Suspicious Mind

8:30 a.m., April 5, 1992

      It was going to be a big day. Jesse knew. Dead celebrities didn't come back from the grave for visits on the eve of just any day.  They only came back before something really big was going to happen.

      The night before, the ghost of Marty Feldman had come to Jesse in the middle of a Rose's department store to tell him, one comedian to another, the secret of comedy.  People were milling around, paying no great attention to the late comic genius, so Jesse had asked, "Can only I see you or can everybody see you?"  The bulbous-eyed comic winked, "With eyes like this, of course they can see me."  Jesse laughed, then thought, "But that doesn't make sense."  "And that's why it's funny," Feldman said, and vanished in a puff of smoke.

      What did it mean? Jesse thought.  It reminded him of his dream from several nights ago, in which Jane Fonda had come up to him in B.Dalton's and told him how big a fan she was.  But she wasn't dead.  She was just married to Ted Turner.

      He couldn't make sense of it all.  Perhaps he would finally be discovered as the comedy god he was.  He didn't know.  He just knew that whatever happened, it was going to be big.

9:43 a.m.

      Jesse knew he would have to hurry if he wanted to make it to church on time.  He threw on his pink shirt like the one worn by Hal Linden on Barney Miller, pulled on a pair of Duckheads, slipped on a pair of Special Limited Edition Donnie Osmond Purple Socks, put on his Nikes, and flew out the door.

      He hopped in the old burgundy Cadillac Seville, started it up, and drove toward the church.  He noticed the digital clock on the radio was wrong.  The battery had died last week and he hadn't thought to reset it yet.  The clock was alternating "5:15", like the old Who song, and "1 8", January 8.  Elvis' birthday.

      Elvis's birthday!  That was it!  The sign!  He hadn't even thought of the clock until he saw it read that specific date.  Logically, he thought, the day before it would have read his birthday, the day before that Nicholas Cage's. 

     Tomorrow, it would read Richard Nixon's, and the next day it would read Rod Stewart's.  But he hadn't noticed the two before, he had only noticed it today, when it read "1 8."

      It had to do with fate and fate had to do with Elvis Presley.

      Or David Bowie, they do have the same birthday. But would fate really have anything to do with David Bowie?

      He turned the car around and headed for home.  He'd have to think about this, about what it all meant, before he could go out.  Today was too important, too big, to accidentally waste.  He'd have to plan his ascent to greatness just as carefully in one day as most stars plan it for years.

10:58 a.m.

      Sitting in the big recliner like the one Art Linkletter sold on TV, in his living room, Jesse thought about it all.  He had been thinking about it all morning, and, gradually, his mind wandered away from today's events to relatedmatters, like the day Elvis died.

      He had only been a child then, but he could remember it as clear as day.  August 16, 1977.  He could still trace the tears streaming down his mother's cheek as she watched the news footage of the ambulance pulling into that Memphis hospital.  The same hospital Martin Luther King, Jr., might have been rushed to just twenty-four years and one day ago.  Not the one that John Lennon, born John Winston Lennon and died John Ono Lennon, was taken to because he died in front of the Dakota in New York City on December 8, 1980.  He had read the actual AP wire report in a frame in the Hard Rock Cafe in Washington, DC, located right next to Ford's Theater, where President Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, was shot in the back of the head, supposedly by John Wilkes Boothe, on April 14, 1865.  Of course, he had lived on until the next day, unlike President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who died in transit to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, where Jesse's cousin Tom worked, on November 22, 1963, just minutes after several assassins, he was sure, had shot both him and Governor John Connally.  To think that Oswald acted alone in the book depository was ridiculous.

      Jesse realized he had become unfocused.  He had to get back to Elvis.  August 16, 1977.  Elvis's bungalow or something was located at 2001 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, or at least at 2001 Something-Or-Other, in California. His offices in Memphis had been at 2001 Elvis Presley Boulevard.  Elvis, late in his career, adopted Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" as his theme song.  It played before every concert, right before he sang "See See Rider."  The song, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," not "See See Rider," had been used in the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

      If you add 8 for August, to 16, to 1977, the date he died, it comes to 2001.

      If you add 4 for April, to 5, to 1992, today, it comes to 2001.

      12 for December, to 8, to 1980, 2000.

      Hmmm.

      On that night, a lone gunman, Mark David Chapman, shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.

      One gunman.  One.  1 plus 12 plus 8 plus 1980, 2001.

