I feel pretty stupid-ass dumb up here, tell you the truth.  I never performed in front of anyone before.  Never wanted to.   I told my mama, I can’t get up on a stage in front of people.  I ain’t got no talent.  She said, you don’t need none, son.  They won’t come to see you perform.  They’ll just come to see you.

That’s true, ain’t it.  Anybody told you, hell, he can’t play, he can’t sing, you’d all have come anyhow.  Just on account of the ad my mama put in the paper.  The name on the marquee.  “Son of Elvis.”  You’ve come to see me because that’s what I am.  At least that’s what my mama tells me.

Hell, I’ll try anything once.

(He takes up the guitar again, strums and sings, badly.

He stops.)

All this was her idea, you know.  She said we needed the money for the mortgage on the mobile home.  And since I’m her only boy, her only child, I’ve gotta be the man of the family.  The breadwinner.  And bagging’ groceries ain’t enough.  Not when my mama spends most of my earnings on beer, bourbon and the lottery.  So this is my new job.

(He sings again, then abruptly stops.)

‘Course, she don’t think of it as a job.  She says it’s my destiny.  The day I turned sixteen my mama told me my daddy wasn’t my real daddy.  Then she told me about the King.  How she met him in the hospital when she was an orderly and he was coming’ off a bender.  How she tried to save his life.  How he loved her and wanted to go away with her and start his life over.  But all the pills, all the booze, had made him fat and weak, and she had to be snuck in past Colonel Tom Parker himself just to see him.  That’s how she got in that night in August, 1977.  The way my mama told it, Elvis made love to her all night...and then died of a heart attack.  Nine months later, out I come and they paid her off to keep quiet about it.  Oh, they covered it up, alright.  So nobody but me will ever know the truth about my mama and Elvis.

(He strums and sings, then suddenly stops.)

If it’s the truth.  Of course, I didn’t believe it.  My mama comes out with some crazy things sometimes.  That weekend, I visited my daddy on death row and asked him.  He just laughed his ass off.  He said, I’m your daddy, and I know I’m your daddy because you’re just as stupid-ass dumb as I ever was, and if you believe your mama you prove me right.

Three months later I saw them strap him into the chair and pull the switch.  His body jumped out like it’d been slingshot, woulda rocketed right out at me, hadn’t been for them straps.  He peed his pants and smoke came out the top of his head.  And I thought, that’s why.  Mama doesn’t want me to think I’m the son of a man who shot up the clerk of a Seven-Eleven during a botched robbery, a man who ends up this way.  She wants me to have a daddy I can look up to.