Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (16 page)
Read Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Online
Authors: Clay Reynolds
This was a typical Texas fishing camp. It was not, however, an ideal place to stay. My idea of “roughing it” is settling for a non-franchised motel and no room service. But camp out we would; I was prepared for whatever discomforts might arise as I drove up to the gate. The proprietor, a gruff, elderly gentleman with a Yankee accent and no apparent sense of humor, carefully checked my vehicle to make sure I was transporting no guns, dogs, drugs, women, wanted criminals, or any materials with which I might build a fire (another illusion shattered); he also inspected my trout stamp and fishing tackle before directing me to The Poet’s campsite and wishing me well. As the earlier trout release had happened the week before, he assured me the state hatchery truck would be arriving momentarily to deliver more fish to the stream. It never showed up.
###
The Poet was already mid-river when I arrived. I had to admire his approximation of the picturesque angler. He had outfitted himself in the height of fisherman fashion. He had a fly rod in hand, a smile on his face, and no trout in his creel. To his credit, though, he had not accessorized himself in as lavish a style as I now knew was possible. In fact, he looked a bit scruffy, more like a traditional Texas fisherman merely pretending to angle. “They’re in here!” he called out to me. “I can see ’em.”
It took me the better part of a half-hour to ready myself to join him. I decided to forgo the fly rod, and reached for my new “Ultra Light” rig. I had terrible trouble mastering the art of tying a lure onto a four-pound-test line. It has the consistency of gossamer, and if I pulled tightly enough to fasten the knot, it broke. Finally, however, I managed to secure it well enough, and I donned The Poet’s spare pair of waders and stepped into the bright green flow of the Guadalupe. The right boot immediately filled with icy water.
“Those may leak,” The Poet said when my blasphemous declamations caught his attention. “There’s some duct tape in the truck,” he offered helpfully.
By this time, I was wet up to my right knee, so I decided to tough it out and made my first cast, just as I had seen on television, right over a shelf of rock which should provide excellent cover for fish. The lure snaked out beautifully, then hung up on a low-hanging mesquite limb. I gave it a light tug, and the line broke.
I waded out of the water to fetch another spinner. While on the bank, I removed the waders, emptied the boot, applied the duct tape, then returned. It leaked even worse now, but I managed to grit my teeth against the chill and to make five or six decent casts before losing the second lure. The Poet, apparently tired of my accusatory discourse with the Deity, waded out of sight downstream.
After about three hours of unmatched pleasure, I was gratified to see him returning. The score for the first day’s efforts, using lures as ante: Trout-22, Fishermen-0. I also had managed to stumble into a hole. Water spilled into the other leg of the waders, so I was soused to the crotch. Now, as we emerged from the water, it was starting to rain, so we began setting up our camp in an icy drizzle.
The tent went up without more than the usual amount of cursing, and soon we had coaxed a flame from our propane stove and cooked and eaten the steak and drunk the wine (smuggled in past the proprietor by secreting it in a book bag) I brought for the first night’s meal. The Poet retired early and vowed to hit the water before dawn, if possible, and to limit-out before the hatchery truck arrived with fresh stock. I figured that the trout would wait for sunrise if I wanted to sleep in, and I had doubts about the truck’s reliability, but I said nothing. By the first gray light of the next morning, sure enough, he was back in midstream, and I, attempting to be a good sport, was wet to the crotch again. The dousing of the day before had apparently opened a leak in the other boot, and both filled as soon as I stepped into the river. At least the rain had moved on.
We took a breakfast break at midmorning, but we still had caught no fish. I, in the meantime, had sacrificed a half-dozen rather expensive lures to the Guadalupe’s submerged rocks and had given up on the notion of catching anything more than a cold. It was nearly three in the afternoon, actually, before The Poet landed his first rainbow. I was nearly as excited as he as I flayed and stumbled in my soggy waders through the water toward him, eager to inspect his trophy.
Now, the only trout with which I was previously familiar (apart from a restaurant plate, of course) was the famous speckled variety from the Texas Gulf Coast. They must be fourteen inches long to keep, and they weigh in at several pounds. The flopping rainbow on The Poet’s stringer was nearly half the length of my hand. I had used larger bait when he and I fished Lake Sabine. I expressed delight at his triumph, but inwardly I conjured a dream of a supper of New Braunfels wurst, complete with potato salad and cole slaw, with cherry cobbler for dessert. The Poet tarnished the vision by announcing that with “five or six more,” we would eat well that night.
