The New Elvis Read online

  With this as his rationalization, Jarrod made sure most of Santa Monica had all the ice it needed, even if he wasn’t a tweaker himself.

  Chapter 4

  Two things happened to Zella on her twenty-third birthday in 1988 that would change her life forever. First, she discovered she was pregnant, and second, she met Eugene Wyatt, a real estate agent from Los Angeles. Twenty years her senior, Eugene looked exactly like she imagined Glenn might in his forties, with a touch of gray in his dark brown hair, crow’s feet at the corner of his azurite eyes, and a slight gut pooching out over his belt. He was alone, seated at the Munster nickel slots, three stools down from an old lady who had chain-smoked her way through most of a pack of Eve Lights.

  He ordered a vodka tonic, which was Glenn’s drink, and asked for olives on the side. When Zella delivered his complimentary drink, and he tipped her five dollars, she couldn’t help herself. She noticed he did not wear a wedding band, so she lingered, hoping to find out more about him. He introduced himself, told her he was there for a realtors’ conference and would be in town ‘til Tuesday, then asked her out. It was atypical of Zella to accept dates with strangers, but she felt lightheaded when she looked at him and couldn’t say no.

  She wrote her home phone number on a cocktail napkin, which he tucked into the pocket of his blazer. Zella had Mondays off. Eugene called at noon, and they met at one o’clock at the entrance to the Paradise Garden buffet. It was a gorgeous day, and the large windows made them feel as though they were in a terrarium, looking out at the wildlife, waterfalls, and palms that filled the preserve.

  Eugene laughed. “Are they watching us, or are we watching them?”

  “I think it’s a little of both,” Zella decided. Dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and a flouncy dress, she felt carefree, impulsive, and ravenous, eager to take full advantage of the salad bar before adding snow crab legs, prime rib, glazed duck, and mussels to her plate. Eugene concentrated on sautéed clams and fried chicken, with only a smattering of salad and veggies to round out his meal. After ice cream sundaes, they pushed back their chairs and gazed outside at the flamboyant flamingos and parleying penguins in contented silence.

  “I love a woman who can eat as much as I can,” Eugene noted.

  “I love a man who doesn’t care how much a woman eats,” she replied.

  They discussed Bugsy Siegel’s affiliation with the Flamingo and how he named it after his girlfriend, Virginia “Flamingo” Hill, who had long, slender legs. Zella recounted a story about the hotel and casino’s grand opening the day after Christmas in 1946, when Jimmy Durante, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford danced to the music of Xavier Cugat’s band. After three hours had melted away, it was time to part, but they couldn’t. Zella followed Eugene up to his room and sat on his king-size bed.

  She was perfectly candid with him and admitted she was still a virgin, holding out her left hand and showing him the promise ring she still wore. “Glenn and I were waiting ‘til marriage.”

  Eugene sat down at the secretary desk. “I’m sorry you lost him.”

  Zella looked thoughtful. “It’s strange, but the only time he crossed my mind today was when I realized again how much you look like him.”

  Eugene sounded rueful. “An older him.”

  “True,” she laughed. “But still…”

  “We’re bound to be a little different, he and I.”

  “Well,” Zella said. “I’ll just have to find out what makes you you.”

  “Sounds good.” Eugene moved from the desk to the bed. He took Zella in his arms and kissed her, tossing her hat toward the pillows, running his fingers through her long, dark hair.

  “Have you ever been married?” Zella asked.

  “Yes, and divorced. My ex-wife remarried, moved to Sherman Oaks, and seems much happier now. We met in high school and married young. No kids.”

  “Glenn and I met in high school.”

  Eugene rested his forehead against hers. “You’ve got to stop talking about him.”

  Her words were barely louder than a murmur. “Yes, please make me forget.”

  Chapter 5

  The first hint Logan had that his father was involved in something shady came on a warm spring day when Logan was eight and his dad picked him up from school before driving to Culver City. There, behind a small bookstore on Overland Avenue, he watched from the passenger seat as his dad got out of his beloved vintage Chevelle SS 396, its shiny black paint job polished to a high sheen, and approached a small gray car with darkened windows.

