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That’s All Right, Mama copyright © 1995 by Gerald Duff . The first edition of That’s All Right, Mama was published by Baskerville Publishers, Inc., Dallas, Texas, 1995. This edition of That’s All Right, Mama was published by The Devault-Graves Agency, LLC, Memphis, Tennessee, 2016.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales of persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The cover image of Elvis Presley is documented as being in the public domain and is reproduced here under fair use considerations and U.S. copyright guidelines. The artistic representation using the image was created by Martina Voriskova and is copyright © 2016 by The Devault-Graves Agency, LLC.

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With Gerald Duff’s That’s All Right, Mama…rock-based fiction turns the corner…No one has ever created a more evil Colonel Parker, or a more credibly manipulative Gladys, or a more befogged Vernon, and this stems from the fact that Duff knows these people, knows that they might believe the universe had ordained what happened to Elvis….Duff’s real triumph within all this is making That’s All Right, Mama a really funny book…

[Gerald] Duff’s transcendent prose swings and sways, whoops and moans in pulsating cadences reminiscent of the King…A rich and well-realized tale, even for readers to whom August 16 (Elvis’s death date) is just another day.

Duff’s darkly witty novel That’s All Right, Mama diddles the language with the same rocking abandon as Elvis thrusting his pelvis. The tale is such a hunka, hunka burnin’ hoot.

[Gerald] Duff stands the Elvis legend on its head and comes up with an Elvis more complex, more sinister…That’s All Right, Mama is a wonderful and funny recasting of one of the century’s most popular myths.

I first encountered Mr. Lance Lee in the early phases of a research project I undertook in the latter half of the 1985-86 academic year. It was in Memphis, where I was gathering data for a study of the resurrection/false death mythology surrounding the date of the death anniversary of the singer Elvis Aron Presley.

At that point in time, the coming together of the followers of the deceased rock star had begun reaching large proportions in August of each year. A perusal of hotel, motel, recreational vehicle campground rentals and individual household leasing figures reveals a 32 percent increase over any other public event in the annual Memphis year. Interested readers may see the published results of my work on the topic in the biennial issue of the Journal of Mass Religious Gatherings (Vancouver, B.C.), pp. 123-129.

As part of my research, I had begun to survey the nightly performances of the many Elvis Presley imitators who had begun to gather in increasing numbers during each Death Week celebration. Not only did I visit the largest and best-known venues for such singer/actor/imitator performers (one young child of female gender and Native-American ethnic extraction was part of that number in 1985, I remember), but I also sought out the less frequented and less prominent establishments offering such entertainment to the crowds of people fascinated enough by such to attend these events.

It was in one of these relatively unknown saloon-cum-singing establishments I found Mr. Lance Lee, or rather he found me, on the night in question. I had been guided to the Green Parrot, for such was its appellation, by a professional colleague, Professor James Lanier of Rhodes College, a scholar and specialist in the study of musical tributes to dying and resurrected deities.

Dr. Lanier and I had just ordered refreshment from the waitperson, a young woman attired in a costume designed to resemble that of a 1960s go-go entertainer/dancer, when a man hailed me from where he sat at a table just next to ours. He was taken by the fact that Dr. Lanier and I were jotting down our impressions in notebooks and that I had placed a medium-sized Japanese cassette recorder on the table before me. (I hasten to add that I had previously received permission from both the bartender and the person onstage performing a medley of Elvis Presley songs to do so.)

He announced his name, Lance Lee, informed us that the actor/singer currently onstage was not of a quality worthy of our attention or even the cost of the cassette tape in the machine, and he did so in a colorfully profane manner. Judging that the man seemed jolly enough not to cause alarm and entertained by his linguistic skills, Dr. Lanier and I asked him to join us for a beverage and a good round of conversation.

Mr. Lance Lee did so, proceeding to match us two drinks for our every one and continuously providing a running commentary on the series of performers who took the stage of the Green Parrot. We were soon caught up in the spirit he generated and, knowing as field data gatherers the importance of becoming both one with and one apart from the cultural event of investigatory interest, Dr. Lanier and I allowed ourselves to be vastly entertained by the man’s manner, his encyclopedic knowledge of Elvis Presley’s public history, and his insights into the career paths of imitators of the man we soon began calling the King, even as he did.

Late into that evening, after Dr. Lanier had excused himself in order to seek a moment of repose in the rear seat of my Toyota minivan, the vehicle I typically employ for fieldwork, Lance Lee and I continued to converse, swapping anecdotes and insights into contemporary popular culture in the most relaxed and convivial manner.

