Alice Mildred Tate
Drama Club
Science Club
Band
Steady Beau: Buck Restell
“Mark. A restraining order?”
“I just want to ask her one question: Does she know what happened to Buck Restell after 1958? If she says sure, I had coffee with him yesterday—well. Game over.”
He flipped the pages in a chunk that fell open to a well-visited site. “Do you see him, Watson?”
“For goodness’ sake. Yes.” On the left page, top row:
Anthony ‘Buck’ Restell
Chorus
Drama Club
Steady Beau: Alice Tate
“That is Elvis Presley’s twin brother.”
Anthony “Buck” Rogers Restell did look like the young Elvis Presley, but plumper in the face, and with a “flattop” haircut. Ahearn flipped to a later page, a collage of candid snapshots—sports, dances, life between classrooms. A photo of Buck and Alice together in a slow-dance clinch, captioned: Swept Off Her Feet.
No photo of the Midwife Sarah Restell among Ahearn’s plunder, just one possible image: an old ad on yellow newsprint showing a woman’s silhouetted profile—Madame Restell’s Sensitive Salve—The Secret of this Midwife’s Success. “If that’s Sarah Jane Restell, then it’s all we get to see of her,” Mark said. Tenderly he touched the silhouetted nose. “This woman’s son, Buck, started out as the baby Jesse Presley.”
“Let me understand this. She attended the birth, and stole the baby?”
“She bought the baby. She and the parents bartered with the souls of the twin babes. To the infant Elvis is given worldly success. To the witch is given the infant Jesse to raise as her own child. I won’t try and imagine for you the putrid ceremony. Don’t scoff, Kev—you know how ghastly superstitious they are down there. Don’t you descend from Confederate generals?”
“My mother’s from the Smoky Mountains, if that’s what you mean. She wasn’t a general.”
“But you know, Kev, you know you know—hoodoo, and rootwork, and the reading of entrails. Down there in the Old Smokies they’re cutting dead animals down the middle and casting hexes all the time. Or anyway those superstitions still held tightly to the minds, let us say, in 1935. Do you doubt it? No. So it’s a deal—give up one son, see the other shine in life. The bargain’s struck, the spell is cast, and the Principalities and Powers take control.
“Years pass…
“The twin: What was he like? Flabby, soft. Oozy. Fat, lazy, perverted—infantile appetites, chocolate éclairs, dirty magazines. His favorite music? Dean Martin, or no, somebody less devious and not so much fun: Vic Damone, Perry Como, Bing Crosby. Like Crosby in his youth, Buck sang in the church choir…His fake mother thinks he may have been seduced by the choirmaster…His mom never married. She wears a wedding ring and styles herself a widow.
“Yes, Sarah Jane Restell received from the Powers exactly what she bargained for—a son to love and raise. Exactly what was promised—and not a morsel beyond that.
“Restell watches her stolen son’s twin brother Elvis blaze up in the heavens and streak across the firmament, and his light flickers on the wet of her eyes.” (Mark really talked like this—he couldn’t help himself; I told you he was a poet.) “In the short space of a couple dozen months the treasures of the earth open themselves for young Elvis, also the hearts of the young multitudes. Restell is choking with envy. The bargain she made seems a mockery, a lie. This is the complex, symphonic Lucifer she’s compacted with, the Miltonian genius with the aching, beautiful soul, and it torments Restell how the fallen Son of Light empties himself into this boy Elvis, her son’s own twin, and speaks to the fallen world through Elvis’s nuanced female gaze and Elvis’s jungle-cry music. Restell schemes on a way for her son Buck to participate—maybe as some kind of double for photo shoots or parades. She approaches Colonel Parker with this notion, making him aware of Anthony “Buck” Rogers Restell, a talented Memphis boy who looks the double of young Elvis…and of course the debauched colonel smells victims, power, advantage—and things proceed with this conspiracy as with all of poor Lucifer’s conspiracies: Suspicions poison him, he plots against himself, he dispatches demon against demon, and the pact explodes. What follows is bloody murder.
“Parker wanted the hoodlum singer to change his clothes and his music and grow soft and have wider appeal—and pull in more dough. When the army draft came along, Parker saw a chance to murder the rebel Elvis and substitute the docile twin. Parker didn’t blink. He pounced, and it was done. As to precisely how the murder of Elvis Presley was accomplished—I won’t commit the sacrilege of trying to imagine.
“The army would serve as Parker’s magic curtain. The real Elvis disappears behind it. A minimum of publicity during Elvis’s military tenure, and then the genius-killer sweeps aside the curtain. There stands the new, domesticated Elvis, with the change accounted for by two years out of the spotlight.”
