Never Mind the Pollacks Page 4

  It’s a big pair of jugs

  It’s a big pair of jugs

  It’s a big pair of jugs

  It’s a big pair of jugs

  Yes, you can buy a picture frame

  For framing both your mugs

  But your woman’s gonna scream your name

  For a big old pair of jugs.

  “Oh, dear god!” Vernon said.

  He turned off the radio.

  “Darn it!” Norbert said.

  “Shut your mouth,” Vernon said. “That music is poison.”

  Vernon had long ago lost the battle for his son’s soul, but now the music had distracted him as well, and they were lost. The car was moving down Fourth Street. Vernon turned left the first chance he could.

  Beale.

  “Oh my goodness gee!” said the boy.

  He rolled down his window to behold an establishment of sorts. Its sign read: “RESTAURANT—DANCE HALL—CRAP HOUSE—WE NEVER CLOSE.” Next door, another said “DINER—BOARDING HOUSE—BURLESQUE—NOTARY PUBLIC.” For blocks along the sidewalk, in front of many other store-fronts of similar repute, men and women played craps, dealt cards, beat on each other, ate hot dogs, laughed, danced, spat, jumped up and down, and kissed in public.

  “Zoot suits!” shouted a tall, bearded black man, who was wearing a zoot suit and holding a sign that read “ZOOT SUITS $25.” “Get your zoot suits here!”

  There were all kinds of people. Field hands still covered in the day’s mud abutted the dandiest swells. Gawking teenagers and eye-patched pimps, bookies and sharps and lawyers and aldermen and prostitutes and soda-foundation clerks and secretaries, the wise and the naïve, the penny cowboys and dime-store Indians, everyone was welcome on Beale Street, even German Jewish immigrants in stolid cars. You went down to Beale, and you were part of the show.

  Across the street, in W.C. Handy Park, a man in a porkpie hat played a mournful blues that Norbert knew well…

  Woke up this morning, with the grease up on my pole

  Yeah I woke up this morning, you were greasing up my pole

  Baby climb aboard my chassis

  We can do the rock and roll…

  “Sing it, Clambone!” shouted a woman, nearly falling out of her red velvet blouse.

  “You know ah will, you sexy bitch!” said the man.

  “Rock and roll,” the boy repeated to himself. His soul awakened. In his short pants, he felt the bulbous stirrings of his first erection.

  Vernon was nearly choking with panic.

  “Close the damn window! This Memphis is crawling with schvartzers! I can’t believe white people are going anywhere near them!”

  “Oh, Vernon,” Gladys said. “Don’t be ignorant.”

  Vernon slammed the car into park. He raised his hand, and slapped Gladys hard across the jaw.

  “Well,” said Gladys, “that’s a fine welcome to our new home.”

  Years later, an adult Neal Pollack wrote, in Crawdaddy, of that day:

  Well, hellbroth and damnation, oh, mama, could that really have been the beginning, if my little eleven-year-old rod had the power it would have ripped right through my slacks, because I saw it, the music, and don’t you tell me that Gene Vincent was the leader of any pack because Memphis was it before I saw Elvis or Jerry Lee or Warren Smith, before I met the Prisonaires before I had even heard of acetate, when cough syrup was the only thing I was on, and I grabbed my daddy hard around the neck, and I pulled and tugged and said, “don’t you fucking touch her, you fucking bastard!” and outside the Black Boy played an electric blues and I never needed “Hound Dog” or some “Love Me Tender” shit because I was there at the source. I had no time for adolescent rebellion or that Blackboard Jungle greaser imitative second-tier crap because when you’re live from the phonograph department at W. T. Grant’s in downtown Memphis, when Saturday night is Willie Mitchell and the Four Kings at the Arkansas Plantation Inn, you realize that rock-and-roll is not born, and it does not die. I see the continuum with my own two eyes, suckers, and when my dearest daddy smacked me with a closed fist in that car and my mother scratched at him with her sharp lacquered nails and he bled from the cheek and someone tried to sell him a fifty-cent chicken pie through the window and he said “fuck your nigger food,” and smashed it back in that man’s face, well, then, it wasn’t much of a choice between my family and the blues. It was one and the same. I was in Memphis, boy.

