All Shook Up (12 page)

26. Elvis Has Left the Building

It was about five o’clock on Sunday when I knocked on my dad’s bedroom door. He’d been rehearsing all afternoon.

“Come on in,” his voice called out.

Walking into his room was like entering an Elvis museum. You had to step over boxes of
JERRY DENNY AS THE KING
flyers and stacks of Elvis CDs and videos and piles of rainbow scarves. But the thing that got me every time was the life-size cutout of Elvis standing near my dad’s closet door. Cardboard Elvis had been a gift to my dad from one of his friends, but it was so realistic-looking it made me jump every time I saw it. Like the King had suddenly materialized out of thin air to strum his guitar in my dad’s bedroom.

“What’s up?” My dad leaned over and switched off the music coming from the stack of stereo equipment next to one wall.

“It’s something about school,” I said. Stretching out across my dad’s bed, I pretended to be interested in studying the ceiling. Better if I didn’t look at my dad or Cardboard Elvis while I was talking.

Dad cleared aside some plastic CD cases and sat down on the edge of the bed. “What about school?” His fingers drummed against his legs as if he wasn’t really paying attention but was still thinking about the song he’d been listening to when I walked in.

I tried to remember what I had planned to say, but once I started talking, none of the words came out the way I had practiced them. “Everybody thought I’d be okay with coming to Chicago and going to a new school, right?” I began in a fairly normal voice.

“I guess, sure,” my dad said, giving me a puzzled look. “Why?”

“I was fine with coming here to your house for three or four months or whatever, until Grandma got better, right?”

My dad nodded slowly. “Sure, yes….”

After that, my voice began to grow less sorry and more angry. It was like another thirteen-year-old suddenly took over my body:
Josh Greenwood, Now Being Played by His Evil Twin.
“Everybody thinks I can handle anything. No problem—send Josh to a new city or a new school or whatever, he’ll be fine, right?”

My voice rushed on, gathering steam. “Then, just when he’s starting to fit in with people and he’s made, like, two or three friends…why not have his dad go ahead and screw it all up? Because Josh can handle anything, right? Don’t even bother asking Josh his opinion—”

“What?” my dad interrupted, sounding completely surprised and confused. “What have I messed up? Tell me.”

This was the point when one of those possessed, forced laughs came out. “Jeez, Dad, how can you not see it?” My voice rose, sounding embarrassingly like a girl’s at one point. “Walking around pretending you’re Elvis and buying thousand-dollar costumes—that’s normal? And then you go and sign up to be Elvis at my school? I mean, what do you think I’d be upset about?”

None of this conversation was going the way I had planned.

“You know the letter you got about the Chicago Elvis contest?” I said. There was no stopping now.

My dad nodded. “Sure, yes.”

“Well, I was the one who made up that letter, because if I hadn’t, you would’ve just gone ahead and shown up at my school, right?” My arms gestured angrily at the air. “Who cares about asking me what I think? Nobody ever worries about that. Not you. Not Mom. Just go and embarrass me in front of the whole entire place.”

I could hear Ivory’s accusing voice in my head repeating:
It’s always about you.
I knew that’s the way it sounded, but I couldn’t help it.

“You made up the letter about the contest?” My dad’s voice was full of disbelief and something else I couldn’t name, something deeper and more painful. I felt a thick lump rising in my throat as I said yes.

“There’s no contest, no Las Vegas? Nothing? It was all a joke?”

“Not a joke—I just—”

“Just what?” My dad stared at me. “Thought you’d see what you could do for fun? Man”—he ran his fingers through his hair—“I thought you and I were way past this, Josh. I thought we were getting along better these days. I thought things had been kind of okay lately.” Leaning over, he picked up his coat from the floor. “But I guess I was wrong, wasn’t I?” Shaking his head, he said in a hurt voice, “Guess I was totally wrong.”

