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1958: THE GIFT

Byron “Blue-Suede” Bluford––soon to be Prince Byron, heir to the Throne of Rock ‘n’ Roll––was reborn in the Elks Club Talent Assembly, Portland High School, Spring 1958. It was the kind of renaissance that turns a boy’s life over like a spadeful of dark, rich dirt—which is fine and good, Byron’s pop used to reflect (in the days when the old coot could still think straight), so long as too many worms don’t crawl out.

It started like any dumb high school amateur show: Teresa Binkley, a candidate for Miss Maine Potato, opened with a giggly fire baton routine (minus fire, due to regulations). Billy “Zits” Parker honked out “Lady of Spain” on a musical bicycle pump, his own invention. Then Butch Marcel and the Heartstoppers trooped on and roasted the place with a smoking hot version of “Red River Rock.” Butch was a chubby kid in a zoot suit. He had greasy pomaded hair that tumbled over his forehead, braces on his teeth, and baby-fat cheeks that jiggled as he blew his big tenor sax. Behind him the Heartstoppers made more noise than a 747, twanging and thundering, amps up full, cymbals hung with stopper chains for extra sizzle. The effect of rock ‘n’ roll in a high school auditorium in 1958 was stunning. Until the Heartstoppers appeared the kids had been orderly. Now they were howling for raw meat.

Butch Marcel approached the mike. After waiting for quiet he motioned to the wings.

“Blue-Suede Bluford!” he announced.

Byron stepped out on stage (with a push from his buddy Fat Larry McCann) and scowled into the darkness. Even with stage fright, something in his image—a manfulness, a dark, full-lipped sensuality—hushed the crowd, made them wait for him. In front of the lights, he seemed to loosen up. Almost casually he ambled to the center of the stage and raked a comb through his hair. His muscular coolness drew whistles and catcalls of admiration. Then the music started. He grabbed the mike and belted out “Hound Dog” with all the trademarks—Elvis’s withering grin, blistering eyes, rubbery legs and swiveling, humping pelvis—in a voice that seemed to be stolen right off the record. This was no joke. With a band behind him, Byron was a man dancing on a thousand volts. In the dreams he would have for years, they tore the seats up with switchblades—like something out of Blackboard Jungle. In reality they stomped and cheered so hard the teachers had to cut the whole thing short and send everyone back to homeroom.

Only later, much later, did Byron realize that if he had just been born in the right place, at exactly the right instant, there was no doubt—he would have been Elvis Presley. Long after Talent Assembly was nothing but fodder for old yearbook memories, after America had reeled through assassinations, discovered dope, counterculture and Asian war—after Byron had toughened into a thirty-ish factory worker with long hair, a softball cap that said “BYRON” and a wardrobe of T-shirts with Elvis’s face on the front—he still clung to the memory of how the King’s power had flowed through him that day in 1958. He couldn’t get over it—that one searing instant of glory, because he stood on a stage for three minutes and did what Elvis Presley did.

Byron had grown up a dusky-eyed, dreamy kind of kid—shy, two left feet, fog in his head, a clothespin on his tongue. The older girls, the ones in lipstick and puffy sweaters, had been watching him from the time he was twelve, but he never had an inkling. It was mumbletypeg, toads, BB guns, then solitary dates with his right hand. Even Elvis, when he came along, was Byron’s personal secret. The looks, the attitude, the moves—Byron put them all together in the privacy of home, like a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. Elvis emerged, a set of fresh muscles.

But where could he strut his new stuff—show off the bumps and grinds, the hip sling, the shaky leg, the Tupelo drawl? How many Talent Assemblies came along in one lifetime? Even in the aftermath, when Butch Marcel had begged him to join the Heartstoppers, it was as himself, Byron Bluford—to sing Chuck Berry songs, Buddy Holly songs, Roy Orbinson songs. Where was that at? Being Elvis was what mattered, after all. Why stand up in front of people and try to be anything else? Without the answer, he hardly considered it a life. It was something else. Time spent killing time. Watching himself go nowhere. Waiting…for what?

Eighteen years later, the answer came—from the King himself.

