It’s late summer, and way too hot to wear the black bolero jacket he’s recently bought, so Elvis has settled for his thick dress pants and best red shirt for his visit to the Memphis Recording Service. With his guitar strapped to his back, he walks past the shining windows of the car showrooms towards the intersection of Union and Marshal avenues. Each time he’s imagined this moment – which is every day for the past six months – he has pictured himself in a similar outfit. In his mind, his hair is always precisely the right shape. But now it’s hot enough to melt the asphalt, let alone Vaseline, and a greasy lock keeps falling into his eye, along with dust from the cars cruising down the wide street.
He’s seen a picture of the owner of the Recording Service, Mr Sam Phillips, in the Memphis Press-Scimitar and has admired his classy suit and hairstyle. In that photo, Mr Phillips looked a bit like a dark-haired Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, but better than that. More manly.
Elvis likes the hit record that Mr Phillips brought out on his Sun label, the Prisonaires’ ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’, but he’s got something different in mind for his recording. He wants something smoother. Something more Perry Como. Something he can do in a bow tie and imagine singing to a girl who will be much better-looking and more loyal than Betty McMahon. Something that will make grown men weep.
At the sight of his own reflection in the glass door of the studio, his spine weakens. He’s struck by the idea that Jesse is looking back at him, and feels suddenly exposed. He’s told nobody he is coming here today, not even Mama. Though he wanted to tell her, he couldn’t help imagining how unbearable it would be to admit that nothing had come of his walking through this door, and he’d decided it was better to keep quiet than face her disappointment.
He’s actually a little shocked that his own feet have carried him all the way to number 706. Perhaps he’ll just duck in to Miss Taylor’s restaurant next door. In his pocket there’s more than enough for a soda and a hamburger. Now he’s graduated and is working five days a week at M. B. Parker’s machinists, it’s easy to have some left over.
He pushes the door open.
Taking off his guitar and grasping it by the neck, he stands on the chequered tiles and looks at the woman behind the desk.
‘Well, good afternoon!’ she says.
He nods, but can’t seem to remember how to speak.
To his relief, she rises from her chair and guides him in, shutting the door. When the air from her rotating fan hits him he gets a whiff of his own body: sweat, and maybe some oil from his car.
‘May I help you, young man?’ she asks.
With her golden hair and brightly patterned dress, she looks like a lady from one of his mama’s magazines. Her glasses have sparkles in the rims. Standing behind her typewriter, she beams.
‘I’m Miss Keisker,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you, son?’
He gestures vaguely to his guitar and manages to clear his throat. ‘I heard you could make a record here, ma’am.’
‘A two-sided acetate will be three dollars ninety-five plus tax. Is it for yourself?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘You want to do the recording yourself?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘When?’ She flicks through the ledger.
‘Uh …’
‘You want to do it right now?’
‘I guess.’
‘I think we can manage that.’ She glances at her watch. ‘I’ll just see if Mr Phillips has a moment. Wait here, please.’
First smoothing her dress, she opens the door at the back of the room and Elvis gets a glimpse of what’s beyond: a microphone, a piano, and empty space.
Seeing this, he doesn’t know if he can keep standing. While Miss Keisker is gone, he fights the urge to save himself the shame of it all and escape onto the bright street by reminding himself that he’d managed to sing at the Humes High Minstrel Show before graduating. The moment his homeroom teacher, Miss Scrivener, had called him out as the winner had made his whole school career worth enduring. When he’d told his mother, she’d shrieked with happiness.
Miss Keisker slides back into the room.
‘Take a seat, son. Mr Phillips will be ready for you in just a moment.’
Elvis does as she asks. She makes a note of his name and address, then takes his money. The bills are sweaty and limp from his pocket, but she doesn’t seem to mind. As she checks the amount, he seizes his chance.
‘You know anybody who’s looking for a singer, ma’am?’
This is actually what he’s come here for. Not to cut a record – although he’s burning to find out what his own voice really sounds like – but to reach other musicians, and to figure out how he might get himself up on a proper stage somewhere.
