Hello, I’m Bobby’s mom. And this is Timmy. He’s already been here for ages. It wasn’t long before he came to join me. To be honest, aren’t we better off here, in God’s breast, than on the other side, namely the kingdom of Satan?
Oh, I don’t resent Bobby for staying alive. He has always been weak, I guess he can’t help it. All I’m saying is that if he were here with me now, like my darling Timmy, he wouldn’t have this penchant for screwing with the pseudodead, with that foul creature. But you know, Bobby has always been a wrongdoer. A mother knows these things; I’ve known virtually since he was born. He was a nasty child, like his father.
Timmy, on the other hand, has always been an angel. A sweetie—quiet, obedient, innocence itself. And he adored me. These are things we can’t control, and it didn’t stop me loving them both equally, I won’t let anyone say I was a bad mother.
But I swear that if I were in Babe’s shoes, I’d take a large knife to his Carmen, without a by your leave. Lord, what have I done to deserve a pervert for a son? Bobby, my baby, stop this nonsense and come to Mom …
Mom, please, can’t you see I’m busy? I’m not a little boy anymore, you know. No, I’m not saying that to make you cry. But you shouldn’t talk like that in front of people. I’m a man. A man has his needs, Mom. And Bobby’s no faggot. It’s like Elvis. Who would dare make out Elvis Presley is a faggot? Or even worse, that he’s become a faggot now he’s dead?
I think sometimes maybe he’s behind all this. These apparitions of my mother (always at the wrong moment—but have you ever known a mother to appear at the right moment?). It could be that Elvis is prompting her: “Go ask your son to join us; I’ve got something I want to sing to him …”
I was young, and he was dead. I mean, he was supposed to be dead. I know, it’s strange. I’ve often thought about it since, and I reckon in the end that the man I loved that day was maybe neither dead nor alive. I’ve kept this story to myself for more than twenty years. Who would I have talked to about it?
The reason I’ve kept quiet this long is not just that I’m afraid no one would believe me. Anyone who has had to make a difficult confession will know what I’m talking about. Elvis, I’m taking the plunge for you, you who were, and still are, great and free and generous, dead or alive.
It was the summer of 1978. To celebrate my seventeenth birthday, I had decided to go on the road, hitchhiking. It was the third day, I was on Route 40, just past Memphis. It was nearly nightfall, the road was more or less deserted, no one was stopping, no one seemed to notice me. The light was failing, it was as if it were taking me with it; I felt like I was disappearing. Maybe the people driving past thought they could see some kind of shadow, a faint silhouette, a ghostly shape by the side of the road … or maybe they saw nothing at all. If I had any substance at all now, it was so fleeting that no one cast a glance over to where I was standing.
I began to wonder if I’d be better off heading back into town, to find someplace to sleep. The few cars still on the road vanished into the red sunset. The huge sky was just an orgy of flames. Finally I decided to carry on walking straight ahead. That’s when an enormous Cadillac loomed up behind me, drove past, then pulled over.
It had tinted windows, so you couldn’t see anything or anyone inside. It was like a great pink hearse. It was magnificent, gleaming, caressed by the fingers of God, which filtered through the clouds in long, hot rays. I walked toward it. I wanted to touch its smooth, shiny, thoroughbred bodywork. But I just stood there staring at it stupidly, not daring to move.
The door opened, and I took a step back. I saw the dark shape of a man at the wheel and I got in. I recognized him straightaway.
THE KING! The previous August, along with everyone else, I had learned of his death. But once I got into the car and saw him, dressed in black leather from head to toe, tall and long and handsome, with his black hair and his chubby cheeks … The King, goddamn it, the King! I recognized him as surely as if he were my brother, or as if I had lived with him all my life. I recognized him immediately and I loved him more than ever.
“Where are you headed?” Elvis asked me.
“I don’t know,” I replied, feeling intimidated.