1976: THE GUN

Byron met Elvis Aron Presley face-to-face in the summer of 1976, at a Boston Garden concert. A distant cousin of Larry McCann’s (the same Fat Larry) was working for Elvis, one of the black belts on his road crew. He ushered Byron through the cavernous back corridors of the Garden and slipped him into Elvis’s dressing room. It was full of pre-show hangers-on. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat. Byron felt suddenly sick—a jangling in his head, a taste of metal in his mouth. The thought of backing out flickered through his mind, but the door had been locked behind him.

The area where Elvis sat glowed as if they had lit it with a spotlight. Elvis looked puffy and tired, in a bulging white jumpsuit with gold and blue trim. He was reading aloud from a book called The Golden Voice of Ra. His face was dripping with sweat and his eyes had a dull polyurethane glaze. There was a gun strapped around his paunch.

“And the mountains shall split asunder to make way for the coming of the Final Spirit, the Fire-Lighter of History, the igniter of the Universe…”

His eyes wandered toward the door. He noticed Byron immediately.

“C’mon over here, son,” he said.

Byron steered himself into the light and shook hands with the King. Then he looked, close up, and what he saw almost made him choke.

Elvis seemed stuck to the jumpsuit, as if it had melted and hardened, a poisonous second skin, tightening its grip on his tired flesh, draining the life out of it, killing him slowly. Sickness seeped through the hooded eyes. Byron tried to shake the image of death out of his head.

The boys from Memphis were fluttering around Elvis, cracking a stream of dumb jokes and snickering nervously at each other. They seemed to want to pull the boss’s attention away from Byron.

“Elvis! Hey, Elvis—!” they were calling. Elvis this, Elvis that. Byron had no sense of time. The moment seemed to spin in an endless circle, as he and Elvis exchanged a few words.

“Y’know, somebody’s been trying to kill me,” Elvis said in a soft monotone. “I thought for half a second it was gonna be you.”

Byron laughed uncomfortably and shoved his hands in his pockets. He couldn’t look Elvis in the eye.

“Nah…not me. Not me, man.”

“You carry a gun?”

“Nah.”

“Y’ought to. This ain’t a world for gentle people. I got a damn Browning Automatic Rifle.”

Then somebody took Byron by the arm and moved him gently toward the door.

“Stop right there—” said Elvis suddenly. He stared oddly at Byron from across the room and then removed the .22 Savage revolver from his bulging waist, belt, holster and all. He folded it and held it out to Byron.

“TCB, my friend,” he said, with a nod. Take Care of Business, read the belt. “TCB” was tooled all over it, with lightning bolts in ornate clusters.

And then Byron found himself out in the hall, cradling the cold weight of Elvis’s own gun in his hands.

TCB. There had been something uncanny, a special tone in the way Elvis had said it. A glint of recognition had gone back and forth between them. It struck Byron that this was more than just a casual exchange. Something enormous had happened here. Elvis had given him a secret message and it clearly said: I am surrounded by assholes—but Brother, I know you and you know me. We know each other in a secret way. We are fated. Like father, like son, like brothers, like lovers.

He had said: You’ve got to finish it for me, man. I’m too far gone to be what I was. Go out and do it! Byron had seen it in that look as clearly as if it had been written across Elvis’s face in Magic Marker. In that moment, Byron understood. It was like a picture in his mind: Elvis, weakened; Prince Byron, strong and ready, standing over the suffering king, receiving his potency, the full force of his earthly mission. And then, if there were any doubts, in front of those gobbling turkeys, Elvis had silenced them by passing on his gun. There was the final answer: Byron would be King; it was only a matter of time. Amen.

Except that now, over a fucking year later, Elvis was still out on the road, struggling and thrashing like a weary old dray horse, embarrassing himself in front of the whole damn world, while Byron simply hung in the wind, his vision deadened by forty desolate hours a week at Cavanaugh Pump Works. Month by month, the promise was running dry. But he kept the gun shining, the leather rich and soft. He practiced quick draws in front of the mirror, over and over, dropping to one knee and fanning the Savage like a gunfighter.

“How ’bout it, man?” Byron would plead with the face on his T-shirt. “How long are we gonna play this game?”

A WALKIN’ DEAD MAN

You could lose a piece of your nose if you nodded off at the Cavanaugh assembly line. Byron usually managed to hang on somehow till lunch, when he could grab a nap out by the vending machines. But this time he had a regular blackout. One second he was watching the stream of ring bearings, one after another—next, his whole upper body was slumping over and falling right into the line.

