I, Jessie Garon Presley
The unlived life of ELVIS’ big brother
After having written it all so well and so wisely in my novel AROUND ELVIS, I knew that to write another novel about ELVIS would be beating the same dead horse all over again, as too many others have done all too often . . . But technically I have held fast to my edict and with but a 2 bar change I have stumbled onto the alternate ode of ELVIS; the tome that never was, because this treatise begins with the death of ELVIS and takes the reader on a journey through ELVIS’ life without him; purporting what the world would’ve been like if he was the twin that anonymously died at birth so tragically and so long ago . . .
So as a special bonus, I unveil a brief glimpse of the horizon in my literary world and entreat you to take a quantum leap into a parallel ELVIS universe. While this is a flight of fantasy, it is not metaphysical and unfolds in the known reality of the times and places where ELVIS traveled through in his lifetime. It does not suppose that the known facts are distorted and does not offer to rewrite the factual chapters in ELVIS history.
This is the ELVIS story 69 years in the making that the world awaits . . .
This is the story of the boy who would not be king; the tale of a turbulent frustrated young man at odds with his sense of self and haunted by the specter of his dead twin brother, who grew up alongside of him as the perfect child that he could never be. His high-strung, domineering momma’s grief over the loss of her stillborn infant drove her to drink and estranged her from her living son all the days of her life. He grew up impoverished and remained working class poor, enduring a lifetime of ridicule and condescension for his own short-comings and his daddy’s failings, which made him bitter and combative. He was a dabbler and a dreamer—like his daddy—and never did enough of anything in particular to become successful at it; he was content to merely spend his life waiting on the docks for a ship that never came in. He fortified his anguish with liquor, and the surge of alcohol that elevated his stature in his mind also destroyed the few breaks he got along the way, leaving him disillusioned. After the 50-year reunion of his high school class, he is gripped by his utter obscurity and, out of desperation, the inarticulate laborer grabs his pen and paper to write about his unremarkable journey through his life and times to send up a flare that he hopes will be seen by someone who will rescue him from total anonymity and allow him to ascend to the exalted place that he had carved out for himself as a child watching movies and reading comic books . . . dreaming that he was the hero.
FOREWORD FROM THE AUTHOR
In order to write this novel, I had to invoke poetic license and take liberties with known facts, actual history and my own feelings. In order to stay true to the literary path I chose for these real and fictional characters, I found myself going against the grain of my heart; particularly concerning Gladys Presley. For instance, Gladys would always invoke Jesse’s name to Elvis as the perfect child when he did wrong, but it drew them closer to each other and to Jesse, and made Elvis try that much harder to do good. This novel chronicles the reverse effect of what that can do to the fragile psyche of a child who wants unconditional approval from a parent.
The one descriptive detail of Jesse that survives is that he was dark-haired, so I used this tidbit to form the supposition that Jesse and Elvis were fraternal twins and polar opposites, as much as twins can be. Often twins who are separated at birth lead similar lives; they gravitate to the same kind of people, are drawn to the same walk of life, suffer from parallel maladies, and are likeminded even if they have different attitudes, so this flight of fancy may be more grounded than we realize. In each given situation that arose, I studied how Elvis reacted and shaded that with a different take and another point of view—Jesse’s. Elvis was a momma’s boy that favored Gladys in attitude and features, so Jesse becomes a daddy’s boy cut from Vernon’s cloth and, rather than clinging to his momma during the hard times, as Elvis did, Jesse sides with his daddy and takes up for him against his momma and the town that ridiculed him.