  A man in the other car lowered the passenger window, and an envelope was passed from a gloved hand to his father. Then Jarrod reached inside his pocket for a small packet, which the gloved hand accepted. The window stayed open a crack, but the men did not speak. Jarrod waited, ran a cut and bandaged hand back through his dark hair, and seemed to examine his Levi’s jacket for lack of anything more useful to do.

  Finally, the window closed and Jarrod nodded. The car jerked into reverse and then forward, careening out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Jarrod turned and walked back to the car. Logan thought he had never seen his father look wearier. His clothes were dirty from work, and there was a new crack in the leather of his work boots, which, when new, had seemed indestructible with their steel toes and soles as thick as sponges.

  As swiftly as the dark car had vanished, a new car rushed into the parking lot, this one a sickly green with white scrape marks along its side. Before the vehicle stopped, a tatted man in a torn undershirt and baggy pants leapt out of the back seat. He ran up to Jarrod and stood so close, their faces were inches apart.

  “What you doing here, man?” The guy was impossibly loud.

  Jarrod stepped back. “Just—” He glanced backward toward the car, nervous, and Logan instinctively crouched down below the dashboard.

  “You have no business here, OK? You don’t deal in Culver. Got it?”

  Jarrod was quiet. Baillie told him the transaction would be hassle free, but he’d been wrong before. If he made any moves or said anything, this guy was prepared to take it to the next level.

  “Tell Baillie to keep it in his own backyard. If I see you around here again, I’ll kill your wife and kid first, then come after you and tell you how it all went down.”

  Jarrod flashed another glance toward the car and didn’t see Logan.

  The man wiped a hand across his brow, then stuck his hand into his pants and pulled out a revolver. “Yeah, you think I didn’t notice the boy? What kind of dad brings his kid to a drop? Asshole. So, what are you supposed to do?”

  Jarrod spoke quietly. “Stay out of Culver City.”

  “That’s right, Pops.”

  Close enough to kiss Jarrod, the man spit on him, daring him to start something, but Jarrod refused. The man went back to his car, jumped in, closed the passenger door, and gave a sign to the driver. They peeled out of the lot. It was only then that Logan sat up again and saw his father, who had crumpled to his knees in the gravel.

  Chapter 6

  Zella and Eugene Wyatt fell in love, were married at Wee Kirk of the Heather in Las Vegas in March of 1988, and settled into his home in the Beverly Hills flatlands after honeymooning in Barbados. That Zella had been a virgin yet was pregnant courtesy of Dr. Johns’s sperm bank was not something they discussed with friends and neighbors. When Zella’s water broke the morning of October third, Eugene rushed her to Cedars-Sinai. Ryan Bryan Wyatt, situated in the breach position with his legs-crossed Indian style, was delivered at three that afternoon via Caesarean section.

  Growing up amidst luxury in Beverly Hills, little Ryan attended Page Private School as soon as he turned five, entering pre-kindergarten at the same time his neighbor, little Beatrice Edwin, did. Beatrice loved playing at Ryan’s house because Zella had decorated the Spanish courtyard style home in bright colors that would later, when SpongeBob Squarepants debuted on television, remind everyone of Bikini Bottom. Rooms were painted plum, mottled with lighter purple; l
ime, mottled with evergreen; and turquoise, mottled with light blue. There were Tiki carvings and aquariums, a modern, pop art Tiki bar with stools, retro sectional sofas and low-slung chairs, boomerang-shaped lamps, glass tables, wall-to-wall shag carpeting, stone and brick walls, and freestanding, globe-shaped fireplaces. There was an ocean mural in Ryan’s bedroom, complete with fishermen, ships, jumping porpoises, whales, and mermaids. Even his toys were kept in fishing nets suspended from ceiling hooks and adorned with starfish, shells, and plastic lobsters. Outside, in the courtyard, there was a sandbox, slide, swings, a pond, and a pool frequented by Nana, the family’s black Newfoundland, named after the kind-hearted canine in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

  After kindergarten one day, Bea and Ryan were playing in his room together when Zella heard music. Their teacher, Richard Prescott, was known to love musicals, and he enjoyed Rodgers and Hammerstein most of all, oftentimes giving recordings of R&H show tunes to the kids to take home. Ryan was well versed at using his plastic cassette player. Mr. Prescott had given him a tape of Oklahoma, and he and Bea were standing in front of his mirror, singing “People Will Say We’re In Love”.

