Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [309]
But Elvis, who had spent his youth surrounded by girls rocking the sides of his Cadillac, took command, climbing from the car and stepping right into the throng. Sonny stood at his side, trying not to let his nervousness show.
“Whatcha doin’ here, man,” one of the youths asked.
“Just tryin’ to get a few doughnuts,” Elvis said calmly. Then he leaned down to Ben, the limo driver. “How ’bout goin’ in and gettin’ us three dozen?”
He straightened back up and faced his audience. Joyce and Janice were frozen in their seats, but Elvis knew what to do. “Okay, guys, keep cool . . . and pay attention now.”
Slowly he pulled back his coat to reveal his massive gold belt, gleaming as it caught the reflection from a streetlight.
“This here,” he told the kids, “was a gift from the International Hotel in Las Vegas for breaking their all-time attendance record.”
A chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” went up from the wide-eyed crowd, some of them moving in to get a closer look. They were pushing against one another now, more excited than before.
“This belt says I’m the best . . . ,” he declared. Then he grabbed the pistol out of his shoulder holster with lightning speed.
“And this,” he said, turning the gun in his hand, “says I get to keep it.”
The rough ghetto kids let out a loud laugh. “Sure, man,” somebody said. “It’s yours. Okay, take it easy.”
It was a masterly performance, and to close it, Elvis shot a curled-lip grin.
“That’s it, fellas,” he said, and now with Ben back in the car and the doughnuts on the seat, they sped away.
It was Joyce’s favorite memory of him. But she didn’t know this new Elvis. And he kept asking her to move into Graceland, where she spent his thirty-seventh birthday with him January 8, 1972, Priscilla having told him at Christmas that she was leaving. Now Elvis was finally free to be with Joyce, to really be with her. But the idea of living with him scared her.
“He was so out of control. And I needed my independence. He really wanted to take over my life, but of course, I had no control over his, and I knew there was something wrong with that thinking.” She was also disappointed that while he had been “very sexual, though intermittently, it didn’t last.”
In February, in Vegas, she realized it was impossible to make a life with him. They came from two different worlds, and she didn’t want to belong to his anymore. In the ladies’ room at the hotel, two hookers who told her they counted Elvis as a customer had just mistaken her for one of their own. Now she just had to get away from it all—the clothes and hair that weren’t really her, the dependence on Placidyls, and being around the man who said that pills helped him get close to the “silence,” to the “resting place of the soul.”
From the passages that he underlined and noted in the margins of his books, she knew he was trying to find his purpose in life. (“El,” he said, was another name for God.) But when he read them aloud to her, “It drove me crazy. They didn’t make any sense to me.” But she did understand that “he truly ached for his brother, and he really wanted his brother to guide him from these books.”
On one of her last nights with him, he was just about to slip away, the pills taking him under, when he mumbled something about not having much time left to get his message out. He was terrified of growing older, worried that “it won’t be long until I’m forty, and that could be too late.”
It was already too late for Joyce. One afternoon when she awoke, he was still sleeping. The room was cold, the way he liked it, and she shivered from the chill. She dressed, packed, and finally, pulled off the gold ring with the little diamond he had given her when they first met, and laid it on the nightstand. Then she kissed his