That's All Right, Mama (eBook)

The Unauthorized Life of Elvis's Twin

Gerald Duff (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Devault-Graves Digital Editions (Verlag)
978-1-942531-18-0 (ISBN)

Infos

What would have happened if Elvis's twin brother, Jesse Garon, had lived and not -- as history has written -- died at childbirth? Leave it to the imagination of the brilliant satirist Gerald Duff to completely and hilariously rewrite the entire Elvis myth, this time with Jesse Garon passing as Elvis's 'cousin' and made to sit it out on the sidelines by Gladys, the forever-worried mama who calls for the twin when Elvis is having bad times and bad spells. So exactly who was it who first entered Sun Records to make a record for his mama? Who was it really who made the appearance on Ed Sullivan and danced around the firemen's pole in Jailhouse Rock? Well, we can't spoil it for you, but Gerald Duff can, and make you laugh the whole while. Devault-Graves Digital Editions has brought the long out-of-print That's All Right, Mama back in print in a new uncut edition with a splendid new cover and in ebook as well as print. That's All Right, Mama is a new addition to the Great Music Book Series released by Devault-Graves Digital Editions in which worthy music books that have not been available for some time are republished in quality paperback editions and ebook format. Award-winning author Gerald Duff has published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including Memphis Ribs, Playing Custer, and Memphis Mojo.

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What would have happened if Elvis's twin brother, Jesse Garon, had lived and not -- as history has written -- died at childbirth? Leave it to the imagination of the brilliant satirist Gerald Duff to completely and hilariously rewrite the entire Elvis myth, this time with Jesse Garon passing as Elvis's "e;cousin"e; and made to sit it out on the sidelines by Gladys, the forever-worried mama who calls for the twin when Elvis is having bad times and bad spells. So exactly who was it who first entered Sun Records to make a record for his mama? Who was it really who made the appearance on Ed Sullivan and danced around the firemen's pole in Jailhouse Rock? Well, we can't spoil it for you, but Gerald Duff can, and make you laugh the whole while. Devault-Graves Digital Editions has brought the long out-of-print That's All Right, Mama back in print in a new uncut edition with a splendid new cover and in ebook as well as print. That's All Right, Mama is a new addition to the Great Music Book Series released by Devault-Graves Digital Editions in which worthy music books that have not been available for some time are republished in quality paperback editions and ebook format. Award-winning author Gerald Duff has published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including Memphis Ribs, Playing Custer, and Memphis Mojo.

Textauszug

2

How am I going to get back there to Tupelo, to the beginning? I have been thinking about that, and I have been wanting to tell it right, the whole story. I could come at it from several different ways, and every one of them has its points. I could back way off and generalize about everything. I could do my best to convince you that all this really happened and that it was all possible for it to happen. I thought about doing that.

Here is what I come to. There’s all kinds of people have different ideas about the same thing, and there’s no way to tell which one of them is the best. Who is to judge?

So what I am going to do is give the straight story by telling you little stories, as Mama used to say. Now and then I’ll probably hold something back, and I may let you know when I’m doing it, and I may not. That’s my business, not yours.

I look at it this way. What you’re going to ask is how could it all be true. Am I real? And what I say to that is that it’s not my job to convince you I’m alive. Hell, I’ve had enough to do to convince myself that I’m alive all these years, and I’m still working on that topic. I am alive because I’m speaking, because I’m standing up and talking back, and that’s good enough for me now, and it’s damn sure got to be good enough for you. All right. Back to the birthplace.

Mama wouldn’t let us play outside in the yard at the same time those days I would come in from the country. That was way before I knew who he was and who I wasn’t, of course.

It was a cold morning, back during the war sometime. I was thinking about what I’d seen the day before at the bus station when I’d gone in there with Uncle McCoy. I’d almost run back out to the pickup when I saw it up against the back wall of the waiting room of the Trailways station in Tupelo.

What it was was a shooting gallery with dolls fixed up to look like Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo, and there was a gun there that shot little pellets if you put in some money. Uncle McCoy offered to let me shoot it once during his turn, but I was too afraid to look at Hitler and Tojo long enough to aim the rifle. So I passed on that.

I was remembering that and the bad dreams I’d had all night, about those little bodies with the big heads when Uncle McCoy asked me if I wanted to ride with him over to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Gladys’s.

I remember it was cold, like I said, but I don’t remember the ride into Tupelo from where Uncle McCoy and Aunt Edith and I lived out in the sticks twelve miles south of town. The first thing that comes into my mind when I think back to that day is the way the smoke looked coming out of the stovepipe on Uncle Vernon and Aunt Gladys’s and Elvis’s house.

