Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [327]
“I’m Elvis! I’m Elvis Presley! I’m a baby! This is my bib! Sit here by me!”
She could tell that he wasn’t just goofing around, that he really wanted to be a baby, and he wanted his mother.
“I thought, ‘Oh, boy. We have problems here.’ And I knew I had to make a decision right then and there. She thought for a minute: ‘Can I do this?’ And the answer was, ‘Damn right I can.’ ”
They spent most of the night together, and while it never got anything close to being sexual, it was romantic. He sang to her on the balcony, and he was very kissy—very, very kissy, she thought—and they had a lot of fun just rolling around with their clothes on. Later she was relieved he wasn’t the sort of cuddler you have to push off of you all night long.
She let him fall asleep, and then around 5 A.M., she got up and went back to her apartment. Six hours later, Joe was on the phone. “Goddamn it, where are you? The boss is furious!” She realized then that she was expected to stay the night, and when she got back to the hotel, she assumed Elvis would be thrilled to see her. Instead, he was mad. He was sitting at the breakfast table, and his leg was doing a Saint Vitus’s dance.
“He said nothing, and I was perplexed. He said, ‘Follow me,’ and I did, like a little geisha. We went in the next room, and he pulled out a hypodermic needle, filled it with Demerol, flicked it three times so there were no air bubbles in it, and handed it to me.” Then he put his thumb into the elastic waistband of his pajamas and pulled it down just far enough.
“Have you ever done this before?”
“Uh-huh.” She’d been a nurse’s aide, so she wasn’t unfamiliar, and she gave him the injection.
“I said, ‘How was it?’ and he said it was okay, but I knew it had to be better than what he got from whoever else was injecting him, because his whole bottom was bruised with contusions, and hard, with scar tissue. You couldn’t really penetrate the skin.”
She didn’t blame him for wanting it. “Demerol is a great way to start the day when you’re around what he was around.”
But there, on the continuation of their first date, Sheila had an epiphany: “I knew that I had been sent there for the downfall. I have always been a believer, and I’ve always known that there is a Higher Power. I knew that Priscilla met him to marry him. And Linda met him for the girls’ time, and I met him for the downfall. That’s what I felt my job was, and I accepted it. I never thought that I would fall in love with him. I just loved him and wanted to take care of him.”
He wanted to take care of her, too, but first he had to put his mark on her. When the shot worked its magic, he had Joe order up a fashion show from Suzy Creamcheese, who brought over racks and racks of dresses. “When you walk through that showroom,” he told Sheila, “I want everybody’s eyes on you. I want everybody to know you’re mine. I don’t want to know that you even existed before this moment. You were born just for me.”
When they finally made love, she was afraid. She’d tried it once with her last boyfriend, and she was too dry, and he couldn’t enter her. And then there was all that guilt tied in with her religion, so it was emotional and confusing. She’d never heard of a man who preferred pumping to actual sex (“In the Catholic faith, he’d get warts on his hand”), but Elvis was thinking of her benefit. So she wouldn’t get pregnant, “he pulled out and finished himself off and put it all over my belly.
“The first thing that crossed my mind was, ‘Oh, my God, he’s perverted.’ Because I was just so naïve. My second thought was that I wasn’t enough woman, that my vagina must have been the size of the Grand Canyon, and that he was bouncing off my insides, so he had to hold on to himself. I thought he was so much more sophisticated, so it had to be me.”
Eventually, Dr. Nick advised her to go on birth control. Yet sometimes she and Elvis just wrestled on the bed and had pillow fights, or he’d tell her stories,