After Bathing at Baxters (19 page)

When they got to the ground, a bare, grassless rectangle flanked on both sides by teams of girls playing six-a-side hockey, the West Ham team were already warming up. A dozen spectators smoked cigarettes or bickered cheerlessly. Alex, regarding them gloomily, noted that they were big lads all right and hoped things wouldn't get out of hand. For a second he felt a brief pang of nostalgia for his old hobby, but the local Boys' Brigade branch had closed now and they hadn't wanted him as a Scoutmaster. Trudging across from the changing room, the reek of disinfectant still hanging in the air, he watched Eric point disparagingly at the pitch. ‘
Merde
!' he said – somehow Alex could never get over the fact that Eric was French – ‘They might at least have shifted the dog turds.'

In the end it all went the way Fantoni had predicted. Before the cameras' dense, vaporous stare, beneath the urgent baying of the crowd, the Red Lion took an early lead through Carlsson's knowledge of the Hanseatic timber trade and lost it again when Leroy failed to define the word ‘paronomasia'.

With one question to go the Trowel and Hammer were a point behind. As Guscott stepped up to the dais, his pale teenager's face twisted with tension, the crowd fell silent.

‘Which group in the early 1970s had three singles which entered the charts at Number One?'

Guscott whinnied slightly, gazed in anguish from right to left, guessed wildly: ‘Abba?'

Amid a mounting crescendo of noise the tuxedo'd MC shook his head. ‘Sorry son. The correct answer is Slade.'

‘Lost six-nil,' Alex informed Doreen. ‘No, they were big lads. Eric and Paul got sent off for fighting … They're keeping Nicky in overnight for observation.' Outside rain fell over the grey London streets. ‘Eleven o'clock then, but I promised Roy I'd drop him off at the station, and you know Ryan's mum doesn't like him staying out late.'

In the hospitality suite Fantoni graciously accepted his fifth daquiri and tried to concentrate on what the interviewer was saying.

‘So what about Europe, Ken? Do you think you can repeat this success on the international stage?'

Fantoni yawned. He was thinking of changing his girlfriend. Mitzi was OK but you coudn't take her to the European Cup Final could you? What about that girl who read the ITV weather? He'd ask Ron about it.

‘Ken?'

‘Definitely, Alan. Munich Bierkeller. Estaminet Georges Pompidou Marseilles. I know they play a different style over there – Economics, Art and Literature, they have university professors turning pro these days – but I'm confident we can beat these Continentals at their own game …'

Vivat Rex

Even now, a quarter, of a century later, I can still remember when it all started, back at the impersonators' convention at Fresno, with the old silver-haired announcer emceeing at the mike, the crowd – farmers' kids in grey denim overalls with their girls wearing plunging polka dot dresses up from the country for the day – hustling up to the front of the stage, and Billy Ray cracking walnuts with his fingers in the big hospitality tent and saying that there were two contestants come as Jack Kennedy but what the hell could you expect in California anyhow? Billy Ray was my manager in those days and he'd been coming to the impersonators' conventions since way back in the fifties, coming with stiff-necked Iowa insurance salesmen who looked like Ike or Nixon, middle-aged Republicans with mortgages and families, desperate for a shot at the big-time, but, he was starting to let the business slide now and talking about condos on the beach or a ranch out in Nevada, so it was a bonus if he paid any attention to what was going on up on stage. ‘Just do your stuff kid,' he'd say easily, whenever I asked him about gesture or intonation – and these were things I wasn't sure about then, wasn't sure about until a great deal later – ‘Just go ahead and do your stuff.' The other entrants, the cheery housewives whose husbands had told them they looked like Elizabeth Taylor, the pale teenagers whose music coaches had said reminded them of John Lennon, had brought their families along – rows of snub-nosed children, fathers in seersucker suits ready to cheer each twitch of the beloved's hand. I hadn't brought anybody – my folks didn't approve of impersonators' conventions so much – so when I got up there was only me, the lazy-eyed college kid who played piano and a sea of neutral, uncomprehending faces.