And then he stood up, walked out of the room, and pulled the door shut behind him. He didn’t just walk out of the bedroom, either. He left the house. I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car pulling out of the garage. The garage door thudded closed and then it was silent. Sitting by myself in his Elvis room, I couldn’t keep my mind from replaying the whole scene—what he had said, what I had said, over and over—as if there was something I could change about it now. Only there wasn’t. I had completely and totally screwed up this time. A book of Elvis sheet music was lying on the floor near my feet. It was open to the song “Heartbreak Hotel.” Which seemed to fit the moment perfectly.

27. Just Pretend

I was still sitting in my dad’s bedroom when the doorbell rang about a half hour later. I think part of me hoped it was my dad and maybe he would wrap me up in one of his garlic hugs and say everything was okay, like the ending to a sappy Disney movie. You know, with “Hakuna Matata” playing in the background or something, and we would both tell each other we were sorry and things would get better.

But it wasn’t my dad. It was a three-foot-tall devil and a fairy princess in a pink raincoat. Seriously. I stared at them, trying to decide if I really had gone crazy or if this was some kind of bizarre punishment for what I’d done.

“Trick or treat,” the midget devil said in a squeaky voice, holding out a black plastic garbage bag.

That’s when I realized why the kids were dressed up. I remembered how the school cafeteria had served pumpkin cookies (hard as rocks) on Friday and a few teachers had worn costumes. This weekend was Halloween. And there I was, standing in front of an open door with absolutely no candy to give out. What a complete moron I was.

I told the two kids to hang on.

“What?” The midget devil didn’t seem to understand what I meant and glanced back at somebody who was standing in the darkness behind him, holding an umbrella.

“Hang on,” I said louder. “I’ve gotta get some candy.”

By some miracle, my dad had a bag of Snickers bars stashed in the back of his cereal cabinet. Who knows how long the candy bars had been there. Last Halloween? Christmas? I ripped open the bag and headed back to the front door. The devil and the fairy princess were in the middle of asking the adult behind them if they should go to the next house. “Maybe he’s not coming back,” the princess insisted.

Pulling out a handful of candy, I mumbled, “Happy Halloween.”

As the Snickers bars landed softly on the heavy pile already inside their bags, the midget devil asked me where Elvis had gone.

“What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him right.

The boy glanced back at the adult. “My dad says Elvis lives here.”

I thought about answering that Elvis had left the building and probably wasn’t ever coming back because of me, but instead I told them he was at a gig. “He’s got a show tonight, I think.”

The adult in the darkness said, “Well, tell him the neighbors across the street—the ones that have the big cookout every year—said hello. Tell him we want tickets to see his act one of these days.”

“Sure,” I said. “I will.”

After the devil and the princess disappeared into the rain, I closed the door and tried not to think about how my mom and I used to be just like those little kids and their parents. How we used to walk around on Halloween with our raincoats and our plastic garbage bags of candy.

I had been a baseball player for trick-or-treating in fourth grade. Which was the same year my mom had insisted that if I didn’t feel comfortable wearing a “real” costume (she didn’t consider my baseball uniform a real costume), I was getting too old for trick-or-treating. So fourth grade was the last year I went out for Halloween.

But honestly, I would have given anything to go trick-or-treating again. I could still remember how it felt to collect loads of candy and then spend hours sorting it into piles on the living room floor: the good candy, the okay candy, and the candy (black licorice) nobody would ever eat. I mean, those were the times when it was fun to be a kid. The older you got, the more the fun disappeared. Every year, something else was taken away. Halloween had been one of the last things to go. What was left? Thanksgiving?

Even parents changed from nice, umbrella-toting people who held your hand and walked around with you in the dark (not that I wanted my hand held!) to complicated people who did things that didn’t make sense anymore. They got divorced. They turned into Elvis. They went to Florida without you to take care of your grandma and her broken hip.

Standing there in the hallway with my bag of old and possibly expired Snickers, I just wanted to go back to the way things were. I was sick of being in Chicago. I was sick of being thirteen years old. I was sick of being Josh Greenwood.

My glance fell on my dad’s new pair of Elvis boots sitting in the hallway. They were still in the same spot where he’d left them after coming back from a show the night before—one boot slightly ahead of the other, as if he had taken them off in midstep.