It was then, near four a.m., as the doors of the Green Parrot closed upon the last patrons, ourselves, I must confess, that Lance Lee made his first mention of the astounding claim developed in the body of the manuscript following these words of preface. He was, he told me, in truth and fact, the twin of Elvis Presley, and he had not died at birth as the biographers, critics, and historians assert and believe, and as documentary evidence in Tupelo, Mississippi certifies.

He had, he told me, in his possession ocular proof, and he produced from his wallet a photograph, obviously aged, faded, and lined with cracks across its surface. In the light of a streetlamp near the minivan where Dr. Lanier rested, I examined the archival item closely and admitted that the woman and child pictured thereon resembled to a remarkable degree Gladys Presley and her son Elvis at an early age, possibly four or five years.

I assured him of my belief that the photograph could be of the famous mother/child combination, but that there was no proof certainly that he, Lance Lee, was in any way involved. He pointed out to me that approximately one-third of the photograph was missing, torn down its length carefully as though by someone eager to remove the likeness of another person perhaps pictured there, and declared that the missing portion had been Elvis Aron and the remaining image of a child was indeed he himself, Jesse Garon Presley.

I clapped the clever, entertaining fellow (whom I have never seen since, search though I have for years) on the shoulder and left him there in the parking lot of the Green Parrot and departed in the Toyota minivan with the sleeping professor of Cultural Phenomenology, bound for Dr. Lanier’s quarters and then my own hotel room.

The next morning when I arose, rather later than my customary hour because of fatigue from the night before, I discovered the message light blinking on the telephone next to my bed. A call to the desk revealed that someone had left me a package there, and when, in a brief space of time, I reported to claim the mysterious item, I discovered the manuscript of the work the reader of these words may find before him/her: an account, in lamentable physical condition, typed on several different machines with a myriad of interlineations on a full dozen kinds and weights of paper, of the fragmentary autobiography of a person claiming to be Jesse Garon Presley.

Is it authentic? Scholar though I attempt to be, I cannot say. Is it persuasive? Perhaps, to those who want to believe, and to those who continue to visit Graceland on an annual basis to pay homage to the King of Rock and Roll.

I myself am not finally convinced, but I must record the opinion of my esteemed colleague that night in August of 1986 in Memphis at the Green Parrot, the sober and meticulously careful critic of Cultural Phenomenology, Dr. James Lanier. The document so adventitiously placed in my possession is the closest we shall come, he opines, to the truth about the bifurcations of the Presley personality and to the relationship between the fallen king and his maternal parent. In Lanier’s words, found in his monograph on “The Shadow-Self and the Maternal Presence in the Life of Jesse Garon/Elvis Aron Presley,” Journal of Jungian Etiology, VII, 785-1023, “what we are left to declare of Jesse Garon Presley’s account of the ur-myth of his doubleness is that it is, indeed, all right, Mama.”

I offer this document, changed in none but typographical and editorial detail, for what I can safely declare it to be: the luminous detritus of a late, hot, scholarly night in Memphis, Tennessee, during the Death Week of 1986. The reader is left to judge for him/herself in that light.

I have never had the benefit of a mother’s love. Elvis got it all.

She always made a difference between us, right back to the first things I can remember there in that little bitty house in Tupelo. We were the same, but we weren’t the same. He was more himself than I was myself, and he got the big share of everything. There just wasn’t enough of whatever it takes to be a person to go around for both of us. Everything that happened later on, there in Mississippi and then in Memphis and New York and Germany and Las Vegas and every damn where else came from that beginning.

When a fertilized egg divides in half and begins to multiply two by two, the same number of chromosomes and genes and whatever else it all is in there, you end up with identical twins. They are the same creature genetically. That’s what science will tell you.

Science doesn’t explain my voice. Oh, it’s like his, and I can deliver a song. But I never could sing it like he could. Not so much that I can’t make a living doing it. But I never could touch whatever it was he could with that voice.

One time the old man told me what had happened the night we were conceived. He generally wouldn’t talk about anything he thought was nasty unless he was drunk or guilt-stricken, and this time he was both. Either he had failed to get it up with one of those women he was running with after Mama died or he had had a vision or some damn thing. I forget. Whatever it was, it had got him into the Jack Daniel’s and into a talking mood.

“What happened that night,” he said and knocked back another half-glass, “was that we had just quarreled real bad, your mama and me, about something. Not enough money, I guess. Or no job or something. I had located some busthead whiskey that morning, and I had kept it out behind the house underneath an old washtub where one of those damn hens was setting on a bunch of eggs.

