Javier Marias - Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

But most unbearable of all were the kind of people who not only let themselves be carried along on the tide of song and incessant humming, but who went looking for it and egged Mr. Presley on in order to feel they were on his level or to ingratiate themselves, trying to out-Elvis Elvis. There were a number of them among that vast company, but the most grotesque of all was McGraw, the small-town magnate, a man of about fifty-five — my age now, awful thought — who, during the days he spent on location with us, behaved not like a young man of twenty-seven (Presley’s age) or twenty-two (mine) but like a fourteen-year-old in the full frenzy of burgeoning pubescence. George McGraw was one of the many inappropriate individuals who swam along in Presley’s wake for reasons that were not at all clear, maybe they were big investors in his conglomerate, or people from his home town whom he tolerated for that reason or owed old favors to, like Colonel Tom Parker, possibly. I found out that George McGraw had several businesses in Mississippi and maybe in Alabama and Tennessee, but in any case in Tupelo, where Presley was born. He was one of those overbearing types who are incapable of rectifying their despotic manners even if they’re very far from the five-hundred-square-mile area where their remote and doubtless crooked business dealings matter. He was the owner of a newspaper in Tuscaloosa or Chattanooga or even in Tupelo itself, I don’t remember, all of those places were often on his lips. It seemed he had tried to make the city in question change its name to Georgeville, and, having failed in that ambition, he refused to give his newspaper the town’s name and christened it instead with his own first name: The George Herald no less, in daily typographic retaliation. That was what some people called him in derision, George Herald, reducing him to a messenger (I’ve known other men like him since: editors, producers, cultural businessmen who quickly lose the adjective and are left with the noun). I remember joking with Mr. Presley about those towns in his native region, he thought it was hilarious when I told him what Tupelo means in Spanish if you divide the first two syllables (“your hair,” he repeated, laughing uproariously), especially since it sounds so much like toupee. “They seem completely made up, those names,” I told him, “Tuscaloosa sounds like a kind of liquor and Chattanooga like a dance, let’s go have a couple of tuscaloosas and dance the chattanooga,” with Mr. Presley everything went fine if you joked around a lot, he was a cheerful man with a quick, easy laugh, maybe too quick and too easy, one of those people who are so undemanding that they take to everyone, even airheads and imbeciles. This can be a little irritating, but you can’t really get angry with that kind of simple soul. And anyway, I was on the payroll.

George Herald, I mean McGraw, was no doubt very boastful of his friendship with Presley and would imitate him in the most pathetic way: he wore a sorry excuse for a toupee, an overly compact mass that looked like Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap from the front, and from the side, since there was no tail, like a bellboy’s hat, though without the chin strap. He admired or envied Presley so much that he wanted to be more than Presley, he didn’t want to lag behind in any respect, but to be a kind of paternalistic partner, as if the two of them were singers at the same level of success and he were the more experienced and dominant. Except that McGraw couldn’t sing at all (even in the airborne choruses of that ill-fated journey which for me was the last), and his ability to rival Elvis was no less delusional. He would shamelessly appropriate Elvis’s phrases, so that if Elvis said to the pilot and me one afternoon, “Come on, Roy, Hank, let’s go to FD,” referring to Mexico City, Federal District in his language, and then added: “FD sounds like a tribute to Fats Domino, let’s go to Fats Domino” (whom he admired tremendously), McGraw would repeat the quip a hundred times until he had entirely stripped it of any conceivable charm: “We’re off to see Fats Domino, to Fats Domino we go.” You start to hate the joke. In the throes of this half-adulatory, half-competitive zeal, he spent the two days of his visit exaggeratedly tripping the light fantastic wherever he happened to be (on the beach, in the hotel, in a restaurant, in an elevator, in what was supposed to be a business meeting) as soon as he heard a few notes nearby or even in the distance, and there was always music playing somewhere. He danced in the most unseemly fashion, doing a big loco act, aided and abetted by a towel which he rubbed at top speed against his shoulders or along the backs of his thighs as if he were a stripper, it was truly a vile spectacle since he was husky verging on fat but moved like a hysterical teenager, shaking that broad head from which not one of his Davy Crockett hairs ever came unglued, and spinning his tiny feet like tornadoes. And he did not stop. In the plane, on the way out (for me there was no return trip), we had to ask Presley not to sing anything that was too fast, because the owner of the George Herald would immediately go into his dance fever — those wee vicious eyes of his — and endanger our airborne equilibrium. McGraw didn’t like slow tunes, only “Hound Dog,” “All Shook Up,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and so on, songs that let him go nuts and do his number with the towel or whatever scarf or handkerchief happened to be at hand, his indecent bump and grind. It may be that he was what we would call in Spanish today un criptogay , a homosexual who hides it even from himself, but he boasted of never letting a tasty chick — his expression — get away from him without putting his hands on her or making some lewd remark.

That night, in addition to Presley, on whom he was always pathologically fixated, he had his eye on an actress, very young, very blonde, who played a bit part in the film and who happened to come along on this particular expedition to the DF; I always went along to act as interpreter, Hank could get out of it when we went by car. But that night we were flying. The girl was named Terry, or Sherry, the name has gotten away from me, it’s strange, or not so strange, and McGraw had the gall to compete in that arena, too, with Presley, I mean he was putting the moves on her without waiting to see if the King had any plans in that respect, which was a serious lapse in manners in addition to being idiotically oblivious, since it was clear to one and all that the young lady had ideas of her own which in no way included the moronic magnate.

It wasn’t Presley’s fault, or mine, except secondarily, it was primarily McGraw’s fault, and for that reason alone have I spoken, very much against my will, of that fake frontiersman. When the five of us walked into a dance hall or disco or cantina — five if we had flown to Mexico City; ten or fifteen if we were in Acapulco, Petatlán, or Copala — a riot would usually break out the moment those present realized that Presley was there, and women would be fainting all over the place. As soon as the owners or managers realized he was there they would put an end to the commotion the more bold-hearted girls were making and throw out the swooners so Elvis wouldn’t get annoyed and leave right away — I’ve seen night club bouncers scaring off harmless teenage girls with their fists, we didn’t like it but there was nothing else to do if we wanted to have a quiet tuscaloosa or watch a chattanooga — and once order had been reestablished, what generally happened was that all eyes without exception were on us, to the great detriment of whatever show was being performed on stage, and nothing ever went any further than that and a few furtive autographs. Once we had a kind of forewarning of what would happen that night, a few young fellows got jealous; they started trying to provoke us and made some seriously inappropriate remarks. I decided it was best not to translate any of it for Mr. Presley and convinced him to get out of there, and nothing happened. Those guys had knives, and sometimes you see the capataz embodied in anyone with a bulging wallet.