had separated. He and I were even closer in our friendship after that. We shared a loss of parent uncommon to children then, but we rolled quite well with our punch, I suppose. We spent hours together deep down in the woods behind his house. He talked of his mother. I talked of my father.
Danny wanted us to become blood brothers. He had seen two Indians on television cut their fingers and then allow their blood to mix. I wanted to be Danny’s blood brother, but I was afraid to cut my finger. I suggested that we swap comic books instead.
* * *
It was a simple childhood, one that I didn’t fully cherish until I had long grown out of it. Only then did I appreciate the fact that I was allowed to grow into manhood having never once spent a day at the country club pool, or playing baseball where they put the ball on a tee like they do for children today, or growing my hair down over my shoulders, or wearing T-shirts advertising punk rock bands, or smoking anything stronger than a rabbit tobacco cigarette wrapped in paper torn from a brown bag and, later, an occasional Marlboro Dudley Stamps would bring on camping trips from his father’s store.
It was a most happy childhood, because the only real fear we had was that we might somehow find ourselves at odds with Frankie Garfield. Frankie was the town bully who often made life miserable for all of us, especially any new child who moved into Moreland. There was the new kid with the harelip, for instance.
The afternoon of his first day in school, the new kid rode his bicycle to Cureton and Cole’s, where Frankie was involved in beating up a couple of fifth graders for their NuGrapes and Zagnut candy bars.
The new kid parked his bicycle, and as he walked to the entrance of the store, he reached down to pick up a shiny nail off the ground. Frankie spotted him.
“Hey, Harelip,” he called, “that’s my nail.”
Nobody had bothered to inform the new kid about Frankie Garfield. The rest of us knew that if Frankie said the nail was his, the best move was to drop the nail immediately, apologize profusely, and then offer to buy Frankie anything inside the store he desired.
The new kid, however, made a serious, nearly fatal, mistake. He indicated, in no uncertain terms, that Frankie was filled with a rather unpleasant substance common to barnyards. Then he put the nail in his pocket and began to walk inside the store.
He didn’t make it past the first step before Frankie began to beat him unmercifully. At first, I think Frankie was simply amusing himself, as a dog amuses himself by catching a turtle in his mouth and slinging it around in the air.
Then the new kid made another mistake. He tried to fight back against Frankie. Now Frankie was mad. When he finally tired of beating his victim, Frankie left him there in a crumpled heap and rode off on the new kid’s bicycle.
I suppose Frankie did have some degree of heart about him. He let the new kid keep the nail.
We were involved in some occasional juvenile delinquency, but nothing more flagrant than stealing a few watermelons, or shooting out windows in abandoned houses, or pilfering a few peaches over at Cates’s fruit stand.
We went to church, didn’t talk back to our elders, studied history in which America never lost a war, and were basically what our parents wanted us to be. Except when it came to Elvis.
* * *
Whatever else we were, we were the first children of television, and it was television that brought us Elvis. He would prove to be the first break between our parents and ourselves. That disagreement seems so mild today after the generational war that broke out in the late sixties, but those were more timid times when naiveté was still in flower.
Elvis was a Pied Piper wearing ducktails. He sang and he moaned and wiggled, and we followed him ... taking our first frightening steps of independence.
RADIO PERHAPS WOULD have made Elvis popular, but television made him The King. We could see him, and there never had been anything like him before.
The only music I knew prior to Elvis was the hymns from the Methodist Cokesbury hymnal; “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Good Night, Irene” from my mother’s singing while she ironed; and “Peace in the Valley,” which I had learned watching “The Red Foley Show” on Saturday nights after my aunt bought the first television in the family.
But Elvis. Ducktails. His guitar. Uh-uh, Baby, don’t you step on my blue suede shoes, and don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.
Elvis thrust a rebellious mood upon us. I was ten or eleven when I decided to grow my own ducktails and refused to get my little-boy flattop renewed. As my hair grew out, I pushed back the sides by greasing them down, and then I brought my hair together at the back of my head, giving it the appearance of the north end of a southbound duck. I wouldn’t wash my hair, either, for fear it might lose what I considered to be a perfect set.
“If you don’t wash your hair, young man,” my mother would warn me, “you’re going to get head lice.”
I didn’t believe her. Nothing, not even head lice, could live in that much greasy gook.
I also pushed my pants down low like Elvis wore his.
“Pull your pants up before they fall off,” my mother would say.
“This is how Elvis wears his pants,” would be my inevitable reply.
“I don’t know what you children see in him,” she would counter.
I wrote her off as completely without musical taste and suggested that Red Foley was an incompetent old geezer who couldn’t carry Elvis’s pick.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with young’uns these days,” was my mother’s subsequent lament.
My stepfather eventually entered the ducktail disagreement and dragged me to the barber to reinstate my shorn looks. I cried and pouted and refused to come to the dinner table. Why were these people so insistent that I maintain the status quo when there was something new out there to behold?
We fought the Elvis battle in my house daily. Sample warfare:
“How can you stand that singing?”
“Elvis is a great singer.”
“Sounds like a lot of hollering and screaming to me.”
“It’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
“It’s garbage.”
“It’s Elvis.”
“It’s garbage.”
“It is not.”
“Don’t you talk back to me, young man!”
“I wasn’t talking back.”
“You’re talking back now.”
“I