I had one definitive advantage, though: I could sing. Most of them couldn't. The impersonators' circuit was in its infancy then and the bulk of the amateurs thought that all you had to do was to look the part. This meant that you had guys who were the dead spit of Dean Martin climbing on stage and simply clamming up, or standing around and signing autographs in the hope that they wouldn't be asked to open their mouths. But I'd been practising. I knew just how long to string out the ‘
Weeeell
…' at the beginning of ‘Heartbreak Hotel', exactly when to throw in that dynamite ‘
Uh
' before the words ‘Lay offa ray shoes'. I gave them ‘Hound Dog' and ‘All Shook Up', and by the time I went into my jitterbug routine at the end of ‘His Latest Flame' (three months in front of a mirror to perfect) it was all over bar the shouting. Earlier on I'd been worried by a Barry Goldwater lookalike in a tuxedo and a woman who could have been Debbie Reynolds's twin sister, but I don't think they even bothered to show up for the awards ceremony. I took first prize, the fifty-dollar cheque, the voucher allowing me twenty minutes free air-time on the local radio station, and the fathers in the seersucker suits and the sullen kids forgot for a moment that Mom had sung flat and looked foolish and whooped and hollered as if the lights had just come up at the Las Vegas auditorium and the man himself, sweat pouring down his glassy forehead, was raising his face to greet them.

Billy Ray wandered out of the hospitality tent then, wiping the walnut flakes off his chin with a big, scrawny forearm, and stood looking at me with a kind of puzzled wonder. He was out of his league, Billy was, and he knew it. Most of his protégés up until then had suffered from some fatal, disabling flaw: the John Wayne double reduced to abject terror by the sight of a horse, the Ella Fitzgerald replica – legs, hairdo, everything – compromised only by a husky baritone. Compared to Big John and Ella and all the others I was flawless, inviolate, unstoppable. ‘El,' Billy confided after the show – I'd told him it was important for my self-confidence that he stopped calling me Vernon, but he could never bring himself to go the whole way – ‘get the feeling you're going places boy.' Well, I could have told him that, Billy Ray with his Lone Star baseball cap and his shy Texas drawl, and I wasn't surprised when he hauled me into his office a day or so later to meet a couple of businessmen (‘Real important guys, El. Showbiz management') who'd flown up from Tennessee on purpose to see me.

I can recall that day precisely – better than the Vegas appearances, better than the time I got to meet Jimmy Carter on the lawn at the White House and even signed a couple of autographs for his grandchildren – the dusty sunlight falling over Billy Ray's rickety pinewood desk, the far-off hiss of the cars on the interstate freeway, Billy Ray all nervy and flustered and sending out for cigars and pitchers of orange juice. When I walked into the room the elder of the two guys – who looked like a Southern grandee at around the time of the Civil War – whistled through his teeth and said: ‘Reckon you struck gold here Billy', while the younger one – he was sweating into a three-piece suit and complaining about the air conditioning – smiled and cocked his eye, as if he'd finally figured out the answer to some nagging problem that he'd been concentrating on for years. Billy Ray chattered on in that shy, respectful way he had – he'd been a District Attourney's clerk before the war and you could see it in the way he never sassed anybody – but it was mostly to the younger one. The elder guy just stared at me, while the smoke from Billy Ray's cigar stole across the room towards us and hung over our heads until the fans caught it and whirled it away. Finally he said: ‘Don't mind my asking this do you boy? That a wig you're wearing there?' I shook my head and he whistled some more and nodded. ‘Uh huh. And the teeth? I got a hundred-dollar bet with Eugene here says that's a false set.' I smiled. ‘Had them a matter of twenty-seven years, sir. Don't know how you reckon on accounting for that?'

Looking back I can see that it was then that my real life began, back there in Billy Ray's thirty-dollar-a-month suite with the cigar smoke hanging in cotton wool clouds under the fans, and that the preceding years had been of no account when set against this smooth, inexorable destiny, a vague preliminary best forgotten in the reckoning up of sterner duties. I can remember shaking hands with Eugene and the Colonel, saying goodbye to Billy Ray, heading back to the rooming house to pack my two suits and my three neckties as if I were a kid who had somehow walked into a magical toyshop full of dazzling sempiternal light, where the dolls leaped up out of their boxes to shake your hand, whirl you round in an ecstatic waltz, leaving you draggled and confused but unswerving in your conviction that the dream couldn't end.

