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By Root 1228 0

won’t be able to do it as well as I can”), and he strummed the only four chords he knew as best as he could and sang an impassioned “Blue Suede Shoes” and a mournful “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and then Rebecca requested “Love Me Tender” and, speaking in his Memphian drawl, he said, “Ah’ve been singing ‘Love Me Tender’ ever since Ah wuzz a little boy. And Ah love that song. It means a lot to me. Ah get real serious and hope that Ah cain finish it, because Ah have never been able to. And Ah’d appreciate it if you-all didn’t laugh.” And he began to sing and he sang half of the song at which point he began to weep and he kept singing through loud convulsing sobs until the sobs overtook the words and dissolved into full-on blubbering. Steve and Rebecca applauded and, composing himself instantly, thus alarmingly, he answered, “Thank you, thankyouver-rrmuch.”

He returned briefly to Los Angeles, where Sutton took him to a costume sale at the MGM lot in Culver City and they bought a hot pink suit which they thought might have been from The Wizard of Oz but probably not, which he would wear to meet Elvis—or to at least get Elvis’s attention. He moved to Uncle Sammy’s house, where he asked to hear as many show business stories as Uncle Sammy could bear to tell, and then he moved to Aunt Esther’s house, where she couldn’t understand why this boy with his farkuckte meditating needed to sit like a lox behind a door and let such nice hot meals that she made for him get so cold. Anyway, it was Aunt Esther who told him to take an all-night bus to Las Vegas so that he shouldn’t have to waste money on a hotel room for an extra night and he followed her advice and carried his pink suit with him on the bus and arrived the next morning at the International Hotel, which was crawling with Elvis fans from everywhere in the world, but not one of them, he believed, was as ardent or as clever as he. A plan was necessary and he had not much money but he did manage to pay to see one of Elvis’s shows unless he didn’t see Elvis perform at all because so many versions of the story would be told that no one, not anyone, would ever know exactly for sure what happened and even he would change things around in tellings and retellings to the point wherein discrepancies would abound so that several variations of actuality could well have been possible. But he had to wait and wait if he was to succeed in confronting Elvis. He had to bide time around the hotel at which he may or may not have ever gotten a room because he was in Las Vegas for four long days or else just over a day, during which time he waited and plotted. It was then, during just such a waiting period, that he stumbled into a lounge late one/that night at the International/someplace else and discovered an entertainer with whom his life and reputation would later become so inextricably intertwined as to bring great confusion/damage to his/their career/careers. The name of the man singing in this lounge was Tony Clifton, but perhaps not—but the name of the man singing in this lounge was Tony Clifton, but perhaps not. Tony Clifton sang like a cement mixer and wore a garish peach embroidered tuxedo and a scrubbrush mustache and gaudy rings on fat fingers and shades that obscured rheumy eyes below which bags hung like hogs in hammocks. He had a way about him—or so Andy Kaufman thought/imagined. “He made quite an impression on me,” he said years hence when it was necessary to become defensive about Tony Clifton. “His first line was, ‘I’m in Vegas—they got a lot of cool chicks here, you know what I mean?’ He was awful. He threw a drink on a girl and tore her date’s jacket, pushed people around. He got into fights with people; he bragged. He was so extreme that it really impressed me.” What he knew then or didn’t know until a short while thereafter was that he would want to imitate Tony Clifton as part of his show business act which he would debut in all of its grandeur sooner than later and then maybe when he got famous enough he could help the real Tony Clifton also become famous and then they could