“So I’d go out every little while for a drink and run my hand up under that tub to get the bottle, and that Rhode Island Red would peck me until I nearly bled. But I finished the whole bottle off by good dark, and I set down on the back steps to watch the moon rise. It was full and red and looked almost as big a coming up as that damn washtub.

“She came out there to see what I was doing, and when she seen that moon she just tottered and fell back against the screen door so hard she might near split it.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked her. “Are you all right?”

“Two heads,” she said. “It’s two of them. Oh, Lord, no. Two in the moon.”

“And then she just commenced to squalling and crying and carrying on. And I tried to hold her and quiet her down, you know, there on the back steps to the house. She never quit talking a blue streak about it being two of them and room enough for only one and not but one soul to go between them and all that kind of thing.

“‘Blue moon,’ she kept saying, ‘blue moon.’ But that didn’t make no sense, because it was all red, you see, just as red as fire.”

I didn’t bother to explain to Vernon what a blue moon was, because it would have been like trying to explain arithmetic to a back-up drummer. I just let him go on, not that I usually listened to him at all, but this time he was talking about something that involved me directly. And that was a seldom goddamn thing, I’ll tell you.

“Well,” he said, “I was pretty drunk by then from all that whole bottle and damn tired from fighting that Rhode Island Red all afternoon, so I finally talked her into lying down across the bed. And I went on off to sleep.

“It must have been two or three hours later that I woke up and found out what was going on. I was on my back, and Gladys was astraddle of me, you know, and she was in full gallop. See, that kind of thing never had happened before, and it never happened after, neither, no matter how much I tried to talk her into doing it that way again.”

The old man finished off his glass and poured some more into it from the quart bottle, and I stayed completely quiet so he wouldn’t change his mind or lose his place or get off on something else.

“What was scary about it,” he said, “was that she wasn’t looking down at me. I could see up into her face, and she was looking full into that moon, and it was reflecting into her eyes like she was wearing glasses or had little mirrors instead of eyes or something like that. It wasn’t red by then, since it had got higher up in the sky. But I could see it plain. Two full-size moons where her eyes were. Not shimmering or moving but just as still and cold as if they was made of two balls of ice.

“About that time I could feel it coming on, you know, starting way back, like it was moving down from my insides and going along my backbone and then taking a turn through my, you know, parts, and it was like fire or electricity moving through me in a kind of rhythm. You know, little shivers, but real regular and getting faster and faster. And then the shakes started coming too close together to keep the little electric feelings apart, and, boom, it just happened, you know, and Gladys just stopped dead still. And it was like she had taken all of me up into her there on that bed, and them two moons in her eyes got real bright and then it was like they exploded, and I blacked out and didn’t know nothing until morning when I woke up with the worst pains in my head I ever felt. Last thing I could remember was them moons leaving her eyes like rockets blowing up.”

How am I going to get back there to Tupelo, to the beginning? I have been thinking about that, and I have been wanting to tell it right, the whole story. I could come at it from several different ways, and every one of them has its points. I could back way off and generalize about everything. I could do my best to convince you that all this really happened and that it was all possible for it to happen. I thought about doing that.

Here is what I come to. There’s all kinds of people have different ideas about the same thing, and there’s no way to tell which one of them is the best. Who is to judge?

So what I am going to do is give the straight story by telling you little stories, as Mama used to say. Now and then I’ll probably hold something back, and I may let you know when I’m doing it, and I may not. That’s my business, not yours.

I look at it this way. What you’re going to ask is how could it all be true. Am I real? And what I say to that is that it’s not my job to convince you I’m alive. Hell, I’ve had enough to do to convince myself that I’m alive all these years, and I’m still working on that topic. I am alive because I’m speaking, because I’m standing up and talking back, and that’s good enough for me now, and it’s damn sure got to be good enough for you. All right. Back to the birthplace.

It was a cold morning, back during the war sometime. I was thinking about what I’d seen the day before at the bus station when I’d gone in there with Uncle McCoy. I’d almost run back out to the pickup when I saw it up against the back wall of the waiting room of the Trailways station in Tupelo.

What it was was a shooting gallery with dolls fixed up to look like Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo, and there was a gun there that shot little pellets if you put in some money. Uncle McCoy offered to let me shoot it once during his turn, but I was too afraid to look at Hitler and Tojo long enough to aim the rifle. So I passed on that.