  On that day, as his father bled and his mother sobbed in that car on Beale Street, the boy said, “This is the Southern dream of freedom. Where black and white play music together.”

  “What are you talking about?” Vernon said.

  “I see things in my mind,” said the boy.

  “You are an idiot and insane.”

  “No, Vernon!” Gladys cried. “Can’t you see how brilliant he is?”

  The family moved into a two-story, three-bedroom Victorian on Alabama Street, which Gladys decorated in dark wood, brass and mostly imitation velvet. She needed a comfortable home, because she could not think of a more repulsive place than Memphis, Tennessee; you were sopping wet as soon as you stepped outside. There were no Jews to speak of, no opera, no activities at all for a woman of refinement, particularly one so refined as she. Better to stay inside and not be infected by the vermin and their vulgar mass culture. Vernon, meanwhile, happily drove the South looking for men like him, joiners with the desire to work for a company on the rise. “Imagine staying at a hotel wherever you go,” he’d say, “and every room the same! It is the future!”

  They enrolled young Norbert at Henry Clay Junior High. The boy was tan and skinny, quiet, and a mediocre student. Most class hours, he drew cartoons of ghostly men playing the blues, of a breakfast tree in the sky, of a better world that he’d seen in short anecdotal snippets throughout his life. On his way to and from school every day, he’d hear strains of music, from houses or passing cars, and his little heart longed for something different.

  I wish I were black, Norbert thought. Then all my troubles would be over.

  One afternoon in October 1952, Vernon returned from a business trip to Macon, Georgia. It was already close to dinnertime, and he was hungry. Vernon said, “Norbert, I want you to run over to that butcher at 704 Union Street. Get me some pig’s knuckles. Be a good boy. Don’t stop anywhere else.”

  Gladys slipped Norbert an extra quarter.

  “Buy yourself something nice,” she said.

  Oh boy, Norbert thought. Now he could afford the latest issue of Weird Tales of Batman.

  But he never got to the comic store. Because next to the butcher shop, at 706 Union, was the Memphis Recording Service, soon to be the home of Sun Records. In the doorway, Sam Phillips stood.

  “Hello, Mr. Phillips,” said Norbert.

  Phillips grinned, like in his archival photographs.

  “Well, young Norbert,” he said. “Are you ready to hear some music?”

  “Oh my goodness gee,” said the boy.

  As his parents listened politely, Norbert ran around the living room in circles, frenzied and happy.

  “And then he showed me his Presto five-input portable mixer board and its PT 900 companion piece, and then he let me play with his collection of Crestwood tape recorders, and then we used his Presto 6-N lathe to cut acetates, and then he let me help him mount an Ampex recorder in a rack behind his head so he could create a slapback bass echo, and then, and then, oh boy oh boy oh boy!”

  He collapsed on the rug, humming to himself.

  “Were there any black people there?” Vernon said.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not. Anyway, they weren’t there very long.”

  “How many?”

  “Only four.”

  Vernon took a puff from his pipe, folded his newspaper in his lap, sipped his tea, crossed and uncrossed his legs, ran a hand through his thinning hair, and performed several other gestures that indicated he was about to speak.

  “Norbert
,” he said, “Mr. Phillips is a foolish and frivolous man. I forbid you from ever seeing him again.”

  Norbert stood up. He was twelve years old and growing, still no match for his father physically. But he did possess a mighty pair of lungs and a gift for language.

  “FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” he said. “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!”

  Vernon shot from the chair and smacked his son hard three times in the gut, and once in the small of the back. The boy dropped, gasping. An archipelago of bruises took shape in his midsection.

  “Never defy me,” Vernon said.

  Gladys jumped on Vernon’s back and clawed at his eyes. A shriek emerged from her prim throat: “Leave him alone! You common monster!”

  His parents slapped and scratched and wrestled on the ground. Norbert crawled down the hall, sobbing. It was the same scene every night, with little variation, but he could no longer look upon their battles uncritically. Tonight he realized, for the first time, that his parents didn’t have a good marriage.

