A VISION OF ELVIS

by Luther Blissett

  I was posing with my slave for the wankers taking photographs on the other side of the hospital gates.
  "Say cheese" I said, giving my slave a whack round the chops, "they'll fuck off in a minute."
  "Wouldn't you rather be somewhere else?" he whined.
  "Not at all!" I snapped. "The oxygen of publicity is my life's blood!"
  The cunts standing on the pavement in Homerton High Street clicked away relentlessly on their cameras, hoping that at least one of the shots would turn out halfway decent. Lisa, my key nurse, chucked a handful of confetti into the air, which would look wicked in the photographs. Just like snow. Know what I mean?
  In my hand I held an old tobacco tin which contained the answers to life, the universe and everything. I stroked it furtively, turned, and gave my slave a swift right hook to the kidneys. He responded by doubling up in agony and coughing up one third of a pint of brown, lumpy substance.
  Once I had a dream. I'd been sitting quietly listening to one of His records. A brief encounter, that was all. He couldn't quite understand what He was doing up in heaven. He was fretting, as if He had a heavy weight on His shoulders. Tired old fears about whispers and rumours, even up in heaven.
  I hit my slave with a karate chop to the windpipe, and that relaxed him a little.
  There was a time in ancient Egypt when people built huge tombs. I don't suppose we'll ever know why they bothered.
  My slave took the tobacco tin from my hand, knelt before me and proceeded to undo my flies. "You can have whatever you want," he simpered. He was ever so sweet.
  Before long he'd liberated my stiffening cock from the bounds of decency and was alternately chewing, sucking and swallowing greedily on the raw meat while the photographers snapped away. To increase my sense of arousal I pinched his nostrils shut and watched him asphyxiate, and it wasn't long before I deposited one third of a pint of liquid genetics down the back of his throat just in time before he passed out.
  The hospital had been built in the good old days. Decrepit as it was, it had a certain kind of charm: a faded, wasted sort of glory, falling splendidly apart at the seams. It was a perfect day as I zipped myself up and strolled back to the ward. I'd never enjoyed a day better. In fact, I might even have gone so far as to say that it was really quite nice considering.
  They brought my slave to me on a stretcher and he soon came round. After binding his hands and wrists, then gagging and blindfolding him, I tired of his company and walked around the ward deciding which of the nurses to shag this time.

  The chandeliers suspended from the nicotine-stained ceilings were all that remained of the glory of days gone by at the Hackney Hospital. As I gazed upwards, I fantasised about the days when photo-shoots would be unnecessary to secure my future well-being.
  My slave reflected upon the ephemeral nature of my success.
  "When all this is over" he bleated, do you think we'll know what `love' means?"
  "Not if I can help it!" I spat. "Anyhow, I don't know what you're talking about. Change the subject at once!"
  Lisa arranged for the pictures to appear in the Hackney Gazette the next morning, along with a story headlined: "TOP ROCK STAR LOSES IT AND GETS LOCKED UP IN LOCAL BIN." The story suggested that there was something improper about the lifestyle I was allowed to lead whilst detained on one of her majesty's sections. I didn't give a fuck. Since promising to marry the medical director as soon as they let me out, I'd been given the run of the place.
  The memory of the visitation by The Dead Elvis Presley had troubled me a little. The accounts I gave of the event, to people who were little more than strangers, prompted the prescription of a medication which did very little to stimulate my senses. In fact, it suppressed all flights of the mind until at times I rather resembled a zombie. And yet stubbornly I continued to tell my story, until my record company arranged for me to be carted off to hospital, to shut me up.
  The hospital blankets were decorated with far too many blim holes to pass for class, but they kept us warm. I usually kept the tobacco tin under my pillow while I slept: it contained the secrets of love, pain, fear, sex and death; and when awake I lit scented candles. During the daytime, the sun filtered through the institutional gold lame curtains and the smoke haze, making it much lighter than it was at night. On the beanbag on the other side of the room, Lisa kept us under close observation while searching through her pockets to make sure that the cocaine was still there.
  "The boss says you'll have a CD out next week, collecting together all three of your EPs" the nurse commented. I suspect that she may have been a plant from the record company. "Then you'll be performing a concert to promote it at the Jolly Butchers in Stoke Newington."
  "How the fuck will I get there?" I scoffed, "I'm on a fucking section!"
  "We'll organise some escorted leave," she explained.
  "Shut up and chop us some lines, bitch!" I commanded.
  She did as he was told, and after snorting one of the lines she passed the mirror to me. I took a toot and then passed it along to my slave.
  "I love the photo they printed in the Hackney Gazette," he twittered.
  "What, the one with the snow?"
  "No, the one of me sucking your knob."

