The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Page 11

  After forty-five minutes, Malcolm left me and entered the bedroom. Liz stood up and said, “Night-night, Linkie. I love you.” She turned to embrace her husband of twenty-five years and said, “Hello, stranger,” and they went out the door. I heard their car pull away, and ten minutes after that Link was dead. The storm continued till about 3 a.m. while I sat by the stove and while the cat Friedrich, made stark in the flashes of lightning, marched restlessly over the boxes and bags and piles. There was nothing to be done. I didn’t want to trouble the hospice staff or the mortuary people until morning, and there was no one else to call. As with Darcy Miller at the end, so with Link—down to a couple of friends.

  In the last decade and a half I’ve corresponded a bit with Jerry Sizemore, but he hasn’t volunteered to tell me about Darcy Miller’s last days, and I haven’t invited him to. I understand, however, that Jerry Sizemore sat at Darcy’s bedside every day, all day, for thirty-one days, until Darcy took his final breath.

  I got that story from Mrs. Exroy. I encountered her now and again during the next few years, over the course of which I got back to Austin several times to teach as a guest professor, and whenever I ran into Mrs. Exroy, usually while she stood smoking an extra-long filtered cigarette behind the Brewer House, flicking her sparks and ashes into the ravine, Darcy Miller’s death was the first topic of our conversation, and she described for me each time, as if for the first time, Jerry’s faithful attendance at his friend’s bedside those last thirty-one days. Then after four or five years Mrs. Exroy and I stopped bumping into each other, because she died too. Oh—and just a few weeks ago in Marin County my friend Nan, Robert’s widow—if you recall my shocking phone call with Nan at the very top of this account—took sick and passed away. It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.

  Yesterday, January 8, 2016, marked the eighty-first anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth. It’s now two days since I learned that the poet Marcus Ahearn (we call him Mark) was arrested, or detained, one week ago, for making a ruckus at the Presley family’s Graceland Mansion in Memphis. In fact Mark was taken into custody for disturbing, or trying to disturb, the site of Elvis Presley’s grave. The shenanigans of a poet don’t rate headlines. I learned of Mark’s troubles through mutual friends. And I reflect to myself that he’s been taken, at last, into the jaws of the powers he’s vexed and bedeviled for nearly forty years: I say forty years because I happen to know that on August 29, 1977, while still a juvenile, Mark took part in an attempt by several persons to rob Presley’s original grave in the Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, which attempt—never alluded to in the press without the adjective “bizarre”—resulted in the transfer of Elvis’s remains, along with those of his mother Gladys Love Smith Presley, to the security of the Graceland estate, where mother and son now rest side by side in matching copper coffins weighing nine hundred pounds each…And Mark confessed to me, person to person, that shortly after midnight on January 8, 2001, under the feeble light of a crescent moon, he entered the Priceville Cemetery near Tupelo, Mississippi, took a shovel to an unmarked grave, dug down to the miniature coffin interred there, and broke it open intending to despoil it of its contents, namely the infant corpse of Elvis Presley’s twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, born dead.

  To the extent we possess a roster of genuine poets, Marcus Ahearn is certainly listed there. I first met him in 1984, when I taught a poetry workshop at Columbia. Mark was in his twenties. I was thirty-five. I’d headed a few such workshops in the previous decade, pored over and struggled with the verses of all sorts of students, not only the grads in the writing workshops but also tiny children in state-funded “poetry-in-the-schools” programs, retirees in community arts center classes, and once, for over a year, robbers, smugglers and thugs in a federal prison, and I’d wondered, more or less constantly: Are my own attempts any better than theirs? Marcus Ahearn’s first half-dozen poems delivered my answer. They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing, and as I held them in my hands a secret anguish relaxed its grip on my heart, and I accepted that I’d never be a poet, only a teacher of poets.