I was remembering that and the bad dreams I’d had all night, about those little bodies with the big heads when Uncle McCoy asked me if I wanted to ride with him over to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Gladys’s.

I remember it was cold, like I said, but I don’t remember the ride into Tupelo from where Uncle McCoy and Aunt Edith and I lived out in the sticks twelve miles south of town. The first thing that comes into my mind when I think back to that day is the way the smoke looked coming out of the stovepipe on Uncle Vernon and Aunt Gladys’s and Elvis’s house.

It was a still morning, and the smoke was thick and white, and it looked like to me it was reaching all the way to the sky and connecting things together.

“Looky yonder, Uncle McCoy,” I said, “the sky is coming out of Elvis’s house.”

“You say some fool things, don’t you, boy?”

Vernon had the door to the house opened by the time McCoy cut the engine, so I was able to run on into the front room without slowing down. I asked Aunt Gladys where was Elvis as soon as I hit the heat of the house.

“He’s lying down in the bedroom resting, Jesse,” she said. “He don’t feel too good this morning, and I’m making him stay in bed until the sun gets good and up.”

“Let me go see him,” I said. “I want to tell him about Hitler and Tojo.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “You can’t come in here and scare your cousin like that. He’s got to keep his mind happy.”

That kind of talk wasn’t new for me, of course. I had learned that Elvis was supposed to be treated special and I had been punished plenty of times already for getting him what Aunt Gladys called “too excited.”

“Please,” I said, “he’ll like it.”

“No,” she said and looked down at me so slow that her eyes seemed to be sorry to have to touch me, “you ain’t going to do it. And if you do, I will wear you out myself, and I will do something else, too.”

“I won’t,” I said, and then because I have always wanted to hear what the worst possible thing could be, I asked her what else she would do, too.

“If you get Elvis to crying and having bad dreams,” she said. “I will take you outside in the yard where that little house is, and I will show you what’s in there.”

I knew the little house she was talking about, of course. Elvis and I had broken the lock off that structure a long time ago, and we had spent enough time inside it to know there wasn’t nothing worth playing with in it, and that the two or three boxes inside had nothing in them but a few letters and papers with writing on them that we didn’t care nothing about.

So I wasn’t scared of what was in that little house in the backyard. What I was scared of, though, was the idea of having Aunt Gladys take me off by herself and making me go with her into a little room where the only people there would be us. She had a way of grabbing my hands and pulling me up close to her so she could look into my eyes for a minute or two that scared the fool out of me.

Looking into her eyes, so brown they seemed all pupil and so big I felt like I could fall into them and never come out, I would imagine myself getting smaller and smaller under her inspection until I might turn into something no bigger than a pecan and roll off across the floor and get lost under a piece of furniture or fall through a knothole.

When she studied me like that, she would squeeze her lips together until there was just a straight line across the bottom of her face and then she would say words to herself so low that I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“Mama,” Elvis hollered from the bed, “let Jesse come in here and play with me.”

“Not now, darling,” she said.

“I believe it would help me to see him,” Elvis said.

“All right, sugar,” she said and her lips seemed to get bigger and softer as I looked at her, “just for a little while, then. I don’t want Jesse giving you nothing that’ll make you sicker.”

“He won’t never,” Elvis said, and I went on in to see him, banging the door back against the wall as I went through it hard enough to make the whole house shake.

“Don’t you make them loud popping noises,” Uncle Vernon said. “You boys don’t get started with none of that rattling and banging in there, now.”

“We won’t, Daddy,” Elvis hollered, making a scrunched-up face at me, and then whispering low for me to close the door.

“Guess what I found, Jesse,” he said. “Something good, too. You ain’t never seen nothing like it.”

“What?” I asked him. “I seen Tojo and Hitler yesterday. They got big old heads and teeth like in a dog’s mouth sticking out from their lips.”

“Where was they? Up on the ceiling when you was trying to go to sleep?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t no dream. Really I saw them. At the bus station up against the wall, and Uncle McCoy shot at them and made them spin around every time he hit them.”

“You mean some kind of a toy, then, or a game or something,” Elvis said. “That ain’t near what I found. I’m talking about something real and scary.”

“What?” I said. “Is it a ghost’s clothes?”

That was what Elvis tried to tell me he had found the last time I had come into Tupelo with Uncle McCoy. It was a thing I believed for a few minutes until he showed me what he was talking about, and I realized it wasn’t nothing but a pair of women’s step-ins. He finally admitted he had pulled them out of the ditch that ran along the road in the front of the house. The only thing interesting about them was the blood stains down in the crotch, which proved to Elvis that the woman had been stabbed and killed by somebody driving along the road there in East Tupelo.

