Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

The other boyfriend who knew about the tattoo didn’t get jealous and I laid there on the sofa bed that night and from the next room I heard him moaning and laughing and moaning and laughing and I knew Mama was regretting his knowing and when they was done, this guy started singing some Elvis song, but I put the pillow around my head and I hummed something else, “Saint James Infirmary” or something like that.

And she almost never does this, but after they was finished in there, she come in to me. We have a shotgun house with shutters that close us up tight and the only place I’ve got is on the sofa bed in the living room, and the next room through — the path that a shotgun blast would follow from the front door to the back, which is how these houses got their name — the next room through was her bedroom and then there was the little hall with the bathroom and then the kitchen and the back door. One of her jealous boyfriends actually did fire through the house and the doors happened to be open, but it was a blunt-nose pistol and the bullet didn’t make it all the way through the house, being as there was another boyfriend standing in one of the open doors along the way. Mama come in to me that night, too, cause I’d seen it all, I carried the smell of cordite around inside me for a week after.

So she come in to me after she’d done with this boyfriend who’d seen Elvis on my chest and she was smelling like the corner of some empty warehouse and I was laying there on my back and she come in and cooed a little and took me by the ears and fiddled with them like they was on crooked and she was straightening them and then her hands went down and smoothed flat the collar of my black T-shirt that I was sleeping in, but she couldn’t undo what had been done. This guy had seen Elvis on me. She had tears in her eyes and I started wondering again if she was ashamed of me, if she thought I did something wrong, like I deliberately let this face of Elvis come upon me and that was a hurtful thing I did to her. But then she always said something that confused me about that. “How can you love a fool such as I?” she said to me that night.

It’s a good question, I think. I think Elvis sold about two million records of a song by a name like that. But she meant it. And I didn’t say anything to her. She waited for me to say oh Mama I love you I do. But she smelled like a stain on a riverfront wall and she never come in like this when things was normal and nobody’d seen me, and maybe she didn’t know where my daddy was or maybe even who he was but he sure wasn’t the guy in there right now and he wasn’t going to be the next one either or the next and the few times I said anything about it, she told me she can’t help falling in love.

But I didn’t buy that. I couldn’t. Still, I know what I’m supposed to feel for my mama: Elvis collapsed three times at the funeral for Gladys. But I’m not Elvis, and I’d stand real steady at a time like that, I think. Nothing could make me fall down. I would never fall down.

And this little scene after the second guy saw me was in that same year, when I was twelve. Now I’m sixteen. Just turned. And her birthday present for me was to bring home a new boyfriend from the bar where she works, a guy who looks like I’d imagine Colonel Parker to look. I never saw a photo of Parker, the man who took half of every dollar Elvis ever earned, but this guy with Mama had a jowly square face and hair the gray of the river on a day when a hurricane was fumbling toward us and he made no sounds in the night at all and this should have been a little better, some kind of little present after all. But Mama made sounds, and I’d gotten so used to them over the years I could always kind of ignore them and listen — if I chose to listen at all — to the men, how foolish they were, braying and wailing and whooping. At least Mama had them jumping through hoops: I could think that. At least Mama had them where she wanted them. But this new guy was silent and I hated him for that — he didn’t like her enough, the goddamn fool — and I hated him for making me hear her again, the panting, like she was out of breath, panting that turned into a little moan and another and it was like a pulse, her moans, again and again, and I finally had sense enough to go out. But I’d heard too much already. Last night, it was.

But I don’t care now. Tina come up to me in the hall this morning at the school and she said “I heard it was your birthday yesterday” and I said “It was” and she said “Why don’t you ever talk with me, since I can’t keep my eyes off you in class and you can see that very well” and I said “I don’t talk real good” and she said “You don’t have to” and I said “Are you lonesome tonight?” and she said “Yes” and then I told her to meet me at a certain empty warehouse on the river and we could talk and she said “I thought you weren’t a good talker” and I said “I’m not” and she said “Okay.” And now I have to think what I’m going to do about my chest.

Mama has worked hard to keep Elvis a secret. Mama even gets me a note from a preacher every year that it’s against our religion to shower with other people. That keeps me hidden in phys. ed. at school. After that, it’s pretty easy. Easy for me. Mama still has the one night a year when the note needs to be done up for the fall and she has to take the preacher into the next room. But I don’t feel guilty about that. Not that one. It’s like her putting her body between me and somebody who wants to touch me where they shouldn’t. I don’t mean the preacher. I mean anybody who’d look at my tattoo. That’s how I feel it.

Because Elvis’s skin is mine. His face is in the very center of my chest and it’s turned a little to the left and angled down and his mouth is open in that heavy-lipped way of his, singing some sorrowful word, but his lips are not quite open as much as you’d think they should be in order to make that thick sound of his, and his hair is all black with the heavenly ink of the tattoo and a lock of it falls on his forehead and his lips are blushed and his cheeks are blushed and the twists of his ear are there and the line of his nose and chin and cheek, and his eyes are deep and dark, all these are done in the stain of a million invisible punctures, but all the rest, the broad forehead except for that lock of hair, his temples and his cheeks and chin, the flesh of him, is my flesh.

I want to touch Tina. She’s very small and her face is as sharp and fine as the little lines in Elvis’s ear and her hair is dark and thick and I want to lie beneath her and pull it around my face, and her eyes are a big surprise because they’re blue, a dark, flat blue like I’d think suede would be if it was blue. I want to hold her and that makes my skin feel very strange, touchy, like if I put my hands on my chest I could wipe my skin right off. Tattoo and all. Not that I think that would happen. It’s just the way my skin thinks about itself when I have Tina in my mind. And you’d think there’d be some big decision to make about this. But now that the time is here, it comes real easy. I will show her who I am tonight. I will show her my tattoo.

Mama used to tell me a story. When nobody was in the house and I was going to sleep, she’d come and sit beside me and she’d say do I want to hear a story and I’d say yes, because this was when I was a little kid, and she’d say, “Once upon a time there was a young woman who lived in an exotic faraway place where it was so hot in the summers that the walls in the houses would sweat. She wasn’t no princess, no Cinderella either, but she knew that there was something special going to happen in her life. She was sweet and pure and the only boy who ever touched her was a great prince, a boy who would one day be the King, and he touched her only with his voice, his words would touch her and she could keep all her own secrets and know his too and nothing ever had to get messy. But then one night an evil spirit come in to her and made things real complicated and she knew that she was never going to be the same, except then a miracle happened. She gave birth to a child and he come into the world bearing the face of the prince who was now the King, the prince who had loved her with his words, and after that, no matter how bad things got, she could look at her son and see the part of her that once was.”