April 4th - Fat Elvis

King of Diamonds - Fat Elvis
1 - Prose

For all his ridiculousness, to give a performance like this, as overweight and full of Demerol as he was, man truly was a king. And yes, sometimes a king needs a sweat rag and two 64oz cups of coke.

Return of The King (excerpt)

The Ghost of Elvis Presley haunted my house the summer I was thirteen. I was terrified of him, sure, but if it wasn't for this ghost, if it wasn't for Elvis, I may have never been able to put a face to the emptiness I have felt for as long as I can remember.

My mother and I moved to Memphis in the spring and settled in a colonial-style house on the east side of the city. The neighborhood was bought out in the early fifties and given a complete overhaul: old rooming houses were knocked down and replaced with split-level homes with tiny yards. Our house was the only colonial on the block and I still haven't been able to figure out why. For all it's cobwebs and peeling wallpaper, it had only been built in the sixties; it was less than thirty years old. I never saw the insides of any other houses in our neighborhood, for we kept to ourselves when we lived in Memphis. My mother liked to remind me that we were there temporarily, and that was that.

I was taken by the house immediately: the large standing bathtub with the bronze feet in the upstairs bathroom, the way the stairs creaked as I jumped my way up them to my room. There were plenty of dark places to find in that house. I led solo expeditions down to the basement that smelled like a turtle's cage - once I found a salamander down there, which fled like a wind-up toy when I shone my flashlight on it - and up to the attic where I could see my bedroom through the floorboards.

My favorite thing about the house was the crawlspaces. There was one hidden in each room - behind the dining room table or an unhung painting - and my greatest discovery came when I realized they all connected to a central chamber. This half-room spanned all three stories of the house and each level was accessible by a knotted rope that had been installed by a former tenant. On each level there was just enough floor space for me to lie down, and there was a hint of sunlight in there from some unknown source. The wooden walls of this chamber were filled with insulation that looked like cotton candy. I loved it there.

I became so comfortable with the interlocking network of crawlspaces, that I began using them to travel through the house. My mother, knowing I was in my room, would call me from the kitchen, "Peter!" and I would bound through my crawlspace, slide down the rope, and within moments be standing behind her. She would jump every time and I never let her in on the secret of how I could do it.

Tennessee summers are as hot as anything and after school ended, I spent my idle days in our house. I would wake up around 10:30, after my mother had gone to work. First things first: change into a pair of underwear and my White Sox cap, grab my trumpet, and prepare a peanut butter and banana sandwich. From there I would spend the rest of my afternoon in my inner chamber - "The Spine Of The House" as I liked to call it - where it was cool and dark. I would lie down on the floor in the middle of The Spine with my feet up in the air, stretching my toes in the cottony insulation, playing my trumpet, nibbling on my breakfast between songs. I played "Yesterday" and "Everything Happens to Me", and the horn part for "Got My Mind Set On You," but my favorite song to play was "Hound Dog." Whenever I played it seemed like just by using my lips I could make the whole house vibrate. It was here that I first encountered the Ghost of Elvis.

One afternoon I dozed off with the cool of my trumpet on my chest and was awoken by the sounds of voices coming from somewhere in the house: a man' voice and a woman's voice, too muffled for me to make out what they were saying. The woman's voice sounded almost like my mother's, but when she laughed, I wasn't so sure. I tried climbing the rope to see if I could hear better on different levels, but the voices were just as hard to understand everywhere. Suddenly they were quiet, and then Elvis started singing. He was so loud and sounded differently than I was used to him sounding. I went back to my trumpet, grabbed it and lay perfectly still, terrified. He sang "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You" and it sounded like it was coming from everywhere. I closed my eyes and tried to disappear. Then came "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" followed by "Love Me Tender." I thought I heard the faint sounds of a lady somewhere crying or something. Elvis introduced "Unchained Melody," sang a few bars and then abruptly stopped. The house was silent.

I lay there, heart jumping in my chest. I knew I had to move, but I couldn't. I lay there a long time and then sprung into action. I left the sandwich plate behind and shimmied up the rope, clutching my trumpet, heart jumping, running through the crawlspace to my room. I placed the trumpet safely on my bed and pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, and then back through the crawlspace, sliding down the rope, burning my hands, leaping through the basement with no regard for dead mice or salamanders. I climbed out the basement window.

There was a baseball bat lying in my backyard and I grabbed it, clutching it white-knuckled, leaning against the back wall of my house, trying to control my breathing. Deep breaths. I leaned against my house, clutching the baseball bat and I breathed, trying to calm myself down. I looked at the grass, the house, the sky. The light told me it was around six o'clock. I had been sleeping longer than I thought. My heart stopped jumping so much. I loosened my grip a bit on the bat and I walked to the front door. Bracing myself, I expected to be greeted by a grotesque apparition of The King, ready to crush me in his inhuman hands. I opened the door. There was no one there. I walked in cautiously.

My mother was sitting at the dining room table drinking a glass of wine. She looked through me, and then focused on my face. "Where have you been?" And before I could answer. "Where are your shoes?" I realized I was barefoot and my feet were cut and dirty. I shrugged. I asked her if she had heard Elvis singing. She said she didn't know what I was talking about. Then: "You shouldn't bring that baseball bat into the house," after me as I walked upstairs.

That wasn't the only time The Ghost of Elvis appeared to me....


The rest of this will appear here or somewhere else in the near future.


In the nearer future, however, another poem - perhaps a proper one this time - will be here tomorrow...
In the meantime, check out April 4th's poem from last year.