  That night, for the first time ever, I told my slave about the visitation from The Dead Elvis Presley.
  "I've met Elvis!" I boomed.
  "Me too!" he ejaculated.
  "No you haven't!" I challenged him.
  "Yes I have!" he insisted. "He's a bit blacker than you might expect, but he's alive and well and living in Hackney!"
  "It must be a different Elvis then," I countered.
  "Yeah?"
  "Yeah!" I affirmed, poking him viciously in the ribcage with a snooker cue. "When I met Elvis I was resting in bed, mid-afternoon, having a wank, listening for the first time to How Great Thou Art as sung by The King Of Rock `N' Roll Himself, when the kitchen door opened ever so slightly, gently, and I felt... A presence! He floated in as if I were an old friend, and just started talking to me! He sat recounting some of the terrible things He'd done with his time here on this earth, and wondering what the fuck He was doing up in heaven. So I did my best to reassure Him. "Don't worry!" I said. I insisted that He needed to snap out of it and enjoy being up there. He should just relax, pull His socks up and get on with it. I'd probably have said the same to anyone to be honest with you, but it seemed to do the trick. And then, as quickly as He came, He went. He was a perfect gentleman. The door opened ever so slightly again, and then He was gone. I lit a spliff and carried on listening to the record."

  My first big international hit Five `A' Sides on Rather Records had recently been revived on the West End night club circuit, causing a thrilled reaction from the kids. It seemed that my `file under cult obscurity' days were over. The money from the royalty cheques, together with my DLA and incapacity benefit, added up to a decent wedge. I was rich!
  I had a vision of the apocalypse and told my slave about it.
  "If everyone farting and dying is filling the air full of methane, and all that stuff is going up into space and just floating there, above and beyond the hole in the ozone layer, and if someone lit a match or sent a nuclear missile and it exploded, would the earth become like another sun? I mean, I saw these two suns burning brightly."
  Breakfast was Weetabix washed down with red wine. After breakfast it was late evening and time for the show, so my slave and I got dressed and we were driven to the Jolly Butchers in an ambulance.
  On the way in the bouncer called me to one side. "Here's your rider" he whispered, handing me the sheet of blotting paper surreptitiously.
  "Thanks mate," I winked back at him, smacking my slave around the side of the head with the mikestand I'd been carrying.
  The bouncer gave me a funny look. "You're not going to take that all at once, are you?" he asked me.
  "Of course not" I lied as I waltzed through the door. At the bar my bass player passed me a joint laced with cocaine and I sucked on it greedily while the barmaid fixed me a bloody mary to wash the tabs down with.
  "My fucking arse is sore" my slave complained, "it's because your cock's so huge!"
  This statement seemed to excite a perfectly pleasant gentleman standing within earshot. After twenty seconds of conversation I led him into the dressing room and allowed him to kneel before me and unzip my flies. My cock sprang into action immediately and I wasted no time in ramming the raw meat right down the back of the bloke's throat. As I did so, the acid kicked in and the doors of perception flew open. I can truly say that I felt at one with all the living creatures that roamed the earth as my groupie's neck muscles strained tightly around my marauding spam javelin. Before long it felt as if all of the planet's oceans were emptying into the gentleman's throat, when in fact, it was merely one third of a pint of liquid genetics flowing from one living creature to another.
  The next day, I couldn't remember the rest of the evening, but the Hackney Gazette reported that the gig was shite, and it appeared that my slave had been admitted to an intensive care ward with multiple fractures. The CD didn't sell as well as hoped, the royalties dried up, and when I was discharged from hospital I broke my promise to marry the medical director. She really wasn't my type.

  I found out later that soon after, Lisa woke up one morning in a drug sweat frenzy having had only four hours' sleep. The balance of her mind felt disturbed by ultra-vivid dream experiences which told her something she couldn't quite understand. She walked into the bathroom and had a good long look at herself in the mirror. She washed, shaved, brushed her teeth and combed her jet-black hair into a quiff. While swigging from a bottle of Hundred Pipers and polishing her boots, she decided to go to Las Vegas: she had to go to Las Vegas! She packed a bag with a couple of pairs of leather trousers, some clean knickers and a fine selection of silk shirts. She wrote a farewell note, got her passport and put it in the inside pocket of her tuxedo jacket. And as she walked out of the hospital for good she blew a kiss behind her.

  This was all a while ago. These days I live in a community residential unit for retired rock stars, where recently I had one final vision, or visitation. I was listening to How Great Thou Art as sung by The King, when I saw two suns melt into one, as in the lid being placed onto a tobacco tin. Elvis had witnessed the contents of the tin: Old Holborn. Two suns became as one, and because I'd absolved Him, I knew that He was OK now.