Resigned, and out of spinners, I fetched a bag of corn and a supply of tiny hooks from his truck and joined him once more.
Clearly, his determination to trout fish in Texas was overriding his epicurean common sense.
I previously tried the fly rod for several hours with no other result than I kept stumbling and filling my waders with fresh and even colder water. One angler down the way actually caught two trout on flies, but it took him six hours to do it. I reckoned that fly fishing was about the hardest work the sport offers. You never stand still and just think. You never relax. You’re always casting the tiny, weightless flies out onto the stream and allowing them to sink or float and drift down to where the line is made taut by the current; then you whip it around and do it all over again while you try not to lose your footing on slippery stones and fall into a hole that would swallow a small car. How one could catch a fish in this manner bewildered me. People claim to do it all the time, but I wished to be drowned in my leaky waders if I could see how the process is more productive than sitting on the bank and bait fishing. At least with that method, you can be still and consider life for a moment or two after you cast. And the line is generally heavy enough that the featherweight of the bait won’t snap it off before it hits the water.
With the corn, though, I had better luck. At least something was
stealing
my bait. I still lost about a dozen hooks when they snagged on errant rocks and busted the four-pound-test line. In the meantime, The Poet added four of the small, brightly colored trout to his collection. “The next one’s yours,” he assured me. Indeed it was! My very next cast brought back a reasonably large (by the standards of the day) rainbow trout. It was my single catch of the day, of the entire trip, for that matter. I figured, taking into account gasoline and lost lures and hooks and flies, that the tiny fish I delicately placed next to The Poet’s limit cost me $145.
This did not count the cost of Sudafed, which I would be imbibing by the liter the very next day.
With that catch, though, I had had enough trout fishing for one outing. I was wet to the waist, cold, miserable, and my ankles ached from more than a half-dozen sprains sustained as I tried to navigate the river’s stony bed in my water-logged waders. If the water hadn’t been so cold, I probably would have been in serious pain. I limped and slogged out to the bank, stripped down to my sodden jeans and socks, and sulked the rest of the afternoon away. But The Poet was undaunted. He fished until dark. My vision of New Braunfels smoked sausage evaporated utterly when The Poet announced that we had enough trout for an evening meal. “Get the butter,” he said. “I’ve got potatoes in the truck.”
###
I have to say that the trout The Poet prepared over our sputtering stove that night was utterly delicious. Seasoned only with salt, pepper, and a bit of lemon, supplemented with fried potatoes and other vegetables, it was satisfying and filling in spite of our diminutive catch. I was surprised and even came to realize that I probably ate better on the banks of that soughing river than I would have in New Braunfels, where I would have spent twenty bucks or more for a meal I would have had trouble enjoying for all the stares and frowns we would have elicited from other diners once they got a whiff of us. The temperature also plummeted, and I suspect that getting that close to a motel would have ended our camping experience, as well. The only heat we had in our frigid camp came from a propane lantern. After our dinner, we drank good quality whiskey, also smuggled in, and smoked and laughed and talked, and we found the camaraderie we had come to the river to enjoy.
On the other hand, had the state hatchery truck shown up, and had we landed our possession limits on flies and lures instead of Del Monte’s Whole Kernel, had the fish been larger than happily swimming around in our living room aquarium, had my equipment been a bit more comfortable and efficient, I might have been happier with the whole notion of trout fishing in Texas. Somehow, even with the fine meal and companionship topping off our trip, the whole idea of angling for trout in the Guadalupe still seems ridiculous.
###
Fishing, generally, is a sport for people who are dedicated to the proposition of collecting the equipment, accoutrements, and experiences themselves. Catching the fish is a secondary or maybe even a tertiary priority for most; it’s the preparation, the activity, and talking about it afterwards that makes it worthwhile. More than one angler of my acquaintance has admitted that the best part of any fishing trip is preparing for it. Not catching anything, or merely catching them and throwing them back is an ordinary part of the whole enterprise. The goal isn’t to provide dinner; the goal is to fish. That, it seems, is well enough, and it just doesn’t get any better than that.
But I think that I’ve had about as much trout fishing in Texas as any one man can stand. It’s just not a sport for the Lone Star State. The trout aren’t indigenous to our waterways, and they don’t seem to have enough savvy to bite flies. There is something about catching them on cooked corn that takes away from the art—even from the poetry—of the whole endeavor. It’s also a fairly expensive business that produces, even at its best, some very small fish. Rather like surfing in Arizona and snow skiing in Florida, where some enterprising tourist-trappers have set up artificial conditions for such activities, trout fishing in Texas just isn’t the right sport in the right place. While I admire The Poet’s determination to have the experience without the expense of a trip to Colorado or Canada, I think that our next fishing expedition should be directed toward any of the several varieties of bass in southwestern lakes or perhaps the catfish along the rivers of East Texas. I’ll leave the trout streams of Texas to those who wade in dreams.
