich fried in butter.
There had been a time when he and his crew would board his private jet and fly
clean across country just to have a special-made fried peanut butter and
’nanner sandwich. He could still taste the damn things.

Elvis closed his eyes and thought he would awake from a bad
dream, but didn’t. He opened his eyes again, slowly, and saw that he was still
where he had been, and things were no better. He reached over and opened his
dresser drawer and got out a little round mirror and looked at himself.

He was horrified. His hair was white as salt and had receded
dramatically. He had wrinkles deep enough to conceal outstretched earthworms,
the big ones, the night crawlers. His pouty mouth no longer appeared pouty. It
looked like the dropping waddles of a bulldog, seeming more that way because he
was slobbering a mite. He dragged his tired tongue across his lips to daub the
slobber, revealed to himself in the mirror that he was missing a lot of teeth.

Goddamn it! How had he gone from King of Rock and Roll to
this? Old guy in a rest home in East Texas with a growth on his dick?

And what was that growth? Cancer? No one was talking. No one
seemed to know. Perhaps the bump was a manifestation of the mistakes of his
life, so many of them made with his dick.

He considered on that. Did he ask himself this question
every day, or just now and then? Time sort of ran together when the last moment
and the immediate moment and the moment forthcoming were all alike.

Shit, when was lunchtime? Had he slept through it?

Was it about time for his main nurse again? The good-looking
one with the smooth chocolate skin and tits like grapefruits? The one who came
in and sponge bathed him and held his pitiful little pecker in her gloved hands
and put salve on his canker with all the enthusiasm of a mechanic oiling a
defective part?

He hoped not. That was the worst of it. A doll like that
handling him without warmth or emotion. Twenty years ago, just twenty, he could
have made with the curled-lip smile and had her eating out of his asshole.
Where had his youth gone? Why hadn’t fame sustained old age and death, and why
had he left his fame in the first place, and did he want it back, and could he
have it back, and if he could, would it make any difference?

And finally, when he was evacuated from the bowels of life
into the toilet bowl of the beyond and was flushed, would the great sewer pipe
flow him to the other side where God would—in the guise of a great all-seeing
turd with corn kernel eyes—be waiting with open turd arms, and would there be
amongst the sewage his mother (bless her fat little heart) and father and
friends, waiting with fried peanut butter and ’nanner sandwiches and ice cream
cones, predigested, of course?

He was reflecting on this, pondering the afterlife, when
Bull gave out with a hell of a scream, pouched his eyes damn near out of his
head, arched his back, grease-farted like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet, and
checked his tired old soul out of the Mud Creek Shady Rest Convalescent Home;
flushed it on out and across the great shitty beyond.

Later that day, Elvis lay sleeping, his lips fluttering the
bad taste of lunch—steamed zucchini and boiled peas—out of his belly. He awoke
to a noise, rolled over to see a young attractive woman cleaning out Bull’s
dresser drawer. The curtains over the window next to Bull’s bed were pulled
wide open, and the sunlight was cutting through it and showing her to great
advantage. She was blonde and Nordic-featured and her long hair was tied back
with a big red bow and she wore big gold hoop earrings that shimmered in the
sunlight. She was dressed in a white blouse and a short black skirt and dark
hose and high heels. The heels made her ass ride up beneath her skirt like soft
bald baby heads under a thin blanket.

She had a big yellow plastic trashcan and she had one of
Bull’s dresser drawers pulled out, and she was picking through it, like a
magpie looking for bright things. She found a few—coins, a pocketknife, a cheap
watch. These were plucked free and laid on the dresser top, then the remaining
contents of the drawer—Bull’s photographs of himself when young, a rotten pack
of rubbers (wishful thinking never deserted Bull), a bronze star and a purple
heart from his performance in the Vietnam War—were dumped into the trashcan
with a bang and a flutter.

Elvis got hold of his bed lift button and raised himself for
a better look. The woman had her back to him now, and didn’t notice. She was
replacing the dresser drawer and pulling out another. It was full of clothes.
She took out the few shirts and pants and socks and underwear, and laid them on
Bull’s bed— remade now, and minus Bull, who had been toted off to be
taxidermied, embalmed, burned up, whatever.

“You’re gonna toss that stuff,” Elvis said. “Could I have
one of them pictures of Bull? Maybe that purple heart? He was proud of it.”

The young woman turned and looked at him. “I suppose,” she
said. She went to the trashcan and bent over it and showed her black panties to
Elvis as she rummaged. He knew the revealing of her panties was neither
intentional nor unintentional. She just didn’t give a damn. She saw him as so
physically and sexually non-threatening, she didn’t mind if he got a bird’s-eye
view of her; it was the same to her as a house cat sneaking a peek.

Elvis observed the thin panties straining and slipping into
the caverns of her ass cheeks and felt his pecker flutter once, like a bird
having a heart attack, then it laid down and remained limp and still.