And difference there was, going by this 1953 yearbook image of Buck, or Jesse—a remarkable resemblance around the eyes, and yet they didn’t smolder, and the lips were shaped identically, though not the mouth, not the expression, no Elvis sneer. The jawline, yes, the chin almost exactly Elvis’s, but the flesh beneath the chin too fatty, self-indulgent, sculpted from those éclairs. Each component quite close, but the whole, like a composite police sketch, somehow bearing no genuine resemblance. “Jesse could sing and dance, and while he didn’t have the deep relationship with the camera that Elvis had, he could emote in a camera’s presence, and he did as directed by the directors, and obeyed the colonel, and enjoyed, or endured, a career.
“On a worldly level, Parker had a strong motive for murder, maybe an irresistible one for a greedy man. But Parker’s real motive was occult. He wanted to assert his identity as Evil’s prefect, Evil’s provincial mayor, and his province was the Province of Mediocrity. I hope I can suggest this, Kev, without turning your stomach: The murder of Elvis Presley had a sacrificial element.”
Three months prior to his enlistment, the actual Elvis allowed his sideburns “to be taken,” was Ahearn’s phrasing, “probably as a sign of surrender, or, let’s state it plainly, a symbolic castration before the evil father figure, Colonel Parker. But Parker didn’t feel truly fed, not till he’d devoured Elvis’s life itself.” As Mark spoke, his fingertips wandered over his documents, touching and greeting them, the scrolls and relics of a private worship. Here was a man completely sane in almost any respect, but on this table he’d arranged meaningless papers and books that had set him back thousands. If the forgers and con artists hadn’t found him, it seemed only a matter of time. Not that Mark looked easy to fool. He had these wonderfully patrician rippling-caterpillar eyebrows, rectangular beasts with highlights of red and blond, bearing down on you—did I mention his auburn hair? And if I called his eyes pale blue, perhaps I should have said gray. His eyes themselves seemed to throb in their sockets. I didn’t feel like contradicting him.
“This is Jesse Garon Presley, the twin of Elvis Presley; not stillborn; born alive beside the future King of Rock ’n’ Roll, stolen by the sorceress midwife Sarah Jane Restell, who recorded a false death certificate and raised him as her own son for seventeen years and then turned him over to the diabolist Tom Parker, who in turn exploited poor Jesse for twenty years, until Jesse died on the toilet and was placed in the tomb of his brother, Elvis, himself already perished, murdered, and his corpse destroyed, no doubt, never to be restored to his family, or to the millions who felt a kinship.
“Can I tell you something sad?
“Sarah Jane Restell had no family in the world but Jesse. She brought him near the colonel, and in 1958 Jesse vanished into the army as into a black hole in space. No communication with her son, her only family, except through the colonel. And then, on August 11th, 1958, the spellbinder Sarah Jane Restell dies in circumstances never questioned, never given any light—I say probably poisoned, probably by the colonel—but let it go.
r /> “Madame Restell died alone.
“Jesse (now Private Elvis Presley) learned, through his master the colonel, of his adopted mother’s death and went into shock and grief in Fort Hood, Texas, surrounded by his comrades in Company A of the Third Armored Division’s 1st Medium Tank Battalion. But he couldn’t explain his upset, except to say, ‘My Mom, my Mom…’ When brought the news that his birth mother, Gladys, whom he never knew or cared about, was dying at Graceland, Jesse was delivered a credible excuse for the misery that everyone could see was overwhelming him.
“Jesse wasn’t permitted to honor or mourn his beloved Sarah publicly. He could howl all he wanted, as long as he howled for Gladys. The army granted him leave to attend Gladys’s last hours and her service. At the funeral he howled, all right, he blubbered, he even fainted several times before, during, and after the ceremony—all for Sarah Jane Restell. On the same day, Madame Restell was buried without a service or any mourners at the Pike Hill Cemetery outside Memphis, but her grave is no longer there. Estes, Franks tell me Sarah Restell was disinterred at the request of relatives—she had none—and moved to an unknown location.” Ahearn glows like a distant fire, Edgar Poe possesses him: “Sarah Restell was moved, I say, to a sub-basement many leagues beneath the Graceland Mansion. A spiral staircase, a hidden vault, a place for Jesse’s corrosive, solitary grief, and the source of an addicting putrescence, the love of the devil-mother, and she fed on her son until he died on the floor of the bathroom two stories above her vault. Her son of two names, Jesse Garon and Elvis Aaron. Her doppelgänger son.”