I knew better than that already by then, but he didn’t want to listen to me tell the truth about it. So I let him go on believing it was a murder that had happened. He always seemed to feel better when he was believing something that was an obvious lie. The woman’s ghost, see, was never going to be quiet until it had its step-ins back on.

“No,” he said. “It ain’t no ghost clothes. It’s something even you’ll be scared of.”

“Well, what is it, then? Is it something Aunt Gladys told you about would happen if you did something bad?”

That was pure-dee Gladys. She would just pour that stuff into him, right from the time he was able to understand what she was saying up to when she died in the hospital in Memphis. Don’t do this because that will happen. Don’t eat fish and drink milk at the same time or you’ll die. Don’t ever start something you can’t finish on a Friday. Or it’ll fail. Step on a crack and you break your mother’s back. I tried that one out, and I know it didn’t work.

“It’s in the back of the house,” Elvis said. “We’ll have to go out there to see it. And then we can do something to it.”

He got on out of the bed and we eased out the back door of the house while the grown folks were talking in the front room by the heater. I remember looking back through the door between the kitchen and the front room and seeing Aunt Gladys backed up to the wood stove with the tail of her dress hiked up to let the heat get to her. It made something low in my belly feel funny to see her like that, and I jerked my head back around so all that was before me was the yard and the cold weather outside.

Elvis was already halfway across the cleared part in back, and by the time I caught up to him we were in the patch of pines that marked the end of the Presley’s yard. Elvis looked up at the trees and counted off three of them and then kneeled down next to the fourth one beside a flat sheet of galvanized metal there in the pine straw.

“Are you ready?” he asked and looked up at me, just the way he always did later on whenever he had something to show me that he thought was dangerous and scary. You know, some new kind of pill or a high-ratio gearshift or a woman that truly liked to get oral on you.

“Yeah,” I said. “Show it to me.”

He pulled up the sheet of metal and propped it against the bole of the pine tree, and I leaned over to look into the hole he’d uncovered. At first it was too dark to tell what it was, there in the shade of the evergreens, and I had to bend over closer to recognize it.

“Is it a inner tube?” I said.

It was big. Coiled up in the bottom of that hole, the thing looked to me like it could have swallowed both of us and never slowed down.

“Is it dead?” I asked, stepping back but keeping my eyes fixed on the thing.

“It’s alive. Something like that don’t never die.” Elvis poked it a little jab with a long stick that had been propped against the pine, and a little wave seemed to move in a slow surge all around the curves of its dark body.

“See,” he said. “It can’t die. It come with all this.” He moved his left hand in a little circle that took in the stand of pines, the backyard, the Presley place, Tupelo, everything.

“It’s always been here,” he said. “And it’s always going to be. Never going to die out.”

“We could kill it,” I told him. “Just like them chickens.”

“Nuh uh,” Elvis said.

“Could, too. You hit something hard enough or stick something into it deep enough, and if it’s alive, it can die.”

“Not this snake,” he said. “Not old Tarzan Snake. I dreamed about it, and I know.”

“What,” I said. “After you saw it, you dreamed about it? Course you did, and you woke up a-squalling, too, and Aunt Gladys had to come put you in the bed with her.”

“Naw,” he said. “Before. I dreamed about it before I found it, and it told me things.”

“What kind of things? Just old snake ideas?”

“It told me how to do stuff. What kind of things made stuff happen. About how poison works when you put it in something to make it die.”

“Snakes don’t know nothing,” I said. But I remember I was starting to feel uneasy there in the pine grove looking down at that hole full of reptile. Elvis hadn’t taken his eyes off of the thing since he’d pulled that sheet of metal off the hole, and it was beginning to make me feel the way it always did when he got to talking about stuff like that.

It always started down in my belly like there was something squeezing tighter together, so tight that I was going to have to run to make it ease up. It was the way I would feel the times when I thought I was late getting somewhere or that I was being left somewhere strange where I didn’t know anybody. A kind of a high tight sick feeling from my breastbone on down.

“They don’t,” I said again. “Snakes is just like dogs. There ain’t nothing in their heads. They don’t even know they’re a snake.”

“This one does,” Elvis said toward the hole at our feet. “Old Tarzan Snake knows who he is. He knows what he is, too. He told me in my dream.”

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Smart Aleck,” I said. “What did he say he was to you in that old crybaby dream?”

