Gigantic.32

Memphis

I had no intention of moving back to Kingston at the time. Cherie came to visit from Iowa. I took her down to New York City, half thinking we might live there. She’d never been to a city larger than Des Moines. The same Chinatown backstreets that fueled my soul gave her a panic attack.

So, New York plus Cherie wasn’t going to work. A few months went by. When no other plan magically materialized, I boarded a Greyhound back to Iowa. All things being equal, I thought I should at least try to keep my girlfriend.

Our relationship had always been subject to turbulence, smooth flying one moment, falling out of the sky the next. This time the wings fell off. Seemed final. Dead of winter, couldn’t stay, couldn’t wrap my head around going back east.

I called my friend Beth who was working on her MFA at Memphis College of Art. Memphis was only 500 or so miles from Iowa City. I walked over to the bus station, hopped on the next Greyhound for Tennessee.

The weather was fine for the first leg. Around midnight, south of St. Louis, a blizzard rolled in. The driver pulled over at an unmanned rest stop and literally disappeared for over an hour. When she returned, she was smoking a cigarette and slurring her words like she was drunk.

“I ain’t endin up in no body cast,” she said repeatedly.

The passengers were literally all screaming at her to keep driving, or at least tell us what was going on. A black woman with a southern accent sitting across the aisle looked over at me.

“How are you staying so calm?” she asked.

Then she saw I was holding the dogeared copy of Leaves of Grass I’d had since Denis Johnson’s class. I was reading it over and over again, like scripture.

“Oh, you’re reading the poetry,” she said. Maybe she read the poetry too.

Socked in by the storm, we were stranded on that cold bus until the following morning. A few hours after daybreak, the next scheduled bus stopped to pick us all up. We were so crammed that some of us had to stand for hours heading south on I-55. But at least we were moving.

Once in Memphis, attempts at maintaining a 19th-century transcendentalist mindset fell short. Every morning after Beth left for her studio, I’d walk over to the liquor store, get a small bottle of vodka, which I’d consume in its entirety along with a bologna sandwich. That was the winning combination.

Beth lived in the midtown section of Memphis in what was referred to locally as a bungalow. Mostly during the days I’d sit around the bungalow. In the evenings she’d introduce me to her art school friends, who were all very nice, but my head was in a different place.

One morning, after consuming my breakfast of champions, I got a little ambitious and began walking westward. Along the way, a random guy started walking alongside me. Maybe he’d meant to ask me for money. What wound up happening was that I told him my tale of woe in its entirety.

The bad break-up, being stranded south of Saint Louis, the overall state of cluelessness about life in general, which led me to walking Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, intoxicated, at 11am on a weekday.

He nodded his head thoughtfully.

“Well, see ya,” he said.

I hit Beale Street, birthplace of the blues and all that. I’d been here before on my trip from Seattle five years previously, touristy. I continued to the river, looked at the Mississippi a while, contemplating my fate, not coming up with any solutions.

It was on my walk back that it happened. Sort of like in Field of Dreams, I heard this little voice, clear as a bell. The voice said:

It’s here.

In the near distance I saw a yellow sign. I didn’t know what it was, but instinctively walked toward it, crossing traffic without looking, cars honking. It was one of those moments out of a movie.

When I reached the building, the sign was unmistakable: Sun Studio. This was the place where Elvis had recorded.

I stood in a daze, basking in rock-n-roll holiness, until a bus full of Japanese tourists unloaded and swarmed the sidewalk around me, at which point I continued walking back to the bungalow, but the nature of my stride had changed.

It was like Whitman and Elvis had become conflated on an astral plane. Intertwined entities, reassuring me that I was onto something, even if I didn’t know what it was.

That evening, an even stranger thing happened. I got a phone call from Suzanne of Mercury Rev.

Suzanne was living in Kingston. She was the one band member I’d become friendly with, hung out at her apartment downtown. Still, it was odd that she’d tracked me down, not too many people even knew where I was.

“We need a keyboard player,” she told me. She asked me if I’d consider coming back to Kingston.

The proposition struck me as so farfetched and out of left field, I didn’t consider it for a second. Without going into great detail, I explained how I’d recently taken a hellish bus ride and had no intention of getting back on a bus anytime soon. I wasn’t playing hardball, I was simply telling her the truth.

“You send me a plane ticket, and we’ll talk,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll talk with our manager.”

This last comment seemed to confirm that the whole conversation had been more of this music industry claptrap that was going around. I mean, talk with our manager, who says stuff like like?

I got off the phone and more-or-less forgot the conversation had ever happened.

Beth took me to a bar she liked called the P&H Cafe. They had a piano there. The woman who owned it, Wanda, was sort of locally famous. She took a liking to me and said I should go ahead and play the piano. When I was finished, she didn’t pay me, but she gave me a beer and said I should come back and play whenever I wanted. That felt sort of welcoming.

My friend LD who was a fixture in Memphis also started taking me around and introducing me to people. We had lunch in a church co-op one day, that was my favorite place. He also dragged me to a trendy restaurant, the kind where the waiters wear black shirts.

The owner was the serious sort, didn’t seem to like me much, but she must’ve owed LD a favor, so she agreed to hire me as a waiter. I wasn’t so thrilled about the black shirts either, but there it was, a job. Looked like I’d be sticking around Memphis for a while.

That night Suzanne called again.

“I spoke with our manager, you’re good to go.”

“Good to go where?”

“Good to go here. We’re buying you a plane ticket.”

No one in my life, ever, had bought me a plane ticket to go anywhere. My path forward had been revealed.

There were various happenstances I could point to. John deVries putting me on the band’s radar by including me on the bill at the Rhinecliff. Joe mentioning to Suzanne in passing that I played piano.

But when my plane ticket arrived in the mail and I prepared to return to Kingston with a purpose, the reason behind my invitation to fly into the arms of rock-n-roll was obvious, at least to me:

I had been blessed by Elvis.

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