Two weird white men come to Gracie May Still’s house. She’s a singer, and they buy the rights to one of her songs. Later, she sees one of the men, Traynor, singing the song on TV, and he’s “looking half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way from the waist down”. She has an uncanny feeling: “If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all.”
Traynor’s version of the song is a global mega-smash, but after a couple of years he returns to Gracie May’s house to confess that he doesn’t know what the lyrics mean. The story follows Traynor’s Elvis-ish career over the decades, his letters and visits to Gracie May, his artistic incomprehension and his increasingly soul-less, machine-like vibe. “It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.”
Collected in You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, The Women’s Press, 1982
A Personal Anthology 