T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Now, as we reached the car and I swung back the door for her, I found something to say. “I can’t believe it — I laughed, hearty, jocular, all my teeth showing—“but I feel like I’m out on a date or something.”

Cindy just cocked her head and gave me a little smirk. “You are,” she said.

They’d booked Joey into the Troubadour Room, a place that seated sixty or seventy and had the atmosphere of a small club. Comedians played there once in a while, and the occasional folk singer or balladeer — acts that might be expected to draw a slightly older, more contemplative crowd. Most of the action, obviously, centered on the rock bands that played the main stage, or the pounding fantasia of the disco. We didn’t exactly have to fight for a seat.

Cindy ordered a Black Russian. I stuck with Scotch. We talked about Elvis, Joey, rock and roll. We talked about Gladys and how precocious she was and how her baby raptures alternated with baby traumas. We talked about the watercolors Cindy had done in high school and how she’d like to get back to them. We talked about Judy. About Fred. About guidance counseling. We were on our third drink — or maybe it was the fourth — when the stage lights went up and the emcee announced Joey.

“Excited?” I said.

She shrugged, scanning the stage a moment as the drummer, bass player, and guitarist took their places. Then she found my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.

At that moment Joey whirled out of the wings and pounced on the mike as if it were alive. He was dressed in a mustard-colored suit spangled with gold glitter, a sheeny gold tie, and white patent-leather loafers. For a moment he just stood there, trying his best to radiate the kind of outlaw sensuality that was Elvis’s signature, but managing instead to look merely awkward, like a kid dressed up for a costume party. Still, he knew the moves. Suddenly his right fist shot up over his head and the musicians froze; he gave us his best sneer, then the fist came crashing down across the face of his guitar, the band lurched into “Heartbreak Hotel,” and Joey threw back his head and let loose.

Nothing happened.

The band rumbled on confusedly for a bar or two, then cut out as Joey stood there tapping at the microphone and looking foolish.

“AC/DC!” someone shouted from the darkness to my left.

“Def Leppard!”

The emcee, a balding character in a flowered shirt, scurried out onstage and crouched over the pedestal of the antiquated mike Joey had insisted on for authenticity. Someone shouted an obscenity, and Joey turned his back. There were more calls for heavy-metal bands, quips and laughter. The other band members — older guys with beards and expressionless faces — looked about as concerned as sleepwalkers. I stole a look at Cindy; she was biting her lip.

Finally the mike came to life, the emcee vanished, and Joey breathed “Testing, testing,” through the PA system. “Ah’m sorry ‘bout the de-lay, folks,” he murmured in his deepest, backwoodsiest basso, “but we’re ’bout ready to give it another shot. A-one, two, three!” he shouted, and “Heartbreak Hotel,” take two, thumped lamely through the speakers:

Well, since my baby left me,

I found a new place to dwell,

It’s down at the end of Lonely Street,

That’s Heartbreak Hotel.

Something was wrong, that much was clear from the start. It wasn’t just that he was bad, that he looked nervous and maybe a bit effeminate and out of control, or that he forgot the words to the third verse and went flat on the choruses, or that the half-assed pickup band couldn’t have played together if they’d rehearsed eight hours a day since Elvis was laid in his grave — no, it went deeper than that. The key to the whole thing was in creating an illusion — Joey had to convince his audience, for even an instant, that the real flesh-and-blood Elvis, the boy who dared to rock, stood before them. Unfortunately, he just couldn’t cut it. Musically or visually. No matter if you stopped your ears and squinted till the lights blurred, this awkward, greasy-haired kid in the green eye shadow didn’t come close, not even for a second. And the audience let him know it.

Hoots and catcalls drowned out the last chord of “Heartbreak Hotel,” as Joey segued into one of those trembly, heavy-breathing ballads that were the bane of the King’s middle years. I don’t remember the tune or the lyrics — but it was soppy and out of key. Joey was sweating now, and the hair hung down in his eyes. He leaned into the microphone, picked a woman out of the audience, and attempted a seductive leer that wound up looking more like indigestion than passion. Midway through the song a female voice shouted “Faggot!” from the back of the room, and two guys in fraternity jackets began to howl like hound dogs in heat.

Joey faltered, missed his entrance after the guitar break, and had to stand there strumming over nothing for a whole verse and chorus till it came round again. People were openly derisive now, and the fraternity guys, encouraged, began to intersperse their howls with yips and yodels. Joey bowed his head, as if in defeat, and let the guitar dangle loose as the band closed out the number. He picked up the tempo a bit on the next one—“Teddy Bear,” I think it was — but he never got anywhere with the audience. I watched Cindy out of the corner of my eye. Her face was white. She sat through the first four numbers wordlessly, then leaned across the table and took hold of my arm. “Take me home,” she said.

We sat in the driveway awhile, listening to the radio. It was warm, and with the windows rolled down we could hear the crickets and whatnot going at it in the bushes. Cindy hadn’t said much on the way back — the scene at the club had been pretty devastating — and I’d tried to distract her with a line of happy chatter. Now she reached forward and snapped off the radio. “He really stinks, doesn’t he?” she said.

I wasn’t biting. I wanted her, yes, but I wasn’t about to run anybody down to get her. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, with that band Elvis himself would’ve stunk.”

She considered this a moment, then fished around in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and expelled the smoke with a sigh. The sigh seemed to say: “Okay, and what now?” We both knew that the babysitter was hunkered down obliviously in front of the TV next door and that Joey still had another set to get through. We had hours. If we wanted them.

The light from her place fell across the lawn and caught in her hair; her face was in shadow. “You want to go inside a minute?” I said, remembering the way she’d moved against me on the couch. “Have a drink or something?”

When she said “Sure,” I felt my knees go weak. This was it: counselor, counsel thyself. I followed her into the house and led her up the dark stairs to the bedroom. We didn’t bother with the drink. Or lights. She felt good, and a little strange: she wasn’t Judy.

I got us a drink afterward, and then another. Then I brought the bottle to bed with me and we made love again — a slow, easeful, rhythmic love, the crickets keeping time from beyond the windows. I was ecstatic. I was drunk. I was in love. We moved together and I was tonguing her ear and serenading her in a passionate whisper, mimicking Elvis, mimicking Joey. “Well-a bless-a my soul, what’s-a wrong with me,” I murmured, “I’m itchin’ like a ma-han on a fuzzy tree… oh-oh-oh, oh, oh yeah.” She laughed, and then she got serious. We shared a cigarette and a shot of sticky liqueur afterward; then I must have drifted off.

I don’t know what time it was when I heard the van pull in next door. Downstairs the door slammed and I went to the window to watch Cindy’s dark form hurrying across the lawn. Then I saw Joey standing in the doorway, the babysitter behind him. There was a curse, a shout, the sound of a blow, and then Joey and the babysitter were in the van, the brake lights flashed, and they were gone.