All Shook Up (14 page)

32. Rhinestone Sneakers

On the day of the show, Ivory left another note on my locker:

Tonight, 6 p.m. Be ready.

I was having second thoughts about the whole idea. My dad had been arguing with me all week about everything—from how much television I was watching to who was supposed to answer the phone when it rang.

Note to Dad: Why is it my job to answer your Elvis calls?

Even ordering pizza was an argument. “Can’t you just pick up the phone and order something for us for dinner, Josh?” my dad had snapped at me the night before. “You’re thirteen years old, for cripes sake. I’ve got one day left to get ready for the big show I’m doing this week. Can’t you just do one daggone thing to help me out?” He yanked the headphones off his head and threw them on his bed before making the phone call himself.

After that, I called Ivory and told her the idea wasn’t going to work.

“Of course it will,” she insisted.

“He’s being a complete jerk.”

“He told my mom you’re being a complete jerk,” Ivory retorted.

“Who do you believe?”

Ivory was silent for a minute. “Both of you.”

I told Ivory I might decide at the last minute to stay home. “I’m not promising anything. If he keeps being a jerk, I’m not going. I’ll just give you the ten bucks back for the ticket.” Ivory said Gladys would be very disappointed if we didn’t see the show.

“Then take her and go.”

But Ivory insisted they weren’t going without me.

On the night of the show, the doorbell rang an hour earlier than it was supposed to ring. I glanced at the clock. It was only five. My dad had left in such a panicked rush, with clothes draped over his shoulder and equipment piled up in his arms, I figured he was probably back because he had forgotten something.

But when I opened the door, I found Gladys standing on our porch. “I know I’m early,” she said in an apologetic voice. “But I wanted to be sure not to miss my ride to the show. You know how forgetful us old ladies can be sometimes.” She tapped her head. “Nothing much upstairs these days.”

She looked like a walking jewelry box. Huge gold-and-pearl earrings were clipped to her ears. Two pearl necklaces dangled around her neck and a large silver piano was pinned to her bright red coat. “How do I look?” she said, patting her curly white hair and turning around in a little circle once she stepped inside. I tried not to stare at her shoes, which were gold sneakers decorated with red rhinestones.

“You look nice,” I said uncomfortably.

“I even got my nails done for Elvis.” She held out her painted nails for me to see. I could tell she was proud of how she looked, but all I could think about was the fact that I was going to be walking around with her.

Of course, Ivory and her mom thought Gladys looked gorgeous. Those were their words when they picked us up. “Look at those gorgeous earrings and your cute shoes, Gladys.” Ivory had on her rainbow beret and the same hippie outfit she’d been wearing on the first day I’d met her. Digger was wearing his usual dog collar and a black
ELVIS LIVES
T-shirt. The extra large Elvis face seemed to float in the middle of his chest like some kind of strange apparition. The three of us crowded into the backseat of Viv’s car, carrying our winter coats. Gladys sat in the front.

“Everybody ready to go and meet Elvis?” Ivory’s mom said in her Viv’s Vintage voice, and we headed for the show.

By the time we finally stopped, my right leg was asleep and my hands were so sweaty I had to keep rubbing them on my jeans to dry them off. The show was in a small town called Winona, which was a lot farther away than Ivory had told me.

When we pulled into the parking lot and got out of the car, the air didn’t even smell like Chicago anymore. It smelled like fields and farms and cows. And I guess everybody in town must have decided seeing Elvis was better than sitting around Winona doing nothing, because the parking lot was packed with pickup trucks and big, shiny cars. Viv got one of the last open spots.

As we walked to the old theater where the show was being held, I looked up at the glaring sign that announced
TONIGHT! WINONA LIONS CLUB WELCOMES JERRY DENNY AS ELVIS.
My stomach began to do nervous flip-flops. A long line of people, bundled up in their winter coats, trailed out the doors of the building. All of these people who didn’t even know Jerry Denny had come to see him pretend to be Elvis? It was kind of frightening.

“Hey,” Digger said loudly, bumping my arm. “Your dad must be pretty good. Look at the big line.”

I spun around. “Stop talking about him, okay?” The last thing I needed was for a hundred strangers standing in line to find out that the
JERRY DENNY
in big glowing letters on the theater sign was my dad.

Ivory and Digger exchanged glances and Digger shut up. Behind us, Viv and Gladys made their way slowly across the parking lot, arm in arm, reminding me of my mom and grandma walking together. Gladys kept saying, “My, it’s cold tonight, isn’t it?” As we got into line, I could feel people’s eyes glancing at us. (Okay, looking mainly at Digger’s dog collar and Ivory’s beret and Gladys’s rhinestone shoes.) They were probably wondering what part of Winona we were from.

At the ticket window, two white-haired old men were taking the tickets. They tore each one in half with their trembling hands and then handed them back through the window, saying things like, “Enjoy the show” and “Hope you brought your blue suede shoes.” They seemed to know most of the people in line by name, which was why the line was moving so slowly, I think. When they got to us, one of the men asked, “Where you folks from?” Viv said we had driven from Chicago. Thankfully, she didn’t add that we were good friends with Elvis. The man smiled and handed the ticket stubs back. “Come back and see us again sometime.”