Larry McCann and some of the other guys saw what was happening. From a distance it looked like the BYRON softball cap was melting right into the KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL T-shirt.

Down the line came a shout: “Byron!”

His head jerked up and he glanced sharply around. Rings were piled up on the line in front of him. Turner, the foreman, rang the alarm bell and stopped the line. The other guys looked up and took a breather while they waited for the old goat to start bitching. Turner was a walking bummer: a bloated, gross-featured humiliator of men.

“You fuck-up,” he muttered.

Byron blinked at him. “Why’d you stop the goddamn line, man?”

The two men eyed each other for a moment. Byron was thin, but powerfully built. Even Turner wouldn’t cross him lightly.

“For you, your highness,” said Turner. “Your stupid face fell into it.”

Byron’s mouth flared into a grin. “You’re shittin’ me,” he purred.

“Would I shit you?”

“Could be, could be, a guy as ugly as you.”

Turner grinned horribly and spat to one side. He dropped his gaze to Byron’s chest and poked Elvis’s nose with one stubby finger. “Who’s that asshole on your T-shirt?”

Byron’s composure slipped a notch. “What do you want from me, scumbag?”

“I want work,” snapped the foreman. He turned his back and walked off to restart the line. Byron raised his middle finger high in the air and turned in a slow circle.

“Pssst! Byron—” From down the line Larry McCann tossed him a Dexadrine the size of a football. Byron reached up with one hand, grabbed it, and gobbled it.

Byron’s eyes rolled as he paced back and forth among the vending machines, raging at the lazy lunch-shift crowd. “I swear to God—I’m losing my balls in there. I’m a walkin’ dead man. For two cents I’d fuck this job! Two goddamn cents—”

“There ya go, Blue-Suede.” Two pennies flashed through the air—Ronnie Spaulding’s idea of a joke. Mouths stopped chewing as Byron picked up the pennies and glared back at the goofball.

“Boy, I don’t deal with small change,” Byron drawled, firing the coins back at Ronnie. “Bank it up your ass!”

The laughs broke over him in cleansing waves. The speed was exploding inside him like a warm ball of light.

Now he felt better. He threw his head back and cackled with pleasure, running in place like a sprinter.

“Damn, that’s good!”

He drew a half-pint of bourbon out of his pocket and squatted in the corner like a hobo.

“Gentlemen, I tell you what—it’s all bullshit, total, all-out bullshit, there ain’t no way around it. So, goddammit to hell! Let’s get drunk. I’m having my first drink of the day.”

He drained the half-pint in two gulps.

NO MORE BING CROSBYS

People said that Byron drank in the style of his pop: quick and dangerous, prone to the bender. In the state of Maine, known for eccentrics, “Plum” Bluford had fit right in, even though he was from “away,” a transplant, a tobacco-chewing Georgia cracker. Cashiered out of the wartime navy, he had drifted North to work in the Boston shipyards where he fell in love with a vivacious half-Indian girl from Maine. Betty Crow was her name. She had a jolly, eager face and dark eyes, sharp as a hawk’s. Plum bowled her over with his redneck charm, playing to her weak side—a desperate optimism, a tendency to stretch promising visions past all sensible limits, right off the map. She looked at Plum and saw not the flashy backwoods drifter, but a man with a limitless future—corporation president, chairman of the board, a sleeping giant.

Betty worked hard stitching shirts for the Navy, but after hours she let herself go, carousing with Plum in the old Scollay Square honky-tonks and “combat-zone” joints like the Hillbilly Ranch. Quickly enough they blew her savings and ran up a small jungle of debts. On Betty’s urging, they headed “down East” to Portland, her hometown, where Plum made an honest woman out of her (she was pregnant) and set out to make himself an honest man.

Around Portland, Plum picked up a double-edged reputation: on the one hand, a serious, flint-tough poker player; on the other, a raucous, overdressed, hard-drinking maniac, with his flashy pinstripes and lunatic laughing fits. At his gambling peak he was good enough for local money-men to back him in blue-chip poker games around the state—a high ride for a young hayseed from nowhere.

