Elvis Presley Died for Your Sins (the Ones You Were Too Gutless to Commit)

Every time they catch a serial killer, it seems, they talk to the minister of the church where the guy taught Sunday school and he describes how good this guy was with the children and how he was a faithful deacon and came to the 9 o’clock service every Sunday and despite the 12 bodies found buried in the guy’s basement, the minister can’t quite bring himself to judge, lest he be judged himself. His neighbors describe a nice, quiet fellow who never threw loud parties, the landlady says he paid his rent like clockwork, the girl at the Starbuck’s drive-through says he always smiled and left a tip.

Indeed, I half expect to wake up myself one morning, sniff a strange aroma rising up from under the kitchen sink, and discover that I’ve got five bodies of my own buried in the crawl space. This is the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde syndrome, a Victorian neurosis that has remarkable staying power. Like Dr. Jekyll we fear what unspeakable damage our interior Mr. Hydes may have committed when he slipped last night out of our control; like Dorian Gray we feel we must keep the true picture of our diseased inner selves hidden from public view.

When my income tax refund came in the mail several years ago, I knew what it was right away, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I knew it was large, dangerously large. I had withheld more than I needed to, worried that I would fall into arrears as I had the year before. I’d adjusted the withholding in the government’s favor, and increased my payments to my therapist in case the insurance company failed to cover their share of the bills. I didn’t want my accounts to slip over the line.

But now the money had come back to me and I could spend it on anything I wanted. I had my eye on a box set put out by Rhino Records called Loud, Fast, and Out of Control. It has all the big bad hits from the ‘50s, no doo-wop, no “Peggy Sue” or “All I’ve Got to Do Is Dream” or “Love Me Tender,” but the scary, disturbing, nasty songs that had undermined decent society and everything this country stood for.

It had songs with words like “Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball” and “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, I’m just 22 and I don’t mind dying” and “You wear that dress, the sun comes shining through, I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you” and “Come into this house, woman, and stop that yakkety-yak, don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a baseball bat” and “You can talk about me, say that I'm mean, but I'll blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.”

I had an unsettling urge to listen to this stuff, a full four-CD collection of it, and only its $70 price tag had held me off this long.

Now I had the money and I bought it. It turned out the songs I hadn’t heard of were scarier than the songs I had. There were people like the Rock-A-Teens (“Woo-Hoo”), Dale Vaughn (“How Can You Be Mean to Me”), Janis Martin (“My Boy Elvis”), Billy Riley (“My gal is red hot,” he sings, “your gal ain’t doodly-squat”), Jimmy Dee and the Offbeats (“Henrietta”), Don and Dewey (“Koko Joe”), Big T Tyler (“King Kong”), and the Phantom (“Love Me,” at once one of the weirdest, most primitive, and ominous things I’ve ever heard). God know what people thought of these songs when they were released in the late ‘50s, because some of them bother me today.

What kind of people would make music like this? What is the human soul capable of? I had seen only one star of that era in person, Bo Diddley, at a street fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1984. A memorable event, if not exactly what you’d call pleasant. It wasn’t like he was playing Yankee Stadium, mind you, he was on the back of a flat bed truck, there were about 50 people standing around, it was 25 years at least since his last hit, but in spite of all that he radiated a menacing arrogance that went way beyond self-possession. As far as he was concerned he possessed himself, his band, the truck, the audience, the city of Greensboro, and all of North Carolina up to the Virginia line. It occurred to me that this was the kind of attitude it took to be who he was and do what he did, against all odds and the collected weight of proper society, in 1955.

The spectacularly vivid liner notes of the CD set (the notes say of Wanda Jackson, “while other women singers were simpering about where the boys are, Wanda always sang as if they were in her hotel room”) describe the lives these people led. Two of Jerry Lee Lewis’s wives died under questionable circumstances, perhaps by his hand. Larry Williams (“Bonie Maronie” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”) was a pimp and a drug dealer. Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash in England in 1960, Johnny Kidd (“Shakin’ All Over”) in a car crash in 1966, Little Willie John (“I’m Shakin’”) died in jail in 1968.

Vince Taylor (“Brand New Cadillac”) died of venereal disease in Switzerland in 1991. Kid Thomas (“Rockin’ This Joint Tonight”) moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he ran over a child in 1970 while working a day job mowing lawns in Beverly Hills. He was tried and freed, but when he walked out of the courthouse the dead boy’s father was waiting for him and gunned him down. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959. Elvis Presley burst his intestines straining on the toilet and died in Graceland in 1977. He was 42.

Is it any wonder that they could have had second thoughts, that Little Richard dropped his career a couple of times to enter the ministry (there’s a church I’d join), that Wanda Jackson and Conway Twitty abandoned rock ‘n’ roll altogether and retreated to country and western music? They were living the lives we still both fear and hope we might slide into ourselves.

They were our Mr. Hydes, and they put a genuine taste of danger and horror into their songs, where I, 58 years old, balding, nearsighted, worried about paying for my retirement but dancing past my bedtime with my cats, can access it any night I want.

Jane Austen, the Dalai Lama, and Harry Cohn's Ass

I picked up a book of interviews with Dalai Lama at the bookstore the other night, and he was talking about the nature of compassion in an interesting way. It was a discussion of the difference between how we experience our own suffering and the way, in a state of compassion, that we experience someone else's—what the odds were that we can experience someone else's suffering at all, and to what extent.

I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.

Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.

So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.

There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.

My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.

It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.

Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.

How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?

I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.

Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.

Auld Lang Me

Resolutions, schmesolutions. This New Year I'm relying on evolution for real change in my life. There's never been a meaningful change in my life that wasn't forced on me by circumstances at the point of gun.

My biochemistry major son would scoff at this idea. This budding scientist, know-it-all, and dedicated Darwinian has contempt not only for the creationists but the Lamarckian heretics, theorists who believe species can change in a lifetime and pass on the changes to their offspring.

This is like believing giraffes happened when a zebra ran out of grass and was forced to nibbles buds in the treetops, the boy genius scoffs. He says natural selection works nowhere near that fast.

Well, having watched this kid progress from knowing everything about his bedroom at the age of five to everything in the universe at the age of 19, I'm not so sure about that. It's like when someone breaks up with their lover and tells me, "We just grew apart," as if nothing beyond the angle of their planting caused them to cross paths in the first place, and nothing about the way they collided affected them in the slightest for good or ill.

When I married my 4'11" wife I did not immediately feel myself beginning to shrink, but my mind quickly lost the ability to bring forth the word "short" and developed an almost instantaneous predilection for "petite." For a while I would get on my knees to make eye contact, but my waddling freaked her out—she had no stomach for hot penguin love—and over time it became unnecessary. Like the zebra with his head in the treetops, my body adjusted to the demands of nature.

OK, maybe I didn't literally lose 12 inches of height. But at this time of year I do not reminisce about old times or old acquaintance as much as old long me. I'm a shape shifter, we all are, inside and out. I liked the old me, but he and all his body parts are long gone, physically, psychologically, and forever changed by time and circumstances.

Siamese twins don't become Siamese distant cousins. But you can bet they make profound individual accommodations to live with the ties that bind. Subjected to the trauma of 9/11, America quickly embraced torture and domestic surveillance; threatened by the menace of economic collapse, she voted for a black president.

The George W. Bushes of this world hold on relentlessly to their preconceived notions and existence. But throw a shoe at them after they've maintained that unremitting grip for eight long years, and you'll find that even they have learned to duck.