Tabloid Dreams

“Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis”

I carry him on my chest and it’s a real tattoo and he was there like that when I come out of Mama. That was the week after he died, Elvis, and Mama made the mistake of letting folks know about it and there was that one big newspaper story, but she regretted it right away and she was happy that the city papers didn’t pick up on it. It was just as well for her that most people didn’t believe. She covered me up quick. Not more than one or two of her boyfriends ever knew — and there was many more than that come through in these sixteen years. The couple of them who saw me without my shirt and remarked on it thought she’d had it done to me, and she never said nothing about it being there when I was still inside her, and one of them got real jealous, as quite a few of them finally do for one thing or another, this one thinking that she was so much in love with Elvis that she had him tattooed on her son and that meant she was probably thinking about the King when the boyfriend and her was thrashing around on her bed, and she never said nothing to make him think that wasn’t so and he hit her and I just went out the door and off down the street to the river. We live in Algiers, and I was maybe twelve then and I went and sat on a fender pile by the water and watched New Orleans across the way and I think I could hear music that time, some Bourbon Street horn lifting out of the city and coming across the river, and it’s the land of music I like to hear, at times like that. There’s other music in me but his. You see, I’m not Elvis myself. I’m not him reincarnated as that one newspaper tried to make you believe. I didn’t come out of my mama humming “Heartbreak Hotel,” like they said.

The other boyfriend who knew about the tattoo didn’t get jealous and I laid there on the sofa bed that night and from the next room I heard him moaning and laughing and moaning and laughing and I knew Mama was regretting his knowing and when they was done, this guy started singing some Elvis song, but I put the pillow around my head and I hummed something else, “Saint James Infirmary” or something like that.

And she almost never does this, but after they was finished in there, she come in to me. We have a shotgun house with shutters that close us up tight and the only place I’ve got is on the sofa bed in the living room, and the next room through — the path that a shotgun blast would follow from the front door to the back, which is how these houses got their name — the next room through was her bedroom and then there was the little hall with the bathroom and then the kitchen and the back door. One of her jealous boyfriends actually did fire through the house and the doors happened to be open, but it was a blunt-nose pistol and the bullet didn’t make it all the way through the house, being as there was another boyfriend standing in one of the open doors along the way. Mama come in to me that night, too, cause I’d seen it all, I carried the smell of cordite around inside me for a week after.

So she come in to me after she’d done with this boyfriend who’d seen Elvis on my chest and she was smelling like the corner of some empty warehouse and I was laying there on my back and she come in and cooed a little and took me by the ears and fiddled with them like they was on crooked and she was straightening them and then her hands went down and smoothed flat the collar of my black T-shirt that I was sleeping in, but she couldn’t undo what had been done. This guy had seen Elvis on me. She had tears in her eyes and I started wondering again if she was ashamed of me, if she thought I did something wrong, like I deliberately let this face of Elvis come upon me and that was a hurtful thing I did to her. But then she always said something that confused me about that. “How can you love a fool such as I?” she said to me that night.

It’s a good question, I think. I think Elvis sold about two million records of a song by a name like that. But she meant it. And I didn’t say anything to her. She waited for me to say oh Mama I love you I do. But she smelled like a stain on a riverfront wall and she never come in like this when things was normal and nobody’d seen me, and maybe she didn’t know where my daddy was or maybe even who he was but he sure wasn’t the guy in there right now and he wasn’t going to be the next one either or the next and the few times I said anything about it, she told me she can’t help falling in love.

But I didn’t buy that. I couldn’t. Still, I know what I’m supposed to feel for my mama: Elvis collapsed three times at the funeral for Gladys. But I’m not Elvis, and I’d stand real steady at a time like that, I think. Nothing could make me fall down. I would never fall down.