“Said he was a-coming. Said he was going to live with me and look in my face when I wanted him to. Said he was going to show me how his old snake tongue worked when I was ready for him to.”

“It just sticks out like the devil’s tongue,” I said. “It’s just forked. That’s all it is.”

“Tarzan Snake told me he would teach me things,” Elvis said, leaning forward to rub the long stick up and down the snake’s back and watching the ripples in its muscles.

“He said he would give me his voice. He said I could use it.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Well, just watch this here.” And I leaned forward and grabbed the stick out of Elvis’s hand and jabbed the sharp end of it as hard as I could into one of the circles of the snake’s body, putting all my weight into it as the point plunged through.

Elvis hollered as loud as I ever heard him and jumped on my back, knocking me on the ground just to the left of the hole and close enough to where the snake was lying that I could see the blunt end of its head not over a foot from my face. As I tried to get up from underneath Elvis, who had one arm around my neck and was hitting me on the back of the head with his fist, I saw the snake’s head move and lift slowly from the coils and turn toward me. Its eyes flickered as though they saw me and the tongue moved in and out of the mouth three times, real fast, and then the whole thing began to move in a slow strong spasm. I never have forgot that.

By that time I was able to start hollering too, and I could hear the back screen door of the house fly open as somebody came running down the steps.

“Elvis,” Aunt Gladys was yelling, “Honey, where are you? What’s he doing to you?”

“Cover him up,” Elvis said, letting go of my neck and rolling off me to reach for the sheet of metal. “Don’t you tell or I’ll say you was beating me up.”

I didn’t say anything then, watching Elvis cover the hole with the snake rolling around at the bottom of it with the broken-off stick in its side, and I didn’t say anything inside the house later as Aunt Gladys held me steady by the shoulders and looked straight into my eyes. All I could think about was the dark thread of blood coming out of the hole in the snake’s side, so deep red it was almost black, and the way my insides were telling me I had to run, run, run.

Elvis had one last thing to say to me as I was getting up into the pickup to ride back to the country with Uncle McCoy.

“Alive,” he said, his eyes on me as blue as mine and as glassy and narrow as the snake’s as he spoke, standing on the running board while Gladys hollered from the front porch.

I wanted to say “dead,” but my insides wouldn’t let me say anything.

“I told you,” Gladys was saying, “I told you not never to go with Jesse Garon outside.”

Several years after old Tarzan Snake I’m still living out in the country with Uncle McCoy and Aunt Edith, but I have learned a lot more about how things are and what’s really going on. By this time Elvis has already won that second prize in the Mississippi-Alabama Fair for standing up in front of about fifty mothers of contestants and three judges to sing “Old Shep.” I was there and saw it, but Aunt Gladys didn’t know I had sneaked into the back of the building to watch.

See, I had got to go to the fair, but I wasn’t supposed to be seen with Elvis there or go on any of the rides with him, and I was especially not supposed to be there when he was singing his song in that children’s contest.

I never was a fool. At least about little things. I could figure things out, and I had already started to realize that the way I was kin to my cousin Elvis wasn’t the way I was kin to any of the rest of the family. And, God, there was lots of them, so many it’s taken me fifty years to be able to forget most of them.

But I don’t want to tell about the second prize Elvis won at the fair, no matter how important all these biographers and critics see that episode to be. It wasn’t that big a deal, I can tell you. I mean not at the time, of course. What Mama did with it later is another story, and that’s a large part of what I’ve got to explain to get this thing all told right. What I want to describe right now comes later than the first time Elvis strapped on a guitar and throwed his head back to sing in front of an audience at the fair.

We were in the fifth grade, me out in that little country school south of Tupelo and Elvis there in town. It was an afternoon early in the spring, and I remember I was out in a field full of new clover in the back of Uncle McCoy’s house. I had taken me a piece of pine sapling about three feet long and peeled all the bark off of it to make a baseball bat. It was green and too heavy to swing right, but I was using it anyway to knock little rocks off into the woods that come up to the edge of the clover.

Anything hit into the woods on the fly was a homerun. Anything that bounced once was a triple, twice a double, and so on. Out was either missing one of the rocks or knocking it foul. I would do that for hours.

I had just moved a man into scoring position that day when I heard Uncle Vernon’s old car come churning up into the front yard. I drove the runner on in with a double, and then I ran on around to the front of the house to see if Elvis was with him.

It was just Uncle Vernon, so I told him hello and went on back to my pine sapling and my pile of rocks.

