4. It’s Now or Never
Later turned out to be the McDonald’s where Dad stopped for a quick cup of coffee after borrowing two bucks from me. We were sitting in a booth and I was rolling straw paper into little balls and putting them in a row like football linemen when my dad said in a completely calm voice, “I didn’t exactly know how to tell your mother this news when we talked before, but, well…I lost my job at the beginning of May.”
What?
I looked up from the table, totally shocked. Dad had worked as a salesman for Murphy’s Shoes since he and my mom were together. The store’s motto was “In Step with Chicago for over Thirty Years.” I could still remember the sharp smell of leather and shoe polish when you opened the glass doors. Old stoop-backed Mr. Murphy, the owner, would always reach into the change cup on the counter and give me a nickel for the Chiclets gum machine by the front door.
“They were losing business,” Dad continued, tracing his finger around the ridges on the coffee cup lid. “What choice did they have? Eventually they had to face the facts, and that meant closing the store and letting all of us go.”
I stared, still shocked. “The whole store is closed for good? Forever?”
“Yep.”
“What are you going to do? Have you got another job?” Even as the words left my mouth, I knew this was a completely stupid question. Of course he didn’t have another job yet. For years, all he had done was sell shoes. How many shoe salesman jobs were floating around out there in the world?
I could picture my mom’s expression when she eventually heard the news. Her lips would tighten into a disapproving line. She would take a deep slow breath, as if she was silently counting to ten. “It’s always something,” she would say finally, staring at the ceiling and sighing. “Always something with your father.”
Next, fill in the words:
And that’s why we got divorced.
Although my mom never spoke those words out loud, of course. The other unspoken words floating around in the air would be:
Please don’t turn out like your dad.
No chance.
Dad moved his coffee cup to the side and rested his arms on the table. “So here’s the deal, Josh,” he said, leaning forward and picking up one of the straw paper balls I’d made. He rolled it back and forth between his fingers. “I entered this contest at the mall in June—an Elvis singing contest. I’d just lost my job at Murphy’s a few weeks before and I thought what the hell—” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Heck. I thought what the heck have I got to lose? No job. Nothing else to do, right? So I paid the ten-dollar contest fee, borrowed a black leather jacket from this friend of mine, got some of those stick-on sideburns, and went up there and sang my tail off.” He leaned closer and his voice fell to an excited whisper. “I mean, I wasn’t half bad, Josh. Really, I wasn’t. People clapped pretty hard for me at least and one lady came running up to the stage and kissed me. I mean, I didn’t even know this woman! She just wrapped her arms around me and planted one right—”
“Okay, Dad, I get it.”
Jeesh, this was way more than I needed to know.
“Well, here’s the thing,” my dad continued. “I actually won the contest. Can you believe that? Jerry Denny. FIRST place. Two hundred fifty bucks.” He snapped his fingers together. “Just like that. For singing ONE song. Two hundred and fifty dollars. That would’ve been three days of work at Murphy’s. Three days of lugging stacks of shoeboxes around and saying nice things about people’s stinking feet. So,” he said, leaning back and smiling. “What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure what to think, except that I promised myself I would not set foot in Chicago’s Summerland Mall after hearing this story. All I could picture was my dad standing on the mall stage where they put Santa Claus every Christmas—my forty-year-old dad wearing somebody’s black leather jacket and trying to twist his hips like Elvis (oh god, did he really twist his hips?) and singing badly and getting kissed at the end by some wacko mall woman.
And what if the purpose of the contest had been to get people to go onstage and make fools of themselves? There were contests like that, did my dad realize that? Maybe the money and applause hadn’t been for being the best, it had been for being Chicago’s biggest joke….
I glanced over at my dad’s proud grin. Even the parrots on his shirt looked like they were stupidly smiling. A hollow feeling started burrowing a place in my stomach. “I’m gonna get something to eat,” I said, standing up suddenly. “I’m hungry.”
“Sure, sure”—Dad waved his hand toward the counter—“get yourself a snack. We’ll have dinner later at home.”
I took a long time to order. While I was standing there, I noticed an overweight, greasy-haired guy about my dad’s age working at the take-out window. Which made me think about my dad serving burgers and fries at McDonald’s someday, if he couldn’t find another shoe store job.