      11 for November, plus 22, plus 1963, 1996. 2001 minus 1996, 5.  So.  There were five gunmen.  Conclusive proof.  That's why they closed the files.  There were five gunmen.  He bet Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't even one of them.  He'd have to call Oliver Stone with the news.

      4 for April, plus 14, plus 1865.  So, the congress had been in on the conspiracy to kill Lincoln.  118 congressmen.  John Wilkes Boothe was innocently framed and killed, and Doctor Samuel Mudd was sent to Alcatraz to cover it all up.

      It all made sense now.

      Jesse was going to die.  His fate had added up perfectly, like Elvis's, so he would die just as Elvis had. No assassins.  There wasn't going to be any conspiracy.  At his own hand or by accident, he would die.  Simply.

12:37 p.m.

      No.

      He just couldn't give up like that.  He couldn't just sit there and wait to die.  He had too much to live for.  He had just come up with a great idea for a new sitcom that the networks would absolutely love.

      It was based on the life of Saint Thomas A`Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury, except it was modernized:  A wacky, party guy is somehow appointed as the archbishop of a large metropolitan diocese.  He tries to conform to the church's rules, but, and here's the hook, his drinking-buddy, college roommate comes to live with him.  An ecumenical Odd Couple, they'd call it.  He'd be famous as a great comedy writer.

      And, when they realize that the perfect star for the show is Sir Richard Burton, and he's dead, they'll turn to Jesse as the next best, and then he'll be a star.

      If he could just make it through the rest of the day.  Then he would be safe.  He calculated and found that there would only be eight days this year which add up to 2001.  He'd already lived through three of them.  After today, he would be safe until May 4, and if he could just make it through August, he wouldn't have to worry again until next year.

      The past three dates, January 8, February 7, and March 6, they were the key.  If only he could remember what he had done on those days.

      January 8.  The day after his birthday.  He had gone out and gotten pretty wasted the night before, and he hadn't felt like doing much after he got off work at the movie theater.  He couldn't remember doing anything after work.  He must have just come home, watched TV, and gone to bed.

      February 7.  He had had a date with Ginger.  They had gone to a party.  She had gotten really drunk and passed out before midnight.  He took her home and put her to bed, staying up the rest of the night by himself, watching old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" videos.

      March 6, he couldn't remember.  It was a Friday night, and he had...What?  What had he done?

RRRING!!!

      The phone was ringing.  Jesse reached for it hesitantly.  It was Ginger wanting to know if he wanted to do something tonight.  Ginger.  Ginger Alden.  Elvis's last girlfriend had been an actress named Ginger Alden.  Now he was talking to his girlfriend Ginger.

      Wait!  He thought.  January 8.  That had been one of the dates.  It was Elvis's birthday and it was also at present flashing on his car clock calendar.

      He had been with Ginger on February 7.

      Ginger and January 8 were joining forces against him and soon something from March 6 would be coming for him.  What did he do on that day?

      "Jesse, are you even listening to me?" Ginger asked.

      "Jesse. Oh my God, my name is Jesse," he shrieked.

      "What are you talking about?"

      Jesse.  Elvis's twin brother.  Possibly strangled by Elvis's umbilical cord, he died shortly after birth.  But not before Vernon could name him Jesse.

      "Elvis's brother died and was named Jesse.  I was born several years later, the day before their birthday..."

      Silence on the other end of the phone.

      "Don't you see?" he pleaded, "I am the reincarnation of Elvis Presley's brother and I'm going to die!"

      Ginger didn't see.  At all.  But she said she'd be right over.  She wasn't too worried.  He'd been like this before.  Last year, when he thought he was Satan because he kept hearing "Sympathy for the Devil" on the radio.  There was a part of her that had always wanted to work on a psycho ward, but she had never gotten up the nerve to do it.  Perhaps, she thought, Jesse's usually harmless neuroses and obsessions appealed to this other side of her personality, and that's why she went

out with him.

      That, or she was crazy herself.

      She'd just go over, give him a sedative or something, and let him sleep it off.  He would be fine, she told herself.  But still, there had been a new urgency in his voice this time.  Had he finally lost it?

2:03 p.m.

      Jesse tried to collect himself.  Could it all be a coincidence?  Could there be no direct correlation between Elvis and himself.  The car battery went dead a week ago.  Certainly that didn't correspond to anything he could think of, and that's what had started the whole thing in the first place.

      Yeah, he thought.  It was just a coincidence.  Maybe.  He couldn't be too careful, but he couldn't let himself get carried away like that again.

      It was ridiculous.  He didn't even really believe in reincarnation.  And Ginger!  She had nothing to do with Ginger Alden.  He knew full well she had been named after Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island.