ELVIS AND US
“If one plays bad music, people don’t listen,
and if one plays good music, people don’t talk.”
—Oscar Wilde
I never was an Elvis fan. I realize that such heresy, when said aloud, leaves the speaker liable for the same sort of nasty looks reserved for those who ask for the smoking section in restaurants; but I can’t help it. I just never was a big fan of the music—or the person—of Elvis Presley.
Oh, I must confess that as a teenager, I listened to his music on the radio and danced to it at the Teen Canteen where, if I was lucky, Sherry French would be untaken for one of The King’s slow ballads. But he really wasn’t “The King” then; he was just Elvis Presley: “Elvis the Pelvis,” a somewhat ridiculous country boy who made silly girls do silly things when he accused them of being “Hound Dogs” and swung his hips in a suggestive manner. I remember Vicki Crossland, big sister of one of my friends, actually wore out her 45-rpm copy of “Love Me Tender” and cried real tears every time she spun that scratchy plastic on her portable phonograph in their garage. (Her father banned Elvis and his music from the house.) Jack, her brother, and I would hide behind the stack of used batteries their father kept in the corner and laugh ourselves comatose while she sighed and swooned all by herself among the greasy cobwebs and broken lawnmowers.
By the time I arrived in college, I regarded Elvis as just another of those “older” and already dead stars—like Buddy Holly or Patsy Cline or Johnny Horton—makers of music that had been completely routed by the British Invasion but that, somehow, continued to hang around on the ghostly fringes of AM radio. Elvis’s music was old fashioned, a little downbeat, and with the exception of “In the Ghetto,” thoroughly lacking in the social consciousness required of most of the songs of the late sixties.
He also made incredibly bad movies. I mean, most of the Beatles’ or anybody else’s films were stupid, mindless funk; but they were at least fun to watch, and the lip-synching was fairly precise. All Elvis ever seemed to do in his films was stand around and look handsome and soulful in between badly staged musical numbers that included plastic-haired women dancing around in various stages of undress. Elvis, to coin a sixties phrase, just wasn’t “my bag.”
Later, when Revolution was giving way to Rolex among the baby boomers, my suspicions about Elvis being over the hill were confirmed by the grotesque image of the overweight King cavorting around the stage at Caesar’s Palace crooning “I Did it My Way” to a bunch of overdressed, overjeweled, and overaged swooners. When he threw his sweat-soaked scarf into the grappling manicures of Las Vegas and elsewhere, I could only shake my head and link him with other sad examples of middle-age heartthrobs such as Tom Jones. Like Perry Como, Tony Bennett, or Andy Williams, Elvis, I was sure, was done. He didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, or even Jim Croce. He might have been the man who combined R&B with C&W to produce Rock and Roll; they might call him “The King”; but insofar as I and most of the contemporary music lovers I knew were concerned, “The King” was nothing but a paper-crown has-been, a poor man’s Frank Sinatra, soon to be as forgotten as Fabian or Wayne Newton. “Elvis,” I proclaimed when his name came up, “ ‘has left the building’ for good.”
I was wrong.
###
I remember the week that Elvis died. Not the day. I wasn’t so into Elvis that I marked the day, but what I did mark was the political cartoon showing Elvis entering Heaven. Bing Crosby’s recent death had prompted a newspaper sketch illustrating a giant hand welcoming the man who made Christmas forever white onto a cloud-floored stage. Now, the same graphic pundit showed the beloved Bing, the man with the million-dollar growth in his throat (or so it was rumored), offering the spangled and jump-suited Elvis a guitar as he was ushered through the Pearly Gates. This, I thought, was touching, but a bit over the top. I mean, I didn’t have much feeling about Bing Crosby then; he belonged to my father’s generation. But I had less assurance that “Elvis the Pelvis” was destined for a celestial pop choir. Unsettling rumors about drugs and other things had already surfaced; and Graceland, Presley’s adult home, had instantly become a musical mecca for thousands of devoted vassals, anxious to tread the very carpets of the stately mansion in which the chief Royal of Rock had lived. The Deity, I always believed, could be particularly nasty about self-appointed temporal gods; it seemed to me that Bing and Elvis, especially, had highly dubious claims on eternal star billing.