  Mark got himself up for the role in tweed blazers and baggy corduroys and bulky cardigans. He had a poet’s stormy auburn locks. His face was very pleasing: clean-shaven and like a doll’s, with round, bright blue doll’s eyes and pink doll’s cheeks. Button nose, small mouth, a charming smile often displayed. Altogether winning. When he entered the classroom, you could feel the welcome. The others didn’t seem to hold his talent against him. Maybe they were blind to it.

  Now. Where did my involvement with this thing begin? In that Columbia classroom, it stands to reason, with its gouged wooden floorboards, tall windows, distant ceiling—an excess of acoustical space that created, in my own ears anyway, a reverberation mocking everything we said. I suppose we surrounded a seminar table and these gifted students from all walks of life explored fresh ideas in an atmosphere of intellectual generosity and mutual support while I got bored, then irritated, and finally desperate to hear something stupid and silly. It was time, in other words, to hear from the professor. It’s likely I started with an anecdote, one of my favorites, about Frank Sinatra: After singing “America the Beautiful” to the assembled 1956 Democratic National Convention, Sinatra was approached by seventy-four-year-old twenty-two-term Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn, at that time and for the previous sixteen years the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who grasped the crooner’s arm and begged, “Sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,’ son,” to which Sinatra replied: “Hands off the suit, creep.” That probably brought to mind another of Sinatra’s quips, furnished sometime in 1955, when he described the rock-and-roll music of Elvis Presley as “a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.” Elvis!—And just like that, I’m twisting in the snares of passion and memory, rehearsing for the youngsters the night in 1957 when I, a third-grader, sat in a theater packed mostly with teenagers, and we all clapped along to Elvis Presley’s numbers in Jailhouse Rock, the whole of us making a single sinister, infantile, sexual entity governed only by a jungle rhythm in the dark—“only by the pulse,” I bet I said, “of our very gore.” Here would have been a smart point on which to pivot toward some aspect of our studies—rhythm, for Christ’s sake—but instead I fall prey to compulsive ruminations, I talk at far too great a length of my bewilderment that the vapid, tedious Elvis of later years seemed nothing like the Elvis of 1957. “The uninformed,” I probably said, “blame the change on drug abuse, but I blame Presley’s manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, a lethal champion of mediocrity. By 1957 Parker had already begun injecting his paralytic ooze into the fiery whirling original fact that was Elvis Presley, and in early 1958, he turned him over to the U.S. military to be rendered down to glue.” Here, I’m sure, I’d have tried to snap my mouth shut with a remark I often deliver: “It wasn’t the Kennedy assassination in 1963 that broke the back of the American century—it was Elvis Presley’s enlistment in the army in 1958”—directly upon which the world witnessed the evaporation of Elvis, the shearing of his sideburns, the photos of him trussed up in a uniform with shiny gold buttons, the announcement that the slender, smoldering androgyne of Jailhouse Rock had taken up the study of karate. And this transformation was instigated by “Colonel” Tom Parker, “who was no kind of colonel, but only an infantry private, cashiered from the U.S. Army as both a deserter and a psychopath.” Am I pounding on the table? Somebody is. “And listen to me! Heed me now! Inside every one of us lives a poisoner like Colonel Tom Parker.” By this time I’ve risen to my feet, I’m shouting, probably weeping—my marriage, I forgot to say, is confused; my finances are on fire; and my tenure-track job as a teacher of poetry at this prestigious university hangs by a thread, a circumstance having nothing to do with my teaching, which is inept, or my poems, which are fraudulent, and everything to do with departmental politics, at which I fail—so, yes, shouting and weeping, I instruct my students to
leave me now, get out, go home—“go sit before your desk without a pen, without paper, without words even. Reach into your heart and pull out your own Colonel Parker from inside you, open your jaws, gnash him down, let him be pulped in your guts and ejected as shit—that’s right, erupt!—and bring that to me smeared on a page!” And from the first word to the last of this monolog the young and talented Marcus Ahearn would have been staring at my face, his doll’s eyes shining, although at that moment, exercised as I was, I couldn’t have noticed.