Flying in towards Memphis in a grey dawn, as the plane swooped low over the narrow ramparts of the tobacco fields and the Colonel twitched and mumbled in his sleep, Eugene filled me in on the daunting protocol of my new existence. ‘Now, I know your real name, and Colonel Tom knows it, but that's as far as it goes OK? You ever hear a limo driver or a guy on the staff call you anything less than “Mr Presley”, then I'll kick his ass. Fire him too, if I reckon he's safe and won't talk to the papers.'

‘And what about him? What does he call me?'

Eugene's shot grey eyes keeled crazily in their sockets. ‘Oh, you don't ever get to meet him son. Noway nohow. Larry, kid who was doing your job a while back, now he got set on meeting him. Bust into his private annexe one night with a crate of beer figuring on saying hello. Now Elvis, he just yelled like it was his mother's ghost. Had to get the medics in and sedate him. So no, you don't ever get to meet him son. Unless he asks, that is.'

The wheels hit ground, Colonel Tom came heavily awake, in the distance the Memphis rooftops glittered in the early sun, and a new life came swarming up to greet me.

That was the last I saw of the Colonel, mostly. Sometimes early in the morning when I was skimming leaves off the surface of the swimming pool – it was in the shape of a guitar, too, just like all the magazines said – or at night when I was catching a late movie in the TV room – watching
Jailhouse Rock
, say, for the seventeenth time – I'd find him staring at me with a kind of queer, calculating intensity, like Uncle Sam on the recruiting poster, but though I'd nod and smile he'd never speak, just drift away as if I wasn't there. So it was Eugene who got things settled, fixed me up with a bungalow at the back of the main complex, made arrangements for the plastic surgery – my nose needed a little straightening and the Colonel had expressed a slight reservation about the point of my chin – and the voice coach and looked over my schedule. I took things gradually at first. In my second month they put me on a radio show where I was discussing new record releases (‘Just say your favourite record's “The Old Rugged Cross” Eugene instructed, ‘only El's been having a little trouble with the Baptist Church just lately.' A month later I went to a Grammy Award dinner and got to sit next to Diana Ross. Eugene was terrified about that, because he reckoned Elvis and her had met once before a couple of years back and really hit it off, but it was nothing I couldn't handle, and when either by chance or design she upset a glass of wine over my white pant suit I just murmered: ‘It ain't nuthin', ma'am.' After that Eugene and the Colonel started to trust me. I did TV shows, a special film they sent out to the troops in Vietnam, and a Vegas walkabout. I got photographed trying on buckskin gear in Madison Avenue, on horseback with Roy Rogers, shaking hands with a candidate in the Republican primaries. ‘I'm just a plain country boy from Tennessee,' I told him, ‘but I'd like to tell you sir that the Good Lord's on your side.'

Eugene enthused about this last touch. ‘Got to hand it to you boy, you're a natural. Reckon we could put you live on the primetime network shows and nobody'd notice the difference. Don't it worry you though?'

‘Why should it worry me?'

‘Think about it. You look like him. You talk like him. You goddamned sing like him. You could
be
him.'

‘No,' I told him – truthfully, as it happened – ‘it doesn't worry me.'

Hectic, restless years. I have album upon album of stills photographs to remind me. All those dumb late sixties films, those monstrous TV shows, the pre-recorded Christmas messages for the fan-clubs, it was me, all of it. The real Elvis, meantime, was reduced to the status of a bit-parter, a walk-on, wheeled in on the rare occasions when I couldn't make it. I got better and better, to the point where you couldn't tell us apart. In fact, if anything I looked more like Elvis – he was getting fat now, apparently, and hitting the booze – than Elvis did. Still naive and credulous about my part in the whole Grace and set-up, I once questioned Eugene about this mounting role reversal.

‘So what does Elvis Aaron' – we called him that to distinguish him from me – ‘what does Elvis Aaron actually do?'

Eugene frowned. ‘He does the big Vegas sessions. He gets to meet the President. Leastways, when he's sober he does.'

‘Eugene,' I said, suddenly biting at the thought which had been crackling away in my head all these months. ‘You don't need him. It's me you need. Admit it.'

Eugene flicked me that lazy, inscrutable smile of his. ‘You didn't say that boy. You didn't say that and I didn't hear it.' He paused. ‘Guess I can fix you a Vegas show, though, if that's what you want.'