The Gospel of Elvis

THE GOSPEL OF ELVIS

by Chasing Jokers Wild

In a hut in garrison in Vietnam on a hot summer day in 1969 there were four soldiers playing spades around an empty spool of wire serving as a table. The soldiers were sharing some good Thai weed, except Elvis. Elvis was a first lieutenant three weeks out of being butter bar, meaning he was a lieutenant who had left behind his college days about a year ago. At this time in his life, he didn’t go by Elvis. He was an officer. Elvis is who he became later, but it would be the name he would go by for most of his life as unaware of this as he was at the time. His name was LT Wells. He was from Kentuky and didn’t drink either, despite the state being one over from the birthplace of Jack Daniels. A lone Vietnamese girl stood at the entrance to the hut. She appeared to be 15 and skinny, which was not an uncommon state for the locals to be in garrison. Smoke whaffed out of the hut by her into the pouring rain outside. Elvis beckoned the girl inside.

“Are you hungry?” Elvis offered the girl a couple of bananas. He had a soft spot for children and teenage girls. She took them and on the way out threw in a grenade. The Rock of the platoon jumped on it. By this, I don’t mean that he deliberately absorbed the blast with his body. She just cooked it more than he realized. He treated it like a baseball, rolling on his back to make a quick launch. It was almost elegant. He got his nickname for both joining voluntarily and being religious, and not for falling out of step while marching. It had been a long time since he had needed to march; at least two years since basic. He’d been an atheist for 5 months now. He was a former band member and was actually decent at keeping in step. It was just exactly two and 4 months since he last blew his trombone as a matter of fact, not that he was aware or that it mattered. Nothing mattered, especially now. Life didn’t make sense to him anymore, but it used to… It stopped making sense 5 months ago. Then he died. His FUBAR’ed body was still there but he wasn’t. He never would rekindle his faith.

On the bright side, Elvis thought much later, the only injury he knew of as a result of The Rock’s sacrifice was a piece of shrapnel flying by and cutting Elvis’s lip. He would come to consider it as a miracle. Elvis was in shock. He couldn’t believe The Rock took the blow for him. Elvis never knew that The Rock wasn’t fully intending to take the blow so much as roll and toss it like when he played shortstop, but he was too dead to explain that. It’s not like that never happened anyway. Those were the ones who should never have been there. The Universe left it a mystery as to whether The Rock would have done it deliberately. It’s been done before. Chicka-boom. It blew. He died. He was gone. Elvis was all shookup for a minute. The concussion damaged his brain, but he was unaware of this. Elvis found Jesus a short while later. He just sacrificed himself for Elvis’s sin of feeding the girl. Sgt Yank caught the girl outside. He didn’t kill her. Elvis did.

Well he killed her, but first she was raped by a few soldiers. “It didn’t matter. Jesus, Nothing mattered.” This was his prayer; his mantra of nihilism. It helped like sweet denial did for the Jesus freaks. They repeatedly raped her; pulled a long train. They killed her after a bit, but shit was crazy and war is anarchy. Nothing matters in this state. Nobody prepared them for his reality, so sometimes it helped to numb the memory. Heroin was heroic. They could have had a tea party, but she tossed in death for their fruit. The platoon went out and slaughtered a nearby village. Men, women, children. All Gooks. It didn’t matter at the time. They left behind one survivor. A child of 10. It wasn’t a girl. They killed all of those. The boy killed himself a few years later. One less gook to fight later, as far as Elvis would have been concerned, but nobody from the military really followed the child’s fate. They eventually withdrew after dropping a huge bomb.

Years later Elvis would be a free man Stateside again. Elvis received three bullet wounds first. Each time, they patched him up and sent him back in to die. When he got out, he did a lot of drugs, but drank far more. The brain damage resulting from the combination of hidden TBI and alcohol would eventually produce his personality of Elvis. This is how he spent much of his life.

Sometimes he was lucid, but not Lieutenant Wells, just Tommy. Most of the time he was Elvis. He found God in Elvis. Music heals the soul and Elvis was King. Jesus though was The Rock. Elvis had made some hard calls. He came of age to death. People loved Elvis. He wanted to be loved, but he killed too many people for him to stomach. He rarely slept. He was afraid God would take him in his sleep when he couldn’t fight it. Sometimes he just wanted to be a woman. To create life was admirable. All he thought he did was take it. He was delusional about this, but he was delusional about a lot of things.

The nurses at the VA loved Elvis, especially Angela. He called her Crystal. She knew a few phrases in Japanese. Gooks were people too. They were different, but just as much human. Life’s disillusionment in this area was brutal. They were kids too. Why? He didn’t talk about that war though. He watched movies about pretty gothic Gen-Xers that were still youthful on his 4:3 TV.

Decades later, during his routine rotation into a psychiatric stay at the Veterans Administration, he would meet Jesus again. He looked just like the Rock. He had risen. Elvis had been staying up for days preparing to have his child. I bet you didn’t know Elvis could bare children, but Elvis was confident that when he spilled his cup of water while watching Beetlejuice that his water had broken. He walked to the toilet writhing in perceived labor pain and took a big shit. It was a huge relief, but he lost the child in his mind. That’s when he noticed the Rock. He said he wrote an academic paper saying it was wrong to torture people to death. That sounded like something Jesus would do. He had an aurora around him. It was obvious who he was; Jesus was reborn as the Rock in Vietnam and now reborn again in the hospital. That explained his entire opposition to torturing people to death. Jesus was especially adamant that it wrong to torture the child of a terrorist to obtain information he otherwise would not give. Elvis had to admit it was effective, but Jesus was right. It went too far. He knew all of Elvis’s sins. Elvis was positive of this. The nurses wouldn’t know the man was Jesus. He kept trying to tell them. “Don’t you see it? He is here with you! It’s in his aura!” Elvis wept and led Jesus to the ward’s reading room. Elvis told him his story. They talked for hours. Jesus forgave him and they cried together. Elvis slept for the first time in three days that night. When he was done he was Tommy again. Jesus was just an intellectual, not Jesus. He couldn’t remember his name; just some crazy guy stuck in the VA who pissed off some people and now couldn’t get out. The crazy intellectual mostly just missed his child, and felt bad about the children he helped bomb. Elvis was discharged three days later. It wasn’t long before he relapsed. It was Jack Daniels. Jack knew him better than Jesus anyway. Still, Jesus was a reoccurring actor in his life. Jack was just there more.