  In all likelihood this was the day I slammed the classroom’s door behind me, sailed down the hall to the office of the Director of Columbia University’s Program in Creative Writing, a nice, nice man, and said to him, “Fuck you. And your program. And these students. It’s a crime to encourage them. I quit.” And so on, and quite a bit more. This man dealt with me adroitly. He kept his hands folded before him on the desk, fingers laced together, his head cocked, and listened. At five-second intervals, he nodded. He neither supported nor contradicted me when I said that Ahearn was a poet and the others were congenital mediocrities, that our writing program amounted to an academic Ponzi scheme, a literary racket…After I ran out of words he cleared his throat, assured me he could appreciate the torsion and doubt I labored under, praised my candor, my valor, even, and got me to promise I wouldn’t leave these young people in the lurch but would finish out the semester, which consisted, after all, of only three more class meetings. He shook my hand. We parted friends. His name was Dusseldorf. He’d written some books and nobody had bought them, and now—he did this. I went down the hallways and stairways and out into the April twilight of Manhattan’s upper west side and walked the streets and waited for sundown to close the lid on one of my life’s top five most embarrassing episodes.

  The lid, however, wouldn’t shut. The mind held back the whole sky. The mind rehearsed the recent scene, explained, denied, composed, revised, all in a whining voice. Meanwhile, the city shrieked and throbbed. Manhattan in the 1980s had a pulse, heady, potent, but like a wound’s. Do you remember? Death-camp homeless. Guerrilla vendors. Three-card monte. Trash all over the streets. How I survived this attack on multiple fronts, how I crossed those streets without getting murdered by a vehicle, I can’t imagine. Maybe Marcus Ahearn saved me. This might have been the day Mark Ahearn strolled up beside me in the middle of the crosswalk and took my arm and said “Professor Harrington!—another dismal classroom performance,” and our friendship began.

  It might easily have been that day. I’m only guessing. So what? The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We’re stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine, and in mine I’m sitting with Marcus Ahearn twenty minutes later in a park plaza I often retreated to in those days, a tiny green triangle where 106th crosses Broadway and then, immediately, West End Avenue: a couple of benches among budding oaks, random pigeons, eager squirrels, and big river rats, too, migrants from the Hudson just blocks away, assimilated by the upper west side culture and now living as squirrels. These rats stand upright, beg, feed from the human hand. Mark and I sip coffee from go-cups, and, “You’re very passionate,” he said, “about Elvis Presley.”

  “All of that just leapt out.”

  “Leapt out,” he agreed, “and ran around with no pants.”

  “A point was being made.”

  “About Colonel Tom Parker.”

  “The colonel ruined Elvis. The colonel leached him and bleached him.”

  Mark pried the lid from his go-cup and peered down at the dregs and interrogated them: “Does Columbia University care, even slightly, what goes on in the classroom? I mean”—now he looked at me—“your fits and your breakdowns.”

  “Conniptions.”

  “Do they trouble you about your outbursts?”

  Yes, I was crazy. Somewhere between the covers of a heavy textbook, my diagnosis waited for me. But at this moment I was Professor Kevin Peter Harrington conferring with a student, duty-bound to guard him from the abyss that constitutes my inner world, the abyss “that separates us,” as the poet Nicanor Parra remarked, “from the other abysses.”

  So I just said, “You write wonderfully.”

  “It’s not the most important thing I do.”

  Then he shut up. I felt prompted to ask the obvious question—I felt prodded, and so I dug in my heels and didn’t ask him what was the most important thing.

  He changed the subject without breaking stride. “You’re right to call the colonel lethal.”

  “Who called him lethal?”

  “ ‘A lethal champion of mediocrity’—you called him that.”

  “Good for me.”

  “The colonel, you know, was suspected of murdering a woman in his youth. Lethal. It ties right in with a theory I have about Elvis’s life and death.”

  “Why this fascination with Elvis Presley? Aren’t you way out of date? How old are you?”