Miss Keisker leans back in her chair and considers him, clearly surprised that he’s found it in himself to ask a direct question.
‘Let me see, now … What kind of singer are you?’
‘I sing all kinds,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘Let me put it another way. Who do you sound like?’
And he replies, quite honestly, ‘I don’t sound like nobody.’
‘Is that so?’ she says, raising an eyebrow.
Mr Phillips puts his head around the door. ‘Ready?’ he asks.
Elvis leaps up and jabs his hand in the man’s direction. ‘It sure is a pleasure to meet you, sir.’
Mr Phillips nods. He’s even more groomed than his picture suggested, and his hand is cool. Holding the door open, he says, ‘Come in, son.’
It’s a plain room, a little bigger than Elvis’s own front yard, tiled white from floor to ceiling. In the centre stands the mike, as lonely as an abandoned child. There is no sound and, it seems to Elvis, no air, in this room. Just a hot vacuum that he cannot possibly fill.
Mr Phillips climbs into the safety of his booth and shuts the door. He’s looking not at Elvis but at the knobs and sliders on the desk, so it’s a shock when the man’s voice, suddenly loud, crackles over the speaker in the corner of the room.
‘What are you going to sing?’
Elvis can see his own reflection in the glass and, through that, Mr Phillip’s perfect hair. He attempts to sculpt his own back into shape without success.
The voice comes again. ‘Son? Do you know what you’re going to sing today?’
Only now does he make up his mind which song to perform. ‘“My Happiness”.’
Mr Phillips looks up. ‘All right. Are you ready now?’
Elvis nods.
‘You see that green light over there? When it comes on, you can start. Just relax and take your time.’
Elvis tries to feel Jesse’s presence, to address him silently, but nothing comes. It’s as though his brain is stuck on the dial between radio stations, and all he can get is static.
The light flashes on. He positions his slippery fingers on the guitar strings. Then he closes his eyes and tries to imagine he is not in this studio but sitting in the laundry room at the Courts in the warm semi-darkness, singing to Betty with the washtubs for accompaniment.
The guitar doesn’t sound good. It’s hollow and barely melodic. His voice is not as good as it can be, but maybe it’s good enough. And he was wrong about this room. Once he’s started to sing, it vibrates with sound. At first it’s discomfiting, this new noise. The room makes his voice different. He’s sung the song so many times and it has never been quite like this before. Realising that it sounds better – rounder, smoother, and yet more alive – he is able to push through to the end of the song.
Mr Phillips looks impassively through the glass.
What did you think of that, Jesse? Pretty good, huh? You couldn’t do no better, anyhow.
Mr Phillips checks his watch. ‘All right. I got that. And you’re doing a two-sided?’
Not even a smile or a ‘well done’. What had he imagined? That the man would come rushing out to shake him by the hand? That he would stand and clap? Well, yes. He’d imagined both those things.
‘I’m gonna do “That’s When your Heartaches Begin”.’
‘Go ahead.’
The green light comes again. He tries to find the song and sing it as it should be sung, as he knows he can. He tries to use the room to help him. But his eyes won’t close; they flick back and forth from the green light to Mr Phillip’s perfect, unmoving hair. Then the expensive-looking crispness of the man’s shirt. Then the reflection of his own ugly pockmarked skin. Elvis doesn’t make it to the end. Instead he stumbles, ducks his head, and says, ‘That’s the end.’
The green light turns red.
Mr Phillips frowns at the deck. ‘Take a seat with Miss Keisker. Your recording will be ready in just a moment.’
Elvis stands, looking into the booth, desperate for something else. Even some disappointment, a sigh, or a ‘That didn’t go so well, how about we try it again?’ from Mr Phillips would be better than this brisk efficiency.
What the fuck are you laughing at, Jesse?
Mr Phillips looks up. ‘Something I can help you with, son?’
‘No, sir. I guess not.’
‘Go take a seat, then.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Because there is nothing else he can do, Elvis leaves the room.