What was it Ivory had said?
You need to walk around in somebody else’s feet for a while….
And I thought—
what theheck.

Call me completely insane, but even though I had nowhere to go, and nobody to go with, I decided to try being Elvis for Halloween. Just for fun. Just to pass out candy to the little kids. Why not? My dad already had the costume stuff, right? I would walk around in his shoes for a while. Literally.

Upstairs, I found a pair of my dad’s gold Elvis sunglasses to wear. Using a brown eye pencil from his bathroom, I drew triangle sideburns on each side of my face and colored them in with little slashes to look like hair. Then I pulled on one of his black leather Elvis jackets. However, there was
no way
I was showing any part of my thirteen-year-old chest to the world, so the jacket went on over a dark blue T-shirt.

With the slightly large leather coat and the huge sunglasses, I thought I looked like a cross between Elvis and some bizarre insect.
Yes, Praying Mantis Elvis, that’s me.
But the next little kid who came to my dad’s door didn’t seem to notice. When I opened the door, he cracked up and said, “Are you Elvis?”

Weirdly, I never had to explain who I was when people came to the door—everybody always knew. Even though I was a thirteen-year-old kid with gold sunglasses and fake sideburns drawn on my face with brown eye pencil, they thought it was a great costume. Some of the little kids even turned around and waved at me as they headed back into the darkness. “Bye, Elvis….”

That’s when I began to realize something about being Elvis: that who you are isn’t as important as who you are trying to be.

28. Cheerleaders and Cowboys

When I was down to my last five Snickers bars, two people came walking up the rainy sidewalk to the house. Standing by the door, I didn’t recognize them at first. I just thought they looked too tall and too old to be trick-or-treating. (My mom wouldn’t have approved.) The guy was dressed like a cowboy, with a Western hat and a large red bandanna tied around his neck. The girl was wearing a cheerleader costume, complete with green-and-silver pom-poms. It took me a minute to realize that the two people coming up to my dad’s porch were actually Digger and Ivory.

But I think Ivory was way more shocked than me.

“Josh?” She leaned forward to stare at me through the screen door and her voice fell to an incredulous whisper. “What are you doing?”

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that anybody from school might come by and see me handing out candy, dressed up as Elvis. I mean, who would expect a couple of Charles W. Lister seventh graders to be wandering around with the five-year-old fairy princesses and midget devils?

Feeling my face beginning to get warm, I tried to downplay the whole costume. “I’m just handing out candy to the little kids. For my dad,” I added stupidly.

“Where is he?” Ivory asked, with a tone that suggested she hadn’t forgotten our park conversation.

“He’s got a gig.”

Ivory gave me a closer look. “He didn’t need his costume?”

Note to Ivory: What are you? The FBI cheerleader?

“It’s an extra one,” I said.

Slowly, Ivory’s face broke into a smile. “Well, you look kind of deranged as Elvis. Deranged, but good. Right, Digger?”

Behind her, Cowboy Digger nodded. I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, wondering how much longer they’d stick around on my dad’s porch, talking to me through the screen door. “We aren’t really trick-or-treating for candy this year,” Ivory began explaining. “We’re going around the neighborhood collecting money for Greenpeace. We stopped by because we thought maybe your dad might want to donate something.”

“But hey, if you want to give us some candy bars instead, that’s okay, too,” Digger joked, gesturing at the almost empty Snickers bag I was still holding. “We’re not that picky.”

Somehow, I ended up sitting on my dad’s porch with the two of them as they finished off the last of my candy bars. The rain was coming down harder and they decided they’d wait a few minutes to see if it let up. “We’ll just hang out here, if that’s all right,” Ivory said, taking a seat on one of the dry patches of concrete and motioning for the cowboy to follow.

“Digger lives two streets away from yours, and we just thought we’d go through his neighborhood this year,” Ivory explained as she carefully unwrapped a chocolate bar and stuffed the wrapper into one of the green knitted gloves she’d been wearing. “Last year, we collected donations for Save the Children in my neighborhood. But Digger’s a big environmentalist, so this year it was Greenpeace.”

