Losing Graceland Read Online Free PDF Page B

not University of Buffalo? Ben had asked her.
    We can’t go to the same college, Jessica had said. It would be like we’re married.
    He said nothing because he knew Jessica was on loan. She was far too beautiful to be anything other than a high-end lease. For the first three months he’d had the upper hand by virtue of being a college guy with an apartment, messy hair, clear skin, and a sob story about his father’s tragic death. But then one night he’d had an awful realization, remembering how he viewed the college guys who dated the hot girls in his high school.
    Losers
. Losers who couldn’t get birds their own age, so they had to dip down. And even the hot high-school girls knew it, butthey were so eager to play grown-up—to drink bad wine, eat bad cheese, and engage in angst-ridden late-night group talks while lounging on papasans—that they bided their time until they learned how to give proper head.
    Losers, Ben thought, and the next five months he never forgot. The first time Jessica swallowed, he realized it was already happening. The next week she grabbed her giant breasts while riding him, and stared at him with wide brown eyes as if to say,
Teach me what else to do so I can please my future boyfriends
.
    He remembered driving Patrick home from the hospital. It was a quiet, sullen ride, Patrick with a Darvocet prescription and ten stitches in his lip. Patrick dry-swallowed three pills and Ben helped him up the stairs. Then Jessica called and said she wasn’t going to Toronto. Why don’t they go to the mall instead. Her mom hadn’t suspected a thing.
    They ate in the food court. Red plastic trays and screaming children. Ben bought Jessica two bagfuls of clothing, and stood by like a silent idiot when she ran into a gaggle of high-school friends and showed them her new outfits.
    “There,” the old man said. “Pull over there.”
    The bar was called Sensations, a cinder-block box with a buzzing neon sign that advertised
Karaoke Night Ladies Drink FREE!
It had a pool table and a dark bar with a gleaming brass footrest. Bikers mingled with locals in Carhart jackets, but there were a few suburban types who drank more than anyone else, husbands in high-waisted jeans and wives in low-cut blouses showing cleavage that rivaled any biker chick. The old man and Ben took a corner booth, and the old man ordered fried shrimp with a pitcher of beer.
    Ben tried to ignore the stares. Men at the bar looked over their shoulders. Suburban couples whispered.
    “If you’re in hiding, you sure don’t dress like it,” Ben said.
    The old man munched a fried shrimp and washed down the grease with a swig of beer. “I’m not in hiding.”
    Ben grabbed a shrimp. “But you said you were a fugitive.”
    “No one believes I’m alive. No family to speak of. No friends, no lovers. I could jump up right now and tell everyone who I am, and they’d laugh.”
    “So why do you dress like that?”
    The old man tossed a tail onto his plate. “Like what.”
    “Like a trailer-park Elvis.”
    The old man licked his fingers. “You been waiting to use that line or did you just come up with it right now?”
    “It’s not a line. I’m trying to understand.”
    “I dress how I want to dress.” The old man poured the rest of the pitcher into his glass. “I’m the freest man in the world. Freer than you. How would you dress if you could dress the way you wanted? And don’t tell me you’d wear jeans and a T-shirt, because that’s bullshit. You’d walk around in your bathrobe, maybe just your underwear and a pair of comfortable socks. Maybe even turn your socks inside out ’cause that way the seams don’t itch.”
    The old man pointed at his lion’s head belt buckle. “You see this here? Had it custom-made in Spoke, Alabama. Melted gold from the fillings of a Confederate general. Made in a shop owned by a little Chinese woman who’d married a Navy man. They’d seen my show in Birmingham and told me if I was ever in the