I wasn’t there but a few minutes when Uncle McCoy opened the back door to the house and hollered at me to come in they wanted to talk to me.

“Jesse Garon,” said Uncle Vernon after I’d walked into the front room where they were sitting, “I’m going to ask you if you’d be willing to do something for your Aunt Gladys.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “What?”

Vernon looked over at McCoy, and both of them looked away as soon as their eyes met. I could hear Aunt Edith back in the kitchen opening up the fire door to the cookstove loud enough to make the stovepipe rattle. I knew by that not to say anything else until Vernon answered.

“It’s at the school house, son,” he said and cleared his throat a time or two. “It’s about your cousin.”

“What?” I said. “Is Elvis sick?”

“Why don’t you just listen, boy,” said Uncle McCoy. “Maybe you’ll learn something. Don’t be always broadcasting when you ought to be tuning in.”

“Jesse Garon,” said Vernon, “what we want you to do is to go on there to the fifth grade in Tupelo for a day or two, there at Elvis’s school.”

“No, son, not with Elvis,” Vernon said. “That’s the whole thing, see.”

I remember he stopped and looked over at Uncle McCoy, and I could hear the floor creak behind me as Aunt Edith came closer to the kitchen door.

“That’s the whole thing,” Vernon said again. “Gladys wants you to go to the school there for a day or two and make out like you’re Elvis. You know, play like you’re him.”

Right then I felt the way I had the time Elvis showed me Old Tarzan Snake under that sheet of metal in the backyard in Tupelo. My insides moved way down in my belly, and the room seemed like it got hot all of a sudden, and it seemed like that everything in Uncle McCoy’s and Aunt Edith’s house got a hard edge on it that I could literally see. I remember thinking that I bet they can’t see that line going exactly around everything in the room, showing where it stopped and everything that wasn’t it began.

“Won’t people know it ain’t him?” I said.

“Boy, you know better than that,” Uncle McCoy said.

“McCoy,” said Vernon. “Gladys told you about that kind of talk.”

“Well, goddamn it,” said Uncle McCoy.

“Both of you shut up,” Aunt Edith said, in a high voice, coming up behind me from the kitchen. “Don’t y’all see Jesse standing in front of you? I know he sees you two.”

“Well, I just…”

“Don’t you say a damn thing else, McCoy,” she said, and then, looking at Vernon, “Go on and ask him and be done with it.”

“I was just fixing to,” said Vernon.

“Jesse Garon,” he went on, “they ain’t nobody won’t believe you ain’t Elvis. You’re just like him. You know that.”

I didn’t know it then, and I’ve been trying not to know it ever since. You know, back then I thought that Elvis looked like me a good bit. Not just like me, of course. Nobody could look just like me, I figured, whenever I would think about it, which was seldom enough. Oh, we were alike, I knew that. But I had never had a reason to look at myself in a mirror and think of anybody but me before that afternoon in McCoy and Edith’s front room.

That was what started me studying myself so much. That’s what got me into this whole thing. That late afternoon in the spring, the sun setting behind the stand of pines across the dirt road in front of the house and Vernon looking first up at me, then down at the floor. I can draw a line from there to where I am right now, and there to here and there ain’t a break or a curve in it.

“It’s a couple of boys at school,” Vernon said. “They been picking on him every day for the last several weeks.”

“That ain’t nothing,” I said.

“Son, it ain’t nothing to you, and that’s the truth. That’s why she came up with the idea. But it’s a whole lot to Elvis. He ain’t like you in that way.”

“What does he do?”

“Can’t sleep. Cries. Afraid to go to school in the morning. Can’t do his schoolwork.”

“What do them boys pick on him about?” I said.

“Aw,” said Vernon, “his lunch, you know. He has to carry biscuits and sidemeat to eat. I hadn’t got the money for him to buy the plate lunch or to get that store light bread the rest of them takes.”

“They make fun of that in Tupelo school?” I said.

“Well, yeah. That, and the way Elvis looks, you know.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I want to.”

“Are you going to get him back here by Sunday?” Aunt Edith said.

“I imagine Gladys will want him back here by then, all right,” said Vernon.

“I hope she’ll sew his clothes up at least.”

“I’ll tell her to do that,” said Vernon.

“Hah,” Aunt Edith said.

“Where does he sit?” I asked. “Next to you?”

“In that desk in front of me. His name is Leo Peeples, so that’s where he sits. Alphabetical.”

“You’re in the back desk on the far row in the second room, then?”

“That’s it. The othern’s Billy Mathis, and he ain’t very big, but he’s always along with Leo.”

