Me and A Guy Named Elvis by Jerry Schilling wrote: July 11, 1954 began as a hot, lazy Sunday, just another sticky summer day
in North Memphis. And I was a scrawny twelve-year-old kid, living at the little
brick duplex my father rented on Breedlove Street, looking for some way to fight
off the boredom of one more stretch of sweltering afternoon.
My father worked long shifts at the Firestone factory, and that Sunday, his
day off, he was sleeping in. My closest friend—the kid next door, Wayne Martin
—was off somewhere on an outing with his family. It looked like I was going to
be on my own for the day, so I decided to kill some time by wandering over to
Guthrie Park.
The park was maybe a half-mile from my daddy’s place, down Chelsea
Avenue, an open field of scraggly grass and dusty patches laid out in front of an
elementary school and a community center. Close to the street was a kiddie
wading pool, and a little farther back was a playground, some basketball hoops,
and a horseshoe pitch—where I’d learned to enjoy the satisfying clang of a shoe
hitting the iron post.
As I arrived at the park, the heat of the day was broken by just a hint of
breeze drifting over from the Mississippi River. There were a few moms watching
their splashing toddlers at the wading pool, and a bunch of older kids out on the
grass. I figured I’d walk around to the community center to see if anything half
interesting was going on inside. The sky was a hazy, summer gray, and I guess I
was lost in a bit of haze of my own. It took me a moment to realize that my name
was being called out from across the park.
“Jerry! Hey, Jerry. C’mere!”
It was one of the older kids out on the grass. I recognized him as a local boy
named Red West, one of the toughest guys I knew of in North Memphis. Red
had been a ferocious All-Memphis football player at Humes High School, and he
and his family lived over in a low-income housing project that had the very fitting
name Hurt Village. Just knowing a guy was from Hurt gave him a kind of
battlefield credibility around North Memphis. Kids in my neighborhood whispered
stories about the rough gangs that lurked around Hurt, and how you’d be lucky to
get out of there alive if you were ever foolish enough to walk through the
projects alone at night.
I wasn’t sure how Red knew my name, but I figured he might know my older
brother, Billy Ray, who’d been a pretty strong football player at the private high
school he’d attended across town. Maybe Red had heard that I was turning out
to be a decent wide receiver on the team from my Catholic grade school, Holy
Names. Football was the one thing I felt good at. My grades were lousy, I didn’t
have a lot of friends, but on the Holy Names football field I was having my first
taste of personal success. It didn’t really matter how Red knew me, though—I
wasn’t going to ignore the call. I started over to the group of older boys, trying to
throw just a touch of Brando from The Wild One into my walk.
“Hi, Red,” I said when I got to them, immediately hating the fact that my voice
sounded so little, so young. So not Brando.
I didn’t know the other guys, and I didn’t pay too much attention to them. I
assumed they were either from Hurt or Humes.
Red looked me over hard for a moment.
“Jerry, we’re a player short of a six-man game here. You want to play ball?”
Of all the things I thought Red might ask me, I hadn’t seen this one coming. A
chance to play football with Red West and some older kids? Of course I was in.
“Sure, Red. I’ll play.”
“All right, then,” he growled. “We got a game. Full blocking. Two-hand touch.
Let’s mark out a field.”
Red and a couple of the guys walked off to figure out the out-of-bounds and
goal lines. The other two players started warming up by throwing long passes to
each other. I kept my eyes on Red, who wasn’t a real big guy but a commanding
figure anyway. I had a feeling that with him, even a touch football game was
going to be played hard and rough.
With the field set, the guys regrouped.
“Our ball,” said Red. “We’ll take Jerry. The rest of y’all get back on some
defense.”
Three of the guys broke away and took positions down the field. I followed
Red and another boy and we leaned together in a tight huddle behind our starting
line of scrimmage. Red handed the ball to the other boy.
“What’s the play, man?” Red asked him.
I looked to this guy who Red had just made our quarterback—really looked at
him for the first time—and felt a jolt.
It was him.
There wasn’t any one thing about this other guy that hit you right away. He
was wearing plain work pants and a white T-shirt. He had blotches of acne on
his face and neck. He was kind of on the skinny side. He certainly didn’t look any
tougher than Red West.
But he had a cool I’d never seen before in person. His hair was greased and
swept up and back into some very impressive ducktails, the kind of look I wanted
as soon as I could get away from the disapproving nuns at Holy Names. You had
to put some work into hair like that, and you had to know that it marked you as a
probable juvenile delinquent in the eyes of grown-up North Memphis.
There was something about the way this guy stood and leaned into the
huddle—nonchalant, but no-nonsense. Something a little loose, but cocky, too. It
looked like he was pulling off the Brando thing without even trying.
It had to be him.
A couple of nights before I’d heard a brand-new song on the radio—so new
the record wasn’t even out yet—and had been amazed to learn that the singer
was a boy from Humes High in North Memphis. This had seemed astonishing to
me—how could a guy from my neighborhood have a song on the radio? And a
great song at that—a song that really stood out among all the hot R & B records
I’d heard on the show that night. For the last two days I’d been wondering—what
guy in North Memphis could make a record like that and get it on the radio? This
guy across from me in the huddle looked like he could.
“All right, now—what’s your name? Jerry?” asked the quarterback.
“Yeah.”
“You can catch a football?”
“Yeah.”
“You know how to run a slant?”
“Sure.”
He held his hand out, palm up, and sketched out a play. “You run down the
sidelines about ten yards—run it easy, not full speed. Red, you go up the middle
and buttonhook. Jerry, when you see Red make his turn, you hit the gas, man,
and run your slant. If you get past whoever’s covering you, the ball’s coming to
you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The quarterback’s serious expression shifted a bit. He looked at me dead-on.
He had ice-blue eyes, and when he looked straight at you, you felt it. A little twist
of half-smile showed up on his face.
“‘Sir?’ Hey, Red, I like this kid’s attitude,” said the quarterback.
“He’s all right,” said Red, giving me a clap on the back that just about
knocked the breath out of me.
Red didn’t introduce us. I didn’t hear his name spoken by any of the other
guys. But I didn’t have to hear it. I knew who he was.
This was the boy from Humes High named Elvis Presley.