Elvis and The White Diner

They said he was nothing but a hound dog. The New York Herald Tribune called him "an unspeakably untalented and vulgar entertainer." Ed Sullivan denounced him "unfit for family audience." What they said about the dramatic, tormented creature made little difference for the young man from Memphis had everything a 15 year old girl could ever hope to find in a boy: a slicked-back-big-city pompadour, dark smoldering eyes, slim swiveling hips, and a voice that set my heart and feet dancing. For all the obvious reasons, I fell in love with Elvis Presley. Our relationship began in 1956 and continues today...for I have never fallen out of love with The King.

I lived in Oelwein, Iowa in September of 1956 and so did The King. My family lived in a brown house on the wrong side of the tracks and Elvis lived in the Wurlitzer Jukebox at The White Diner on Frederick Avenue. The diner was an ancient, white stucco one-story that sat diagonally on a small corner lot downtown. Everyone said the unusual positioning of the building gave it an old fashioned, art-deco sort of look. What it looked like to me was a small white diner. The owner of this charming establishment was a gentleman who was never seen without his "Lube ‘Til You Die" petroleum baseball cap, and the cartoons taped to the wall beneath the Coke signs were definitely not Hallmark card material. The White Diner was an educational facility in itself.

The booths inside were covered in tangerine vinyl that had weathered years of wear and cigarette burns very nicely. Stretched across the back of the room was an aqua-blue lunch counter complimented by swivel bar stools with stuffing that poked out in wispy, bearded tufts. A shiny new jukebox was stashed in a corner near the soda fountain like an afterthought. The jukebox appeared to be the only new addition to the diner since 1928, the year that "Lube ‘Til You Die" bought the building and turned it into a diner. The color combination and the condition of The White Diner left something to be desired, particularly if one was into fine dining or interior decorating, which I wasn’t. I was into Wurlitzer Jukeboxes, the home of Elvis Presley.

It was hot that summer of ‘56. One day after another of dripping humidity and blazing heat, but it wasn’t hot inside the diner. The Methodist Church sat proudly on the corner across the street and cast a heavenly shadow over the little restaurant. The cool, dark interior provided blessed relief for patrons who lingered over cherry cokes and iced teas as they sought relief from the unforgiving September temperatures. In the hot, blank darkness of evening, the crumbling stucco and the cracked tiled roof of the building blended into the night leaving only the lights drifting pleasantly across the parking lot and into the street. Darkness gracefully excused the price time and weather had extracted.

The close proximity of the church to the diner seemed almost biblical. Only divine intervention from Jesus could have produced someone as beautiful and talented as Elvis Presley and then stuck him in a jukebox within 65 feet of my mid-week activities. I mean, just how lucky could a girl get? With all that luck waiting to be used, I meekly requested permission to visit the girls’ bathroom during choir practice on Wednesday nights. I then raced down two sets of stairs, through the double doors of the church and across the street, dodging oncoming traffic to save precious seconds.

The brilliantly devised plan left me with 28 minutes to wrap myself in a dream, and it was the dream of every teenage girl in 1956. The dream was impossible, of course, yet anything is possible in the mind of a young girl who has fallen recklessly in love. And so it was that I carefully saved my weekly allowance to feed the jukebox at The White Diner. The depressing interior miraculously changed face as the Wurlitzer Jukebox filled the room with luscious Juicy Fruit colors that splashed across the ceiling and the walls. The recordings of my beloved lifted and played and magically dropped back into place before the next selection of heavenly rock n’roll filled the room.

My sensitive bladder condition stubbornly persisted until I fell in love with the minister’s son, a dark-haired boy with a father who clearly had no appreciation for Wednesday night escapes or Elvis Presley. It was impossible for the minister to imagine that things could go much further before civilization itself broke down. One mistake led to another and eventually I cast Elvis aside in favor of handholding in the back row of the chorus line. It was a boring romance. The King and I reunited six weeks later at The White Diner. We never parted again.

The years passed for both of us. The rigors of growing up didn’t last but my affection for The King did. Elvis wrote the book on rock n’ roll, became a soldier and then a movie star. I became a carefree young woman who loved men, fast cars, good books, and expensive clothes. Elvis met Pricilla. I met Ted. We both married when hippies were smoking dope and preparing for the social revolution of the century. Getting married seemed like the proper way to conduct a relationship that had reached stranglehold proportions. Apparently Elvis thought so, too. The 60s were good years for both of us...and then they were gone...leaving us with a nice little war that became a permanent human nightmare.

Suddenly it was the 70s. Elvis had grown older and so had I. He filed for a divorce while I only thought about it. Time hadn’t diminished his ability to sing nor mine to listen. It seemed that life had taken on a steady and predictable course for both of us, but things aren’t always what they seem. In the space of a single heartbeat there was silence for Elvis, at 42, had found a new place to dwell...and it wasn’t down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis stepped on a rainbow and went to live with Jesus. His untimely demise left fans everywhere feeling like life was a pie and a huge, delicious slice had been snatched away by some uncompassionate god. The King said he was so lonesome he could die, yet even now that doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse.

I no longer live in Oelwein and Elvis doesn’t live in the Wurlitzer Jukebox. The Methodist Church no longer shades The White Diner for that, too, is gone. Nothing is left forty years later but the music and the memory of a boy who sang to a girl in a tiny restaurant long ago. Sometimes in September, when the earth is hot and sweet like a man’s love, the wind blows the years away and I remember that time and the feelings of the teenage girl. There is a sense of sorrow that comes with the memory and it settles over me like a great fatigue. Perhaps I yearn for all that is lost, for the years and for the people, and for the simplicity of life. Yet time hasn’t erased everything, for that girl is still in love with Elvis Presley.