White Noise - Don Delillo [29]
“I know exactly where I was, Alfonse. Let me think a minute.”
“Where were you, you son of a bitch?”
“I always know these things down to the smallest detail. But I was a dreamy adolescent. I have these gaps in my life.”
“You were busy jerking off. Is that what you mean?”
“Ask me Joan Crawford.”
“September thirty, nineteen fifty-five. James Dean dies. Where is Nicholas Grappa and what is he doing?”
“Ask me Gable, ask me Monroe.”
“The silver Porsche approaches an intersection, going like a streak. No time to brake for the Ford sedan. Glass shatters, metal screams. Jimmy Dean sits in the driver’s seat with a broken neck, multiple fractures and lacerations. It is five forty-five in the afternoon, Pacific Coast Time. Where is Nicholas Grappa, the jerk-off king of the Bronx?”
“Ask me Jeff Chandler.”
“You’re a middle-aged man, Nicky, who trafficks in his own childhood. You have an obligation to produce.”
“Ask me John Garfield, ask me Monty Clift.”
Cotsakis was a monolith of thick and wadded flesh. He’d been Little Richard’s personal bodyguard and had led security details at rock concerts before joining the faculty here.
Elliot Lasher threw a chunk of raw carrot at him, then asked, “Did you ever have a woman peel flaking skin from your back after a few days at the beach?”
“Cocoa Beach, Florida,” Cotsakis said. “It was very tremendous. The second or third greatest experience of my life.”
“Was she naked?” Lasher said.
“To the waist,” Cotsakis said.
“From which direction?” Lasher said.
I watched Grappa throw a cracker at Murray. He skimmed it backhand like a Frisbee.
15
I PUT ON MY DARK GLASSES, composed my face and walked into the room. There were twenty-five or thirty young men and women, many in fall colors, seated in armchairs and sofas and on the beige broadloom. Murray walked among them, speaking, his right hand trembling in a stylized way. When he saw me, he smiled sheepishly. I stood against the wall, attempting to loom, my arms folded under the black gown.
Murray was in the midst of a thoughtful monologue.
“Did his mother know that Elvis would die young? She talked about assassins. She talked about the life. The life of a star of this type and magnitude. Isn’t the life structured to cut you down early? This is the point, isn’t it? There are rules, guidelines. If you don’t have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology. She worried about his sleepwalking. She thought he might go out a window. I have a feeling about mothers. Mothers really do know. The folklore is correct.”
“Hitler adored his mother,” I said.
A surge of attention, unspoken, identifiable only in a certain convergence of stillness, an inward tensing. Murray kept moving, of course, but a bit more deliberately, picking his way between the chairs, the people seated on the floor. I stood against the wall, arms folded.
“Elvis and Gladys liked to nuzzle and pet,” he said. “They slept in the same bed until he began to approach physical maturity. They talked baby talk to each other all the time.”
“Hitler was a lazy kid. His report card was full of unsatisfactorys. But Klara loved him, spoiled him, gave him the attention his father failed to give him. She was a quiet woman, modest and religious, and a good cook and housekeeper.”
“Gladys walked Elvis to school and back every day. She defended him in little street rumbles, lashed out at any kid who tried to bully him.”
“Hitler fantasized. He took piano lessons, made sketches of museums and villas. He sat around the house a lot. Klara tolerated this. He was the first of her children to survive infancy. Three others had died.”
“Elvis confided in Gladys. He brought his girlfriends around to meet her.”
“Hitler wrote a poem to his mother. His mother and his niece were the women with the greatest hold on his mind.”
“When Elvis went into the army, Gladys became ill and depressed. She sensed something, maybe as much about herself as about him. Her psychic apparatus was flashing all the wrong signals. Foreboding and gloom.”
“There’s not much doubt