  As it did every night, the mad, bloody scrum gradually turned passionate. Vernon pinned Gladys by the shoulders and kissed her, full and hard, smearing her mouth into a mush. She slid her knee into his groin, and he began to grind. He tore at her blouse with one hand and plunged his other below her skirt.

  Norbert stared sadly. Vernon saw him.

  “Do not watch us,” he said.

  Norbert went to his room, curled into a fetal position on his bed, and read the latest issue of True Boy Detective Digest.

  Minutes later, Vernon and Gladys finished their death tango of love.

  As they lay gasping, Vernon said, “That boy will never be involved in the music business. Not as long as I am alive.”

  The next afternoon, an awkward, shy teenager appeared at the front door. He slouched with a hangdog sneer. His eyes were cloudy with adolescent confusion and dreams of stardom.

  “Flour,” he said.

  “I can’t understand you, son,” Gladys said. “Stop mumbling.”

  “Um um flour.”

  The kid had a look and an attitude that impressed her, even if she didn’t immediately realize how or why. She felt a stirring below, in her private heart, but she later attributed it to the fact that she’d just finished rereading The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original German. Goethe always got her going.

  “You want to borrow some flour?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Momma’s fryin’ up some okra.”

  “Do you live next door?” Gladys said, hopefully.

  “Um yeah.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The young man shuffled his feet, shook his greasy head once or twice, and leaned toward Gladys sweetly.

  “My name is Elvis, ma’am,” he said with perfect clarity. “Elvis Presley.”

  The stirring below became a flood.

  “Norbert!” Gladys said.

  In his room, Norbert was reading the latest Haunted Soldier comic.

  “What?”

  “Come here and meet the new neighbor!”

  Norbert shuffled to the front room, where he beheld Elvis.

  “Hey,” Elvis said.

  “Hey,” said Norbert.

  Gladys crossed her legs and squirmed.

  “Why don’t you go over to Elvis’s house for a while? Momma has some work to do around here.”

  “But he’s too old for me to play with,” Norbert said.

  “JUST GO!” she said.

  “OK,” he said.

  “But…” Elvis said.

  Gladys looked at Elvis with a longing and lust that he would soon experience hourly, but had not yet seen until that day.

  “Take him,” she moaned, “before I do something sinful.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Elvis said.

  Next door, inside 462 Alabama Street, a large and merry woman was puttering in the kitchen.

  “This is my momma, Gladys,” Elvis said. “Momma, this is Norbert.”

  “My momma’s also named Gladys,” Norbert said.

  “Well, isn’t that something!” Gladys Presley said.

  “She’s not as happy as you, though.”

  They went upstairs to Elvis’s bedroom. Norbert found it deadly dull. Elvis didn’t have any comic books or baseball cards or posters of Jennifer Jones, all the things that made life worth living.

  “You go to Clay?” Elvis asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m graduating from Humes in two weeks. Then I’m going to work at M. B. Parker’s Machinists’ Shop.”

  Norbert was so bored that he contemplated suicide.

  “But what I really wanna do is play guitar.”

  “Really?” Norbert said.

  “Yeah,” said Elvis.

  “Are you inspired by the music in the air in Memphis?”

  “I dunno,” said Elvis.

  “Do you feel the soul of the South traveling up the delta, settling in the place where modernity meets the old, weird America?”

  “What?”

  “Can you play me a song?”

  “Well, sure,” Elvis said.

  He got his guitar out of the closet.

  “This here’s one I’ve been working on that I heard on Dewey Phillips’s show.”

  “Dee-gaw!” said Norbert.

  Elvis sat on the end of his bed and sang, You ain’t nothin’ but a Bear Cat/Scratchin’ at my door…

  The future Neal Pollack heard something that day, which he later described in his unpublished book of prose poetry, Elvis, Elvis, as “Elvis, pure Elvis.”

  “Elvis,” he said, “there’s somewhere I must take you.”

  “Huh?” Elvis said.