Those were dark days, though. Watergate was synonymous with scandal; Vietnam was still a fresh and bloody memory; war raged in Central America, Asia, and the Middle East; and all of us were anxiously awaiting Reaganomics to trickle down. A lot of us expected music to once more take the lead in calling for social and political reform, for peace and love and brother- and sisterhood. What we got instead was Willy and Waylon and a collection of “Austin Outlaws,” who were no less silly than Elvis, and who, we imagined, demonstrated in their personal excesses the danger of popular music’s effects on those who produced it. Popular stars were at a nadir, then. Comedians were setting themselves on fire with their own narcotics, musicians were drowning in swimming pools, disco continued, and the punk rockers had a stranglehold on overtly sexual unintelligible lyrics. It looked like Rock and Roll was finally dead.
It was about then that I visited Graceland for the first time. I didn’t go to Memphis for that purpose; but since I was there with some friends—all of whom shared my cynical view of “The King” and his courtiers—we decided to kill an afternoon wandering the grounds and making satiric marvel of the purple opulence required to sustain a true rock idol. We found what we were looking for.
At the time, Graceland was a much more primitive place to visit than it soon became. On that steamy October afternoon, we parked in a dilapidated strip center across the street, braved traffic on the newly renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard (we couldn’t believe that, for starters), passed through the lyre gate, and plunked down a couple of dollars each for the privilege of hiking up to the mansion. Once there, we were told, if a large enough group gathered, a tour would be conducted. Our group’s size failed to meet the standard, so we were permitted to wander through the house more or less on our own. Stern security guards were the only signs of life inside.
We saw the ground floor with the living and dining rooms, the basement TV room with its three sets, the pool room with its fabric-covered walls and ceiling, and the jungle room with its fountain and gargantuan, ugly furniture. And we saw mirrors, lots of mirrors. Ceilings and walls made of mirrors appeared throughout the house. “Maybe just a touch narcissistic,” one of my party whispered.
Our self-guided tour was marked by soft sneers at the complete lack of taste, the artlessness of the furnishings, the horrendous absence of any eye for color, form, or even fashionable mundanity. Graceland was, we whispered to each other, painfully mediocre: the typical residence of someone who came into more money than he knew what to do with. Couldn’t Elvis locate a decent decorator? Couldn’t he at least
appear
to live like a king?
From the house, we were directed by signs to the Meditation Garden, where The King and members of his family were laid to rest beneath bronze slabs. This turned out to be both the high and the low point of the tour. Situated adjacent to the smallish swimming pool, it is bordered on the other side by a semicircle of stone and stained glass. Flowers bedecked Elvis’s grave to the point of obscuring the writing etched on his sarcophagus, which is headed by an “eternal flame” enclosed in glass. It was out on the day we visited.
When we came up, another small group stood there, listening to piped recordings of Elvis singing “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace” over and over; some were openly weeping. One woman prayed over a rosary.
“What does that stand for?” one of my companions asked, pointing to a logo engraved on Elvis’s slab. The letters
T C
and
B
were arranged around a lightning bolt.
I spoke without thinking. “Tacky, Crass, and Banal,” I said.
A woman standing nearby turned on me and slashed my arm with a plastic long-stemmed rose. “Have a little respect,” she ordered in a tearful hiss. “This is His grave.” She then threw her polyethylene tribute to The King atop his slab and rushed off.
“It stands for ‘Taking Care of Business,’ ” another mourner explained softly. “That was his philosophy.”
I was stunned. I would have expected this sort of reaction in Jerusalem at the purported tomb of Christ, or at the Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, or even, perhaps, at the site of Custer’s Last Stand. Once, I had even shushed an overloud American tourist in Canterbury Cathedral while I stood pensively over the spot where Thomas á Becket was martyred.
