LITMIR.BIZ

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have heeded all the reports about how lying in the sun causes skin cancer; and they are usually working on their first nervous breakdown by age thirty, and all they want to do at the beach is sit there and relax while drinking cold beer.

      The three of us that day at Hilton Head had already tiptoed into our thirties and the beer was going down exceptionally well. I have no idea what women talk about when they’re sitting on a beach together without any men around, but when no women are present, men talk about the physical attributes of everything that happens to walk past them — or is lying close to them on a towel — wearing a bikini.

      Me and Price and Franklin were doing just that:

      “Good God.”

      “Where?”

      “Left.”

      “Good God.”

      “How old do you think she is?”

      “Eighteen.”

      “No way. Sixteen.”

      “Did they look like that when we were sixteen?”

      “They couldn’t have.”

      “Why not?”

      “If they had, I wouldn’t have lived this long. Some daddy would have shot me.”

      “Yeah, and they got the pill today, too.”

      “I wonder if the boys their age know how lucky they are.”

      “They don’t have any idea.”

      “Wonder how old they are when they start these days?”

      “Rodney Dangerfield said the kids are doing it so young these days that his daughter bought a box of Cracker Jacks and the prize was a diaphragm.”

      “Great line.”

      “Look coming here.”

      “It’s a land whale.”

      “Damn, she’s fat.”

      “If somebody told her to haul ass, she’d have to make two trips.”

      “That’s awful.”

      “Hey, we’re out of beer.”

      I remember distinctly that it was Franklin who went back to the condo to get more beer. I also remember distinctly that the month was August and the year was 1977. We had the radio playing. It was a country station.

      Franklin was gone thirty minutes. When he came back, he had another twelve-pack. He also had a troubled look on his face.

      “What took you so long?” Price asked him. “You didn’t call Sweet Thing back home, did you?”

      “You’re not going to believe what I just heard on television,” he answered.

      I had just taken the first pull on my fresh beer when I heard him utter three incredible words.

      “Elvis is dead,” he said.

      Elvis is dead. The words didn’t fit somehow. The queen of England is dead. There has been a revolution in South America and the dictator is dead. Some rock singer has been found in his hotel room with a needle in his arm and he is dead. All that made sense, but not Elvis is dead.

      “They figure he had a heart attack,” said the bad news bearer.

      A heart attack? Elvis Presley couldn’t have a heart attack. He was too young to have a heart attack. He was too young to have anything like that. Elvis Presley was my idol when I was a kid. Elvis changed my life. Elvis turned on my entire generation. I saw Love Me Tender three times. He died in Love Me Tender, but that was just a movie.

      I figured this was some sort of joke. Right, Elvis Presley had a heart attack. And where did they find his body? In Heartbreak Hotel, of course.

      The music had stopped on the radio. A man was talking.

      “Elvis Presley is dead,” said the voice. “He was forty-two.”

      Forty-two? That had to be wrong, too. How could he be that old? Elvis had to be younger than that. He was one of us, wasn’t he? If he was forty-two, maybe he could have had a heart attack. If he was over forty, that meant he probably had wrinkles and maybe his hair had already fallen out and he had been wearing a wig.

      But if Elvis Presley was forty-two and old enough to die, what did that say about me and the generation he had captured? He had been what separated us from our parents. He had been our liberator. He played the background music while we grew up.

      Elvis is dead. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so good myself.

      “Damn,” said Price, “if Elvis is dead, that means we’re getting old, too.”

      “Damn if it don’t,” said Franklin.

      I asked for another beer.

      The announcer on the radio had stopped talking, and the three of us fell silent as an eerie sound came forth. It was Elvis’s voice. It was a dead man’s voice. Elvis was singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” It was spooky.

      “‘Don’t Be Cruel’,” said Price. “That was his best ever.’’

      “‘One Night With You’ was my favorite,” Franklin said. “I remember dancing with Doris Ann Plummer and singing along with Elvis in her ear. ‘Oooooooone ni-ite with yuuuuu is all I’m way-ayting fooor.’ Doris Ann said I sounded just like Elvis, and soon as I got her in the car after the dance, it was all over.”

      “Everything he did was great,” I said.

      Elvis went on singing. I sat, still stupefied from the news, and listened. My friends went on talking.

      “My old man hated Elvis.”

      “So did mine.”

      “He was always screaming at me, ‘Get that garbage off the radio!’”

      “Mine was a religious nut. He said the devil had sent Elvis, and anybody who listened to his music was going to hell.”

      “I wish my old man was alive today to see who the kids are idolizing now.”

      “Yeah, Elvis wouldn’t look so bad compared to some of those weirdos they got today.”

      “He probably wouldn’t even be noticed.”

      “You really scored with a girl because she thought you sounded like Elvis?”

      “Doris Ann Plummer, right in the back seat out behind the National Guard Armory.”

      “I always used Johnny Mathis.”

      “Well, Doris Ann wasn’t exactly a great conquest. I found out later she’d do it if you sang like Lassie.”

      “Everybody had somebody like that in their school.”

      “Yeah, but just one.”

      “Imagine if it had been like it is now back then.”

      “I’d have never graduated from high school.”

      “I guess we were pretty naive back then compared to the kids now.”

      “Maybe we’re better off.”

      “Maybe. I wonder if we’d have taken drugs if we’d had ’em back then.”

      “Hell, I thought drinking a beer was the wildest thing I could do.”

      “I went to a fraternity party at Auburn when I was a senior in high school. I drank gin and 7-Up and danced with college girls. I didn’t think there was anything you could do any better or wilder than that.”

      “We didn’t have it so bad growing up.”

      “At least we had Elvis.”

      “He was the greatest ever.”

      “The

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