One More Thing Page 13

  But Elvis wasn’t going to give up something as big as being Elvis without a fight.

  If Elvis wanted to feel like Elvis again, thought Elvis, he was going to act like Elvis.

  Elvis came up with a plan.

  He would set out on a live tour across America—the grandest of his age. He would wear a suit of sparkling jewels—something that only a king of rock and roll could wear. He would sing each and every one of Elvis’s hits, one after another, while standing in front of a giant flashing sign that said ELVIS—just so there would be no mistaking, for him or anyone else, who he was.

  He did it. And each night he felt like Elvis again, for a couple of hours.

  But then the day after each show, he would feel worse than before. In the tender light of early afternoon he would realize all over again that the person onstage the night before was still not quite Elvis; except now, he would realize in a panic, the situation was far worse: now that all these thousands of people had seen this not-quite Elvis and had been told in no uncertain terms that this was Elvis, that meant this new, almost-Elvis was replacing and erasing—show by show, ten thousand by ten thousand—the Elvis that he did know, for sure, had once been real, and true, and not this.

  He wanted to die. No, that wasn’t it: he wanted to breathe and eat and remember, to laugh at funny movies and practice his karate. But the more he kept living his life trying to be this other person, the more he knew he was harming that person; and he loved that other person more than he loved himself; and he knew that wasn’t crazy, because everyone else did, too.

  He told the Colonel that it was time for Elvis to die. He wasn’t as articulate as he should have been, given the sensitive nature of the request, but luckily, the Colonel understood. The Colonel always did. “I’ll take care of it,” said Colonel Tom Parker, and on August 16, 1977, the body of Elvis Presley was found dead in Graceland.

  Elvis woke up in Las Vegas. For a while he couldn’t tell if he was in heaven or hell, but when he realized he was in Las Vegas, he knew he’d be okay.

  Now that the king was dead, the man could do as he wished.

  Elvis wondered what a regular person who wasn’t Elvis would do now, and he reasoned that person would get a job. He looked around for something that paid well enough for work he would be able to do.

  Before long, he found such a job, and became an Elvis impersonator.

  Once again, he was the best in the world at something he loved.

  “You’re incredible!” people would tell him after his shows. “Incredible!”

  “Thank you, thank you very much.”

  Afterward, when he walked down the street, people would wave at him: happily, affectionately. And, most exciting of all: casually.

  “Hey, it’s Elvis!”

  He would wave back, the same way, and they’d both smile and forget about the moment a moment later.

  He was finally who he had long wanted to be: a person for whom Elvis Presley was a major part of his life, but not everything.

  And then there was the undeniable and all-American pleasure of being well paid for a job he found easy.

  It wasn’t the best time of his life; he had, after all, once been Elvis—Elvis!—but it wasn’t the worst time of his life anymore, either.

  It was a time of his life.

  Elvis died the second time in 1994, this time of a heart attack in the early morning hours at the breakfast counter of a diner on South Las Vegas Boulevard. A waitress found him over a grilled-cheese sandwich with an untouched half a grapefruit to its side. The only identification he had on him said Elvis Aaron Presley with the birth date 1/8/35 and the address of Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.

  This was something that happened from time to time in Las Vegas.

  The second time, Elvis died happy.

  And that was the moment—almost to the hour—that the tabloids stopped making up stories that Elvis had been seen here or there, and started making up things about people everyone already knew were alive, a tradition that continues to this day.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence.

  Or maybe when something that big is out there, a presence that size, it just doesn’t go undetected. It has to be sensed, and said, by someone, in some way.

  If I Had a Nickel

  If I had a nickel for every time I spilled a cup of coffee, I’d be rich!

  Here’s how I’d do it.

  1. SETUP AND EXPENSES

  First: the coffee. At Costco you can get a 12-pack of 34-ounce cans of Folgers coffee for $65.99. Each of those makes 270 cups, which comes out to 2.04 cents a cup. An industrial-strength filter-free coffee brewer capable of brewing 40 cups at a time costs $119.99 at Costco. Five of these will be a one-time expense of $599.95. Costco also sells a 1,000-count box of 12-ounce paper cups for $116, which comes out to 11.6 cents a cup and to 1.16 cents per use of cup (based on a conservative estimate of ten spills per cup). I do not have a Costco card, but I can borrow one from a friend.

  In terms of a workspace, a 1500 square foot space downtown with easy-to-wipe floors rents for $750 per month. While this is technically the kind of work one could do at home, I believe in keeping work and home life separate when possible for psychological reasons, especially in an enterprise such as this one, which I can easily envision driving a person insane. Mental health is an issue I take very seriously.

  The single biggest one-time expense that I anticipate would be the construction and installation of a waist-high circuitous conveyor belt that would deliver cups of coffee from one side of the room to the other at a speed of four miles per hour, allowing proper time for me to retrieve and spill coffee cups on one end of the room while an assistant restocks and refills the coffee cups at the other end of the conveyor belt. I would estimate $14,400 for construction and installation (this is a ballpark estimate because none of the custom-conveyor companies I consulted understood the nature of the request) which can be amortized over the length of the enterprise.