  On a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1953, Elvis and the future Neal Pollack walked into the Memphis Recording Service. That day, as his many chroniclers have chronicled, Elvis recorded two popular ballads: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Neither of them was very good. Sam Phillips sat behind the mixer board, filing his nails and drinking a soda.

  “Well, this is simply not interesting,” he said.

  “I disagree,” said Norbert. “That boy has something inside him, a fullness of spirit that barely begins to reveal his true intentions.”

  Phillips sighed.

  “Norbert,” he said, “if I could find a black man who criticized music as well as you, I’d make a million dollars.”

  “Gee!” said the boy.

  Elvis was done.

  “That’s the end,” he said.

  “Well, we might give you a call sometime,” said Sam Phillips.

  What happened next had been lost in time except for an account in the Memphis Commercial Shopper’s Gazette, a small newspaper that the young Neal Pollack published himself but never showed to anyone.

  “We got one more song,” Elvis said.

  “We?” said Sam Phillips.

  “Me and the boy. He wrote these lyrics that I like.”

  “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do today except promote about a dozen records,” Phillips said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The boy went into the booth with Elvis. Sam Phillips took a deep, meditative breath, which he always needed during recording sessions so he could channel the true sound of music being born.

  “Let’s begin,” he said.

  Elvis strummed his guitar, tentatively at first. But as the lyrics took hold, he took control of his material, and then he plunged toward the piano, and played that, too. His dumb gawk became a confident swagger. They sang the first song that Neal Pollack had ever written, an up-tempo number called “Come on Over Tonight”:

  Well, a whoppa whoppa woo

  I got the boogie in my shoes

  Well, a whoppa whoppa wee

  I got a shakin’ in my knees

  So come on

  Come on over tonight!

  Come on over tonight

  If you have to drive a car,

  If you have to take a flight

  If you haven�
��t got a cigarette,

  I haven’t got a light,

  So come on

  Come on over tonight!

  The song went on for a couple of verses. When they finished, Sam Phillips said to Elvis, “Son, I think we might be able to work together.”

  “What about me?” said Norbert.

  Sam Phillips laughed, and so did Elvis.

  “You’d better stick to criticism,” Phillips said. “There’s no room in the music business for songwriters who can’t sing.”

  Norbert thought that someday he’d meet someone who couldn’t sing. That person would then become famous. He’d prove the founder of Sun Records wrong.

  Such a god might walk the earth even now. But where could the boy find this tuneless wonder?

  Where?

  On June 20, 1954, as he did every morning, Vernon Pollackovitz woke at 6 A.M. did fifteen minutes of vigorous calisthenics, smoked a cigarette, gargled with salt water, took a shower, read a couple pages of Norman Vincent Peale, ate a boiled egg with a slice of country ham and sourdough toast, went to the toilet, where he surreptitiously looked at a Betty Page flipbook, and put on a natty gray suit and a stylish Kangol hat. He wore comfortable shoes, because he walked the five miles to and from work just about every day.

  “Cars make people lazy,” he said.

  Gladys liked to look out the window because she wanted to know the exact daily moment when she’d be free. On this day, she saw Vernon stroll down the sidewalk, whistling “And the Caissons Go Rolling Along.” She also saw Elvis Presley in his Crown Electric service truck, windows closed, singing along to some unknown boogie-woogie. The truck backed down the driveway and ran Vernon over.

  Elvis shouted, “Oh, my god, Mama!”

  Gladys Pollackovitz rushed from the house. Her husband’s brains dribbled into the gutter.

  Norbert ran out after her.

  “He’s dead!” Gladys said.

  Oh thank god, Norbert thought.

  “I wasn’t looking,” Elvis said. “Oh, mercy!”

  Gladys acted with wit and speed.

  “Norbert, Elvis, grab his legs,” she said.

  “Huh?” Elvis said.

  “Drag him into our driveway,” she said.

  They were too shocked to do anything else. Gladys ran into the garage, started the car, and drove it down the driveway over her now lifeless husband, taking care not to flatten him with the tires. She got out of the car. With a screwdriver, she punched a hole in the oil pan. Thick black goo gushed over Vernon’s mangled corpse.