And this little scene after the second guy saw me was in that same year, when I was twelve. Now I’m sixteen. Just turned. And her birthday present for me was to bring home a new boyfriend from the bar where she works, a guy who looks like I’d imagine Colonel Parker to look. I never saw a photo of Parker, the man who took half of every dollar Elvis ever earned, but this guy with Mama had a jowly square face and hair the gray of the river on a day when a hurricane was fumbling toward us and he made no sounds in the night at all and this should have been a little better, some kind of little present after all. But Mama made sounds, and I’d gotten so used to them over the years I could always kind of ignore them and listen — if I chose to listen at all — to the men, how foolish they were, braying and wailing and whooping. At least Mama had them jumping through hoops: I could think that. At least Mama had them where she wanted them. But this new guy was silent and I hated him for that — he didn’t like her enough, the goddamn fool — and I hated him for making me hear her again, the panting, like she was out of breath, panting that turned into a little moan and another and it was like a pulse, her moans, again and again, and I finally had sense enough to go out. But I’d heard too much already. Last night, it was.

But I don’t care now. Tina come up to me in the hall this morning at the school and she said “I heard it was your birthday yesterday” and I said “It was” and she said “Why don’t you ever talk with me, since I can’t keep my eyes off you in class and you can see that very well” and I said “I don’t talk real good” and she said “You don’t have to” and I said “Are you lonesome tonight?” and she said “Yes” and then I told her to meet me at a certain empty warehouse on the river and we could talk and she said “I thought you weren’t a good talker” and I said “I’m not” and she said “Okay.” And now I have to think what I’m going to do about my chest.

Mama has worked hard to keep Elvis a secret. Mama even gets me a note from a preacher every year that it’s against our religion to shower with other people. That keeps me hidden in phys. ed. at school. After that, it’s pretty easy. Easy for me. Mama still has the one night a year when the note needs to be done up for the fall and she has to take the preacher into the next room. But I don’t feel guilty about that. Not that one. It’s like her putting her body between me and somebody who wants to touch me where they shouldn’t. I don’t mean the preacher. I mean anybody who’d look at my tattoo. That’s how I feel it.

Because Elvis’s skin is mine. His face is in the very center of my chest and it’s turned a little to the left and angled down and his mouth is open in that heavy-lipped way of his, singing some sorrowful word, but his lips are not quite open as much as you’d think they should be in order to make that thick sound of his, and his hair is all black with the heavenly ink of the tattoo and a lock of it falls on his forehead and his lips are blushed and his cheeks are blushed and the twists of his ear are there and the line of his nose and chin and cheek, and his eyes are deep and dark, all these are done in the stain of a million invisible punctures, but all the rest, the broad forehead except for that lock of hair, his temples and his cheeks and chin, the flesh of him, is my flesh.

I want to touch Tina. She’s very small and her face is as sharp and fine as the little lines in Elvis’s ear and her hair is dark and thick and I want to lie beneath her and pull it around my face, and her eyes are a big surprise because they’re blue, a dark, flat blue like I’d think suede would be if it was blue. I want to hold her and that makes my skin feel very strange, touchy, like if I put my hands on my chest I could wipe my skin right off. Tattoo and all. Not that I think that would happen. It’s just the way my skin thinks about itself when I have Tina in my mind. And you’d think there’d be some big decision to make about this. But now that the time is here, it comes real easy. I will show her who I am tonight. I will show her my tattoo.

Mama used to tell me a story. When nobody was in the house and I was going to sleep, she’d come and sit beside me and she’d say do I want to hear a story and I’d say yes, because this was when I was a little kid, and she’d say, “Once upon a time there was a young woman who lived in an exotic faraway place where it was so hot in the summers that the walls in the houses would sweat. She wasn’t no princess, no Cinderella either, but she knew that there was something special going to happen in her life. She was sweet and pure and the only boy who ever touched her was a great prince, a boy who would one day be the King, and he touched her only with his voice, his words would touch her and she could keep all her own secrets and know his too and nothing ever had to get messy. But then one night an evil spirit come in to her and made things real complicated and she knew that she was never going to be the same, except then a miracle happened. She gave birth to a child and he come into the world bearing the face of the prince who was now the King, the prince who had loved her with his words, and after that, no matter how bad things got, she could look at her son and see the part of her that once was.”

This was the story Mama used to tell me and all I ever knew to do at the end was to say to her not to cry. But finally I stopped saying even that. I asked her once to tell me more of the story. “What happened to the boy?” I asked her and she looked at me like I was some sailor off a boat from a distant country and she didn’t even know what language I was talking.

