Ryan’s first real job was bussing tables for the lunchtime shift at Denny’s the summer of 1977, before his senior year of high school. The shift manager was a woman named Alice. In her late thirties, Alice appeared quite old to teenaged Ryan, but he liked her because she wasn’t bossy and had a remarkable talent for making dirty jokes seem funnier than they really were.
One morning in August, Ryan clocked in a few minutes early and got himself a cup of coffee. He was standing next to the urn thinking about a second cup when Alice arrived, pale and red-eyed. She looked like someone had just died, and it turned out someone had just died, because she announced, “Elvis is dead” in a throbbing voice and began to sob. A mascara-tinted tear trickled down one cheek.
Ryan had to turn away quickly so she wouldn’t see he was trying not to laugh, not because he thought Elvis dying was funny—he didn’t—but because it was the first time he had seen someone emotionally affected by the life (or death) of a celebrity, and it just struck him as absurd. He wouldn’t realize until years later that what to him was the unsurprising demise of a washed-up, overweight lounge singer was to Alice the downfall of a hero, a crushing blow to her adolescent fantasies, forever tainting memories of high school dances, her first kiss, and visions of what life could be. It was a bereavement he would finally share the night he sat bug-eyed, frozen in front of the TV that was saying John Lennon was dead.
R.K. West is a former travel blogger who sold everything, spent two years on the road, and now lives next to the mighty Columbia River.
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