  2. STAFF

  I would require one full-time assistant dedicated to preparing the next batch of coffee while I am busy spilling the current one and one additional full-time assistant simultaneously dedicated to cleaning the debris of the previous group of spills while I am on to the next. This system of cleanliness and order will help provide a situation of maximum safety, sanitation, and efficiency, as well as maintaining the all-important positive psychological environment. (Once again, mental health is an issue of paramount importance to me.)

  Alternatively, I could conceivably enlist two unpaid interns who would receive college credit instead of monetary payment, but then I’d have to spend time writing their evaluations: time I could have spent spilling coffee.

  I am presuming minimum wage (and would in fact become very angry if one of these employees asked for more than minimum wage for this job, likely out of proportion, especially given the stressful work enviroment I anticipate for this enterprise). Staffing would come to a total of $116 per day.

  3. MISCELLANEOUS & UNANTICIPATED COSTS

  Rubber pants and other similar miscellaneous expenses too numerous and minor to list in full detail here should add up to no more than $1000 per year.

  Cleaning materials when purchased in bulk from Costco should average no more than $50 per day.

  Theft of company materials is likely to run as high as $1000 per year. (While I believe in paying minimum wage, I don’t expect my workers to like me for it.)

  Psychological counseling to handle the effects of devoting my life’s work to this crushingly bizarre and isolating activity of no relevant value or connection to the wider world should run me approximately $750 per week.

  4. NET INCOME

  Finally, the fun part: time to knock these babies down and watch the nickels come pouring in!

  Assuming that at full operational capacity with a functional 4-mph conveyor belt that averages one spill of coffee per two seconds over the course of an eight-hour workday, we’re looking at approximately 1800 spills
per hour and 14,400 spills per workday.

  At 5 cents per spilled cup of coffee, that comes to $720 per day, or $3600 per week, or $180,000 per year, allowing for two weeks of vacation per year, during which I envision myself going somewhere calm and cold.

  5. TOTAL PROFITS

  The total cost per spill associated with this process comes to 2.9 cents per cup, or $417.60 per day, or $104,400 per year. The remaining expenses total $52,232.00 annually.

  These figures combined, and then subtracted from the previously calculated $180,000 net income from spilling approximately 3,600,000 cups of coffee per year at a compensation of five cents per spill, leave me with a total profit of $23,368 per year, before taxes.

  6. CONCLUSION

  So, maybe I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d get by.

  A Good Problem to Have

  When we were in the fourth grade, an old man burst into our classroom one day waving his rumpled little plaid arms and screaming. It might have been adorable if we had been old enough to find older people adorable, and also if it hadn’t been a little bit scary.

  “Stop! Is he saying anything about trains?! About train times?! Stop!”

  Our teacher, Mr. Hunt, had a mustache and an inner calmness about him, and we never noticed that then he must have only been in his twenties. He put his arm lightly across the old man’s back and led him to a big wooden chair in the corner of our class, a chair that none of us ever actually sat in but that might look to a visitor like a seat of honor.

  “How can we help you?” asked Mr. Hunt.

  “Are you asking them questions about trains?” asked the old man.

  “No,” said Mr. Hunt. “We’re talking about geometry today. Can I help you with something? Would you like a glass of water?”

  Mr. Hunt had an accent that my parents identified as a working-class one from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Some of us thought it made him sound cool, and some of us thought it made him sound like an old lady. Either one may have been why the old man seemed to calm down a little bit whenever Mr. Hunt spoke.

  “Did he ever,” exhaled the old man, who now rotated toward the class from the chair as if he were an amateur actor with stage fright in a community musical who was nonetheless following through on the play’s plan to break the fourth wall, “ask you about trains? About trains leaving stations at different times?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Mr. Hunt.

  “What textbook did you use? Problems and Solutions Four?”

  “I got it from the internet.”

  A few of us gasped and then realized that Mr. Hunt didn’t seem embarrassed about this, and then realized that we, too, got a lot of good stuff from the internet. Why shouldn’t Mr. Hunt?

  “The internet!” wailed the old man, his head sinking into his little hand. “No no no no no.”

  We all just watched him breathe for a second, like we had with the turtle our class had adopted earlier that year.

  “Can I talk to you privately?” the man asked Mr. Hunt.

  “Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my students,” said Mr. Hunt. “Within the parameters of acceptable language.”

  “That’s my problem,” said the man.

  He stared at us all at once, somehow, with a look that said that we knew what he was talking about, but we didn’t.

  “A man leaves Chicago at twelve p.m. on a train heading for Cleveland at sixty miles per hour,” he said quickly. “Another man leaves Cleveland at one p.m. heading for Chicago on a train going eighty-five miles per hour. At what time will the two trains cross paths?”

  One kid, Arush, raised his hand. “Approximately—”

  “I know the goddamn answer!”

  “Language,” said Mr. Hunt.

