I sat, still stupefied from the news, and listened. My friends went on talking.
“My old man hated Elvis.”
“So did mine.”
“He was always screaming at me, ‘Get that garbage off the radio!’”
“Mine was a religious nut. He said the devil had sent Elvis, and anybody who listened to his music was going to hell.”
“I wish my old man was alive today to see who the kids are idolizing now.”
“Yeah, Elvis wouldn’t look so bad compared to some of those weirdos they got today.”
“He probably wouldn’t even be noticed.”
“You really scored with a girl because she thought you sounded like Elvis?”
“Doris Ann Plummer, right in the back seat out behind the National Guard Armory.”
“I always used Johnny Mathis.”
“Well, Doris Ann wasn’t exactly a great conquest. I found out later she’d do it if you sang like Lassie.”
“Everybody had somebody like that in their school.”
“Yeah, but just one.”
“Imagine if it had been like it is now back then.”
“I’d have never graduated from high school.”
“I guess we were pretty naive back then compared to the kids now.”
“Maybe we’re better off.”
“Maybe. I wonder if we’d have taken drugs if we’d had ’em back then.”
“Hell, I thought drinking a beer was the wildest thing I could do.”
“I went to a fraternity party at Auburn when I was a senior in high school. I drank gin and 7-Up and danced with college girls. I didn’t think there was anything you could do any better or wilder than that.”
“We didn’t have it so bad growing up.”
“At least we had Elvis.”
“He was the greatest ever.”
“The King.”
“I don’t think there will ever be anything like him again.”
“Hard to believe he’s dead.”
“Think he was on drugs?”
“Probably.”
“Ready for another beer?”
“Let’s drink one to Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
“To Elvis.”
I joined in. “To Elvis.”
The King was still singing on the radio:
“Love me tender,
Love me true,
Make all my dreams fulfilled.
For my darling, I love you.
And I always will.”
* * *
I have never forgotten that day at the beach. It was like the day John Kennedy was killed. Like the day Martin Luther King was killed. Like the day Robert Kennedy was killed. Like the day Nixon resigned.
You never forget days like that, and you’re never quite the same after them. There have been so many days like that, it seems, for my generation — the Baby Boomers who were minding to our business of growing up when all hell broke loose in the early sixties.
A few weeks after Elvis’s death, I heard another piece of startling news. I heard they found Elvis dead in his bathroom. I heard he died straining for a bowel movement.
The King, we had called him, but he had gotten fat and at the age of forty-two he had died straining for a bowel movement. Or so was the rumor. I have spent much of the past seven years hoping against hope that it wasn’t true.
I AM THIRTY-EIGHT years old — it’s approximately half-time of the promised three score and ten — and I don’t have any idea what is taking place around me anymore.
Lord knows, I have tried to understand. I have dutifully watched “Donahue” in an attempt to broaden myself into a creature adjusted to the eighties, but it has been a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.
How did Phil Donahue do it? He’s even older than I am, with the gray hair to show for it, but he seems to understand what people mean when they talk about the new way to live. Me, I feel like an alien in my own country. These new lifestyles seem to be in direct contrast to the way they taught living when I was a child. Back then, gay meant, “1. Happy and carefree; merry. 2. Brightly colorful and ornamental. 3. Jaunty; sporty. 4. Full of or given to lighthearted pleasure. 5. Rakish; libertine.” (That’s straight from my high school dictionary.) Pot was something you cooked in, and back then nobody ate mushrooms. Where did I miss a turn?
The first hint that the world was taking leave of me came after Elvis died. The women who mourned him were older and had beehive hairdos and children of their own. Their teeny-bopper, socks-rolled-down days were far behind them. They were my age and they were weeping not only for Elvis, I think now, but for the realization that an era and a time — their time — was passing to another generation. To know that Elvis had gotten old and sick and fat enough to die was to know that their own youth had faded as well.
Elvis, forty-two. Elvis, dead. The voice that sang for the children of the late forties and early fifties stilled, and in its place a cacophony of raucous melodies from scruffy characters playing to the screams of young earthlings of the modern generation, to whom happiness and normalcy was a computerized hamburger at McDonald’s and mandatory attendance at earsplitting concerts given by people dressed as dragons or barely dressed at all. Elvis may have shaken his pelvis, but he never by-God showed it to anybody on stage.
Why this gap between me and the younger generation? Why, in my thirties, do I have more in common with people twenty years older than with people five or ten years younger? Where is my tolerance for change and modernization? Why would I enjoy hitting Boy George in the mouth? Where did the years go and where did the insanity of the eighties come from? And why did I ever leave home in the first place?
Home. That’s probably it. I don’t seem to fit in today because it was so different yesterday.
Home. I think of it and the way it was every time I see or hear something modern that challenges tradition as I came to know it.
Home.
