Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself. Lewis Grizzard
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NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2011 by Dedra Grizzard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-271-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-083-7
LCCN: 2011016138
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
Other books by Lewis Grizzard:
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You (1979)
Glory! Glory! Georgia's 1980 Championship Season (1981)
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat (1982)
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About A Quart Low (1983)
Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else But Me (1984)
Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (1985)
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (1986)
Shoot Low Boys - They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1986)
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? (1987)
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny - You Know Them Taters Got Eyes (1988)
Lewis Grizzard’s Advice to the Newly Wed (1989)
Lewis Grizzard on Fear of Flying (1989)
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground (1990)
Does a Wild Bear Chip in the Woods? (1990)
Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night (1990)
Don’t Forget to Call Your Momma; I Wish I Could Call Mine (1991)
You Can’t Put No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll (1991)
I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 and Other Nekkid Truths (1992)
I Took a Lickin’and Kept on Tickin’ and Now I Believe in Miracles (1993)
The Last Bus to Albuquerque (posthumous) (1994)
It Wasn’t Always Easy but I Sure Had Fun (posthumous) (1994)
Grizzardisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Lewis Grizzard (1995)
Southern by the Grace of God - Lewis Grizzard on the South (1996)
Dedication
To Danny Thompson, Bobby Entrekin, Mike Murphy, Dudley Stamps, Charles Moore, Clyde Elrod, Worm Elrod, and Anthony Yeager — the boys from Moreland, who I hope and pray didn’t grow up to be as confused as I am.
And to the memory of Eddie Estes, a great centerfielder.
Contents
1 - A Last Toast to the King
2 - When Life was Black and White
3 - Guilt Trip in a Cadillac
4 - Camelot in Bloody Ruin
5 - Where Rock ’n’ Roll Went Wrong
6 - They Call It Blue-Eyed Soul
7 - Hairy Ode to the Goat Man
8 - The Great Double-Knit Dilemma
9 - One Table Daintz to Go
10 - Eddie Haskell is Still a Jerk
11 - Who Does My Butt Belong to Now?
12 - Women Don’t Wear Jocks
13 - Romancing the Turnip Green
14 - Somebody Pull the Plug on Modernity
15 - You Can’t Trust a Psychiatrist with Cats
16 - Maybe Someday, Rainbow Stew
Credits
About the Author
WE WERE SITTING on the beach in Hilton Head, South Carolina, me and Price and Franklin. We were mired in those squatty folding chairs, the kind the old people take down to the surf and sit in while the salt water splashes over them. We were drinking cold beer and acting our age.
You can always tell the approximate age of people by watching what they do when they go to the beach. Babies, of course, dabble in the sand and splash around in the shallow water.
When a kid is about ten or twelve, he goes out farther and rides the waves and balks at his mother’s motions that it’s time to leave.
“Come on, Timmy. It’s time to go back to the motel.”
“Can’t we stay just a little bit longer?”
“No. Your daddy is ready to leave.”
“But I want to swim some more.”
“I said come here, young man.”
“Let me ride just one more wave. Please?”
“Don’t make me call your daddy.”
“I’ll ride just one more and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Okay, but just one more.”
Parents never win at the beach, at least in these permissive times they don’t. A kid can always just-one-more his parents into another thirty minutes of wave riding.
When children become teen-agers, the girls stop going into the water because they’re afraid they will get their hair wet. What they do instead is put on tiny little swimsuits and lie on towels getting tanned. Teen-aged boys throw frisbees.
There should be a law against throwing frisbees on beaches. In the first place, throwing a frisbee is a mindless exercise that can’t be any fun whatsoever. After you’ve seen one frisbee float through the air, you’ve seen them all. They might as well try catching horseflies.
Also, on crowded beaches there isn’t room for teen-aged boys to throw frisbees. Frisbees are difficult to control and difficult to catch, so they’re always landing on people who are trying to relax in the sun. Sometimes, frisbees even knock over somebody’s beer.
A kid knocked over my beer with a frisbee at the beach once. I threatened him with a lawsuit and then put this curse on him: “May your voice never change and your zits win prizes at county fairs.” I hate it when somebody knocks over my beer at the beach.
When kids are college age, the girls still lie on towels getting tanned and worrying about getting their hair wet. The boys, meanwhile, have given up throwing frisbees and have joined the girls, lying next to them on their own towels.
They play loud rock music, and when the girls ask them to rub suntan oil on their backs, they enthusiastically oblige ... especially if the girl has unsnapped the back of her tiny top and the boy knows that her breasts are unleashed, for all practical purposes. The beach habits of people this age are basically preliminary sexual exercises, but rarely do they lead to anything more advanced later in the day. As numerous studies have shown, it is quite uncomfortable to attempt to have sex after an afternoon of lying in the sun because of the unpleasant feeling that individuals