Free Dreamboat Dad by Alan Duff

in America. Especially when he wrote less
than six months later sending another fifty pounds.
    To have such money enough to send me I figured he must work
    in the oil industry, or have a good business. I'd write and ask. Though for
    some reason distractions kept putting my reply off. And I got this sense of
    awkwardness, as if our relationship was being forced, by his money and the
    expectation I be thankful. Wrote him a half-hearted response and it took several
    months to get around to.
     
    Had my reply to Jess been the following year, just a few months closer
to enlightenment via countless hours spent analysing with Nigel Blake, I
would have written to him about music.
    Of the social revolution born of modern music. Of not knowing who
started it, just taking my place in the line for my turn to be swept along
by a universal force. From Nigel I was filled with this sense that we owed
people. We, the whole listening, changing world, owed musical artists for
helping shift evolution itself.
    Little Richard, Nigel said we owed him big-time. He set his own
standard that other artists followed. A crazily outfitted and behaved Negro
who, Nigel somehow had discerned, dressed and acted like an effeminate
clown so white Americans couldn't put a label on him and therefore would
let him be. Way ahead of me, Nigel was one of those types with bits of
seemingly inside knowledge on all manner of subjects.
    Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others must have got the
ball rolling too. You just picked up on whoever was the dominant figure
of your time. So we thanked Elvis Presley; he influenced the world. Every
big city and small town in his home country, every country on the planet
even Africa, he had an effect. He could have been Jesus Christ he was so
important. But with quite a different message.
    Seemed impossible that an American singer could change a society so
distant and so irrelevant and totally unconnected to his. But that was what
Elvis Presley did: changed tiny, obscure Waiwera; changed Two Lakes;
changed our entire tiny nation of two point something million, stuck way
down in the lower Pacific — three, four years after the rest of the world
had been transformed. Changed Yank Takahe: make that Yank Hines.
    Elvis liberated our dancing limbs; pulled away the masks so we could
openly express what had previously been vague, sometimes troubling,
emotions and thoughts. He said it was okay to show off, good to strut
your stuff.
    He gave girls permission to be overtly sexual, in dance and in the tone
of his sultry voice that said he was coming after them. His photographic
images transformed bedroom walls and festooned shop windows and
picture theatre billboards.
    He informed, enlightened us we'd been hoodwinked about life and
social conventions and it didn't have to be this way. Not any longer.
We could be whatever we chose to be. His musical phrasing sent us into
raptures, me in particular. I could mimic his every note and tone, his
unique phrasing. We wore his cowlicks, his confident half-smile; made
our eyes project a melting quality just like his to the girls; stood around
with legs astride a symbolic world, ready to turn our crooked smiles into
sneers of contempt for the older generation, at any peer who would dare
mess with us. The man made us cry — and not ashamed in secret, but
openly.
    He came like a letter from America, addressed Dear Young World . . .
I, Elvis Presley, give you permission to be whatever you want.
    He could have written: Dear Yank, I, Elvis Presley, give you permission to
rise far above Henry's ignoring of you and become a big star like me. Just go out
and do it, son. Get yourself all shook up, turn yourself loose. Then watch big Henry
reduce to a tiny little man of no consequence. Drive past him in your big limo, park
it right outside his hotel, picture his face when he sees who's riding in back.
    The cult of Elvis was on every radio wave, he played himself in movies
that seemed to come out