But by the time Byron was born, things were already unraveling. In her sixth or seventh month, Betty abruptly ran out of whatever had fueled her infatuation for Plum. In public she treated the man with icy coldness. No one knew exactly why, but people had their notions: she had found a few long blond hairs in her bed most likely, or spotted Plum feeling up a factory girl. Some clear act of betrayal had turned Betty Crow around so sharply that Plum was written out of the future. All those visions of greatness she simply transferred to the life that, three weeks overdue, sprang from her belly.

Again, she was off the map: this boy would be the most brilliant of professionals, a man of consequence; a Congressman, a Senator, and maybe someday (why the hell not?) President of the United States. Little Byron was a miracle. She had nothing but joy for the future. Plum be damned—let him come and go; he no longer mattered.

So, Plum came and went, still quite the swashbuckler, until his youth began to fade. Then the cracks yawned open in his personality and a paralyzing darkness could be seen behind the slick face he showed the world. Middle age robbed him of his nerve. He lost his touch at poker, blew big money in a series of high-stakes disasters, and was reduced to scrounging work in the Lewiston mills. Before he died, Plum Bluford had turned into a raw stumblebum, sleeping in the street, crazed on rot-gut brandy.

And growing up somewhere in the midst of all this was Byron––mortified by poverty, stunned by his pop’s spectacular flameout, fearful of his mom’s growing moodiness and anger. He would be no lawyer, no Congressman, that was obvious to him at least—and finally, grudgingly, to his mom. Everything around him said he was nowhere, nobody, nothing. He learned to strut like a scrawny little rooster, but he was white trash and the world made sure he knew it.

After they found Plum’s body one morning, frozen in a culvert, Betty aged fast, graying, losing her fun, her girlish shape, the brightness in her eyes. She went into and out of depression for months, then years, unforgiving of her son, like his dad a denial of her dreams, a flash that burned out quickly. Byron knew that was her view and now, he figured, she’d take it to the grave.

This is where Elvis blew into his life like a storm. Here was a man who made pure style out of being white trash. He was dazzling. He didn’t apologize for anything. He turned it into gold. With Elvis as your guide, there was no need to hide your bush-hog status in front of rich kids—you strutted it right in their faces. No more Bing Crosbys. Being Elvis was a way of life that Elvis had made as clear as A-B-C. As Elvis, he was sexier, smoother, better-looking, more relaxed than when he was just Byron. Being Elvis was being somebody. It was an achievement, a distinction. Everything the young Elvis did had the mark of the high wire artist about it. Byron admired Elvis for that, and he respected himself for walking the same high wire.

As Elvis, he was an authentic American hero. That was why he had such contempt for jerks like Turner: here was a true bush-hog with no roots, no culture, no respect for a hero, no reverence for the undisputed King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. And in the so-called real world of Cavanaugh Pump, this slob outranked him!

Three nights after Byron’s meeting with Elvis, Betty Crow Bluford clutched at her chest and keeled over dead. At the wake, Byron got drunk with his Indian relatives. His eyes rolled. He wailed and clawed at his mother in the coffin. Before they closed the lid he tossed the .22 Savage in with her, but someone pulled it out for him. He drank steadily for two weeks, and was seen around town night and day with burning, bloodshot eyes, stumbling, sitting in the gutter.

“Like Plum all over again,” said the folks who knew him, watching what was surely a rerun of the old man’s flameout.

Then one day—a miraculous change of weather: It was over. He pulled himself together, took the job at Cavanaugh, and held it—a week, a month, two months. “Byron is steadying up,” was the revised forecast.

Until, that is, they saw him going public with this Elvis craziness—actually standing up and trying to pass himself off as Elvis Presley, or Prince Byron, or whatever the hell he was calling it. In the spring of ’77, with Presley himself still performing all over the place, it just seemed witless, pointless, another piece of flaming futility out of Byron Bluford. How the hell could one boy come up with so many ways of going to the devil? You had to wonder at it.

DIVINE STUFF

But Byron had a plan, and a message for Elvis. The message was this: No more waiting.

