All Shook Up (10 page)

22. Sweepstakes

As it turned out, the idea for how to keep my dad from performing came from an unusual place: Gladys. A few days after I’d found out about my dad’s Elvis gig, I was walking home from school when Gladys flagged me down outside her house. She said she had a letter she wanted me to read.

“I’ve got something I need you to look at, dear,” Gladys called out from her porch, where she was standing in a rose-flowered housecoat and pink slippers. Once I got to her door, she held an envelope toward me. “This letter came in the mail today,” she whispered in an excited voice. “It says I’ve won a million dollars. A million dollars—my stars, can you believe that?”

Of course, once I looked at the letter I knew exactly what it was. The metallic gold print at the top actually said
GLADYS BEDFORD
,
YOU MAY BE OUR NEXT MILLION-DOLLAR SWEEPSTAKES WINNER
. However, you had to send in your name and address in order to be entered in a drawing for the prize. Most of the important information about your chances of winning or not winning was in microscopic blocks of print at the bottom of the page.

Standing uncomfortably on Gladys’s porch, I tried to figure out the nicest way to explain to her that she hadn’t won any money. “I know the letter says you’re a million-dollar winner, but that’s not really what the letter means,” I began. “It’s a contest, see, where you send in an entry and you get entered into a drawing with millions of other people and somebody in the drawing wins a million dollars.”

“So I didn’t win all that money?”

I shook my head. “I mean, you have a chance—”

“Well, shoot,” Gladys interrupted. “And there I was thinking I was gonna die a rich old lady. That’s the way life goes, though. Easy come, easy go.” She waved her hand in the air. “How about coming in for a drink of something before you leave?”

I didn’t really want to stay, but I felt like Gladys had been disappointed enough for one day, so I told her a glass of water would be fine but I couldn’t stay very long. While I was sitting at her kitchen table, my eyes glanced over the sweepstakes letter again.

GLADYS BEDFORD
,
YOU MAY BE OUR NEXT
…

And I started thinking about what would happen if my dad got the same kind of letter. What if he actually won a million dollars, for instance? Would he give up being Elvis? Would it stop him from performing at my school?

That’s when the idea hit me. Well, no, it wasn’t like
bam, here’s an idea
—it was more like in the game of Solitaire when you turn a card over and you don’t see where it fits at first and then all of a sudden you do. And once that card is moved into the right spot, a lot of other cards fall into place.

What if my dad received his own sweepstakes letter? Not a letter offering him a million dollars, but one that invited him to enter a special Elvis competition in Chicago? And what if the contest was on the same day as the school show?

JERRY DENNY
,
YOU HAVE THE CHANCE TO BE OUR NEXT CHICAGO ELVIS
….

It was exactly the kind of opportunity that would appeal to my dad. He was always looking for bigger and better places to perform. And if it was on the same day as the school event, he’d definitely go ahead and cancel the school gig. Maybe the contest could even offer the winner the chance to compete in Las Vegas at a national—no,
international
—Elvis competition with the best Elvises from all over the world.

The only drawback I could see was the fact that there wasn’t going to be a real competition. But I thought I could solve that problem by sending another letter later on—maybe a week or so before the competition date—saying the show had been canceled but would be rescheduled at a later time.

The beauty of my plan was that it didn’t really hurt anybody. The school wouldn’t be hurt—they would have plenty of time to find another Elvis to perform. My dad’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt by standing in front of a crowd of howling, jeering middle school kids. And I wouldn’t be hurt by people finding out who he was.

Sure, it required being a little dishonest. But
in theory
(my Listerine science teacher’s favorite phrase) my idea was no different than a sweepstakes letter telling people “you may be a winner.” My dad
might
be the winner of a Chicago Elvis contest, if it actually happened. Only it wouldn’t. And even if he was a little disappointed when the contest was canceled, it still wasn’t as bad as being publicly humiliated. Being disappointed was like going to the store and discovering they were sold out of your favorite ice cream flavor. No big deal. You got over it.

However, being publicly humiliated was way worse. Especially if you were my dad and you hadn’t been to middle school in, oh, about twenty-seven years and you had no idea what you were getting into when you agreed to perform in front of hundreds of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. So by writing the letter, I swear I believed I was saving him from being hurt.

What I didn’t consider at the time was the effect the letter would have on somebody like my dad—somebody who thinks he always has a chance in life, no matter what the odds are. My dad is the kind of person who would actually believe he could be a
MILLION-DOLLAR WINNER
, while my mom and I would just laugh and toss the letter in the trash. Since I didn’t think about how seriously my dad might take the whole idea, I didn’t realize what was totally wrong with my plan.

