CNL: Stories
reprinted from the Compost NewsLetter
Spring 1994:
Elvis Sings the Blues
by Rand Warzeka
First Sergeant Carlos Garcia was one tough Marine. The bulk of his muscular body was shaped like an upside-down pyramid with a perfectly round cantaloupe sitting directly on top. He wore no ears and a nose so small he needed a rigged-up rubber band around his shaved head to hold a pair of aviator glasses across his deep set Neanderthal eyes. The most prominent feature on his tanned, pitted face was his protruding chin. It stuck out several inches from his small mouth and moved slowly from side to side while chewing gum.
Enlisting himself into the Corps at 17, he had served as rifleman and sniper at the height of the Vietnam War. It was while mortar fire hit his squad that Sergeant Garcia was shot in the head. Today, he still carries a .32-caliber bullet embedded in the portion of his left brain controlling speech and lip movements, causing a persistent lisp with words beginning with "S".
His most serious wound happened three years after the war during a parachute exercise over Camp Pendleton, California. As jumpmaster, he was the last to leave the C-130 aircraft at a height of 1600 feet. His chute opened late, leaving the sergeant dangling in a tangle of high tension wires less than forty feet above ground. A strong wind whipped him back and forth until the heel of his highly polished left boot touched a live wire several yards away.
"I felt the shock of a hundred goddamn devils," he told the base newspaper. "Everything turned bright flaming orange and thunderbolts seemed to drive right through me," he recalled in the base hospital. It took his left leg clean off below the knee.
The Marine Corps was proud he didn't try and wriggle out of his enlistment by making his disability look as bad as possible, as others might have been tempted to do. So proud that they promoted First Sergeant Carlos Garcia, son of two seasonal Napa Valley grape pickers, to Marine Recruiter Garcia. With his family and heart stateside, the Corps placed him in one of Honolulu's concrete strip malls on Kapiolani Boulevard. There he attempted to meet his monthly quota of marine skinheads.
His recruitment office was a cold steel-hard place with three solid cinderblock walls connected by a large front picture window with a bright red flashing neon sign that said: WE'RE LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD MEN. One recruiting poster of a helmeted marine was placed exactly in the center of each wall. There was not a speck of dust on any of the three pieces of furniture within that room, the desk and two marine-issue olive drab swivel chairs. It was there Sergeant Garcia first met Elvis Presley.
"You're Elvith Prethley, that right?" Sergeant Garcia growled in a deep base falsetto sounding more of a command than a question.
"Yes, sir!".the man who said he was Elvis yelled back, shooting straight up from his swivel chair and saluting even though he didn't have to.
"There's no need for any of that. Pleath thit down."
Elvis did.
"Now then, you want to be enlithed as thoon as pothible." lisped the sergeant.
"Uh, yes, sir. Thankyou ... Thankyouverymuch."
Sergeant Garcia barely kept a straight face while the man claiming to be Elvis duck-walked over to the water cooler and drew a paper cup full of tepid spring water.
The man stood nearly six foot tall next to the cooler and wore large plastic-framed sunglasses and an untidy ducktail curling around his eyes and hanging down over his forehead. He wore a silver-studded black leather motorcycle jacket over a pink sequined silk shirt. Below his wide silver buckled belt were fringed bell bottom trousers. On his feet, white patent leather platform boots with three inch Cuban heels.
"You're too old to be a Marine recruit, Mr. Prethley." Sergeant Garcia tapped his olive drab marine-issue pencil rapidly on his desk and chewed his Juicy Fruit gum frantically with his protruding marine-issue jaw until it snapped and popped on every other chew. He tried remembering Elvis as he had seen him on his mother's old LP record albums. Elvis was thinner then, and certainly had narrower hips. Now, his body seemed to be one rectangular block of vertical flab.
"It's the other way around, Sarge. I, uh, I'm here to recruit you."
"For what?" the sergeant sputtered.
"For peace." And with that, the paunchy piglet-faced man jumped up on Sergeant Garcia's desk and marched in place where there were no stacked manila folders. He sang, "I've got those hup, two, three, four, occupation G.I. Blues," in time with his air guitaring.
Suddenly, Sergeant Garcia stood up, his face purple with rage and understandable befuddlement. "Get your lard-ath carcath offa my dethk, jughead!" the sergeant lisped.
Elvis kept singing, and marching in place, air guitaring and smiling as he did it.
Seeing that words were not going to make the man stop, Sergeant Garcia lifted up the bottom of his uniform trouser and removed his wooden left leg. Whirling it wildly overhead he screamed the additional lyrics to G.l. Blues: "From my G. 1. hair to my G. 1. shoeth!" before whacking the man who claimed to be Elvis squarely on the side of his ducktailed head.
It took several of Honolulu's "finest" to drag Sergeant Garcia from his cinder blocked recruiter's office that hot July day with his broken wooden leg clutched tightly in both hands and screaming the remaining stanza of G l. Blues from the top of his well disciplined marine lungs. "And if I don't go thtatethide thoon, I'm gonna blow my futhe!" He didn't of course; after a few weeks stateside with his family the sergeant returned to Kapiolani Boulevard and continued turning out marine skinheads.
As for Elvis, he did join the military after all, and is sighted every Christmas duck-walking and clinking his Salvation Army-issue bell outside Ala Moana Shopping Center. And while the coins are tossed into his kettle he yells out, "Uh, thankyou ... thankyouverymuch", smiling as he does it.