on crowded beaches there isn’t room for teen-aged boys to throw frisbees. Frisbees are difficult to control and difficult to catch, so they’re always landing on people who are trying to relax in the sun. Sometimes, frisbees even knock over somebody’s beer.
A kid knocked over my beer with a frisbee at the beach once. I threatened him with a lawsuit and then put this curse on him: “May your voice never change and your zits win prizes at county fairs.” I hate it when somebody knocks over my beer at the beach.
When kids are college age, the girls still lie on towels getting tanned and worrying about getting their hair wet. The boys, meanwhile, have given up throwing frisbees and have joined the girls, lying next to them on their own towels.
They play loud rock music, and when the girls ask them to rub suntan oil on their backs, they enthusiastically oblige ... especially if the girl has unsnapped the back of her tiny top and the boy knows that her breasts are unleashed, for all practical purposes. The beach habits of people this age are basically preliminary sexual exercises, but rarely do they lead to anything more advanced later in the day. As numerous studies have shown, it is quite uncomfortable to attempt to have sex after an afternoon of lying in the sun because of the unpleasant feeling that individuals get when they rub their sunburned skin against that of someone whose epidermis is in the same painful condition.
At about age thirty, most people have the good sense to stop frying their skin in the sun for hours. They know by then that having sex is more fun than having a sunburn; they have heeded all the reports about how lying in the sun causes skin cancer; and they are usually working on their first nervous breakdown by age thirty, and all they want to do at the beach is sit there and relax while drinking cold beer.
The three of us that day at Hilton Head had already tiptoed into our thirties and the beer was going down exceptionally well. I have no idea what women talk about when they’re sitting on a beach together without any men around, but when no women are present, men talk about the physical attributes of everything that happens to walk past them — or is lying close to them on a towel — wearing a bikini.
Me and Price and Franklin were doing just that:
“Good God.”
“Where?”
“Left.”
“Good God.”
“How old do you think she is?”
“Eighteen.”
“No way. Sixteen.”
“Did they look like that when we were sixteen?”
“They couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“If they had, I wouldn’t have lived this long. Some daddy would have shot me.”
“Yeah, and they got the pill today, too.”
“I wonder if the boys their age know how lucky they are.”
“They don’t have any idea.”
“Wonder how old they are when they start these days?”
“Rodney Dangerfield said the kids are doing it so young these days that his daughter bought a box of Cracker Jacks and the prize was a diaphragm.”
“Great line.”
“Look coming here.”
“It’s a land whale.”
“Damn, she’s fat.”
“If somebody told her to haul ass, she’d have to make two trips.”
“That’s awful.”
“Hey, we’re out of beer.”
I remember distinctly that it was Franklin who went back to the condo to get more beer. I also remember distinctly that the month was August and the year was 1977. We had the radio playing. It was a country station.
Franklin was gone thirty minutes. When he came back, he had another twelve-pack. He also had a troubled look on his face.
“What took you so long?” Price asked him. “You didn’t call Sweet Thing back home, did you?”
“You’re not going to believe what I just heard on television,” he answered.
I had just taken the first pull on my fresh beer when I heard him utter three incredible words.
“Elvis is dead,” he said.
Elvis is dead. The words didn’t fit somehow. The queen of England is dead. There has been a revolution in South America and the dictator is dead. Some rock singer has been found in his hotel room with a needle in his arm and he is dead. All that made sense, but not Elvis is dead.
“They figure he had a heart attack,” said the bad news bearer.
A heart attack? Elvis Presley couldn’t have a heart attack. He was too young to have a heart attack. He was too young to have anything like that. Elvis Presley was my idol when I was a kid. Elvis changed my life. Elvis turned on my entire generation. I saw Love Me Tender three times. He died in Love Me Tender, but that was just a movie.
I figured this was some sort of joke. Right, Elvis Presley had a heart attack. And where did they find his body? In Heartbreak Hotel, of course.
The music had stopped on the radio. A man was talking.
“Elvis Presley is dead,” said the voice. “He was forty-two.”
Forty-two? That had to be wrong, too. How could he be that old? Elvis had to be younger than that. He was one of us, wasn’t he? If he was forty-two, maybe he could have had a heart attack. If he was over forty, that meant he probably had wrinkles and maybe his hair had already fallen out and he had been wearing a wig.
But if Elvis Presley was forty-two and old enough to die, what did that say about me and the generation he had captured? He had been what separated us from our parents. He had been our liberator. He played the background music while we grew up.
Elvis is dead. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so good myself.
“Damn,” said Price, “if Elvis is dead, that means we’re getting old, too.”
“Damn if it don’t,” said Franklin.
I asked for another beer.
The announcer on the radio had stopped talking, and the three of us fell silent as an eerie sound came forth. It was Elvis’s voice. It was a dead man’s voice. Elvis was singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” It was spooky.
“‘Don’t Be Cruel’,” said Price. “That was his best ever.’’
“‘One Night With You’ was my favorite,” Franklin said. “I remember dancing with Doris Ann Plummer and singing along with Elvis in her ear. ‘Oooooooone ni-ite with yuuuuu is all I’m way-ayting fooor.’ Doris Ann said I sounded just like Elvis, and soon as I got her in the car after the dance, it was