The other mistake I made was taking the idea too far. Once I started putting my ideas down on paper, I couldn’t stop. I’m kind of ashamed to admit it now, but I had a lot of fun creating the Elvis letter on my computer. It took me about three days to pull together the whole page. I found a great black-and-white clip art picture of Elvis in his younger years, and I put that in the upper left corner of the invitation. Across the top, I typed:
CALLING ALL CHICAGO ELVISES! A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY! YOU MAY BE THE NEXT LAS VEGAS ELVIS!

Note: If some of the words have a familiar ring, it’s because I borrowed a few of them from Gladys’s sweepstakes letter.

Searching through the Chicago Yellow Pages, I found a fancy downtown hotel to use as the site for the contest: the InterContinental Hotel with the Grand Ballroom. That sounded convincing enough to me. Who wouldn’t give up a crummy middle school program at Charles W. Lister for the opportunity to perform at the Grand Ballroom? And just to be sure the whole plan would work, I listed five thousand dollars as the first prize—with the chance to be part of a special Las Vegas Elvis concert.

I had to admit, it looked completely professional when I was finished. I even added a few lines of microscopic type at the bottom:
THE INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL AND ITS EMPLOYEES ARE NOT LIABLE FOR THE JUDGING OR OUTCOME OF THE ELVIS CONTEST. ALL DECISIONS BY THE ELVIS JUDGES ARE FINAL. NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

Note: I was very proud of the word “liable.”

I mailed the letter in the blue post office mailbox across from Charles Lister. As I pulled back the handle of the mailbox and watched the envelope slide down the metal chute, I felt like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Three days of work with fonts and mailing labels and spell-checking everything about a hundred times—and now the letter was done and out of my hands. Calling all Chicago Elvises….

23. Return to Sender

A few days later, the letter arrived at my dad’s house—or
returned
to it (depending on your perspective). But I have to say I was a little shocked when I got home from school and found my dad sitting in the living room, wearing a suit and tie. “Put on something nice,” he announced excitedly, jumping up from the sofa as I came through the door. “I’m taking us downtown for dinner tonight.”

“Us?”

“You and me.” My dad patted my back. “I’m in the mood for a celebration.”

I could feel a small prickling start in my scalp and make its way down the back of my neck. You know the feeling you get when you are caught in the middle of telling a big fat juicy lie to your parents? When you can’t decide whether to stop or keep going with your story?

“What are we celebrating?” I said, trying to appear clueless, even though I had already guessed.

“Just something good that happened to me today. You’ll see…,” my dad said with a secretive smile. “I don’t want to give it away just yet.”

As I stood in my bedroom pulling on a new pair of khakis that my mom had sent the week before with an update about my grandma, I had to admit that my dad’s reaction wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. I tried to decide how to act when my dad told me about the letter.

Surprised? Of course surprised. But since the contest wasn’t going to happen, I didn’t want to encourage him too much—especially since I hadn’t shown much interest in his Elvis gigs before. Maybe I needed to play it cool. Say something like,
that’s great—but the competition will probably be pretty tough, won’t it?
Mostly I just hoped the whole conversation would end quickly, because I wasn’t very good at any of this deep psychological stuff.

It took about forty minutes to get downtown from my dad’s neighborhood. We drove past the InterContinental Hotel with the Grand Ballroom on our way to the restaurant. Dad leaned toward my window and pointed out the white-gloved guy standing by the hotel’s gold-and-glass front doors. “Look, they even have somebody to open the doors for you at that place. Fancy-schmancy, huh?”

“Yeah, pretty nice,” I said, pretending to seem more interested in cracking my knuckles than in what was going on outside.

My dad had made reservations at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel, although, by the empty look of the place, he didn’t need to bother. It was kind of embarrassing to watch him march right up to the front desk with his slicked-back hair and his suit and announce, “Reservation for Denny—two people” when most of the tables didn’t have a soul sitting at them. The Chinese lady at the front pretended to take him seriously by spending a few minutes paging through a black book on the desk before saying, “Ah yes, Mr. Denny, we have a table for you. Right this way.”

We were taken to a white-cloth-covered table by a window facing a brick wall. It was a nicely made brick wall but not exactly what you would call a view. I don’t think my dad noticed the window or the lack of a view, though. After we sat down, Dad reached into his pocket and set an envelope on the table in front of me. “Guess what came in the mail today?” he said excitedly. “Open it up and look.”

