all our children.”
I suppose if it hadn’t been Elvis who ruined us, it would have been something, or somebody, else. But it was Elvis, and it was his music that set us off on a course different from that of our parents.
“That Elvis,” the old men around the stove at Cureton and Cole’s would say, “ain’t nothin’ but a white nigger.”
“Don’t sing nothin’ but nigger music.”
“That little ol’ gal of mine got to watchin’ him on the teevee and he started all that movin’ around like he does — look like a damn dog tryin’ to hump on the back of a bitch in heat—and I made her shet him off. Ought not allow such as that on the teevee.”
“Preacher preached on him last week. Said he was trash and his music was trash.”
“He’s ruinin’ the young’uns.”
The teachers at Moreland School caught one of the Turnipseed boys, I think it was Bobby Gene, shaking and humping like Elvis to the delight of a group of fifth-grade girls on the playground one morning during recess.
They took him to the principal, who paddled him and sent a note home to his parents, explaining his lewd behavior. Bobby Gene’s daddy whipped him again.
“Do your Elvis for us, Bobby Gene,” we said when he came back to school.
“Can’t,” he replied. “I’m too sore.”
Bobby Gene Turnipseed may have done the best Elvis impersonation in Moreland, but each of Elvis’s male followers had his own version. After my stepfather forced me to have my ducktails sheared back into a flattop, my Elvis lost a little something, but I still prided myself on the ability to lift the right side of my lip, a la Elvis’s half-smile, half-snarl that sent the girls into fits of screaming and hand-clutching.
There was a girl in my Sunday School class who was a desirable young thing, and as our Sunday School teacher read our lesson one morning, I decided to do my Elvis half-smile, half-snarl for the latest object of my ardor.
Recall that we were children of church-minded people, and I was quite aware of the wages of sin. I once snitched a grape at Cureton and Cole’s, and my cousin saw me and told me I was going to hell for thievery. I was so disturbed that I went back to the store and confessed my crime to Mr. J.W. Thompson, one of the owners. He was so moved by my admission of guilt that he gave me an entire sack of grapes free and assured me I’d have to steal a car or somebody’s dog to qualify for eternal damnation. When my cousin asked me to share my grapes with her, I told her to go to.... Well, I ate all the grapes myself and spit the seeds at her.
Stealing grapes was one thing, but thinking unspeakable thoughts about girls while in church and curling my lip at my prepubescent Cleopatra while the lesson was being read probably would bring harsh punishment from above. I couldn’t remember which thou-shalt-not such activity fell under — I wasn’t certain what covet meant, but I figured it had something to do with wanting another boy’s bicycle — so I decided to take a chance and do my Elvis lip trick at the girl anyway.
I curled up the right side of my lip perfectly as Cleo looked over at me. I didn’t know what to expect. Would she absolutely melt? Would she want to meet me after church and go over to what was left of the abandoned cotton gin and give me kisses and squeezes?
She didn’t do either. What she did was tell the Sunday School teacher I was making weird faces at her while the lesson was being read. The teacher told my mother about it, and my punishment was to read the entire book of Deuteronomy and present a report on it to the class the next Sunday. I learned a valuable lesson from all that: When you’re in church, keep your mind on baseball or what you’re going to have for lunch, not on something sweet and soft and perfumed wearing a sundress. Church and Evening in Paris simply don’t mix.
Never one to be selfish, I attempted to share my ability to mime Elvis’s facial expressions with others, especially with Little Eddie Estes. Little Eddie was a couple of years younger than me and I served as his self-appointed mentor. I taught him how to bunt, where to look in the Sears Roebuck catalog for the most scintillating pictures of women in their underpants, how to tell if a watermelon is ripe (you cut out a plug and if what you see inside is red, it’s ripe), and I also attempted to instruct him in mimicking Elvis.
“What you do is this,” I said to Little Eddie. “You curl your lip to the right a little bit, like the dog just did something smelly. If you want to add Elvis’s movements to this, you bring one leg around like a wasp has crawled inside your pants leg, and then you move the other and groan like when your mother insists you eat boiled cabbage.”
Little Eddie made a gallant attempt. He got the lip fine and he groaned perfectly, but he couldn’t get the legs to shake in the correct manner.
“I couldn’t shake my legs, either, when I first started doing Elvis,” I told him. “What you need to do is practice in front of a mirror.”
Several days later, Little Eddie’s father found his son curling his lip and groaning and shaking his legs in front of a mirror in his bedroom and thought he was having some sort of seizure. His mother gave him a dose of Castor Oil and put him to bed.
* * *
I don’t suppose that any generation has really understood the next, and every generation has steadfastly insisted that the younger adapt its particular values and views.
My parents’ generation, true to form, sought to bring up its young in its mold, but it also had a firm resolve to do something more for us.
It was much later in my life, perhaps at a time I was feeling terribly sorry for myself and looking for a way out of that constant dilemma, that I decided my parents’ generation may have endured more hardship and offered more sacrifices than any other previous generation of Americans.
So they never had to cross the Rockies in covered wagons and worry about being scalped. But my parents, both of whom were born in 1912, would live through and be directly affected by two World Wars, one Great Depression, and whatever you call Korea. And when they had been through all that, they were ushered into the Cold War and had to decide whether or not to build a fallout shelter.
It is no wonder that the men and women who came from those harried times were patriots, were traditionalists, were believers in the idea that he who worked and practiced thrift prospered, and he who allowed the sun to catch him sleeping and was wasteful perished.
These were hard people, who had lived through hard times. But they endured and the country endured, and they came away from their experiences with a deep belief in a system that had been tested but had emerged with glorious victory.
Looking back on my relationship with my own parents and with others from their generation, I think they also felt a sense of duty to their children to make certain that, at whatever cost, their children would be spared the adversity they had seen.
Have we, the Baby Boomers, not heard our parents say a thousand times, “We want you to have it better than we did”?
They wanted to protect us. They wanted to educate us. They wanted us to be doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers, not farmers and mill hands. They hounded us to study and to strive and avoid winding up in a job that paid an hourly wage. They may have mistrusted individuals their own age who had educations and who went to work wearing ties, but that’s exactly what they wanted for us. And they made us feel terribly guilty if we did not share their desires.