So tonight I go out of the house and around the back and in through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. She and the Colonel Parker guy are in the bedroom and I never go in there. Never. Before I step in to wash up I pause by her door and there’s a rustling inside and some low talk and I give the door a heavy-lipped little sneer and a tree roach is poised on the door jamb near the knob and even he has sense enough to turn away and hustle off. So I click the bathroom door shut as soft as I can and I pull the cord overhead and the bulb pisses light down on me and I don’t look at myself in the mirror but bend right to the basin and wash up for Tina and there’s this fumbling around in my chest that’s going on and finally I’m ready. I turn off the light and open the door and there’s Mama just come out of her room and she jumps back and her sateen robe falls open and I lower my eyes right away and she says you scared me and I don’t look at her or say nothing to her and Elvis might could sing about the shaking inside me but I for sure can’t say anything about it and I push past her. “Honey?” she asks after me.

I slam the back door and I beat it down the street toward the river and it’s August so it’s still light out but the sun is softer this time of day and I’m glad for that. I start trying to concentrate on Tina waiting for me and I want the light and I want it to be soft and I keep thinking about how she says I don’t have to talk and that makes me feel better and it makes me think that I’m right about Tina. And thinking that, I start to feel the eyes on me. I’m going along a street of shotguns that are like them twins you see in pictures that are joined at the hip and the stoops all have people sitting and catching the early-night sun and maybe a little breeze off the river and the men are smoking and the women are in their bare feet and they all are looking at me as I pass and they know the sight of me cause I been coming by here for a long time and they always say Hi.

So they know enough to see the difference in me. They know I got something on my mind now. They can see things like that. Most of them along here are black folks and Elvis had a special feel for them. They taught him his music. He always said that. And they know by just looking at me that I’m thinking about Tina. They smile at me and say, Evening, and I dip my head when they do because I don’t want them to think I don’t appreciate who they are but it makes me feel real funny this night because they’re right. I’m thinking of the looks she says she’s been giving me and I can see her eyes on me from across the classroom and they are flat blue and when they fix on me they don’t move, they always wait for me to turn away, and I always do, and now I think maybe she’s been seeing as much about me as these folks on the stoops. Maybe more. I think maybe when I show her who I am, she’ll just say real low, but in wonder, “I knew it all along.”

Then I’m past Pelican Liquors and the boarded up Piggly Wiggly and a bottle gang is shaping up for the evening on the next corner and they lift their paper bags to me and I just hurry on and I can see a containership slipping by at the far end of the street and I have to keep myself from running. I walk. I don’t want to be sweating a lot when I get there. I just walk. But walking makes my mind turn. Mama’s robe falls open and I look away as quick as I can but I see the center of her chest like you sometimes see the light after you turn it off, she comes out of her bedroom and her robe falls open and I see the hollow of her chest, nothing more, and when I turn away I can still see her chest and it’s naked white and I wonder why Elvis didn’t appear there. She could’ve kept her own secret then and known his too, and there wouldn’t never had to be nobody else involved in the whole thing.

I’m walking real slow now. I even stop. The ship has passed and it looks like the street up ahead just runs off into nothing. I can’t see the river. But I know it’s there and the warehouse is not far now and I hear a sound nearby and I leap a little inside and I turn and it ain’t nothing but an old hound up on its back legs trying to get into a trash can. I watch him for a long time and he turns his head once, one of his ears flopping over his nose, and then he goes on trying to get in, though it doesn’t look like he ever will.

And then I see that the light is starting to slip away and I better get on, if I’m going to do this thing. And I turn down the next street and I can see the river now and I follow it and the warehouse has a chain link fence as high as my house but it’s cut in a few places and I find Tina on the other side already and she sees me and she comes my way. She’s wearing a stretchy top with ruffles around the shoulders and her stomach’s bare and she’s in shorts and I haven’t seen her legs till now, not really, and they’re nice, I know that, they’re longer than I figured, and we both have our fingers curled through the fence links and we are nose to nose just about and she says, “Get on in here.”

I go in and she says “I was worried you wasn’t coming” and I find out I don’t have anything to say to that and she smiles like she’s remembering that she told me I don’t have to talk good. But I can tell she’s misunderstood that. I talk okay in my head. I just can’t let it out. She says, “I don’t know this place so well. Where should we go?”