The status and history of the Presley family is unchanged in this fictional account of the twin that never lived; daddy still goes to prison, they still are run out of Tupelo and land in Memphis, and live in the projects, where Jesse attends Humes High School and meets the people of Elvis’ life; after graduating he gets a job driving for Crown Electric. As a child, Jesse is taught to play guitar by Uncle Frank Smith and wins 2nd Prize singing and picking at the Mississippi/Alabama Fair & Dairy Show. Later, he even makes a record at the Memphis Recording Service. He gets up now and then over at Hernando’s Hideaway, but it never amounts to more than a hobby in spite of his lofty notions—maybe if he had gone into the Tupelo Hardware Store and bought his own guitar at the age of ten like Elvis had, rather than getting a rifle, it could’ve been different for Jesse. There are many other familiar roads that Jesse takes along the Elvis path that lead him nowhere; he even gets caught in the draft and sent to Germany, but the press does not follow him and there are no throngs of fans to see him off and greet him and no 14 year old beauty queen to fall in love with him—though he does try to win her heart with dogged pursuit. While in basic training at Fort Hood, his momma dies leaving him with mixed emotions and unresolved anger that would gnaw at him more intensely as the years go by.
I chose to write this novel from Jesse’s first person perspective, so we can get inside of his head and maybe understand what Elvis thought of and heard when communing with his dead twin brother; again I will be reaching, but hopefully finding. In telling Jesse’s story, I have illustrated from the inside just what Elvis was up against just to get himself through the day; it is remarkable that he was able to hold onto his dreams in the face of his reality and see beyond where he was in order to have a clear focus of where he wanted to be. This aspect of Elvis’ character was quite extraordinary. However, Jesse is not extraordinary; he’s just a regular guy. But so was Elvis, and he managed to come through with grit, using the sleights and torment as fuel to propel himself and his family out of generations of socio-economic shackles. What this story underscores is that we never know what is significant until we look back upon it; Jesse’s perception of the same events and setbacks Elvis endured is what shapes him and determines his fate.
This novel also peripherally touches on a world where there was no Elvis Presley, and I have put together what I believe is a realistic scenario of what Pop culture and Rock & Roll became without his trailblazing influence in the mid-1950s—there wasn’t any . .
If in the telling of this story the beloved Gladys Presley is painted in a bad light from Jesse’s description of her and his feelings about her, note that it is the same treatment that she gave Elvis; Jesse just doesn’t take to it and by turning away from her and having hard feelings toward her what becomes quite apparent is that if Elvis didn’t have Gladys in his corner, he’d have never gotten anywhere . . . but the only reason that she was in Elvis’ corner is that he put her there. He could just as easily have let his momma’s ways get to him and turned his back on her—like Jesse does. For the sake of the plot twist I have dramatized this aspect of their tension, but it is not blown out of proportion, considering the dramatic nature of the people involved.
Writing in the voice and from the head of Jesse Garon Presley was the most difficult feature of this novel, because he had lived and died in a day without uttering a sound. I went in with a preconceived idea of who he might have been had he responded in the way I chose for his character to react. I have no evidence that he would’ve had the attitude or outlook ascribed to him here, which at times is loutish and self-pitying. I took this path based on Elvis, who was known at times to swagger and show off and also had dark days where he thought the world was out to get him and keep him down. Elvis had the dynamic needed to overcome these trials and tribulations in order to triumph and Jesse does not . . . as far as this story goes. In bringing Jesse alive through my study of what his life would’ve been and how it was for his brother, I am able to channel him a bit and at times I had a strong sense of him while writing this novel. I’d like to believe that in some way I have spoken for him with his words and attitudes so that he can at last be heard, but in the end I’d admonish you to take it all with a grain of salt and view it as a piece of fantasy literature grounded in logical conclusions, common sense deductions and educated speculation.
There is no metaphysical aspect to this novel and it in no way lends itself to the deranged assertion that has surfaced over the years that the Presleys sold baby Jesse at birth and he is still among us; to even repeat such a scandal is an outrage and a disgrace that I would never be party to. This is more or less Elvis’ life as lived by Jesse and told by an author who was fascinated by the possibilities and the alternative realties that this story held. I in fact hope that is worthy of the person it chronicles and I would like to dedicate this to his memory. Perhaps in this small way, Jesse Garon Presley can live . . . at least as a fictional literary character.
From A Jack To A King