He began simply by working anywhere a house band would let him step on a stage; that meant the mill town bars and roadhouses around Portland or Biddeford or Old Orchard Beach—tough joints where they’d just as soon throw a ten-pound bluefish at you as look at you. He brought with him a tight medley of “early Elvis” hits and a rough, dopey charisma that worked on these crowds, the beer-sotted fishermen and tough-talking factory girls. His crafted image of Elvis came across without a crack: solid, youthful, attractive, and dangerous. They liked this guy. He spoke Maine: Rod and Gun Club picnics and rock ‘n’ roll barn dances, plastic pools and dories in the backyard, stinking mud flats at low tide and pine forests bigger than the moon. Maine, where God had his duck camp—the pride and dirt-poor shame of it. Ayeh. He could rap to them, all right. He kept them guessing. What the hell was he going to do next? They couldn’t tell—but they wanted to know.

TR’s was in South Portland, less than a mile from Cavanaugh Pump—which gave Byron the home-court advantage. It was a place to unwind after your shift—dark, stinking of beer and motor oil, a place to get loaded fast and swing a pool cue at somebody’s head, a place to mess around in the back of a van before stumbling home to the wife and kids.

The club had been around for years under one name or another. In recent times, T.R. “Jake” Hogan, a Buick dealer, had bought the place and tried to elevate the clientele by offering live rock on weekends. The music attracted gangs of rowdy kids who clashed with the Cavanaugh regulars, but Hogan stuck to his guns—rock ‘n’ roll was putting his place on the map in Portland and Hogan liked that. He began to fancy himself a regional impresario. He launched a talent search, turning Mondays into what he called “Hoot Night,” and made it known he was looking for a regular act for mid-week when business was slow. After a few failures, the word got out that he was desperate for a solid success. Byron was quick to smell the ultimate possibility: real money—a chance to make a living as the Prince of Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Tonight, for the fourth straight Monday, he and Larry McCann pulled into the parking lot and drained a ritual half-pint of bourbon. The sounds of Hoot Night filtered out into the warm summer twilight. In the darkness of Byron’s old Ford pickup it seemed as if time had gone nowhere since high school. There they were, Byron and Fat Larry, waiting in the wings, just like 1958. Byron grinned.

“C’mon, old guy,” he said softly. “Let’s check it out.”

Fat Larry was essentially the same wide-eyed high school fan who had goaded Byron onto the stage back in ’58. Bald and pot-bellied now, he had looked hard into “the mystery of history” and devised a theory, which went like this: Early rock ‘n’ roll had produced the last generation of American creative geniuses. The early rockers were heroes who had chiseled themselves into history the hard way, “originals” who had created themselves from dust. Nothing like them had appeared since. Now, however, an astounding thing was happening: Elvis, the first, last and greatest of all, was running out of steam. With the gift of the .22 Savage, he had passed the torch to Byron. Thus, went Larry’s logic, working alongside Byron on the assembly line was like a ticket into history: He was working with the undiscovered Elvis himself—the re-anointed, reappointed rockabilly genius, future unbounded, potential unlimited! That’s the way Larry saw it. And he spoon-fed the vision to Byron.

“Me, now, I couldn’t possibly become anything, man, I’m a squat failure. But you—” His rheumy eyes would glisten. “You’re sheer action, you’re put together out of divine stuff, original stuff. Just like Elvis…”

Byron stepped gingerly across the parking lot gravel so as not to dirty his blue suede shoes. He was wearing pink slacks and a shiny purple ’50s-style early-Elvis sport jacket. At the door he stopped for a moment and took several deliberate breaths. When he turned around and glanced at Larry the transformation was like a makeup job: the cheekbones were higher, bonier, the smile more crooked and dazzling, the eyes glowing in their sockets. Even though his hair still hung almost to his shoulders, Byron Bluford seemed to be gone. Elvis was there.

“Everybody drunk yet?” Byron called as he sauntered in, peacock-like, followed humbly by Larry.

“Yo! Blue-Suede!” shouted a few bloated regulars clinging to the bar. “Goddamn. C’mere, Elvis!”

Byron and Larry joined the drinkers for a pit stop, then wandered on down to the stage, where a nervous-looking girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen was picking away at her guitar and trying to cut through the din. There was a thin film of sweat across her face and her cheeks were flushed. Dimples appeared and disappeared in her cheeks. Every so often she tossed her head to clear the thick chestnut mop out of her eyes. Byron stopped dead. Something about her seemed to freeze him in his tracks. He watched her intently until she couldn’t avoid his eyes any longer. With a flush she let her gaze lock onto his, then looked straight through him and kept on singing.