But this was the grave of Elvis Aaron Presley. Rock and Roll Star. Born 1935, died as a result of a heart attack that possibly was induced by an overdose of prescription drugs. Or not. But it was only Elvis Presley, in any case. His contributions to Western Civilization included no grand “I have a dream” speeches, or “Ask not what your country can do for you” admonitions, but rather such gems of wisdom as “That’s All Right [Mama]” and “Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Shoes.” Elvis Presley: Poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who moved from sometimes truck driver to radio crooner to recording artist to . . . to king? Hell, I thought, he never even won a Grammy for his pop music—only for his gospel recordings—he didn’t write his own stuff, and he didn’t even play a great guitar, not like Pete Townsend, Jimi Hendricks or Eric Clapton. He wasn’t John Lennon or Mick Jagger or Otis Redding or James Brown or Elton John. He wasn’t even Johnny Rivers or Ray Charles or Billy Joel. He couldn’t croon like Gene Pitney, lacked Roy Orbison’s range, and was unable even to wade into the schmaltz of Bobby Goldsboro. You couldn’t make out to his music the way you could to Johnny Mathis or Nat King Cole; there was no Moody Blues mystique or driving intensity such as came from the Doors. There wasn’t even the frayed and dusty romance of Blood, Sweat, and Tears or Credence;, or the slickness of The Association or Chicago. Elvis’s time passed quickly. He belonged to the same generation of has-beens that included Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Herman’s Hermits, and that other notorious pretender to the throne, Jerry Lee Lewis, who at least wrote most of his own music.
Sure, he had a lot of gold and platinum records; sure, he made a fortune in movies and concerts; but he belonged to another time and place, to another generation.
In short, I had heard the rockers singing, and Elvis just didn’t sing for me.
This opinion was affirmed, I thought, when we departed this gaudy shrine in south Memphis. Along the stone wall fronting the estate was a collage of graffiti scrawlings. They read, “We did it in your pool, Elvis,” and “I smoked a joint in Elvis’s john.” And those were fairly typical of the less reverent observations etched on the rocks out front. I breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, back at the grave site, I thought the world had gone mad and that Elvis had somehow been beatified.
“In ten years, this place will be a parking lot,” I predicted to my friends. “It’s too near the airport to survive.”
Wrong again.
###
A little over a decade later, I revisited Graceland. It was a deliberate trip, this time, a pilgrimage to seek out, if I could, what exactly keeps The King alive.
Did I say “alive?” Yes. That’s the word. Apart from tabloid reports of Elvis sightings, there is no doubt that Elvis Presley lives. Oh, I don’t mean that whatever corpse interred in the Meditation Garden didn’t belong to Elvis Aaron Presley, and I don’t think that the now seventy-something crooner turns up in supermarkets and shopping malls, taunting his former fans with a ghostly shade. I mean rather that he’s more alive than Lennon and Hendricks, more alive than Holly or Cline or Cash, more alive than Jack or Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.; even more alive than Ronald Reagan. In a way, he’s more alive than most of the singers and performers and icons of culture who are still drawing breath and interest on their fantastic earnings. For Elvis is alive in the heart of America.
Anyone who doubts this must have spent the past thirty years on Mars. That might not even be distant enough; we have no real idea just how far radio waves carry into space. It could be that even beyond Pluto, Elvis impersonators thrive. It’s possible that some of them, like their terrestrial counterparts, derive a pretty good living from dressing up in white, spangly jumpsuits, driving around in pink Cadillacs, and attempting to imitate the deep baritone melodies of The King.
It doesn’t take a public affairs expert to note that in America, at least, Elvis-ana is part and parcel of craft shows, flea markets, and garage sales as well as some of the finer gift shops around the country. In some homes his portrait hangs next to that of presidents or popes. From ceramic statues to paintings on black velvet, from authentic original 45s to signed album covers, Elvis memorabilia and collectables constitute a fairly decent industry in America. There are more Elvis experts than there are Elvis stories to tell, more active fan clubs devoted to Elvis than to any half a dozen living artists, and Elvis film festivals are frequent annual events.
So I had to go back, and I had to determine what there was about Elvis—apart from the invention of the CD rerelease—that had made his recordings sell more since his death than they did before, what kept middle-aged America steering their motor homes to Memphis, what, indeed, kept anyone else from seriously pretending to the throne of popular music. The answer, I figured, had to be at Graceland. I must have overlooked it the first time.
Graceland had not become a parking lot. Instead, they built a parking lot for it behind an elaborate Graceland Center that houses, among other things, slick, modern shops full of Elvis souvenirs. There is a movie theatre that shows a documentary about Elvis’s life, a museum that contains nothing but Elvis’s motor vehicles, and a tour that takes visitors through Elvis’s
Lisa Marie
and
Hound Dog II
Jetstar planes that have been towed in and parked nearby. There is a post office and a bookstore and a record shop. Some of the old tourist courts along the boulevard have been refurbished in pinks and blues and advertise “Twenty-four Hour Elvis Movies” in each room. And, of course, there is Graceland itself.