      Tina Louise.  Now there was a babe.

      He decided he would go back to his bedroom and read.  That would help calm him down.  He walked back to the bedroom, grabbed a paperback from the shelf at random, lay back on the bed, and began to read...

      The Omen. The omen? The sign!  He recalled a picture he had seen in the Elvis Presley Museum in Pigeon Forge, of Elvis at an airport, holding a worn paperback edition of The Omen, giving the Heavy Metal devil sign.

      And today was April 5, he thought.  Gregory Peck's birthday.

      He flung the book across the room.  It slammed into his Ziggy Stardust poster and fell to the floor.

      Now he was trapped.  If he had questioned it before, now he had no doubt.  He was Elvis Presley's dead brother come back, he was going to die, and the Anti-Christ would be the one to kill him.

      Well, he'd just see about that.  Ginger was coming over and they'd stay in and do everything just as they had on January 8 and February 7 and...

      March 6.  His old college roommate's birthday.  It was a Friday.  Of course!  That was the day he had gone to see his grandparents in Tupelo.

      So, he and Ginger would go see his grandparents, come back, she would pass out, and he would watch "Moose and Squirrel."

      He dialed the phone to tell his grandparents to expect them later.

      "Hello," a strange voice said.  It wasn't his grandfather, that he knew.

      It was his cousin Tom from Parkland. 

      Cousin Tom from Parkland. 

      He rolled the words around in his head.  Cousin-Tom-Parkland.  Cousin Tom Parkland.  Colonel Tom Parker.

      It was almost uncanny.

      He hung up the phone without saying a word.  He couldn't go down there.  That's just what they were expecting him to do.  They had sent the signs so he would figure it all out, get scared, and play it safe.

      Well, he thought, he would just see about that.  He'd out-thunk them this time.  They thought they were so clever.  As soon as Ginger got there, they'd go out and do something they'd never done before.  Maybe they'd go to a ballgame.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

      There was a knock at the door.  It had to be Ginger.  Or did it?  What if it were space aliens working for Satan, disguised as Jehovah's Witnesses, armed with exploding Watchtower's, and just waiting to use his blood for scientific experiments that would allow them to clone Wayne Newton and...

      "Jesse, open the damned door!"

      Or maybe it was Ginger.

      He ran to the door, peeked through the peephole, saw it was Ginger, and opened the door.  After she stepped in, he stuck his head out to see if anyone had followed her.

      "Were you followed?" he asked.

      "No," she replied gingerly, giving him a peck on the cheek. "You feeling all right?  Have you got a temperature?"

      "No, I don't think so.  How was work yesterday?"

      "All right, I guess," she said, putting a hand to his forehead.  "You're a little warm, but nothing serious."

      If she only knew, he thought.

      "You might think this is interesting," she continued.  "Yesterday, when I went in at five, "Piano Man," by Billy Joel, was on the Muzak."

      "So?"

      "Well, the Muzak's on a four-hour cycle, so at that moment I knew that when Billy Joel said, 'it's nine o'clock on a Saturday,' it would be."

      "Was it?"

      "It should have been, but I forgot about it and didn't notice.  Here take a couple of these."  She reached into her bag and produced a bottle of pills.  "They'll help you relax."

      He took the proffered pills.  "Thanks."

      "I'll get you a glass of water," she said, waltzing into his kitchen toward the sink.  "So, what's up?  With Elvis and everything?"

      He told her the whole story.  How he had been going to church, had seen the "1 8," the whole spiel.  Explaining it to her again helped him see just how silly it all was.  He had just over-reacted.  Pretty soon, he would probably just sit back and laugh about it all.

      "How many should I take?" he interrupted his own story as she came back with the water.

      "Well, it says two," she answered, "but go ahead and take four."

      What was she saying? Did she want him to O.D, or something?  "What?"

      "Just take four, I don't think it'll hurt you."

      "Won't hurt me? Well, thanks, Doctor Nick, but no thanks."

      "Look, Jess, I just thought..."

      "Oh yeah, you just thought.  Like Doctor Nick thought Elvis, like somebody thought Marilyn Monroe.  'Go ahead, take all you want, we'll make more,' like some pharmaceutical Jay Leno."

      "Hey, I'm just trying to..."

      "Kill me!  That's what you're trying to do."

      "Is that what you think?  Do you want me to just go?"

      A nod of approval.

      "Well, that's just hunky dory."

      And with that, she was gone.