Not very likely.

The theater had about twenty rows of seats with a small stage at the front. Most of the seats were already full when we walked in, except for an empty section in the middle of the fifth row, which turned out to be ours. As we squeezed past the other people in our row, I could feel my heart hammering. Why did our seats have to be so close? And right in the middle? There was no means of escape, except by climbing over the laps of about eight large strangers.

Gladys and Viv sat on one side of me, and Digger was on the other side, with Ivory next to him. The old wooden seats were the kind that squeak when you push them down. Mine had a missing armrest and somebody had carved their initials inside a heart on the curved wooden back.

“Isn’t this place wonderful?” Gladys whispered, and patted my arm. “Look how close we are to the stage, Josh. Elvis is going to be right up there in front, isn’t he?”

“Probably.” I slouched farther down in my chair, taking the chance the entire thing might fold up with me inside it.

Ivory passed a box of Sno-Caps down the row. “Want some?” she said, reaching around Digger, who was ignoring me. I shook my head and Ivory gave me one of her “what the heck is up with you” looks before she poured the rest of the box into Digger’s hand.

It seemed like forever before somebody finally came onstage to announce that the show was about to start. A tall, bearded man with a cowboy hat and boots (reminiscent of Digger’s Halloween costume) stepped out through the stage curtains to thank us for coming out and supporting the Winona Lions Club. “We’ve got a real treat for all you folks out there in Winona tonight,” he said, leaning over the microphone, which was too short for him. “All the way from the bright lights of the big city, please welcome Chicago’s own Jerry Denny as Elvis Presley!”

And then the lights went out and this
Star Wars
–type music started playing. Really, you would have expected the
Millennium Falcon
to come rising up from the stage at any moment. Slowly and agonizingly, the red curtains jerked open little by little, but the stage was empty and dark. There was no Jerry Denny or Elvis standing there.
Oh god.
My hands reached up to cover my eyes because I didn’t want to watch the whole disaster unfold. A few people around us snickered.

A spotlight came on and moved back and forth across the empty stage, as if it couldn’t find the performer, either. Little bits of dust swirled like mini tornadoes in the light. Suddenly a voice said dramatically over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Jerry Denny as the King.”

My head pounded—
blam, blam, blam
—and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I slid lower in the seat, hoping it would swallow me up in its creaky wooden jaws. And then the spotlight caught a white jumpsuit moving quickly across the stage. The audience began clapping and shouting, “Elvis, Elvis….”

Gladys’s fingers tightened excitedly on my arm. “It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s Elvis.”

33. Jerry Denny as the King

Really, I could have believed it was Elvis, because the person standing onstage looked nothing like Jerry Denny. I stared at the figure posed like a statue in the spotlight, with his legs slightly apart, microphone at his lips, left arm pointing at an angle. I hardly recognized my own dad. Somehow on the stage, he seemed taller. And younger. In the spotlight, the Aloha Eagle costume looked like the real thing, not just white polyester and fake glass stones.

“Well, it’s one for the money.” Elvis began to move.

“Two for the show.” His arm dropped and his head snapped to the other side. “Three to get ready.” He spun the other way. “Now go, cat, go….” Elvis’s heel began bouncing up and down, and pretty soon his whole leg was shaking by itself. As he danced across the stage strumming his guitar, the audience whistled and clapped. Blue and red rhinestone eagles sparkled in the stage lights. The gold stars on his jumpsuit shone as he leaned toward the front row, snapping his fingers and singing about nobody stepping on his blue suede shoes.

I don’t think I breathed during the entire song. Next to me, Gladys clapped her hands and Digger’s leg bounced up and down in time to the music. But I sat frozen in my chair, as if one wrong move might break the whole spell. As if Elvis might glance out into the audience, see me, and in a flash of smoke turn back into Jerry Denny, divorced dad and out-of-work shoe salesman.

When the song finished, somebody behind us shouted, “We love you, Elvis!”

My dad shaded his eyes against the spotlights. “Thank you, honey. I can’t see nothin’ up here, but I love you, too.” That’s when I began to realize that it wasn’t just my dad who was pretending to be Elvis. Everybody in the audience was pretending, too. The people around us weren’t sitting in a dusty old theater in Winona, Illinois, watching a forty-year-old guy from Chicago sing like Elvis. They were picturing themselves somewhere else, watching the real Elvis, the King himself.

Even when Elvis’s belt fell off, people kept right on pretending. In the middle of the song “Suspicious Minds,” when my dad was doing a knee-bending, arm-swinging move, the big gold eagle belt of his Aloha jumpsuit just popped right off and thumped onto the stage. But the music kept right on playing, and Elvis kept singing, and at the end of the song my dad calmly picked up his belt, fastened it back on, and said in his fake Southern drawl, “Well now, folks, sure hope nothin’ else falls off tonight.” The whole audience cracked up.