“Tree hugger.” Digger grinned through a mouthful of chocolate and caramel. “That’s me.”

While the rain drummed down on the metal roof over our heads, Ivory started going into a long explanation of the different causes Greenpeace helped: whales, rain forests, global warming. I brought up the topic of Digger’s dog collar in the middle of global warming. It was the only thing I could think of to change the subject. Like “dog collar” was written in big letters across my brain or something. “So what’s up with that collar you wear around at school?” I said, reaching for the Snickers bag.

Digger shrugged. “It’s different. Nobody else has one, right?”

Note to Digger: Maybe there’s a good reason for that.

“Artistic expression,” Ivory added. “He’s an artist.”

“You aren’t wearing one tonight,” I pointed out, and Ivory explained she and Digger had decided to be opposites of themselves for Halloween. “This year, we wanted to be something we would never, in a million years, be in real life—so we picked a cheerleader and a cowboy.”

“Yeah, can you see me sitting on a horse?” Digger said, grinning. “If I got up on one, in ten minutes it would be totally flat.” He made a sound like air going out of a balloon (or somebody farting). “There goes Digger on his flat horse.” Which made us almost fall off the porch laughing. Really.

“You’re not that fat,” I heard myself say when the laughter had died down a little.

Note to self: Are you blind? Why do you keep saying such dumb things?

“Right.” Digger snorted as he crumpled up his candy wrappers and stuffed them into his jeans pocket. “I’m the poster child for fat.”

After that, there was an uncomfortable silence when nobody said anything. The rain on the porch roof suddenly seemed extra loud. Anybody passing by on the street must have done a double take at the three of us scrunched together, knee to knee, on the small square of dry land in the middle of the concrete. Now playing on Jerry Denny’s porch:
Elvis, the Cheerleader, and the Cowboy.

“Anybody seen any good movies lately?” Digger finally blurted out, which made everybody relax again.

Ivory asked me how my grandma was doing, if she was getting better. I told them how she was out of the hospital but in a physical therapy center. My mom had just sent me the new address, adding in capital letters how much my grandma would LOVE to hear from me. But my mom had no idea how crazy my life had been in Chicago. What would I write about? The Aloha jumpsuit? Viv? My dad storming out of the house that night?

Surprisingly, Ivory didn’t ask anything about my dad until she and Digger were about to leave—which was unusual, considering what Ivory was normally like. We were standing around at the bottom of the porch steps. It had stopped raining briefly, and Ivory wanted to get back to Digger’s house before it started to pour again, so his mom could drive her home.

“Did you say anything to your dad?” she asked in a low voice after Digger had moved a step or two away to call his mom on his cell phone. I appreciated the fact that Ivory wasn’t spilling my whole life story in front of Digger, but it was still embarrassing.

I told her I’d talked to my dad that night.

“How’d he react?” she asked.

“Not great,” I mumbled.

“Really?”

“Kind of,” I said, not wanting to go through all the details of what had gone wrong. I could tell Ivory was already putting two and two together herself anyway.

“I’ll try and figure out what you can do next.” Ivory reached down to pick up her silver-and-green pom-poms from the steps. “But this is a good start, Josh.” She shook one of her pom-poms in my direction.

“What’s a good start?”

“Talking to him. And wearing his Elvis costume for Halloween, too.”

Note to Ivory: The costume wasn’t exactly my dad’s idea.

“You look crazy but cool.” She laughed. “I never thought you’d wear anything Elvis.” Turning toward Digger, she added loudly, “Don’t you agree?”

“Sure, right.” Digger shoved his phone in his pocket and tried to act as if he hadn’t been listening to our conversation the whole time.

“There’s hope for you yet, Josh. That’s what your horoscope said this week. Peace,” Ivory finished.

She and Digger flashed me a peace sign and then the two of them went running—okay, with Digger, maybe “lumbering” is a better word—into the darkness. I could hear them chasing each other and laughing halfway down the street.