  Zella snuck down the hallway, marveling that the kids had memorized the lyrics.

  Little Bea was singing to Ryan, who wore a jaunty wool fedora and an oversize blue blazer that draped down to the floor, both borrowed from his father’s closet. When Bea was done with her verse, Ryan sang the next one to her.

  Zella gasped. Ryan’s voice was in tune and as clear as a bell. Backing up to the hall closet, she retrieved the video camera and pressed the record button as she crept back to his room. Noticing his mother’s reflection in the mirror, Ryan turned and approached her, getting down on his knees, continuing to sing, not missing a beat. When the song ended, he rose from the floor and pushed the off button on the cassette player.

  Bea beamed at Ryan’s mom. “So, Mrs. Wyatt, are we ready for Broadway?”

  Zella sat down on the turquoise rug. “Come here and see for yourself.”

  They crowded onto her lap as she hit rewind so they could watch the video play back in the viewfinder. When the recording was done, Bea and Ryan applauded.

  Though Zella shared the tape with her husband, Eugene didn’t witness Ryan’s talent firsthand until three years later, when he came home and heard singing coming from his son’s room. Approaching the closed door, he listened as Ryan sang “A Little Less Conversation” from Live A Little, Love A Little, an Elvis Presley movie from 1968.

  Chapter 7

  Logan woke up in the corner of his room with swollen glands, and he dreaded telling his mother, because he knew she would keep him home from school.

  Ramona Lockhart had started hoarding when her mother died five years earlier, and as the years passed, their residence became less of a home and more of a garbage dump. Jarrod was at his wit’s end and chose to handle the situation by working long hours, both at Abercromby’s and on the streets as a dealer for Calder’s meth. In his father’s absence, Logan, an only child, was left to face long hours at home alone with Ramona. He found himself parenting her, trying to curb her online shopping and frequent trips to local thrift stores by finding petty distractions to pull her off her destructive course.

  This morning, he picked his way down the hallway through bags of still-tagged, never-worn clothing, purses, and shoes. He found Ramona in a spare room, where she kept a record player and a collection of albums scattered atop boxes stacked on chairs and tables. She was nearly in a trance, listening to the Andrews Sisters singing “Sincerely” in distinctive three-part harmony.

  Logan had trouble getting to her and nearly tripped. He ended up falling in front of her, into in a pile of used, folded, recyclable plastic bags she refused to discard.

  Over three-hundred-and-fifty pounds, Ramona used a walker for support, clinging to walls and furniture to navigate piles of debris. At twenty-nine, she looked two decades older, with strikes of gray throughout her knee-length, straight dark hair, which took two hours daily to wash and braid. Wrinkles creased her forehead, eyes, and mouth. She smoked not one, but three packs of Camels every twenty-four hours, leaving overflowing ashtrays in her wake whenever she moved from one room to the next.

  “Mas música,” she cried out in Spanish, lapsing into her mother’s native language.

  More music. Logan tugged at the collar of the T-shirt he’d slept in and kept his distance lest she pull him into a smothering bear hug. She loved her only boy, even if she didn’t know how to take care of him.

  “I’m sick. It feels like I swallowed eggs.”

  “Your glands. Swollen again?”

  He nodded.

  She struggled to get up from the cushioned chair, but he put out his hand in protest. “I’m just going to sleep.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  Logan knew what was in the kitchen: dirty dishes piled on countertops, unwashed pots in the sink, rotten food in the refrigerator, ice-encrusted artifacts in the freezer, and no place to sit down because the dining table and chairs were buried in clutter.

  “It’s OK.”

  He picked his way out of the room and made his way back to his bedroom.

