Elvis and Marilyn Have Left the Building

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

(text and images copyright 2013 © by Umberto Tosi, all rights reserved)

Sure. I'm a hard-headed woman.But that doesn't mean I'm “the cause of trouble since the world began.” More often than not, the trouble comes to me.

I do that song with attitude – in my Elvis persona, costume and makeup and all. Hard-headed women do it all, most of the time – raise the kids, do the jobs, keep it together for men, most of them I meet who don't have the sense of jackrabbits.

I know every word of every song The King ever sang and most everything he ever said in public too. Like Elvis said once: “The only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one,” and he would have known, what with all the cow pies he turned into cash cows. And a bad movie might describe the last couple of days in Vegas where I was appearing for the umpteenth time, but maybe scary too.

Serves me right for meddling. Normally I don't run around getting into other people's problems. When I'm up on stage, everyone has a piece of me, offstage I like to keep to myself. I'm my own woman. I don't fret too much over the state of things or what people think either. But I can get soft-headed and  soft-hearted

I wasn't always this way. I had to learn to be tough raising and providing for the kids when Jake was my man, and down low and sinking, and finally gone. He sure could be hard-headed too, but soft hearted too, and with no sense half the time. Still, I miss him.

Jake wasn't much like Elvis, though, except he had the look, oh my, and the hair, oh my, and the bod, oh my, sexy, till he sort of went to pot. When I met him he looked very Jail Rock Elvis and don't step on his blue suede shoes.

I got Jake, in more ways than one, and he sure got me. And I get all the bad-boy, pretty Elvis' and the lost, gone-to-seed-but-hanging-in-there cowboy Elvises too, in a whole nuther way.

Jake was about enough brawny bad boy, though, for one lifetime. If I ever do get me another steady fella, I want the softer, gentler kind. But that's moot nowadays doing what I do, because most men I meet I either get all threatened and want to challenge me or run away, and that's just as well. I'm okay not looking for anyone. Though God knows, the boys come looking for me, some of them young and pretty, but no, not for me.

I like being independent, on my own these days. I make good money when I tour, which is about half the year, a nice enough living to be putting Beth through collage now, and Bobby not far behind her, graduating next year with honors from high school.

Beth doesn't like Elvis, neither does Bobby much. She's going for a master's in musical composition at New England Conservatory – got a gift and works hard at it, like I always taught the kids. She plays piano like a possessed angel and goes for I never can tell who next, no one kind, all over the place --Regina Spektor, Natalie Desay,Yoko Kano. And Bobby, he's into jazz and techno, classical and computers.

Mama's been the number-one breadwinner in this little family since before we lost Jake, and in that, I'm no different than a lot of women. I don't worry about the money. I've learned to take life as it comes, and trust it all to make some kind of sense, even when I can't see it. Elvis said “never believe that anything is a coincidence. There's a reason for everything that happens.”

Even so, I didn't think that it was for any particular purpose a few days ago when I saw a man drop his cell phone into a swimming pool, plop. Looked like it slipped – no, jumped – out of his hand as he took it out of his pants pocket. I had to laugh when I saw him almost fall in the pool trying to catch it. He tripped over a plastic chair and little table, spun around, caught his balance, but not the cell phone, and finally just stood glaring when the phone hit the water and sank like a brick. “I'm sorry for laughing,” I said, but couldn't stop.