For what seemed like an age, neither of us spoke. The car ate up the road, which stretched ahead like an unrolled ribbon toward the last drop of sun on the horizon. I looked at Elvis now and again, and each time I was struck by his beauty. He was as slim and handsome as in his youth, even though when he had died he had looked bloated and gone to seed. Now, as he stared at the road ahead, I could see that he was older, that he really was forty-two. He had a serious look on his rosy-cheeked face, a determined, piercing, almost mean gaze that made him even better-looking. Everything he had been through in recent times—that physical deterioration from which he now seemed fully recovered, all his personal problems, the torment he had had to endure—no doubt the effort of coming through all that had etched this new expression on his face that I had never seen in any image of him.
I knew everything about him: his style of singing, his syncopated rhythms like nervous lovemaking, the glottal modulations of his voice that evoke the trance and languor of sexual pleasure, his swaying hips, the hypersensual way he moved his legs, his body, and also his mouth and his eyes … Like everyone, I knew subconsciously that Elvis was basically a sexual invitation—he came onstage to whisper to you, to beseech you, to scream at you: “Desire me!”—that Elvis so wanted to be desired that it made him the genius of rock and the masterful performer that he was, and that he had given to millions of people; he the artist, the sensitive, generous soul, had given everything, infinitely more than anyone could give him back, had given right up to the end, had given his life. That is what I suddenly realized, and he was still giving, since the mere fact that I was sitting here next to him filled me with such happiness that I ended up sleeping like a baby, my head in the crook of his arm.
It was his voice that woke me. It was now completely dark, and as he drove he was singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I lay against his chest, not moving, and at the same time listened to the pulse of blood in his body. Sung a cappella, the song was even more beautiful. I’ve always known that in his voice there was not only great charm, but also a fantastic joy to be alive, and also tears. The car tunneled noiselessly through the coal-black night, and nothing existed outside of his bare voice—nothing but our two bare souls within this enclosed space.
A while later, Elvis told me that I had caught his eye because I reminded him of Debra. He explained to me that Debra had been his first love, a little black girl with whom he had sung in gospel choirs. She was twelve and he was thirteen. He told her his dreams, and he thought he would go mad with grief the day she was killed.
I wondered how I, a white boy, could remind him of a little black girl … but I felt extremely flattered and touched that for him I represented some kind of reincarnation of his first love. “I love you as much as she did,” I whispered. He stroked my hair with his hand, and softly began singing “Love Me Tender.”
It all happened like it had at the start—in other words, better than in a dream, as it were the easiest, most natural thing in the world. My fingers found the belt and buttons of his pants and undid them. My face slid down his stomach, and while Elvis carried on driving and singing, I took his penis into my mouth.
His dick was heavy and soft and sweet as a baby’s, as Elvis himself, and I could feel my own dick stiffen inside my pants, and I caressed Elvis’s with all my soul, with both a vast maternal love and all the physical passion that little Debra had been unable to show him.
I was so extraordinarily happy that I doubted the angels in heaven could have felt anything so perfect. As the song ended I felt a gush of what tasted like concentrated, sugary cream spurting in my mouth. Almost immediately, I heard the King’s resounding laughter, and once I’d swallowed I started laughing myself.
That was the first time, and the last. With Elvis, it just happened naturally, but I could never do it with another man, even if he had the same taste of concentrated, sugary cream. In any case, no one could sing “Love Me Tender” to me like he did, no one could reproduce the miracle …
Later, we passed through a town. Elvis pulled up in front of a Burger King and sent me to buy some hamburgers, some Pepsi and a milk shake for myself. We ate as we drove, laughing constantly at nothing at all. Now and then, Elvis would sing and I’d dance on my seat. Sometimes he spoke of his quest for God and I understood him.
As dawn broke, I asked Elvis to drop me off at the first bar we found open on the road. I knew I couldn’t stay with him any longer. Hugging each other tight, It’s now or never, Kiss me, my darling, we exchanged a long good-bye kiss.
At the counter, the truckers came and went, giving me curious looks, the waitress put a hot, steaming pot of coffee in front of me. I poured out cup after cup as the tears rolled down my cheeks. Again and again I could hear him singing: “Shall I come back again?”