Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [31]
Sometimes they played pool at the Odd Fellows Hall, Elvis liking eight ball and rotation. Mostly, they played corkball with a cut-off broom or mop handle, adhesive tape wrapped around a simple cork to serve as a ball. One day, Farley spit on the corkball stick, trying to emulate Buzzy’s habit of spitting through his teeth. Elvis didn’t see him—didn’t realize what he was doing—though when he picked up the stick he instantly realized what was on it. By his teen years, Elvis had developed a hair-trigger temper, and in a second, he had Farley in the air.
“I grabbed a peach soda bottle on the way up,” says Farley. “I told him, ‘Elvis, if you don’t put me down, I’m going to crown you with this bottle!’ ”
Suddenly, all hell broke loose, Gladys shouting out of her window, and Farley’s mother, too. Elvis hauled off and hit Farley hard, and as his little sister, Doris, remembers it, “Farley said, ‘Okay, you’ve hit me. Now it’s my time to hit you.’ And Mrs. Presley came running out there yelling, ‘Don’t hit my boy!’ Later that day, she told my mother, ‘We can’t have Farley going around hitting my boy,’ but my mother told Mrs. Presley that boys would be boys and it was best if grown-ups did not get involved. She was one domineering woman.”
Elvis and Farley shook hands and were friends again, but Elvis was gaining a reputation as a boy who could take care of himself. When one of his uncles got in trouble in a bar, it was Elvis he called. And once when Humes played a rival school, Treadwell, Elvis coldcocked a Treadwell player who cursed the Humes coach, “knocking him all the way back into the bus,” as Buzzy recalls.
It was a way for him to work off steam and deal with the hormonal pull of puberty, if not to distance himself from Gladys. Now that they lived in the big city, she wanted to walk Elvis to school again, fearing for him when he crossed the street by himself. For a little while, she simply followed him, darting behind bushes so Elvis wouldn’t see her.
Sometimes at night, in foreshadowing how the adult Elvis would interact with his entourage, the boys played tag on their bikes, Buzzy remembering that they raced at one another full force. (“It’s a wonder we didn’t get killed.”) If they could scrape together ten cents, they went swimming at Malone Pool. But Elvis liked to save his money for pinball at a beer joint up at Third and Jackson, or for special occasions like the Cotton Carnival. Once they saw burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee there, Elvis frozen in his tracks, watching as if transfixed.
Often they made their own entertainment. When his parents were out for the evening, Elvis sometimes held dances in the Presleys’ apartment with a phonograph and the few records the kids had between them. Each boy pitched in twenty-five cents for himself and his date, just enough for popcorn and Cokes. “None of us was rich enough then to just have a quarter,” Buzzy remembered, “so we would save all week—a nickel a day—to get up enough money to go to the dance in Elvis’s apartment.”
Elvis, trying to overcome his shyness, pulled out his guitar and sang—he was working on Hank Williams’s “Kaw-liga”—and initially, he brought a girl from the third floor named Betty Ann McMahan, also fourteen. She was his first love in the Courts. Gladys had met her even before Elvis, through her mother. The two women struck up a conversation outside one warm evening and continued it most nights in the McMahans’ lawn chairs, Betty soon sitting in. Elvis, though, was too shy to join them. “Finally one night, I guess, she just forced him to come outside and sit with