Elvis the Pelvis

Quote of the Day: "We're bigger 'n Jesus."

-John Lennon

The following is from a story I wrote last semester:

When Mom went missing, Gramma took me in. I suppose that once it was learned that Mom had died, Gramma was stuck with me. She was living in that tiny house all alone (three years earlier a heart attack had killed poor Grampa) and certainly she needed the company.

We spent much of our time in the living room, me watching the television while Gramma knitted. Sitting on her favorite chair, a plaid recliner with deflated cushions, Gramma often set her knitting aside to cry out, “Toby, for Pete’s sake, turn down that T.V.” Whenever I watched my cartoons on Saturday mornings, I sat on the floor directly in front of her recliner. This didn’t stop Gramma, with her poor hearing and worse eyesight, to yell as if I were three blocks away. “I swear that goddamn box put your Grandad in that casket,” she’d cry. This was in response to Grampa’s often vehement reaction to the Ed Sullivan Show or to American Bandstand. Of course I wasn’t born at the time, but I’ve heard enough stories involving Elvis’s suggestive dancing and Grampa’s violent reaction that it’s become family legend, how Grampa would leap from his chair and point and shake his hand at the television in this same living room, spit flying from his lip as he damned Elvis to hell. This was such a spectacle that I think Gramma, perhaps traumatized, has equated all television with music television, and now she thinks that Elvis gyrating his hips in the sixties put Grampa in the grave in the seventies. Grampa had a decade-long heart attack.