  “And there’s no ‘approximately’ in math,” said the old man. “It’s math. The answers are exact.”

  “The answers are exact,” echoed Mr. Hunt, somewhat faintly. “Put your hand down, Arush.”

  “That’s my problem,” said the old man, sitting back down in the chair. “I wrote it. That was the one thing I did. The one thing. When you’re young, you think everything you do is just the beginning. But when you’re old, no matter who you are, you realize you only did one or two things.”

  We were silent. We had never heard anything like this before.

  Some of us wondered what the one or two things we would do would be.

  The old man smiled like it was over, but it wasn’t.

  “What I did not, could not, expect and should never have expected was that it would become the most famous math problem in the goddamn United States!”

  “Language.”

  “Pardon … Fine. What I did not expect was that every textbook in America would rip it off from the one I worked for and that I would end up taking home thirty-five dollars, yes, that’s right, kids, a whopping thirty-five dollars for what would become the most famous math problem in America. Does that sound fair to you? What does that work out to per year?”

  Arush raised his hand and Mr. Hunt signaled him to put it down.

  “Mister?”

  I spoke with what I believed was the right balance of politeness and confidence to get the old man’s attention. “Sir? We actually learned the problem a little differently. Does that possibly make it different, in your opinion?”

  The old man listened.

  “We weren’t asked where the trains would meet. We were just asked which would get to its destination faster.”

  “And,” Mr. Hunt chimed in, “I taught it to them with Boston and New York.”

  “Everybody changes it,” said the old man. “But when I came in here yelling about how they stole my problem, you all knew which problem I was yelling about, didn’t you?”

  We did.

  “So that says a lot, doesn’t it? If after all these years, you can recognize the basic spirit of something?”

  It did.

  “Would you care to tell us how you came up with it?” asked Mr. Hunt.

  The man settled back into the big chair, and we could see how small he really was.

  “Spring 1952,” he said. “I was deployed in Europe, this is postwar—I was in the war, too, but I was sent back as part of a rebuilding effort in Belgium. I was homesick, more than during the war. I’m not afraid to admit that. I wasn’t homesick during the war. I got married in between, to my wife.”

  He said the next part differently, and he looked out the window as he did: “June.

  “I went again to earn extra money so we could build a family. I had my textbook job, and I could do that from anywhere, so this was like having two jobs. I was there ten months and one week before I was able to go home. I flew from Antwerp to London to New York—Idlewild, it was called then, the airport, before JFK died, before there was a JFK, well before JFK was JFK, anyway—and then to Chicago.

  “Our home was in Columbus, Ohio. When I landed I phoned her from the airport and told her that I was taking the train right away from Chicago to Columbus, and it was only five hours away, she … June.

  “She said she couldn’t wait that long, now that I was so close. Can you believe that? Five more hours, after ten months, and she said she couldn’t wait! She said she was going to hop on a train going toward me, too, and we would just have to meet in the middle. I said, June, that’s crazy! But she insisted. And the real crazy thing is, secretly, I had been thinking the same thing.

  “You have to understand what it was to be separated from someone back then. You’re across an ocean; the world was just at war; now the Russians say they’re going to bury us with a shoe. There are no rules anymore. And there’s no telephone in your pants. You don’t get news very often, and when you do, your heart pounds because it might be bad news. After all that, we couldn’t take not being in sight of one another for a second more than we needed to.

  “I did the math, and I kept doing it again and again on the train, how many minutes it would take to meet each other, estimating her train and my train at all these
different speeds … Just looking at it every which way on the back of the train stationery envelope. They had stationery on trains back then—can you believe that? Everything was better then. Not everything,” he said, looking at Arush, “but so much. So many things. Anyway. I don’t know how I ever thought of it because I was only thinking about June, but I think your brain gets bigger at times like that because there was another part of my brain that thought, Boy, this would make one hell of a textbook problem.

  “We met on the platform of the train station in Spencer, Ohio, exactly three hours and one minute after I got on the train, and we kissed for eleven minutes. They were the best eleven minutes of my life.”

  The girls and even a couple of the boys in the class applauded. The best-looking boy in the class, Tyler, made eye contact with Amanda, the best-looking girl in the class, and they both mouthed Awwww together, as though the two of them together had somehow had something to do with this.

  Maybe Amanda wasn’t the best-looking girl in the class. Maybe she was just the blondest.

  “Wasn’t it two guys in the textbook?” said one of four kids in our class named Matt. “Not, like, a guy and a girl?”

  “I changed that part. I thought if it was a man and a woman, kids would get distracted and not focus on the math. Two men was a simpler thing back then. And anyway,” said the man, “haven’t you ever heard of artistic license? The point is, it’s my life and my story. And it’s my problem.”

  “It truly is a beautiful problem,” said Mr. Hunt. “I mean, the math problem—not your problem. Your problem, we all hope you resolve it and get what you deserve.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But just in case,” said Mr. Hunt, “look around at this classroom. Look. Generations of children have learned math from what you did, generations are a little bit smarter because of what you wrote. Doesn’t that count for something?”