Well, these days, even a flutter was kind of reassuring.

The woman surfaced from the trashcan with a photo and the
purple heart, went over to Elvis’s bed and handed them to him.

Elvis dangled the ribbon that held the purple heart between
his fingers, said, “Bull your kin?”

“My daddy,” she said.

“I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Only been here once before,” she said. “When I checked him
in.”

“Oh,” Elvis said. “That was three years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Were you and him friends?”

Elvis considered the question. He didn’t know the real
answer. All he knew was Bull listened to him when he said he was Elvis Presley
and seemed to believe him. If he didn’t believe him, he at least had the
courtesy not to patronize. Bull always called him Elvis, and before Bull grew
too ill, he always played cards and checkers with him.

“Just roommates,” Elvis said. “He didn’t feel good enough to
say much. I just sort of hated to see what was left of him go away so easy. He
was an all-right guy. He mentioned you a lot. You’re Callie, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, he was all right.”

“Not enough you came and saw him though.”

“Don’t try to put some guilt trip on me, Mister. I did what
I could. Hadn’t been for Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that stuff was, he’d have
been in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t have the money to take care of him.”

Elvis thought of his own daughter, lost long ago to him. If
she knew he lived, would she come to see him? Would she care? He feared knowing
the answer.

“You could have come and seen him,” Elvis said.

“I was busy. Mind your own business. Hear?”

The chocolate-skin nurse with the grapefruit tits came in.
Her white uniform crackled like cards being shuffled. Her little white nurse
hat was tilted on her head in a way that said she loved mankind and made good
money and was getting regular dick. She smiled at Callie and then at Elvis.
“How are you this morning, Mr. Haff?”

“All right,” Elvis said. “But I prefer Mr. Presley. Or
Elvis. I keep telling you that. I don’t go by Sebastian Haff anymore. I don’t
try to hide anymore.”

“Why, of course,” said the pretty nurse. “I knew that. I
forgot. Good morning, Elvis.”

Her voice dripped with sorghum syrup. Elvis wanted to hit
her with his bedpan.

The nurse said to Callie: “Did you know we have a celebrity
here, Miss Thomas? Elvis Presley. You know, the rock and roll singer?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Callie said. “I thought he was dead.”

Callie went back to the dresser and squatted and set to work
on the bottom drawer. The nurse looked at Elvis and smiled again, only she
spoke to Callie. “Well, actually, Elvis is dead, and Mr. Haff knows that, don’t
you, Mr. Haff?”

“Hell no,” said Elvis. “I’m right here. I ain’t dead, yet.”

“Now, Mr. Haff, I don’t mind calling you Elvis, but you’re a
little confused, or like to play sometimes. You were an Elvis impersonator.
Remember? You fell off a stage and broke your hip. What was it . . . Twenty
years ago? It got infected and you went into a coma for a few years. You came
out with a few problems.”

“I was impersonating myself,” Elvis said. “I couldn’t do
nothing else. I haven’t got any problems. You’re trying to say my brain is
messed up, aren’t you?”

Callie quit cleaning out the bottom drawer of the dresser.
She was interested now, and though it was no use, Elvis couldn’t help but try
and explain who he was, just one more time. The explaining had become a habit,
like wanting to smoke a cigar long after the enjoyment of it was gone.

“I got tired of it all,” he said. “I got on drugs, you know.
I wanted out. Fella named Sebastian Haff, an Elvis imitator, the best of them.
He took my place. He had a bad heart and he liked drugs too. It was him died,
not me. I took his place.”

“Why would you want to leave all that fame,” Callie said,
“all that money?” and she looked at the nurse, like “Let’s humor the old fart
for a lark.”

“’Cause it got old. Woman I loved, Priscilla, she was gone.
Rest of the women . . . were just women. The music wasn’t mine anymore.
I
wasn’t
even me anymore. I was this thing they made up. Friends were sucking me dry. I
got away and liked it, left all the money with Sebastian, except for enough to
sustain me if things got bad. We had a deal, me and Sebastian. When I wanted to
come back, he’d let me. It was all written up in a contract in case he wanted
to give me a hard time, got to liking my life too good. Thing was, copy of the
contract I had got lost in a trailer fire. I was living simple. Way Haff had
been. Going from town to town doing the Elvis act. Only I felt like I was
really me again. Can you dig that?”

“We’re digging it, Mr. Haff . . . Mr. Presley,” said the
pretty nurse.

“I was singing the old way. Doing some new songs. Stuff I
wrote. I was getting attention on a small but good scale. Women throwing
themselves at me, ’cause they could imagine I was Elvis, only I was Elvis,
playing Sebastian Haff playing Elvis. . . . It was all pretty good. I didn’t
mind the contract being burned up. I didn’t even try to go back and convince
anybody. Then I had the accident. Like I was saying, I’d laid up a little money
in case of illness, stuff like that. That’s what’s paying for here. These nice
facilities. Ha!”