“They have been so mean to your cousin, Jesse Garon,” said Gladys, “that I have laid awake every night worrying about it.”

She was making my lunch on the other side of the table from where Elvis and me were sitting, stopping every now and then to lean across and pat him on the cheek while he told me about where things were in the schoolhouse and how to get along as him there all day.

“I’m bound to mess up some,” I told him. “Since I ain’t never been there before or nothing. Somebody’s going to see something funny in the way that I act.”

“Jesse Garon,” said Elvis, laying his biscuit down in the plate and looking at me with his eyes starting to brim up with water, “there ain’t nobody notices me much at school. Except Leo and Billy. Nobody won’t see nothing wrong.”

“Honey, honey,” Gladys said and put down the sandwich she was making to come over and hold Elvis’s face between both hands. “It’s going to be all right, sugar.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They are going to notice you all right, Elvis. And it won’t be long neither.”

“Jesse, do you want two or three meat biscuits in your lunch sack?” Gladys asked me, never taking her eyes off Elvis as she spoke.

“Three,” I said. “These here are real good, Aunt Gladys.”

She walked me to the school that morning, just like she would every time I stepped in to be Elvis at school from then on. I wanted her to do it, and I didn’t want her to do it, at the same time. She always walked him to school, even in Memphis, at least up to the time Elvis started high school, and that was her excuse for going along with me then and later.

I never knew what to say to her, walking along there between the ditch and the edge of the road on the way to the schoolhouse, and I always felt the whole time every time that I wasn’t doing something right or that I was forgetting to say something I ought to. You know how it is when there’s something just at the edge of your mind that you have just brushed up against when you’re thinking about something else. And at the time you do it you tell yourself now that’s really what I want to be thinking about and I’ll come back to it just as soon as I finish this thing that I’ve already got started. But when you do get through with the first thing and try to go back and take up the thing you barely glimpsed and now have time for, it’s gone. You can’t get it back, and you’re sorry you didn’t just take it up when you first came across it instead of going on with that first thing you were onto.

That’s the way I always felt with that woman. With Aunt Gladys. Hell, I’ll say it. With Mama.

Anyway, that first morning I filled in for Elvis she walked me down the little dirt road from the house up to the paved highway and on down to the road the Tupelo Elementary School was on. She didn’t say anything most of the way. Just held on to my left hand because that was what she always did with Elvis, she told me, although she knew I probably didn’t like that kind of thing.

When we came in sight of the schoolhouse, a red brick building that back then looked to me as big as the Astrodome would look to me years later, she stopped and pulled me around so I was facing her. There was a breeze that morning, and her hair was all pushed up by it on one side so that she looked like she was mad or in a big hurry.

“Jesse Garon,” she said. “You understand why I’m asking you to do this now, don’t you? I mean me and your Uncle Vernon asking you. Him too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Because them boys is being mean to Elvis.”

“That’s right. We can’t let him think people can do that to him and get away with it.”

“They ain’t going to,” I said. “I don’t want nobody to bother him, neither.”

“Jesse Garon,” Gladys said. “I thank you. You be careful.”

“Don’t you worry no more about Leo and Billy. Elvis is going to take care of them boys.”

“Jesse,” she began and then stopped talking and turned around to go back the way she had come, never looking back a time as she walked up to the paved road and then down it until she was out of sight behind the pines.

I went on in the front door of the red brick building just as the bell was ringing and found the second classroom to the right with no trouble. I recognized it was the right one by the miniature bale of cotton that Elvis said would be sitting on the teacher’s desk in front of the class. I was one of the first ones to come into the room, but by the time I had reached the last seat in the far row a whole bunch more of Elvis’s fifth grade classmates had come swarming in, banging desk tops and dropping books and pushing at each other.

While they were all getting settled in their seats, I lifted up the top of my desk to see what was inside of it that I might be able to use. I remember there were a few sheets of Blue Horse notebook paper, a picture of a gospel quartet that Elvis must have torn out of a newspaper, two or three little short pencil stubs, and a metal compass. You know what I’m talking about. One of those dudes with a sharp point to stick in a piece of paper and a pencil at the other end to turn around and draw circles with. I took it out and was closing the lid on the rest of the junk when I felt the front part of my desk jolt as somebody flopped down against it.

I looked up from the compass to see who it was and could tell from the hanging mouth that it had to be Leo Peeples. He was twisted around in his seat to look over his shoulder at me, and when he saw me looking at him, he let his mouth hang open even wider to say something.