I could feel the prickly needles creeping up the back of my neck as I slid the letter I had written out of the envelope. I could practically recite what it said, word for word, from memory: Calling All Chicago Elvises! A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity! You May Be the Next…

As I pretended to be slowly reading the letter, I wondered how I could possibly look up again without appearing guilty. This was the part of the plan that I hadn’t considered. I hadn’t expected my dad to be sitting two feet away, studying my face while I read my own words.

“This sounds pretty good,” I said, folding up the letter and avoiding his eyes.

“It’s the same day as the concert at your school, though.”

I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “So cancel the school thing. The contest is more of a big deal than coming to a school concert, right?” I was amazed at how smoothly these words came out of my mouth.

Note to self: Maybe you should consider a career in Hollywood.

A grin spread across my dad’s face and he leaned forward, jostling the table with his elbows. The lighted candle on the table flickered. “You and I must be on the same page. That’s exactly what I thought, too.” His voice dropped to a whisper, as if someone in the empty restaurant might overhear us talking. “This could be my big break, you know. If I win this competition and get to go to Vegas—man, that would be it!” His voice rose excitedly. “If people know you’re good, you can make big money traveling around the country being Elvis.”

My throat began to feel like I had swallowed a mouthful of sand. I reached for one of the water glasses on the table and took a long drink. The glass wobbled in my hand as I set it back down and little splashes seeped into the tablecloth.

The Chinese lady came back with two menus. “Any questions—be back in few minutes,” she said, handing them to us with a polite smile.

“Get whatever you want,” my dad said, passing one to me. “I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

It got worse. All through dinner, he talked about how he was going to prepare for the competition. “My costume needs work, that’s the first thing,” he said, shoveling big spoonfuls of rice into his mouth. “My shoes aren’t the right color. Elvis wore white, so I’ve gotta find some white boots somewhere, and I need something flashier than the black leather costume I’ve been wearing. Something from Elvis’s later years. Gotta do a lot more practicing on the moves, too. I just can’t get the leg shake exactly the way he did it, no matter how much I keep working on it.”

And right there in the middle of Ho Wah’s nice, quiet (and fortunately empty) restaurant, my dad had to show me the secret of how Elvis jiggled his leg. “I’ll show you what I mean—”

“Dad, jeez, come on—”

“No, I’m serious. It’s a really simple move. Look how he did it.” My dad stood up. “It’s a heel tap, not a toe tap, see—” His heel began bouncing up and down on the red carpet as if he had suddenly stepped on a poisonous snake. Or a nest of ground wasps. “But whenever I’m performing, I always start tapping my toes instead, which looks completely wrong, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have the same leg jiggle, does it?”

I could not believe we were actually having a demonstration of “leg jiggles” in the middle of a Chinese restaurant.

As my dad’s shoe tapped one way and then the other on the thick red carpet, I could see the Chinese lady hurrying across the room toward us. Dad, who was totally oblivious to everything, slid back into his seat and picked up his white napkin, which had fallen on the floor. “So I’ve gotta get that move right before the competition,” he said, dumping another huge pile of rice onto his plate. “And I keep messing up the timing on the song ‘Teddy Bear.’ ‘Just wanna be’”—he tapped two fingers on the table and hummed in a low voice—“‘your Teddy Bear.’ See, that pause is tough.”

The Chinese lady came over, looking worried. “Everything okay?”

My dad nodded and answered through a mouthful of food that the meal was great. I could see the Chinese lady’s eyes glance toward my plate, where I had only made a few dents in my chicken fried rice mountain. A sharp throbbing pain had started right below my ribs.

Driving back in the car with my dad, I had a lot of time to think. Or at least the guilty side of my brain had a lot of time to think. As the lights of the city flashed past the car windows, I noticed how everything had a hazy, starburst kind of look—the streetlights, the neon signs, the crosswalk signals—as if I was seeing Chicago underwater.

Note: I knew this was an observation that shouldn’t be shared with any adult in my life because it might mean I would eventually need glasses.

Next to me, my dad hummed songs to himself and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, as if he was rehearsing his entire Elvis show in his head from start to finish. I could tell he was in a really good mood. This made the guilty voices in my brain even louder. And the stomach pain sharper.

Even then, I sensed that something about my plan wasn’t working. Like the city skimming by the car windows, something, somewhere, seemed to have gone hazily wrong. I just didn’t know what it was.