“Hard to believe he’s dead.”
“Think he was on drugs?”
“Probably.”
“Ready for another beer?”
“Let’s drink one to Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
I joined in. “To Elvis.”
The King was still singing on the radio:
“Love me tender,
Love me true,
Make all my dreams fulfilled.
For my darling, I love you.
And I always will.”
* * *
I have never forgotten that day at the beach. It was like the day John Kennedy was killed. Like the day Martin Luther King was killed. Like the day Robert Kennedy was killed. Like the day Nixon resigned.
You never forget days like that, and you’re never quite the same after them. There have been so many days like that, it seems, for my generation — the Baby Boomers who were minding to our business of growing up when all hell broke loose in the early sixties.
A few weeks after Elvis’s death, I heard another piece of startling news. I heard they found Elvis dead in his bathroom. I heard he died straining for a bowel movement.
The King, we had called him, but he had gotten fat and at the age of forty-two he had died straining for a bowel movement. Or so was the rumor. I have spent much of the past seven years hoping against hope that it wasn’t true.
I AM THIRTY-EIGHT years old — it’s approximately half-time of the promised three score and ten — and I don’t have any idea what is taking place around me anymore.
Lord knows, I have tried to understand. I have dutifully watched “Donahue” in an attempt to broaden myself into a creature adjusted to the eighties, but it has been a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.
How did Phil Donahue do it? He’s even older than I am, with the gray hair to show for it, but he seems to understand what people mean when they talk about the new way to live. Me, I feel like an alien in my own country. These new lifestyles seem to be in direct contrast to the way they taught living when I was a child. Back then, gay meant, “1. Happy and carefree; merry. 2. Brightly colorful and ornamental. 3. Jaunty; sporty. 4. Full of or given to lighthearted pleasure. 5. Rakish; libertine.” (That’s straight from my high school dictionary.) Pot was something you cooked in, and back then nobody ate mushrooms. Where did I miss a turn?
The first hint that the world was taking leave of me came after Elvis died. The women who mourned him were older and had beehive hairdos and children of their own. Their teeny-bopper, socks-rolled-down days were far behind them. They were my age and they were weeping not only for Elvis, I think now, but for the realization that an era and a time — their time — was passing to another generation. To know that Elvis had gotten old and sick and fat enough to die was to know that their own youth had faded as well.
Elvis, forty-two. Elvis, dead. The voice that sang for the children of the late forties and early fifties stilled, and in its place a cacophony of raucous melodies from scruffy characters playing to the screams of young earthlings of the modern generation, to whom happiness and normalcy was a computerized hamburger at McDonald’s and mandatory attendance at earsplitting concerts given by people dressed as dragons or barely dressed at all. Elvis may have shaken his pelvis, but he never by-God showed it to anybody on stage.
Why this gap between me and the younger generation? Why, in my thirties, do I have more in common with people twenty years older than with people five or ten years younger? Where is my tolerance for change and modernization? Why would I enjoy hitting Boy George in the mouth? Where did the years go and where did the insanity of the eighties come from? And why did I ever leave home in the first place?
Home. That’s probably it. I don’t seem to fit in today because it was so different yesterday.
Home. I think of it and the way it was every time I see or hear something modern that challenges tradition as I came to know it.
Home. I was born in 1946, the son of a soldier who lived through seven years of combat and then drank his way right out of the service, but who still stood and sang the national anthem to the top of his forceful voice at the several hundred ball games we watched together.
Home. It was a broken home. That came when I was six and my mother ran for her parents and took me with her. The four of us lived in my grandparents’ home. We warmed ourselves by kerosene, we ate from a bountiful garden, and our pattern of living was based on two books — the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog.
Everything came in black and white.
* * *
Moreland, Georgia, had perhaps three hundred inhabitants when I moved there in 1952. The population is about the same today, and Moreland still doesn’t have a red light.
Some other things have changed, however. There are two tennis courts in Moreland. Back then, we played baseball and dammed creeks, and that was enough. Cureton and Cole’s store, where the old men sat around the stove and spit and imparted wisdom, is boarded shut. I don’t know where the old men in Moreland spit and impart wisdom nowadays.
Perhaps spitting and wisdom-imparting around a stove have gone the way of ice cream cups with pictures of movie stars on the bottom side of the lids. I purchased hundreds of ice cream cups at Cureton and Cole’s, licking the faces of everybody from Andy Devine to Yvonne DeCarlo. I haven’t seen ice cream cups like that in years, but even if they were still around, I wouldn’t buy one; I’d be afraid I might lick away the vanilla on the bottom of my lid only to find John Travolta smiling at me. What a horrid thought.
Those were good and honest people who raised me and taught me. They farmed, they worked in the hosiery mill that sat on the town square, and some went to the county seat six miles away where they welded and trimmed aluminum and sweated hourly-wage sweat — the kind that makes people hard and reserved and resolved there is a better world awaiting in the next life.
We had barbecues and street square dances in Moreland. We had two truckstops that were also beer joints, and the truckers played the pinball machines and the jukeboxes. The local beer drinkers parked their cars out back, presumably out of sight.
The religion in town was either Baptist or Methodist, and it was hardshell and certainly not tolerant of drinking. The church ladies were always gossiping about whose cars had been spotted behind the truckstops.
There was one fellow, however, who didn’t care whether they saw his car or not. Pop Towns worked part-time at the post office, but the highlight of his day took place at the railroad yard. The train didn’t stop in Moreland, so the outgoing mail had to be attached to a hook next to the tracks to be picked off when the train sped past. It was Pop’s job to hang the mail.
Every morning at ten, when the northbound came through, and every evening at six, when the southbound passed, Pop would push his wheelbarrow filled with a sack of mail from the post office down to the tracks. There he would hang the mail, and we’d all stand around and watch as the train roared by. Then Pop would get in his car, drive over to one of the truckstops, park contemptuously out front, and have himself several beers.
One day the ladies of the church came to Pop’s house in an effort to save him from the demon malt. I wasn’t there when it happened, of course, but the word got around that when Pop answered the door for the ladies, he came with a beer in his hand.
Hilda Landon began reciting various scriptures regarding drunkenness. Pop countered