Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Elvis performing Good Rockin’ Tonight.
“I hate Elvis, I love Elvis,” I can still hear the echo of my old “the projects” boy, the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments for those who are sticklers for exact titles but the projects for the less timid and socially realistic, William James Bradley. William James Bradley , also known as Billie, not Billy, by the way, not some common billy-goat name as he made us painfully aware if we didn’t get it right. Not if you did not want to be on the wrong side of an argument if you made the mistake of calling him Billy and after a while no one did. No kid at least. Period.
Yes, Billie from the hills, a mad demon of a kid and my best friend from about second to sixth grade down in that projects elementary school, Adamsville South. We grew apart after a while, and I will tell you why sometime, but for a long time, a long kid time long, Billie, Billie of a hundred dreams, hell maybe a thousand dreams but who kept count after a while. Billie of fifty (at least but still with no exact count) screw-ups made me laugh and made my day on many days when things were tough, like they almost always were, at my beat down broke down family house (ah, apartment). But this is not about me, my family, or that beat down family apartment so I won’t belabor the issue. This is about Billie, and the mad jail break-out craziness that Elvis created just by, well in the end, just by being Elvis.
You know though fifty some odd years later Billie was right. We hated Elvis, especially at that time when all the girls, the young girls got weak-kneed over him and he made the older girls (and women, some mothers even) sweat and throw their underwear at him and left no room, no room at all, for ordinary mortal boys, “the projects boys” most of all, on their “dream” card. And most especially, hard as we tried, for brown-haired or tow-headed, blue-eyed ten, eleven and twelve year old boys, us, who didn’t know how to dance, or sneer. We both got pissed off at my brother, my older brother by a year, James Michael, because, he looked very much like Elvis and although he had no manners, no sneer, and no time for girls, they were all following him. Christ there really is no justice in this wicked old world.
And we loved Elvis for giving us, at least as far as we knew then, our own music, our own "jump' and our own jail-break from the tired old stuff we heard on the parent-controlled radio and television but did not ‘”speak” to us. And for the songs that he left behind. Not the goofy, Tin Pan Alley or somewhere like that, inspired “happy” music that went along with his mostly maligned, and rightly so, films but the stuff from the Sun Records days, the stuff from when he was from hunger. That, as we also from hunger, was like a siren call to break-out from cheap street and then we caught his act on television and that was that. I probably walk “funny,” knees and hips out of whack, today from trying way back then to pour a third-rate imitation of his moves into my misbegotten body to impress the girls. No regrets though.
But enough of Elvis’ place in the pre-teen and teen rock pantheon this is after all about Billie, and Elvis’ twisted spell on the poor boy. Now you already know Billie, or you should, from another story, a story about how he wanted to “channel” Bo Diddley. See he was crazy for that Afro-Carib Bo beat too (much more so than I then) and wanted to, as a change of pace break from the Elvis rut that he claimed every other young boy was into in order to attract girls, create his own “style.” That was Billie, Billie to a tee, a Billie dream and of course a Billie screw-up.
Billie (and not just Billie but me and a lot of guys then) our ears screwed to the radio didn’t know that Bo was black. Hell, we thought, if we thought about it at all, everybody was white on the radio it all sounded like everybody was bouncing to the non-parent approved same beat. (It was only when we madly dashed home after school to watch American Bandstand that we started to become race conscious.) Well, in hard, hard post-World War II Northern white "the projects" filled to the brim with mainly unspoken racial animosity (and not directly observable since there were not blacks there, and maybe not in the whole town) learned the hard way. Poor unknowing Billie one church dance night when he started singing the crazy beat song Who Do You Love? For a crowd of girls got blasted away by one of the older, more knowing boys about wanting to emulate a n----r for his troubles.
That sent Billie, Billie from the hills, back to Elvis pronto. See, Billie was desperate to impress the girls way before I was aware of them, or their charms. Half, on some days, three-quarters of our conversations (I won’t say monologues because I did get a word in edgewise every once in a while when Billie got on one of his rants) revolved around doing this or that, something legal something not, to impress the girls. And that is where the “hate” part mentioned above comes in again. Billie believed, and he may still believe it today wherever he is, that if only he could approximate Elvis’s looks, look, stance, and substance that all the girls would be flocking to him.
Needless to say, such an endeavor required, requires money, dough, kale, cash, moola whatever you want to call it. And what twelve year old project boys (that’s the age time of this story, about late 1957, early 1958) didn’t have, and didn’t have in abundance was any of that do-re-mi. And no way to get it from missing parents, messed up parents, or just flat out poor parents. Billie’s and mine were the later, poor as church mice. No that‘s not right because church mice (in the way that I am using it, and as we used it back then to signify the respectable poor who “touted” their Catholic pious poorness as a badge of honor in this weary old world) would not do, would not think about, would not even breathe the same air of what we were about to embark on. A life of crime, kid stuff crime but I'll leave that to the reader’s judgment.
See, on one of Billie’s rants he got the idea in his head, and, maybe, it got planted there by something that he read about Elvis (Christ, he read more about that guy that he did about anybody else once he became an acolyte), that if he had a bunch of rings on all his fingers the girls would give him a tumble (a tumble in those days being a hard kiss on the lips for about twelve seconds or “copping” a little feel, and if I have to explain that last expression in more detail then you had better just move on).
But also see Billie’s idea was that if he has all those rings, especially for a projects boy then it would make his story that has set to tell easier. And that story was none other than he wrote to Elvis (possible) and spoke man to man about his situation (improbable) and Elvis, Elvis the king, Elvis from nowhere Mississippi like we were from the nowhere projects, Elvis bleeding heart, had sent him these rings to give him a start in life (outrageously impossible.) Christ, I don’t believe old Billie came up with that story even now when I am a million years world-weary.
But first you needed the rings and as the late honorable bank robber, Willie Sutton, said about robbing banks-that’s where the money is-old Billie, blessed, beatified Billie, figured out, and figured out all by himself, that if you wanted to be a ring stealer that you better go to the jewelry store because that is where the rings are. Now the reader, and rightly so, now, might ask where was his best buddy during this time and why was he not offering wise counsel about the pitfalls of crime and the virtues of honesty and incorruptibility. Well, when Billie got off on his rant you just waited to see what played out. The real reason though was, hell, maybe I could get a ring for my ring-less fingers and be on my way to impress the girls too. I think they call it, or could call it, aiding and abetting.
But enough of that superficial moralizing. Let’s get to the jewelry store, the best one in the downtown of the working class town we were appendaged to (literally so because the projects were located on a one road in and out peninsula). We walked a couple of miles to get there, plotting all the way. Bingo the Acme Jewelry Store (or some name like that) jumped up at us. Billie’s was as nervous as a colt and I was not far behind, although on this caper I was just the “stooge”, if that. I was to wait outside to see if John Law comes by. Okay, Billie, good luck. And strangely enough his luck was good that day, and many days after, although those days after were not ring days. That day his haul was five rings. Five shaky rings, shaky hands Billie, as we walked, then started running, away from the down town area.
When we got close to home we stopped near the beach where we lived to see up close what the rings looked like. Billie yelled, “Damn.” And why did he yell that word. Well, apparently in his terror (his word to me) at getting caught he just grabbed what was at hand. And what was at hand were five women’s rings. Now, how are you going to impress girls, ten, eleven or twelve year old girls, even if they were as naïve as us, and maybe more so, that Elvis is you bosom buddy and you are practically his only life-line adviser with five women’s rings? Damn, damn was right.
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