“Whenever you’re ready,” the counter girl kept saying, giving me an annoyed look for taking up space. Even though McDonald’s in Chicago are the same as the ones in Boston, I stared at the menu choices like I was reading them for the first time. I couldn’t seem to decide on anything. My mind jumped from one thought to the next—Elvis, my dad, Mr. Murphy’s store closing, my mom in Florida, my grandma in the hospital with her broken hip—and my eyes kept moving back to the greasy-haired guy who was handing people’s orders through the take-out window. How had he gotten there? I wondered. Did he go from selling sneakers to flipping burgers?
The counter girl glared at me. “Ready yet?”
“Strawberry milk shake,” I answered finally, even though I didn’t really want a milk shake and I never order strawberry.
5. Shaking Things Up
When I got back to the booth, my dad slid a small card across the table. “Here. This is what I wanted you to see.”
Printed in gold letters on the white business card were the words
JERRY DENNY AS THE KING. FOR BOOKING INFORMATION, CALL…
Below was my dad’s phone number.
Dad leaned back in the booth, smiling like he had just won the lottery or something. “So what’s your reaction?”
“To what?” I replied, loudly squeaking my straw up and down in the milk shake cup, as if this would cover up the sound of what my dad was going to say next, which I had already guessed.
“About me being Elvis, you know, as a way to earn a living. Just temporarily. I used to sing in that band in college when your mom and I were dating. I only gave it up when we moved here to Chicago and I never got around to finding another band. I’m not that bad a singer. You’ve heard me before—am I a bad singer?”
I’ve heard my dad sing in exactly three places: the car, birthday parties, and baseball games. He can sing the national anthem better (and louder) than most people, I’ve noticed. And he’s the one who usually starts off “Happy Birthday” when nobody else wants to sing. But that doesn’t make you Elvis.
I’ve also seen a few out-of-focus pictures of my dad and his college band, the Fifth Street Players. Picture guys with really big ’80s hair who look more like static electricity experiments than singers.
Still squeaking the straw up and down, I tried to figure out what to answer. “I think people won’t really get it.” This was the nicest, vaguest advice I could come up with. “They might think it’s a little weird that you want to pretend to be Elvis,” I added. “As a job.”
A hurt look flickered across my father’s face. “Do you really think it’s weird?”
I don’t know why, but the fact that my dad didn’t seem to have a clue about why this was a bad idea was beginning to bug me. How many adults did he see walking around with parrot shirts and triangle sideburns calling themselves the King?
“It’s not exactly normal.” The words came out of my mouth more sarcastically than I planned, and the parrot feathers looked ruffled as Dad stood up.
“That’s okay. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, I guess.” Swiping his business card from the middle of the table and jamming it in the front pocket of his shirt, he kept on talking to me over his shoulder. “I just thought you and I could have some fun with this idea while you were staying here. I figured maybe you’d want to help out at some of my gigs—you know, work the sound equipment or something. But if you aren’t up for that, hey, it’s your choice. You’re getting old enough to make your own choices these days, I guess.” He pushed open the door of the McDonald’s with one hand. It swung back hard and smacked into mine as if my dad was saying,
Take that for hurting my feelings.
Really, though—help out at his gigs? I stared at the smirking parrots on my dad’s back as we stepped out into the hot blacktop sunshine. It would have been hysterical if it was a joke, and I knew if I called my buddy Brian in Boston and told him the whole story he would probably fall off his pool deck laughing. I could hear his voice:
You’re freaking kidding me…no way…your dad is doing what?
But of course I would never tell something like that to Brian—or to any of my friends in Boston, for that matter.
Once we got in the car, Dad pretended to ignore the topic of Elvis altogether. He tuned the radio to the Chicago Cubs game. They were losing by eight runs. Since I didn’t know many of the Cubs players, except for an outfielder who was traded from Boston (know that feeling), it was hard to make myself care.
As the crowded neighborhoods and rusty factories of Chicago skimmed by the car windows, my dad tried to make conversation. He asked me about school and soccer and even—this was stretching it—the weather in Boston. I could tell he was trying hard to get back on the right foot with me after our bad start.
Note: Getting off to a bad start with each other is pretty normal for us.