I nod my head in the direction of the end of the warehouse, on the river side, and I feel a lock of my hair fall onto my forehead and we move off and the ground is uneven, rutted and grown over with witch grass and full of stones and pipes and glass, and she brushes against me again and again, keeping close, and I think to take her hand or put my arm around her, but I don’t. I want this to go slow. We walk and she’s saying how glad she is that I come, how she likes me and how she is really on her own more or less in her life and she has learned how to know who’s okay and who isn’t and I’m okay.

And I still don’t say anything and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because I’m shaking inside pretty bad and we enter the warehouse through a door that says danger on it and inside it’s dark but you can feel the place on your face and in your lungs, how big it is and how high, even though you can’t see real clear at this time of day, you just see the run of gray windows down the river side and dust hanging everywhere and there’s that wet and rotted smell but Tina says “Oh wow” and she presses against me and I let my arm go around her waist and her arm comes around mine and I take her into the manager’s office. The light’s still coming in clear in the room and there are some old mattresses and it doesn’t smell too good but a couple of the windows are punched open and it’s mostly the river smell and the smell of dust, which ain’t too bad, and I let go of Tina and cross to the window and I look at the water, just that. The river is empty at the moment and the last of the sun is scattered all over it and there’s this scrabbling in me, like Elvis goes way deeper there than my skin and he’s just woke up and is about to push himself out the center of my chest. I want to try to say something now. Not say. There’s words that want to come but it feels like a song or something. I try to slow myself down so I can do this right.

Then I turn around to look at Tina and she must have gotten herself ready for this too because as soon as I’m facing her where she’s standing in the slant of light, she strips off her top and her breasts are naked and I fall back a little against the window. It’s too fast. I’m not ready, I think. But she seems to be waiting for me to do something, and then I think: she knows. It’s time. So I drag my hand to the top button of my shirt and I undo it and then the next button and the next and I step aside a little, so the light will fall on me when I’m naked there and she circles so she can see me and then the last button is undone and I grasp the two sides and I can’t hardly breathe and then I pull open my shirt.

Tina’s eyes fall on the tattoo of Elvis and she gives it one quick look and she says “Oh cool” and then her eyes let go of me and she’s looking for the zipper on her shorts, and whatever I’m thinking will happen, it’s not that. It’s not that. The secret of me is naked before her and I know she can’t ever understand what it means, and then I know why Mama is naked so easy and why the face of Elvis didn’t come upon her, why it come upon me instead, it was already lost to her, and then I’m sliding away and the shirt is back on me before I hit the warehouse door and I don’t listen to the words that follow me but I’m stumbling over the uneven ground, trying to run, and I do run once I’m out the cut in the fence and I hear a voice in my head as I run and it’s my voice and it surprises me but I listen and it says, “Once there was a boy who was born with the face of a great king on his chest. The boy lived in a dark cave and no one ever saw this face on him. No one. And every night from deeper in the darkness of the cave, far from the boy but clear to his ears, a woman moaned and moaned and he did not understand what he was to do about it. She touched him only with her voice. Sometimes he thought this was the natural sound of the woman, the breath of the life she wished to live. Sometimes he thought she was in great pain. And he didn’t know what to do. And he didn’t know that the image that was upon him, that was part of his flesh, had a special power.”

Then I slow down and everything is real calm inside me, and I go up our stoop and in the front door and I go to the door of Mama’s bedroom and I throw it open hard and it bangs and the jowly faced man jumps up from where he’s sitting in his underwear on Mama’s bed. She straightens up sharp where she’s propped against the headboard, half hid by the covers, and she’s got a slip on and I’m grateful for that. The man is standing there with his mouth gaping open and Mama looks at me and she knows right off what’s happened and she says to the man, “You go on now.” He looks at her real dumb and she says it again, firm. “Go on. It’s all over.” He starts picking up his clothes and Mama won’t take her eyes off mine and I don’t turn away, I look at her too, and then the man is gone and the house is quiet.

It’s just Mama and me and I have to lean against the door to keep from falling down.