      Watching her go, Jesse realized how he must have sounded to her.  She must have thought he was crazy, really crazy, this time.  He'd probably lost her.  He started after her, but the Pinto was already charging up the road and out of his life.

      Damn, he thought.  The best thing he'd ever had just walked out that door, probably never to return.  He thought about how they got together in the first place.  She was the most beautiful waitress in town.  He had tried to ask her out for months, but every time he almost got the courage, he would hear either "You Can't Always Get What You Want," by the Rolling Stones, or "Dream On," by Aerosmith, and chicken out.

      Finally, one day, he said screw it, and asked her out.  She accepted.  Only by working against his neuroses had he won her, and now, by falling prey to them again, he had lost her.

      He realized things were out of his hands now.  He'd have to put her out of his mind, or he might do something crazy.  That's how Freddie Prinze went out.  And he wasn't going out over a girl.

      He was going out to the ballgame.

7:28 p.m.

      Jesse sat alone in the stands.  He tried to think about something other than the events that had ruled the day up until that point.  He tried to think about baseball.  After all, what better place to think about baseball than a   baseball park?  He thought about his father and how, when they never had anything in common, come October, they could still sit and watch the World Series together like best friends.

      He also thought about perfect games and no-hitters.  Was it possible to lose a game in which you pitched a no-hitter?  It would have to be done on errors, he thought.  It was possible, but would any team really commit that many errors?  He didn't think so.  Baseball wasn't really his favorite subject.  It reminded him of his dad.

      Suddenly, the loud speakers crackled into life.  It wasn't the announcer welcoming people to the park.  It wasn't the local PTA head asking for Campbell's Soup label donations.  It was blaring out a stirring rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra."  He couldn't get away from it.

      He had to get out of there.  But where could he go?  Nowhere.  This was the safest place for him to be.  In a crowd.

      And so he sat and watched the game, having only the occasional hysterical fit when a ball was hit in his general direction.

      Finally, the home team lost.  The pitcher had thrown a no-hitter, but they had lost it on errors.

11:57 p.m.

      Three more minutes and he would be safe.  Could he make it? The drive home had been horrifying.  Halfway home he had realized he was driving the same type car, a burgundy Cadillac Seville, that Elvis had bought just before he died.  He almost ran off the road.

      A lot could happen in three minutes.  Just in the United States alone, nine people would be shot and killed with a handgun that someone else could have purchased on impulse, at most having to wait two days, and that in only twenty

-two states, Tennessee being one in which there was no waiting period.  Elvis had a gun.  He shot his TV out with it.

      The TV!  That was it.  He'd turn on the TV.  It would help him pass the time, and, perhaps, enable him to distract any major threats that might come his way.

      He switched it on and heard Sally Struthers, Archie Bunker's little goil, the voice of Baby Pebbles Flintstone, tell the story of poor Five Year Old Melanie, who lived in a grass hut in India, and had been five years old for at least the last six.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

      There was a knock at the door.  He froze.  This could be it.  Whoever was on the other side of that door was going to be the one to kill him.

      The knocking continued into David Bowie's video, "Fame," the 1990 re-mix from the hit movie Pretty Woman, which you could have gotten the cassette single for free with the purchase of Reeboks, for a limited time only.  The song featured John Lennon on guitar.  So.  It was coming back to Elvis and Lennon again.

      Or it might be David Bowie.

      The book had landed against his Ziggy Stardust poster.  Ginger had used the words "hunky dory," an odd thing for a twenty-five year old woman to say if she weren't referring to the David Bowie album of the same name.

      January 8.  It was David Bowie's birthday, too, not just Elvis's.  Of course.

      He ran to the door, flung it open, and there was Ginger.

      "I've finally figured it all out," he said, "the world doesn't revolve around Elvis. It doesn't revolve around John Lennon, and it doesn't revolve around me."

      "Oh Jesse," she flung her arms around him, "I'm so glad you've come to your senses.  You were really scaring me there for awhile."

      "It revolves around David Bowie."

      "Oh no. No. Say it's not true. You can't believe..."

      Denial, he thought.  He had felt the same way at first.  It was better to let her just come to accept it, not force her.  He had almost gone crazy fighting it, so he just said, "Of course, I'm kidding."

      They laughed, went in, sat on the couch.  As the night ran on and they got closer and closer, Jesse couldn't help but think how unfair it all was.

      David Bowie, the center of the universe, had to change his name from David Jones to David Bowie because some silly bubble-gum band called the Monkees already had a lead singer and tambourine player named Davy Jones.

      Ah Bowie!  Ah Humanity!