Thu, 19 May 2005

Oh, To Be Elvis’ Houseboy
Y’know what I really, totally, cannot at all fucking stand? people who walk up and tell me stories and then don’t even bother to explain what the fuck they’re talking about, like I’m supposed to give a shit or something. For example. I was drinking in the greyhound station over in c.f. where, before the Dekalb move, the Blackhawk Lounge all-night swingers used to play every Wednesday, led by fast Eddie Satan’s dad. So this guy I know from my Iowa city days named Jackson Demerol asks me if I wanna head out to janesville, where in the back of a tool shied out on some farm a guy named raven set up a workbench with coke and JD and some kinda strange yellow powder you sprinkled under your tongue before doing your shot. I was bored, and thus agreed.

So we’re out there and this guy with half a left arm starts setting up shots like Jackson’s a local and he takes us up into the combine, whose windows were covered over with decade-old newspapers, all about Reagan’s four more years, and gives us the powder, which we take under the tongue and take our shots and then my body locked up, muscle paralysis, and raven starts telling us about how he used to be Elvis Presley’s houseboy. One of three, actually; it was him and Clem and Jimmy something, and all three of them lived on Graceland and watched over the king in his final fe years, picked him up when he passed out and fixed the bulletholes in the walls and make him peanut-butter and banana sandwiches, regular housework stuff. So the three of them start swiping pills when E’s not looking, which is pretty often, and soon they all got training-wheel addictions of their own, so in between handfuls of Demerol and Percodan they start turning on each other. Jimmy Something was the smallest, so they started in on him; they’d hold him down and pill off his work scabs, which led to Jimmy Something stealing a caddie and heading south to Miami, where he apparently came to a grisly end while sleeping in his car. Raven and Clem were about to set in on each other but admitted to mutually assured destruction and tried to find a way to up their pay to keep their habits in line.

It was Raven, ultimately, who came up with the plan, or at least that’s the way he tells it. It got kinda lonely in the mansion, whose size and decor was known to do strange things to a person’s mind, and the houseboys occasionally waited until the king was well into a blackout and then, well, doing the sorts of things that houseboys are prone to do when left to their own devices. (I should interject here and say that it was at this point I was convinced raven was not only a liar but possibly mentally deficient: I would have left were it not for the fact that my body was no longer obeying my orders and the incessant flanging quality of the world around me would make climbing out of the combine rather difficult.) Raven realized that if they could sneak people into the mansion for a round with Elvis they could make serious cash. Their price was a thousand a pop and even the fat dying Elvis could command that kinda price. Over one hundred and fifty customers, raven estimates, snuck over the outer fences of Graceland that last summer.

“Yeah?” I asked, forcing my mouth to move, waiting for the punchline. “Then?”

“Then nothing, dingleberry. That’s the end of the story.”

Raven took Jackson and I down out of the combine and sat us along the back of the barn so as not to disturb the patrons while we stared out at empty cornfields and low-flying clouds. Jackson regained muscular control before I, dragging me back to the car and dumping me in the back seat just before I passed out.

Even now, now that my brain and my body kinda work again, I’m still wondering what the fuck happened, and why you’d even bother telling someone a lie if no one’s gonna believe you anyway. Some people.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #