Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [72]
“I have to go back to the motel real quick to change clothes,” he said, and when they got there, he didn’t invite her in (“the room’s a mess”). She sat there a few minutes, wondering if she’d done the right thing in even coming, and then Scotty and Bill came out of the room and stood on either side of the car. It frightened her—she didn’t know they were just getting the bass down—and then finally Elvis came out and they went to Gus Stevens’s restaurant to see comedian Dave Gardner do the floor show. They stayed a long time, just listening to music, but they were both underage—Elvis was still just twenty—so they left before anybody found out, and went and parked at the pier at the White House Hotel.
They talked in the car for a while, and then he wanted to go for a walk. He took her hand, and there was just enough moonlight that she could watch for the cracks in the pier’s old boards so her high heels wouldn’t get stuck. Suddenly, he stopped. He turned her around so he was behind her and slipped his hands around her waist and kissed her neck. She felt a shock of electricity, and squirmed, but he promised he wouldn’t hurt her. He kissed her tenderly, first her forehead, and each eye, then her nose, and finally her lips. She kissed him back in a way that had a future in it.
“Where did you learn to kiss?” he asked, surprised at her passion.
“I was just getting ready to ask you the same thing!” she said, and she still remembers what it was like: “Soft, full lips. Nothing too sloppy. Oh! It was just marvelous, a little pecking here and there, a nibble, and then a serious bite. It started small, and then got bigger, and then went little again before ending up with a lot of eye contact.”
They sat on the end of the pier and talked and smooched and talked and smooched, and said the usual things that young lovers do, about not wanting to be any other place in the world in that minute. Then she thought about what her mother always told her about being in a compromised position, and got her wits about her and asked what time it was. Elvis tried to look at his watch, but the moon was so pale he couldn’t tell if it was 1:15 or 3:05. It was definitely past her curfew, though, and she said, “Oh, my God, my mother’s going to kill me! I’m always home by midnight!”
They parked outside her mother’s house, and it was just supposed to be for a minute. “Do you have to go in?” he asked, his voice saying he hoped she didn’t. “Well, not yet,” she told him, “but if that light comes on right there in the corner of the house, I’ve got to run.”
The light never blinked, but June knew her mother kept an eye out to see what they were doing. She didn’t care. She just wanted to talk to him. It was 6 A.M. when she finally got out of the car, an eight-hour date. By that time, they’d talked about everything. He was shocked that her parents were divorced. He thought of marriage as a lifelong commitment, he said, and when he got married, it was going to last forever. And he told her all about his twin, who died at birth.
“By the way,” she said, “what’s your real name?”
“What do you mean my real name? My name is Elvis Aaron Presley.”
She’d never met anybody quite like him.
Now she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about his face, the way it looked the first time she saw it up close. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but it was wonderful, and she wished she could keep it forever.
He said he had shows in Mobile, but he would phone her when he got back to Memphis. But each time he placed his person-to-person call, some guy answered the phone, and Elvis didn’t know what was up, didn’t realize it was June’s brother, Jerry, who didn’t tell her that she’d gotten a call and that she was supposed to phone the operator back to be connected. June prided herself on being feisty and independent (“I wasn’t staying home monitoring the phone”), and she didn’t tell a soul about her date with Elvis. It was too surreal,