It was a still morning, and the smoke was thick and white, and it looked like to me it was reaching all the way to the sky and connecting things together.

“Looky yonder, Uncle McCoy,” I said, “the sky is coming out of Elvis’s house.”

“You say some fool things, don’t you, boy?”

Vernon had the door to the house opened by the time McCoy cut the engine, so I was able to run on into the front room without slowing down. I asked Aunt Gladys where was Elvis as soon as I hit the heat of the house.

“He’s lying down in the bedroom resting, Jesse,” she said. “He don’t feel too good this morning, and I’m making him stay in bed until the sun gets good and up.”

“Let me go see him,” I said. “I want to tell him about Hitler and Tojo.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “You can’t come in here and scare your cousin like that. He’s got to keep his mind happy.”

That kind of talk wasn’t new for me, of course. I had learned that Elvis was supposed to be treated special and I had been punished plenty of times already for getting him what Aunt Gladys called “too excited.”

“Please,” I said, “he’ll like it.”

“No,” she said and looked down at me so slow that her eyes seemed to be sorry to have to touch me, “you ain’t going to do it. And if you do, I will wear you out myself, and I will do something else, too.”

“I won’t,” I said, and then because I have always wanted to hear what the worst possible thing could be, I asked her what else she would do, too.

“If you get Elvis to crying and having bad dreams,” she said. “I will take you outside in the yard where that little house is, and I will show you what’s in there.”

I knew the little house she was talking about, of course. Elvis and I had broken the lock off that structure a long time ago, and we had spent enough time inside it to know there wasn’t nothing worth playing with in it, and that the two or three boxes inside had nothing in them but a few letters and papers with writing on them that we didn’t care nothing about.

So I wasn’t scared of what was in that little house in the backyard. What I was scared of, though, was the idea of having Aunt Gladys take me off by herself and making me go with her into a little room where the only people there would be us. She had a way of grabbing my hands and pulling me up close to her so she could look into my eyes for a minute or two that scared the fool out of me.

Looking into her eyes, so brown they seemed all pupil and so big I felt like I could fall into them and never come out, I would imagine myself getting smaller and smaller under her inspection until I might turn into something no bigger than a pecan and roll off across the floor and get lost under a piece of furniture or fall through a knothole.

When she studied me like that, she would squeeze her lips together until there was just a straight line across the bottom of her face and then she would say words to herself so low that I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“Mama,” Elvis hollered from the bed, “let Jesse come in here and play with me.”

“Not now, darling,” she said.

“I believe it would help me to see him,” Elvis said.

“All right, sugar,” she said and her lips seemed to get bigger and softer as I looked at her, “just for a little while, then. I don’t want Jesse giving you nothing that’ll make you sicker.”

“He won’t never,” Elvis said, and I went on in to see him, banging the door back against the wall as I went through it hard enough to make the whole house shake.

“Don’t you make them loud popping noises,” Uncle Vernon said. “You boys don’t get started with none of that rattling and banging in there, now.”

“We won’t, Daddy,” Elvis hollered, making a scrunched-up face at me, and then whispering low for me to close the door.

“Guess what I found, Jesse,” he said. “Something good, too. You ain’t never seen nothing like it.”

“What?” I asked him. “I seen Tojo and Hitler yesterday. They got big old heads and teeth like in a dog’s mouth sticking out from their lips.”

“Where was they? Up on the ceiling when you was trying to go to sleep?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t no dream. Really I saw them. At the bus station up against the wall, and Uncle McCoy shot at them and made them spin around every time he hit them.”

“You mean some kind of a toy, then, or a game or something,” Elvis said. “That ain’t near what I found. I’m talking about something real and scary.”

“What?” I said. “Is it a ghost’s clothes?”

That was what Elvis tried to tell me he had found the last time I had come into Tupelo with Uncle McCoy. It was a thing I believed for a few minutes until he showed me what he was talking about, and I realized it wasn’t nothing but a pair of women’s step-ins. He finally admitted he had pulled them out of the ditch that ran along the road in the front of the house. The only thing interesting about them was the blood stains down in the crotch, which proved to Elvis that the woman had been stabbed and killed by somebody driving along the road there in East Tupelo.

I knew better than that already by then, but he didn’t want to listen to me tell the truth about it. So I let him go on believing it was a murder that had happened. He always seemed to feel better when he was believing something that was an obvious lie. The woman’s ghost, see, was never going to be quiet until it had its step-ins back on.

“No,” he said. “It ain’t no...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.2.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Comic / Humor / Manga
• ISBN-10: 1-942531-18-4 / 1942531184
• ISBN-13: 978-1-942531-18-0 / 9781942531180