Jail. House. Rock., excerpt
Second grade, Clinton Elementary. My classmate Ben Kovacs doing a hot Elvis imitation while in line for the drinking fountain at school.
He's singing Jail House Rock. From the 1957 Elvis Presley movie. Still a recent film.
The warden held a party in the county jail.
Jail. House. Rock.
Rock. Paper. Scissors. Growing up, this game fascinates me, even as I reel trying to keep up. It goes like this: Three fist pumps. Say ROCK PAPER SCISSORS. Then say SHOOT. With your hands, rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats rock. If you both do the same, take another turn. Three times and it's a game. Rock Paper Scissors. Utterly confusing. The rock should beat both: smash the scissors, fly through the paper. Or the paper should beat both: cover the scissors, cover the rock. Or the scissors should beat both: hone the blade on the rock, then hammer and vulcanize on the heated rock, then use the hardened metal to stab and shatter the rock into bits.
Then Jail. House. Rock. In my mind there is a connection. Those first two notes of the guitar, dum DUM. Two E-Flat power chords, schooshed up half a step. Dum-DUM. Then the two taps on the guitar, Bump-Bump. In the movie Jail House Rock Elvis's cellmate is the actor Mickey Shaughnessy. I recognize him as one of the spacemen from the 1955 Conquest of Space. Crewmate Ross Martin is pierced by a meteor, ( Rock punctures Spaceman ) and his lit-up scream fuses with Elvis's orgiastic jailbird yowl. Even the title, Conquest of Space seems an allusion to an impossible choreography that flings open jail cells and teaches old timers to rock.
Dum-DUM. Bump-Bump. Elvis's conquest of space in the dance sequence. Liquid. Balancing on his toes. All the dancing convicts in perfect synchrony. They look like old style cliched jail birds, "jail boids" from 1930's and 1940's movies. How did they get into rock and roll? Are they doing rock and roll, or is this some jitterbug throwback to the 1940's? Have these mugs been in duh stir so long they follow an alien like Elvis? Looking back at the prisoners in Jail House Rock, and then, (ten years later!) the southern chain gang in Cool Hand Luke, there are no black prisoners. An invisible, oppressive black hole of assumptions about race, class, and sexuality swallows light and life out of everything's center. I look and see nothing wrong, but I know the blind spot is there, like a sucking drain behind eyes. A hint of secret, subversive code leaks out from gesture and word, like the Pig Latin of my sister's friends. How did they do that? How did it work? How come everyone can understand it but me? Even now I don't know, and have to look it up:
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Words beginning with consonants/ consonant sounds, move to the end of the word, add "ay." Jail = Ail-Jay.
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Words beginning with vowels/vowel sounds, leave the same, but add "hay" to the end.
Elvis Presley = Elvis-Hay. Esley-Pray.
Dum-DUM, Bump-Bump. Rock Paper Scissors SHOOT. The warden held a party in the county jail.
Much later, through the strangeness of Critical Theory Elvis Studies in early 2000's, I come to appreciate the codes of disguised racism, homoerotics and S&M in the scene. "Jail house rock" old prison slang for inmate sex.
Now I can't stop watching the dance sequence on YouTube. Dum-Dum. Bump-Bump.
The strangest line of all:
If you can't find a partner, use a wooden chair
After the collapse of the Batman Fan Club, I stare entranced at the chair in front of me. Shadows thrown from the legs bump over the weave of the wicker rug and I see blobby lines in old comics, printed on cheap paper with uncertain color registration, and coarse Ben Day dots raw as pimples on older girls. I go to the chair and lay on the seat, face down on my stomach, my head, arms and legs like folded bologna drooping out the sides of a white bread sandwich. Slowly the tips of my sneaker feet find the floor. My toes gently push, and I rock.
Dum-DUM Bump-Bump
I shimmy until the corner edge of the seat is pressing against me in the right spot between my legs. I stop breathing. I rock more. Heat between my legs stirs from a wisp to a spark to a flame. Inside me is that sky full of bats, only now they're on fire.
"EEEEWWOOOOOOO WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" My sister says. (Various other verbs—shrieks, shouts, yells, hisses, snarls—are presented to memory's editor, but it's the charged, loud flatness and fiercely bland affect in her voice that dictates the choice of "says," as if my sister knows very well what I am doing, doesn't care one way or the other, but is telegraphing that my mother and the rest of the world is going to care, in a very bad way, very much, so I'd better stop it, or at least do it somewhere hidden, RIGHT NOW). I drop four legs into now. Then a tip, sideways.
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