Later on, my dad came out with an armful of Gladys’s scarves for the song “Love Me Tender.” I guess everybody in Winona must have known about this Elvis tradition, because people started lining up the minute they spotted them. You would have thought he was handing out hundred-dollar bills. There were old ladies, moms with little kids, and even one or two teenagers. The scarf line stretched way past our row. Each time my dad draped one of those scarves over some lady’s shoulders, she got this look on her face like he had just put a wreath of roses around her neck. Or like someone had just told her,
I pronounce you Queen.
It was bizarre.

Viv and Gladys got in line with everybody else, and you could tell my dad was surprised to see them when they reached the front of the stage. As he looked down, his voice wavered a little in the song and a smile crept across his face, although I don’t think anybody noticed it except us. Reaching out, he kissed Viv’s hand before he put a bright yellow scarf around her neck. And then (this was kind of surprising) he bent down on one knee and sang the last line of “Love Me Tender” to eighty-seven-year-old Gladys. “For, my darlin’, I love you, and I always will….”

After he finished singing, my dad draped a lavender scarf around Gladys’s neck and leaned down to kiss her paper-white cheek. The entire audience clapped. Really, it was a pretty touching moment (and I’m a guy). When she got back to her seat, Gladys’s eyes were still bright and sparkling. “If I wasn’t so old,” she whispered to me, “I’d marry Elvis in a minute.”

My dad spotted me during that part of the show, I think. He must have seen Gladys and Viv come back to our row and noticed me sitting beside Digger and Ivory. But I didn’t realize he knew I was in the crowd until the song “Teddy Bear.” He was tossing teddy bears into the audience (apparently this was an Elvis tradition, too). Looking across the theater, he gave a little wave at me and sent a bear flying over five rows of people. As I reached up and caught it, I suddenly had this weird feeling of being five years old again—when little things like getting a stuffed animal from my dad used to make me happy.

34. Such a Night

The audience didn’t want the show to end. Maybe because Winona isn’t the kind of place where much happens, people stayed in their seats and kept on clapping and clapping after the curtain slid closed. My dad finally came out to do an encore. You could tell he wasn’t used to doing encores very often, because he couldn’t find his way out of the stage curtains—all you could see was his hand pushing and tugging on the red velvet drapes for a minute or two.

When he finally did find an opening to slip through, he had to tell the sound guy which track to play. “Number five, Joe,” he said, holding up five fingers. Then he turned toward the audience and wiped the perspiration off his face with a long blue scarf. “Everybody ready to rock?” he shouted into the microphone. The crowd roared. “Well then let’s all stand up and dance to this last number.”

You could hear a whooshing groan echoing through the whole theater as people got up from their wooden seats. But when “Jailhouse Rock” began playing, everybody started swaying and bobbing their heads to the music. Some women—like the very wide ones in front of me—even tried twisting their hips. Winona, Illinois, became one big cell block dancing to the Jailhouse Rock…

I’m embarrassed to admit I stood up with everybody else. Ivory, Digger, and I pretended we were playing a huge piano. Leaning from left to right, we moved our hands back and forth along the seats in front of us as if they were a big keyboard. When I thought about it later, I couldn’t believe I acted like such a geek. What thirteen-year-old from Boston dances to “Jailhouse Rock”? What had happened to me in Chicago?

It was easy to get pulled into the illusion even after the show ended. We watched people posing for pictures with my dad and getting autographs in the theater lobby after he finished. They would walk away, waving his signature in the air proudly, as if it was the real thing. As if it said Elvis Presley, not Jerry Denny.

I could feel people turning to stare at the six of us when we left, too. I swear you could almost hear them whispering,
Look, it’s the King and his family
as we walked out beside my dad in his rhinestone-sparkling jumpsuit. It made me feel like turning and waving, the way movie stars do when they stroll down the red carpet to their limos.

Once we got outside, my dad couldn’t stop talking. His voice was loud and excited as we stood by Viv’s car in the parking lot. “So what’d you think? Wasn’t that a great crowd tonight?” His hands gestured in the air. “I mean, I felt like they were really with me tonight. They were with me, weren’t they?”

You could tell he was still in Elvis land and didn’t even notice the cold. It had started to snow and, weirdly, even the falling snow kind of looked like rhinestones as it sparkled in the parking lot lights. My dad’s voice rolled on, throwing out question after question—and then answering most of them without even waiting for us. “How was my voice tonight, Viv? I’ve been working hard on the voice all week. I thought the voice was on tonight. It was, wasn’t it? You know”—he ruffled his Elvis hair—“I can’t come up with a single thing that went wrong. The voice, the moves, it was all working tonight. Man, Elvis would have been proud of me tonight, wouldn’t he? I think he would’ve been proud.”

He draped his arm over my shoulders. “And then to have my son here and my friends and my favorite neighbor, Gladys”—he broke into a wide smile—“I mean, what a night, as Elvis would say!”