Dreams He Eats, Marcus Ahearn’s fourth book, came out in the spring of 2001. Scattered through its forty-three poems I found five brief, good-humored pieces depicting day-to-day moments in the life of a professor called Somers Garfield. But it was me. Somers Garfield was Kevin Harrington.
Professor Garfield, for instance, drops coins into a panhandler’s fresh cup of coffee—I recalled the incident, but I saw nothing personal in its use. Then I read about myself erupting in the classroom, once again looking foolish in words that will never die. Twelve pages later I’m ordering a sandwich at a deli counter and falling into the Abyss, the one I thought I’d kept hidden. Does it mean I’m childish, or ungenerous, that I felt several different ways, but mainly resentful, felt exploited, violated, when I saw myself walking around half-naked in somebody else’s creations?—so I asked in a long, handwritten letter, one of a multitude Mark never received. Nothing on paper would communicate the tone of the query—wounded, yes, but also academically interested in whether I have a right to feel that way…I had to ask him face to face: Am I Somers Garfield?
Of course, between our Slocum Pond meeting in ’91 and Dreams He Eats in 2001, Mark and I crossed paths a few times. And we talked on the phone every three or four months. Elvis always came up as a topic—never Somers Garfield. Somers Garfield could wait until the autumn, at the retirement celebration of Mark’s long-time editor, Edison Steptoe. I had no other reason to go to New York, or anywhere else for that matter—really, I couldn’t claim to be anywhere. The bare facts: Anne and I divorced and sold the Wellfleet house, and Anne moved to Spain. I joined the English Department at a pretty good college in central Illinois which I won’t name because I was so very unhappy there through no fault of theirs. I wandered, or trudged, through a colorless, leafless, damp winter’s day that never changed, whether June came, or April or August, no matter, it never changed. In time I dropped my poet’s persona; since then I’ve masqueraded as a literary critic, and with a great deal more success, but criticism isn’t real—it’s not a real thing. So excelling at it hasn’t healed me. In trying to get this Somers Garfield business squared away with Mark Ahearn, I might have been seeking a healing. I got myself invited to Steptoe’s celebration and hopped a flight.
These events can be really second-rate, but not this one—I gave the planners high marks. In a tall midtown building, eighty or so well-wishers eased amongst each other downing canapés and free liquor in the vicinity of ten big tables arranged for the farewell feast. The access to alcohol and the prospect of more food set everyone aglow. Today happened to be, as I knew, Mark Ahearn’s forty-second birthday, but I’m not sure Mark himself remembered. I’d last seen him in ’97. After four years, in addition to looking heavier, with a heavier gait, he seemed distracted, a prisoner of his thoughts in the midst of frolic, and I believe he was avoiding his editor and mentor, Edison Steptoe, who made a speech and was given a plaque and then toured the room holding the plaque in the crook of his arm, filling the premises with his big, onrushing face, his bush of brown hair floating above his head and following it around. I never liked him. I admired his deeds. I approved especially of his steady support of Marcus Ahearn. Under his own imprint, Steptoe had built a daunting list of poets from all over the Americas, and Mark was the one he kept most prominent. But the charismatic editor always had around him this contingent of darling, curly-haired young women and slender-fingered young men, all poets. They made me nervous.
Steptoe and I had a moment alone. Fresh drinks and re-introductions on a balcony fourteen floors above Fifth Avenue—almost night. In the purple sky, four or five stars crowned the Empire State Building. The others, the editor’s elfin admirers, his bodyguard of Peter Pans and Orphan Annies, started talking about that. I had a chance to consult with him about a matter that had come up between me and Mark recently—more documents out of Tupelo and Memphis—Mark’s latest and greatest expenditure. It wasn’t my money, but I worried anyway. Steptoe could lend an ear, maybe a voice—frankly, I hoped he’d stick his nose in. “The latest document is a single page torn from the personal diary of Elvis’s birth doctor. Mark tells me he paid eighty-five hundred bucks.”
Steptoe, a tall man, peered down at me, all smiles, witless. “Elvis Presley’s diary?”
“No. His doctor’s diary, and only one page of it. And then, to verify the thing, his law firm charges a nice fat fee. And as long as Mark’s willing to pay like that—well, the world’s always got something to sell, right?”
Watching Steptoe’s face as he gathered in these words and plainly comprehended none of them, I felt my stomach plunge…Inadvertently I’d snitched my friend Mark. I measured the balcony’s railing with the thought of hopping over. It seemed the quickest exit. Here’s what you say when you screw up like this: “I might be mixing up two or three subjects. I’ll shut up.”
Others dragged Steptoe away—but the incident told me that Mark was hiding from his long-time mentor a passion that had, in many respects, overmastered his life. Had he made me his sole confessor?