When we pulled up to my dad’s house, it was the seventh-inning stretch and the score was such a joke the announcers had stopped giving it. My dad flicked off the radio and pointed at the house and yard through the windshield. “Notice anything different?”
At first, I didn’t get what he was talking about. Things looked pretty much the same as always. My dad lives on a street called Oakmont in one of the older parts of Chicago. It’s one of those city neighborhoods where all of the houses look like they were made with the same house cookie cutter. The ones in his neighborhood are white bungalows with curved metal awnings over their small front porches. The awnings seem to come in one of three colors: black, green, or rusty white. A lot of the windows have awnings over them, too. It must be a Chicago thing.
My dad’s house is usually easy to spot because it’s the one with the yard that looks most in need of mowing. Sometimes, there are one or two leftover Christmas decorations still on display. Like plastic candy canes or one of those mechanical reindeer with a head that goes up and down. Even in August.
But this time, I could see the Christmas decorations were gone. And the lawn was mowed in neat diagonal stripes, almost like a miniature baseball field. A basket of straggly purple flowers hung from the front porch.
“Looks different, huh?” My dad nodded at the yard as we tugged the suitcases out of the car. “Been trying to find things to keep myself busy now that I’m home all day. Can’t sit around doing nothing, you know.”
When he pushed open the front door, a bleach-smelling tidal wave came rolling out, so I could tell that cleaning was one of the things he’d been doing. “Check out what’s new in your bedroom,” Dad said excitedly, pointing down the small hallway.
After seeing my bedroom, I could tell my dad was doing his best to be different (better) on this visit. I wasn’t sure if it was me turning thirteen or what, but the embarrassing
Empire Strikes Back
bedspread that had been on the bed since I was about seven was finally gone.
May the Force be with you, old bedspread, wherever you are….
Above the bed, Dad had put up two new posters. They were those inspirational-message-type ones, which I wasn’t crazy about, but I didn’t say anything. One had the word
SUCCESS
and the other
PERSEVERANCE
. The pictures on them weren’t bad, though—a crowd of running shoes crossing a finish line in one, and a kayaker going through some kind of orange Popsicle–colored canyon in the other.
Looking around, I also noticed that the room was clean. Everything wasn’t covered in a layer of dust like it usually was. When I was younger, I always used to imagine that nobody touched the room between my visits and even the air was kept sealed inside like King Tut’s tomb until I opened the door the next time.
“What do you think?” My dad thumped a suitcase down on the bed.
“It’s good, thanks,” I said, being cautiously nice, but not overly nice. I didn’t want my dad thinking a new bedspread and a few posters would suddenly turn me into his best buddy.
But he kept trying. He had bought a bucket of KFC fried chicken for dinner, which was one of my personal favorites, and here was the real shocker—he’d made a batch of brownies, too. “Ta-da,” he announced, whipping the foil cover off the brownies. “Double chocolate fudge, made by Chef Jerry Denny himself. Who woulda thought this old man could cook?”
While he was tossing everything onto the table—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, rolls, corn, brownies—I noticed he hadn’t set a place for me. There was only one for himself. This was typical. My dad spent most of the year without having me around, so it was probably easy to forget me when I was there.
Josh? Josh who?
But I guess part of me still thought he should feel guilty about forgetting.
“You didn’t set anything for me,” I pointed out as I pulled my own plate from the cupboard.
Dad waved his hand at the table. “Go ahead. I’m not eating. I’ll have the leftovers later.”
“Later?”
“Got a gig tonight.”
A gig? I guess up to this point, I didn’t really get the fact that my dad was serious. Okay, I could see that maybe he was serious about wanting to start a singing business, but I didn’t expect many people would seriously hire him to perform as Elvis Presley. This was Chicago, not Las Vegas. And if it wasn’t for the new sideburns and the dyed hair, my father would look almost nothing like Elvis.
Dad leaned forward and squinted at the tiny clock on his old stove. “In fact, crap, is that the time? I gotta get ready.” He shoved one last pan onto the table with a metallic clang. “If you need anything, give me a holler upstairs.” As he was going up the steps, he called out to me, “When I come back down, be prepared to meet the King!”
Looking at it later, this should have been my first clue that my dad had already decided pretending to be a famous dead person was a whole lot more fun than being an ordinary living one.