WARNING:
The following post contains anecdotage of the father-and-son type, and should probably not be read by those with a low tolerance for such.
My four-year-old son is a big Elvis Presley fan. People who know me might find it hard to believe that I had little to do with this, but other than introduce the lad to a few songs every once in a while, just to dilute the kiddie playlist some, he took it all the way home, all by himself. First with a ukulele and now with a kid-sized six string, he has for years filled our apartment with his ungodly caterwauling, angry-faced posturing, and extemporaneous “Hound Dog” lyrics . (All rock & roll is angry to him.) He’s particularly taken with the amped up, ramped up versions of “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” from the ’68 comeback show. And since he hasn’t (to my knowledge) seen any video of Elvis, only still photos, he’s had to let his imagination fill in the steps in between the frozen karate chops and leg twists he’s seen in the illustrated Elvis books he’s long enjoyed perusing. No joke.
On Saturday morning, to celebrate Presley’s 70th birthday, we threw a little dance party at home. It was after this shindig -- heavy on the Sun Sessions, and his current fave, “Blue Suede Shoes” (it’s a source of amusement that it’d be okay to step on his face, if only you left the shoes alone) -- that I chose to tell my boy that Elvis was dead.
He cried for a pretty long while. The bromide that “he lives in his music” was the source, ultimately, of a little solace, but not much.
This was a parental miscalculation of some magnitude. Not on the order of, say, a public browbeating over a pants-wetting accident, but up there with other dream-crushers as the accidental revealing of the death of Santa. I think on the surface I was trying to be honest (“Where does Elvis live?”) in the face of his questions (“Can we go visit?”), but given his belief, and the unlikelihood of his driving down to Memphis to discover the truth for himself, there was zero harm in letting him think that Elvis still walks the earth (others do, after all). There was something cruel and hard in my telling him.
Of all the possibilities, the one that feels truest is that I wanted to watch him experience the loss, and that I wanted him to feel something that I didn’t, or couldn’t. I remember when Elvis died -- it was 1977, I was nine -- and my main concern was that he and my father were the same age: shades of dad’s mortality. But I wasn’t a fan, then. When I discovered, much later, Elvis’ music, he was already long dead, and an approachable figure. Elvis, as far as my son was concerned, lived, and no amount of
Greil Marcus mythologizing or
Peter Guralnick reportage could make it so for me.
As someone whose enthusiasms often feel, to myself, prefabricated, I hope I can steer clear of my son’s loves enough to let him discover the inevitable disappointments and loss on his own -- just be there to pick up the pieces. Thankfully, my kid doesn’t listen to or believe everything I say, evidenced by a question he asked of his mom the next day, Sunday: “Elvis isn’t gone, right?”