At that moment, Ahearn stepped onto the balcony and gripped my arm. He’d celebrated enough—he hated crowds, I remembered that now. We could smell the free, catered dinner, but Mark wanted to go. “I chose the medallions of sirloin,” I told him. He hustled me out past friendly faces, through a song of friendly voices—“Well done!” and “Congratulations!”—Dreams He Eats had been nominated for a National Book Award. Mark steered me by my elbow out of the building and down through the pungent streets on this night too warm for his flapping Dylan-Thomas trench coat.
Mark had a place in mind two blocks west, Italian aromas, candles flickering all around, almost like a bomb shelter, I thought. He paused to read the menu mounted just inside. The face turned toward its little light seemed sad, even old.
No pity. I was prepared to drill him with four ridiculous-sounding words: Am I Somers Garfield?
But even before we sat down, he rifled his overcoat and slapped a flat manila envelope on the table. “I shouldn’t be giving you this.”
“Then don’t.”
“This is the page from Dr. Hunt’s journal. This is what really happened the night Elvis Presley was born. It completely contradicts the entry in this same doctor’s ‘baby book.’ Which, incidentally, was a CIA put-up job.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“This is a photocopy. The original’s in my safe. The legal geniuses Estes and Fran
ks,” he said, “have warned me I shouldn’t have it. It was stolen in a burglary. I couldn’t tell you that over the phone.”
“I mean, eighty-five hundred. God, Mark.”
“Lotta dough. And to verify the origin of this one piece of paper, old Estes tagged me for two thousand more.”
“It’s verified?”
“Partly, mostly—sufficiently. Their cover letter’s stapled to it.”
“Mark, when I hear the letters C, and I, and A—”
“I’ll give this to you now. Take it. Tomorrow we’ll talk. Take it, Kev!—it’s not booby-trapped.”
We settled down to a Chianti-fest. Not a happy one.
I might have seen Mark drunk once or twice. But not drunk and defeated. Apparently he’d expended more than money trying to get the state of Mississippi to exhume the grave of the infant Jesse Garon Presley. He’d burned up his fuel, his hope. “No amount of evidence will satisfy the fools. And they say I don’t have a legal claim of injury—no dog in the fight, they say, and I’m the only one who wants a fight anyway.” Later, drunker, he said, “But I could get more evidence. I’ll exhume the grave myself.” And a little later he said, “Imagine a child’s coffin dragged up after sixty-plus years in the cold, moldy ground, dangling roots and clots and dripping putrefaction.” (Somebody at another table wondered, “Do people really have to talk so loud?”)
Around midnight, I put him in a cab. We agreed on lunch the next day, but not on where. Mark’s mood seemed lighter.
He went his way to friends on the upper west side, and I went mine, tipsy, hyperventilating the late summer oxygen. During a brief subway ride I ripped open Ahearn’s envelope and squinted at a photocopied page. “…A preponderance of facts would support a claim to authenticity (See Exhibits A–H). However, let it be noted that some facts would serve to undermine, if not refute, the claim (See Exhibits I–L)…” I rolled up and folded the pages as tightly as I could, as if to compress this entire affair into a state of nonexistence, climbed up into the city, and soon dumped my boozy head on a pillow at my digs—the Chelsea on West Twenty-Third downtown, an 1800s-built tomb of moaning wooden bones, tilted, hazardous, trading on its long bohemian legacy only to make it the excuse for slow ruin. No restaurant. No room service. Abandon your assumptions about elevators. “There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules, and no shame,” said Arthur Miller, who nevertheless lived several years under its roof. I stayed there for the art, the walls laid over from floor to ceiling with paintings, the bold sculptures guarding all the nooks and crannies, the hordes of beatnik-era mobiles dropping from the ceilings like an airborne division. Anybody could turn up at the Chelsea—the next morning, for instance, I stepped into the small doubtful elevator by myself, and on the fourth floor I picked up the actor Peter O’Toole. In the shock of finding us shut up together and breathing each other’s breath, I told him, “I think you’re a great person. The Ruling Class, Lawrence of Arabia”—and so on, and Peter O’Toole listened to me closely, in happy surprise, as if he’d never heard of these movies before, or even of himself. In the middle of the kooky, art-bound lobby he stopped for an elderly couple who wanted to tell him exactly the same thing, and for almost a minute he gave them his full, sincere, smiling attention—his eyes, by the way, were actually that blue. At the moment, I was heading anywhere at all for breakfast, but when I heard the desk clerk’s radio playing news that an aircraft, I assumed a sightseeing plane, had struck Tower Two of the World Trade Center, I decided to jump on the number 3 subway half a block west, and go have a look.