and banana sandwich fried in butter. There had been a time when he and his crew would board his private jet and fly clean across country just to have a special made fried peanut butter and ‘nanner sandwich. He could still taste the damn things.
Elvis closed his eyes and thought he would awake from a bad dream, but didn’t. He opened his eyes again, slowly, and saw that he was still where he had been, and things were no better. He reached over and opened his dresser drawer and got out a little round mirror and looked at himself.
He was horrified. His hair was white as salt and had receded dramatically. He had wrinkles deep enough to conceal outstretched earthworms, the big ones, the night crawlers. His pouty mouth no longer appeared pouty. It looked like the drooping waddles of a bulldog, seeming more that way because he was slobbering a mite. He dragged his tired tongue across his lips to daub the slobber, revealed to himself in the mirror that he was missing a lot of teeth.
Goddamn it! How had he gone from King of Rock and Roll to this? Old guy in a rest home in East Texas with a growth on his dick?
And what was that growth? Cancer? No one was talking. No one seemed to know. Perhaps the bump was a manifestation of the mistakes of his life, so many of them made with his dick.
He considered on that. Did he ask himself this question every day, or just now and then? Time sort of ran together when the last moment and the immediate moment and the moment forthcoming were all alike.
Shit, when was lunch time? Had he slept through it?
Was it about time for his main nurse again? The good looking one with the smooth chocolate skin and tits like grapefruits? The one who came in and sponge bathed him and held his pitiful little pecker in her gloved hands and put salve on his canker with all the enthusiasm of a mechanic oiling a defective part?
He hoped not. That was the worst of it. A doll like that handling him without warmth or emotion. Twenty years ago, just twenty, he could have made with the curled lip smile and had her eating out of his asshole. Where had his youth gone? Why hadn’t fame denied old age and death, and why had he left his fame in the first place, and did he want it back, and could he have it back, and if he could, would it make any difference?
And finally, when he was evacuated from the bowels of life into the toilet bowl of the beyond and was flushed, would the great sewer pipe flow him to the other side where God would — in the guise of a great all-seeing turd with corn kernel eyes — be waiting with open turd arms, and would there be amongst the sewage his mother (bless her fat little heart) and father and friends, waiting with fried peanut butter and ‘nanner sandwiches and ice cream cones, predigested, or course?
He was reflecting on this, pondering the afterlife, when Bull gave out with a hell of a scream, pooched his eyes damn near out of his head, arched his back, grease-farted like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet, and checked his tired old soul out of the Mud Creek Shady Grove Convalescence Home; flushed it on out and across the great shitty beyond.
Later that day, Elvis lay sleeping, his lips fluttering the bad taste of lunch — steamed zucchini and boiled peas — out of his belly. He awoke to a noise, rolled over to see a young attractive woman cleaning out Bull’s dresser drawer. The curtains over the window next to Bull’s bed were pulled wide open, and the sunlight was cutting through it and showing her to great advantage. She was blonde and Nordic-featured and her long hair was tied back with a big red bow and she wore big, gold, hoop earrings that shimmered in the sunlight. She was dressed in a white blouse and a short black skirt and dark hose and high heels. The heels made her ass ride up beneath her skirt like soft bald baby heads under a thin blanket.
She had a big, yellow plastic trashcan and she had one of Bull’s dresser drawers pulled out, and she was picking through it, like a magpie looking for bright things. She found a few coins, a pocket knife, a cheap watch. These were plucked free and laid on the dresser top, then the remaining contents of the drawer — Bull’s photographs of himself when young, a rotten pack of rubbers (wishful thinking never deserted Bull), a bronze star and a Purple Heart from his performance in the Vietnam War — were dumped into the trashcan with a bang and a flutter.
Elvis got hold of his bed lift button and raised himself for a better look. The woman had her back to him now, and didn’t notice. She was replacing the dresser drawer and pulling out another. It was full of clothes. She took out the few shirts and pants and socks and underwear, and laid them on Bull’s bed remade now, and minus Bull, who had been toted off to be taxidermied, embalmed, burned up, whatever.
“You’re gonna toss that stuff,” Elvis said. “Could I have one of them pictures of Bull? Maybe that Purple Heart? He was proud of it.”
The young woman turned and looked at him, “I suppose,” she said. She went to the trashcan and bent over it and showed her black panties to Elvis as she rummaged. He knew the revealing of her panties was neither intentional or unintentional. She just didn’t give a damn. She saw him as so physically and sexually non-threatening, she didn’t mind if he got a bird’s-eye view of her; it was the same to her as a house cat sneaking a peek.
Elvis observed the thin panties straining and slipping into the caverns of her ass cheeks and felt his pecker flutter once, like a bird having a heart attack, then it laid down and remained limp and still.
Well, these days, even a flutter was kind of reassuring.
The woman surfaced from the trashcan with a photo and the Purple Heart, went over to Elvis’s bed and handed them to him.
Elvis dangled the ribbon that held the Purple Heart between his fingers, said, “Bull your kin?”
“My daddy,” she said.
“I haven’t seen you here before.”
“Only been here once before,” she said. “When I checked him in.”
“Oh,” Elvis said. “That was three years ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. Were you and him friends?”
Elvis considered the question. He didn’t know the real answer. All he knew was Bull listened to him when he said he was Elvis Presley and seemed to believe him. If he didn’t believe him, he at least had the courtesy not to patronize. Bull always called him Elvis, and before Bull grew too ill, he always played cards and checkers with him.
“Just roommates,” Elvis said. “He didn’t feel good enough to say much. I just sort of hated to see what was left of him go away so easy. He was an all right guy. He mentioned you a lot. You’re Callie, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, he was all right.”
“Not enough you came and saw him though.”
“Don’t try to put some guilt trip on me, Mister. I did what I could. Hadn’t been for Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that stuff was, he’d have been in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t have the money to take care of him.”
Elvis thought of his own daughter, lost long ago to him. If she knew he lived, would she come to see him? Would she care? He feared knowing the answer.
“You could have come and seen him,” Elvis said.
“I was busy. Mind your own business. Hear?”
The chocolate-skin nurse with the grapefruit tits came in. Her white uniform crackled like cards being shuffled. Her little white nurse hat was tilted on her head in a way that said she loved mankind and made good money and was getting regular dick. She smiled at Callie and then at Elvis. “How are you this morning, Mr. Haff?”
“All right,” Elvis said. “But I prefer Mr. Presley. Or Elvis. I keep telling you that. I don’t go by Sebastian Haff anymore. I don’t try to hide anymore.”
“Why, of course,” said the pretty nurse. “I knew that. I forgot. Good morning, Elvis.”
Her voice dripped with sorghum syrup. Elvis wanted to hit her with his bed pan.
The nurse said to Callie: “Did you know we have a celebrity here, Miss Jones? Elvis Presley. You know, the rock and roll singer?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Callie said. “I thought he was dead.”
Callie went back to the dresser and squatted and set to work on the bottom drawer. The nurse looked at Elvis and smiled again, only she spoke to Callie. “Well, actually, Elvis is dead, and Mr. Haff knows that, don’t you, Mr. Haff?”
“Hell no,” said Elvis. “I’m right here. I ain’t dead, yet.”
“Now, Mr. Haff, I don’t mind calling you Elvis, but you’re a little confused, or like to play sometimes. You were an Elvis impersonator. Remember? You fell off a stage and broke your hip. What was it…Twenty years ago? It got