  “Last September I turned twenty-four.” And he gave me the particulars: Charles Marcus Ahearn (but he didn’t mention the Charles; the Charles came out later), born September 10, 1959, in the Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland; father a physician, a specialist in liver ailments, and for nearly twenty years the assistant director of the National Institutes of Health; mother a Smith College valedictorian, respected amateur bibliographer (of the poets Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop), and activist in the cause of animal rights. Mark attended public schools, graduating in 1977 from Potomac’s Winston Churchill High, the only such institution I know of named for someone not an American. Mark’s parents, old enough to be his grandparents, raised him in an atmosphere of kindly tolerance and good order, and, at the time of our conversation in the plaza, mother and father still lived together in the house Mark had known from infancy to age eighteen, when he’d left them to attend Williams College. The sudden death of his only sibling, a brother eleven years older than Mark, delivered his childhood’s single abiding injury. Employed for the summer in a national forest somewhere in the Northwest ahead of his freshman debut at Harvard, this brother, Lancaster, nicknamed Lance, had plunged from the upper boughs of a very tall evergreen. What he was doing up there, I couldn’t ask. What if it was something silly, a drunken bet, a youngster’s manic, simian impulse or seizure? Or worse—suicide?

  “My brother Lance,” Mark said, “was a legendary youth. He had this negligent charisma, completely irresistible to other kids his age, and younger ones too, like me, all of us floundering in a pimply mess while Lance lived out every minute as if he’d rehearsed for it, this cool rocker with jeans and boots and an old MG roadster that used to be red and had no top—but he flew all around Montgomery County in it, winter and summer, rain and snow, sort of blazing a trail in the sky. The girls worshipped him; he had his pick of them; he must have deflowered dozens. In a fight, he was like Errol Flynn, dancing around as if his opponents were hired to make him look invincible. He laughed at authority—got himself suspended from school several times each year, and he didn’t care. And neither did Mom and Dad. When Lance was around, they were speechless. They were like a woodcutter and the woodcutter’s wife in their thatched hut in a European folk tale: They understood they’d reared some kind of magical giant. The quests, and the voyages, and the kingdoms he’d win—it was so much fun imagining Lance’s future. Hang the infractions—the school principal helped him talk his way into Harvard. Then he was dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Cards on the table. Did you know about my juvenile criminal record?”

  “No.”

  “My youthful indiscretions?”

  “Mark, you’re still in your youth.”

  “The thing with Elvis’s grave?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Seven years ago, I spent four days in the juvenile lockup in Memphis for trying to dig up his grave.”

  “Whose grave?”

  “Elvis Presley’s, ma
n. Elvis.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you the short version: The day after Elvis died I took a Greyhound bus to Memphis and walked thirty-one blocks to the Graceland Mansion. I was one of the thousands of mourners standing outside in the rain. I was sixteen. I met a pack of fools who said they were going to dig up Elvis’s grave, which was across town at the Forest Hill Cemetery, in a hole three days old. I went along, and we all got pinched.

  “It turned out the whole thing was sort of a ruse, a publicity stunt. Nobody could have got into that vault. They didn’t even bring a shovel. Later came rumors that the vandals had been hired by the Presley family. They just wanted to show how vulnerable the site was, so the grave could be moved to the Graceland Mansion. At Graceland, the family get fifteen million bucks a year from tourists.

  “I wasn’t charged with anything. I stayed in a sort of dorm for runaways. After a few days the prosecutor declined to pursue the case, and I went home on a plane.

  “All of this happened because I was out of my mind over Elvis Presley’s death. I’m going to explain. My brother Lance was obsessed with Elvis Presley and collected all his records…No. Let me start again:

  “I have another brother—also dead.

  “Have you ever heard the term ‘twinless twin’? My brother was one of those, a twinless twin, with an identical twin brother born dead beside him.

  “Elvis Presley was the same—his twin brother Jesse was stillborn.