“Sweet little fox, huh!” Byron said to Larry. He threw some nuts into his mouth and washed them down with a glass of Old Milwaukee. “Can’t sing, but what a beauty!”

Aside from the girl, who at least looked terrific, the talent was pretty raw tonight. You could tell from the bored faces on the house band. There was a groaner who did “My Way,” the losers’ national anthem. The band pitched it too high for him so it came out sounding more like a howling dog. But no matter how you mutilate it, “My Way” goes over in any tavern, so he got a hand. Then came a couple of college boys with a banjo and fiddle. They drew a few yahoos, but TR’s was not a shit-kicker’s scene so the crowd fell mostly into raucous chit-chat. Then a beefy trucker who called himself Billy Utah tried to struggle through “Truck Drivin’ Man,” but blanked on the lyrics and had to sit down.

The girl meanwhile had squeezed in beside a couple of pouty-looking girlfriends at a table near the front. Her large dark eyes occasionally glanced back at Byron, coolly, as if she were just scanning the room. There was something proud about her. Byron liked that. She was young and a little awkward, like she hadn’t quite grown into her body. Except that she had. Byron kept noticing her shoulders, the way she held her neck. He watched her flick the beer foam off her lips. He followed her with his gaze when she went to the bar. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She was unusual and she was doing something unusual to him.

“Damn…” he whispered.

A pudgy little Canadian with sprayed hair was squeezing out a polka on the accordion. Hogan drifted around to Byron’s table. “You’re up next, Byron,” he said with a nod.

Once the polka-boy had bowed off, Hogan stepped up to the mike.

“Okay, last but not least, we got the Prince Byron Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue—Byron Bluford!”

Now the house band was wide awake because this was going to be fun. The Cavanaugh Pump crowd came alive with a howl when Byron rushed on, lugging a guitar with no strings, his hair slicked back and held with a rubber band. While the band vamped he stood at the mike and rolled his hips around, Elvis-style, pulling some squeals out of the factory girls. He waved the band into silence and grinned his lopsided Elvis grin at the crowd, letting the moment stretch and stretch until it fell apart into hoots and whistles. Then, with a sudden swing of his hips, he blew straight into “Hound Dog” and the place went wild.

This was head-and-shoulders above the other acts. Byron knew he had it, the definitive version of Elvis—the hips, the shaky legs, the throaty baritone, the grins and winks—Elvis, the young King, the insolent punk teen idol. He had what the others lacked—the power to command attention. He could turn it on or off at will. He played with it like a young dog tossing a hambone.

At the finish he had the crowd up and sloshing their beer as they cheered. He raised both arms like a fighter and grinned out into the rowdiness, loving it.

“Thank you, folks!” he mugged. “C’mon, I know you love me better than that! Lemme hear it!”

Byron caught the girl’s eye. He grinned straight at her.

She fingered her blouse and looked away, blushing again. Suddenly she leaned over to one of her girlfriends and whispered something in her ear. Whatever it was, they all got up and left. By the time Byron had finished taking his bows and worked his way through the crowd to the front door, she was gone.

“Well, goddamn!” Byron said, pulling the rubber band off his hair and throwing it into the dirt.

Karen LeBec was hanging around the front door with her halter top almost down to her stomach, working on Hogan’s bouncer. But all of a sudden she wasn’t into the bouncer anymore, she was chattering in Byron’s ear. Her husband was on the road somewhere in his eighteen-wheeler that Santa Claus gave him for Christmas and she was mad at the sucker anyway—Byron got the whole story on the way out to the truck as a vague depression crept over him.

“Walked out on ya, didn’t she,” Karen said, as she slid across the seat. Byron pretended he didn’t know what she meant. “Don’t play dumb, Byron. The little honey walked out on ya so I get a free trip, right? I know you, baby….”

She smirked at him a little sadly and started rubbing her lipstick off.

Damn it, she was right. But not tonight.

“Tell you what, then,” he said. “How ’bout here in the truck? That way you can still go back in and circulate, huh?”

She gave him a long, stony look and blinked once. Then she pulled her lipstick out and, taking her time, smeared up her mouth all over again.

“S’long, Byron.” Her heels hit the pavement.

“Sorry, baby. Guess I’m just not into it.”