  He didn’t have a bed, so he usually formed a pile of clothing—some clean, some not—in the corner and crawled on top, pulling something weighty—usually a coat—over his frail frame so he could stay warm. For a pillow, he used a bolt of quilted fabric his mother bought at the Salvation Army down the street. It didn’t matter to him if he didn’t eat that day. He had gone hungry before rather than eat something spoiled that had been unrefrigerated too long. If he were lucky, Ramona would muster up the energy to get her walker in gear and head to McDonald’s for some fast food. And if her conscience rumbled louder than her stomach, maybe she would consider saving half a bite for him.

  Chapter 8

  Ryan Wyatt got his first guitar the Christmas he turned ten and wrote his first song two days shy of his eleventh birthday in the privacy of his bedroom. The décor hadn’t changed much as he got older, save for the addition of an ivory coin bank shaped like a skull that sat on his desk, watching his pen move across the pages of his early American history notebook, where he dutifully entered multiple choice answers to questions from his textbook on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  The words running across the page…blah blah blah…were nudged by strings of new ones. All my worries used to be…blah blah blah…where to go and who to see…blah blah blah…now I’m older, lookin’ around…blah blah blah…wondering about the new girl in town. Ryan threw down his pen and ran to his bed, where his Les Paul sat in its open, velour-lined case. Oh, she’s blond, and she’s boogie, wanna call her my shoogie, with hair down to there and a thousand-yard stare, she’s a cinnamon heart of a cutie.

  An electric thrill raced down Ryan’s spine. He sprinted back to his desk, wrote two more verses to run against the chorus, and returned to his bed to bang out the melody. Inspiration struck swiftly, and the payoff rolled out faster than a greyhound on race day. He’d been barely able to write down one line before another tumbled out and rendered him deliriously happy. He ran over to the mirror to make sure he hadn’t been transported to another realm. His handsome young features—clear blue eyes, thick dark hair, lopsided grin, and strong jaw—were reflected back at him. He was the same boy in the same house, with the same guitar, yet he felt reborn and more alive than ever. The word came to him—purpose—and swam around in his mind until it merged with the porpoises on his underwater mural, and he laughed aloud with pleasure.

  Chapter 9

  An ordinary chain-link fence separated Jarrod and Ramona Lockhart’s property from the family that lived behind them, but it didn’t stop Logan from trying to make friends with the boy who lived there, Fred Henn.

  When summer arrived, and Fred’s eleventh birthday loomed, Kara Henn sent out invitations for a pool party in their backyard, complete with pizza, sodas, cake, and a clown, to the boys in Fred’s class. Not being
in Fred’s class, Logan wasn’t invited, but the morning they began hanging crepe streamers outside, Ted Henn took pity on the boy and issued him an invitation.

  Excited, Logan searched for his swim trunks in the piles of clothing that had formed like haystacks throughout his room. His mother was in the kitchen, burning bacon and eggs for his father, who hadn’t found an adequate excuse to escape her rare offer to push all the trash aside and try to cook a meal.

  Flipping through channels on the television positioned across from the cluttered kitchen table, Jarrod settled on NBC Sports and lit a cigarette. He was in his undershirt and shorts and needed a shower, but it was Saturday, and Abercromby’s was closed until noon because Calder Baillie needed to fill double his usual meth orders.

  Ramona was giddy with excitement. She had found her frying pan in a cupboard filled with old glass jars her mother had used for preserves. Once she cleared off the stove, she could make a late breakfast, and maybe, if Jarrod showed interest, they could find time to be alone.

  The bacon and eggs were beginning to blacken as smoke filled the kitchen.

  Jarrod jumped out of his seat. “Jesus, woman! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I thought you liked your bacon crisp.”

  “Yeah, but not my nose hair!”

  Logan couldn’t find his swimsuit, so he put on a pair of shorts and wandered outside. He had dug a hole directly into the Henns’ backyard, so he crawled under the fence and looked up at the treehouse in the oak that grew along the property line, where Logan spent many a night whenever his parents argued. He sat down and watched as a pair of Fred’s classmates showed up and placed gifts on the picnic table.

  Kara came out with a stack of plastic cups and a pitcher of lemonade. “Hi, boys. Fred is inside. I’ll tell him you’re here. You can put your towels over there.” She indicated to another table near a sandbox filled with Tonka trucks.