She slammed the door and walked back to the bar, giving him the rear view of what he was missing.

At 4 A.M. Byron brought his truck to a bucking, lurching stop in front of his house. Elvis Is Back was blasting off the cassette stereo, full volume. Byron staggered out of the truck, tripped, and crawled the rest of the way to the front door. Lights popped on up and down the dusty blacktop street.

“Fuckin’ turn if off!” a voice shouted.

But Byron was already inside the house, dragging himself through the dream-jungle of Elvis posters, back to the bedroom, where a dartboard hung with four darts piercing Elvis’s face.

Steadying himself in front of the full-length bedroom mirror, he shot a hard look into his own eyes. For a minute someone else was there, on the other side of the mirror. His lip curled slightly. He set his legs apart and did a few slow gyrations. Elvis was there.

Outside, there were more shouts from up and down the street as the music blared on. Byron pulled away from the mirror and sloshed some water over his begonia plants, gifts from a lady he couldn’t remember, now his only companions.

“Have a little drinky, boys,” he mumbled.

A wave of dizziness forced him back against the bed and, just as it occurred to him to do something about that goddamn racket out front, he toppled over on his back and passed out cold.

THE MYSTERY OF HISTORY

June 15, 1977

Dear Col. Parker:

I understand Elvis will be appearing in Portland again for two shows August 16. Welcome to Maine! I wonder is it possible to talk to you and him about my views concerning the style of show he has taken on lately, which I think is a serious mistake (as you know). As ever, my offer stands to take over for Elvis in any situation where he might become unable to perform.

Yours truly,

Byron “Prince Byron” Bluford

Byron finished soaping up the truck and tossed the sponge back into the bucket. He unscrewed the cap from a new pint of Old Buffalo Gums or whatever it was and took a gulp. He aimed the hose at the chrome-and-plastic Elvis hood ornament and watched the water carom off it into a fine mist, making rainbows in the late sunlight. Wearily his eyes followed the soap as it ran off into layers of scum across the gravel. He went back to the front porch and tipped some more whiskey into his mouth, sloshing it around before he let it go. A Quaalude went down for dessert. Sunday. Fucked up again.

He sat on the porch steps and watched the sky filling with cotton. Bud Kimball started up his chainsaw—what would Sunday be without a little chainsawing?

“Timber!” Byron shouted.

“Fuck you, Blue-Suede.”

Byron took a deep breath. The air had an ugly trace of paper mill sourness in it, the usual stench. He squinted lazily at the neighborhood he had grown up in: peeling paint, busted asphalt, rickety leaning overgrown shacks, wood chips everywhere, uncut weeds, kids scuttling around the sawdusty yards on their Big Wheels. There was a tightness in his gut, a Sunday hopelessness that defied every attempt to booze it and dope it away.

“Fuck you, Blue-Suede!” The Kimball’s oldest kid buzzed past on his moped, imitating his dad. Byron shot him the bird—cocky little bozo. The kid shot it right back. Byron laughed. The booze ran around his head. He stood up—and the world stood up along with him, trying to wrestle him to the ground. He staggered once and regained his feet.

Okay: at least the letter to the Colonel had gone out on time. The Presley organization would damn well know where to find Byron if they had to—whether they answered his goddamn letter or not. TCB. He staggered again. The earth seemed to turn a slow flip. A little girl in a Brownie uniform came skipping up to the porch.

“Here’s your Girl Scout cookies, Mr. Bluford.” She handed him a box of mixed creme sandwiches and rubbed her nose, hopping from foot to foot.

“Well, thank you, honey—d’I order these or something?” Byron tossed the hair out of his face and fixed her with a bleary stare.

“Yeah, dontcha remember? Last month, I come up and you was asleep in your car?”

“That sounds about right.” Byron reached into his pocket and pulled out whatever was there—a ten. He gave it to the Brownie. She blinked back at him.

“That’s too much, Mr. Bluford!”

“You just keep it all, honey.” Byron folded his arms and nodded firmly. He thought he could feel the Quaalude coming on already. “Keep the whole damn thing.” His legs wobbled.

“Wow! Thanks a lot––!”

“Thank you, sweetheart. You have a good day, you hear?”

The Brownie jumped up and down and scampered away, clutching the ten. “Yippeeee!” she squealed.