Burning with Elvis in Hell
Touring Elvisworld on the 10th Anniversary of His Death. From GREED v1, #4
By Kurt Sayenga
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS
Friday, August 14. Peter’s sitting in back eating veggie trail mix and Chip and I are in the cockpit chugging Diet Cokes and slamming mouthfuls of potato chips into our maws. We’re going about, oh, 85 miles an hour or so with the windows open, which means that I’m driving. In two days Elvis Presley will have been dead for ten years, and I want to be at Graceland, right at ground zero, on Holy Day.
It has not been an easy journey. Yesterday Peter and I flew into GREED’s Midwest Bureau in Cincinnati, Ohio, via Delta “We Get You There, Usually, More or Less” Airlines and today we’ve fried in Chip’s battle-scarred Dodge Charger for eight hours and counting. It's 2,456° outside with matching humidity and the temperature gauge shoots into the red whenever we turn on the air conditioning. We are as greasy as hour-old microwave french fries.
“Look! Up in the sky!” Chip shouts.
A huge black cloud hangs overhead – a giant hand, outstretched, palm up, begging for a handout. This is clearly a bad omen, but my attempts to turn around and head back to what passes for civilization in Ohio are met with, well, less than a friendly response.
“This was your idea anyway,” I am reminded by my so-called friends after a brief battle for control of the steering wheel. “You’re the Elvis fan.”
“You're right.” I’m trying to settle down. I grab a handful of potato chips and wash them down with more Aspartame-enhanced beverage. “This is a holy pilgrimage. We’re here to cleanse Elvis’ soul.”
“Oh, shut up.”
ELVIS IS INSIDE HIM
A bit later we ooze into an incredibly hot (and incredibly expensive) Memphis hotel room. Someone turns on the television set. Leeza Gibbons, on location at Graceland all week for Entertainment Tonight, is interviewing Little Kid Elvis, a blonde elementary-school age boy in a spangled white jumpsuit. The kid tells Leeza that everyone says he looks just like Elvis and sings just like Elvis. Elvis is a part of him. Elvis is inside him.
At Graceland it is considered perfectly acceptable to shove your seven-year-old into a rhinestone-splattered jumpsuit and present him as the Second Coming of Elvis. Plenty of people will pay to see the kid. People like us, for example.
Still excited about being in Memphis, not yet knowing that we were on a speedboat crossing the Styx, we resolve to track down the youthful pretender. Consulting a local newspaper, we discover that “Little Elvis” has a gig out at one of the airport hotels, where most of the pilgrims are staying. We set out.
On the way to the show we stop by an Elvis impersonator contest (or Elvis “tribute” – the word “impersonator” is frowned upon) down on Beale Street, “the birthplace of the Blues.” The competition is just about over; mobs of people reeking of booze stagger to and fro. Most of the Elvi are dressed in Vegas-period Anti-Elvis regalia, complete with the black blob of hair, bushy sideburns and silver sunglasses. Many have wondered why Elvi impersonate mid-'70s, gone-to-seed Anti-Elvis as opposed to the Presley of the '50s or '60s (Elvis Prime). Simple: Elvis Prime was young, thin, hip, and very handsome; most Elvis impersonators are middle-aged, rotund, and average in every way.
TODAY’S JUNKIES ARE TOMORROW'S ELVI
So we’re standing in the middle of Beale Street. A swirling crowd of rednecks and bleach-blondes and sailors and yuppie couples and Elvi flow past us in a blur of pink and black. Most of the Elvi look a bit silly in their homemade outfits (some clad in jumpsuits, a lot more in polyester recreations of rockabilly clothes), but they seem to be enjoying themselves and only a few appear to take the posing seriously. Considering the number of humorless Sid Vicious impersonators I’m still meeting nine years after that hapless sap spiked his final vein, I’m inclined to wonder if anyone from my generation has a right to sneer at these people. We have our subculture: they have theirs. Okay, theirs is pretty silly, but since the Summer of Hate punk has been reeling around like a drunk, walking headfirst into brick walls, falling down, getting up each time a little more dazed than the last. Silliness is relative.
Are amateur Elvis impersonators really harming anyone? And is it that strange that so many people would travel to Memphis to honor a man who changed so many lives? In the 1950s Elvis was burning sex with the voice of God. I can only imagine what it was like to have been a teenager in 1956, to have felt the full force of his cultural impact. Elvis fans stared into the face of the atomic blast and were transformed. Some of this has to do with his musical impact; a lot of it has to do with his sexuality.
Elvis fans love Elvis in all of his incarnations. For most of the fans, especially for the women who fell hard for him in the '50s and comprised the majority of the crowd at Graceland, Elvis is not the pudgy guy in the jumpsuit of 1976, he’s the sexual threat of 1955-1968. True fans remember Elvis the way they remember their first good sexual experience.
CLONING – GOOD SCIENCE OR BAD ENTERTAINMENT?
“Appearing tonight! Michael – Little Elvis!!” We buy our tickets and sit at the back of a small ballroom packed full of middle-aged women. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” rings out of the cheap public address system. (Speaking of which, what would Nietzche have thought of Uberelvis?) The crowd is in a frenzy! Well, maybe not a frenzy, but they're definitely clapping! Then, rushing in, a blur of white flanked by two “bodyguards” – It's Little Elvis! But…it’s the wrong Little Elvis!
This guy is probably 45, short and chubby and kind of Italian! AND HE’S DOING ELVIS’ ENTIRE 1976 VEGAS ACT! All three and a half hours! “Welcome To My World” and “CC Rider” and “My Way” and “Don't Cry, Daddy” all performed in passable-to-deplorable form!
For about a half-hour the “tribute” is entertaining. It’s amusing in its grotesque, spine-chilling way. Then my head starts to throb. After a while my life passes slowly before my eyes. After that someone else's life passes slowly before my eyes, someone with an alarming lack of regard for personal hygiene.
A pilgrim sitting next to us asks Chip where he got his Elvis t-shirt. “I haven't seen that one around.” Chip is wearing a Costello tour shirt that reads “ELVIS – GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD.” The pilgrim wears a Humes High School t-shirt. Humes was Elvis’ old school, and we were all looking forward to going on the guided tour of the place, conducted by present-day Humes students. The pilgrim advises against it on the grounds that Humes “is all black now.” Oh, dear. And just an hour earlier a cute waitress at a Beale Street restaurant told us that if we really wanted to know what Memphis is about we should “try getting a cab at night when you’re black and female.”
The pilgrim keeps talking to Chip (whose anguished grin sits frozen on his face for half an hour) and Michael keeps singing. I’d wondered how far the audience would go along with the “tribute” – would they accept this guy as the real thing and scream out “Elvis, touch me!” or kiss the hem of his garment? In this case (and in all cases, several pilgrims told us) the answer is no. The atmosphere in the hall is chummy, but certainly not reverential. If anything, it’s like a strip club. The women call the impersonator Michael, not Elvis. They know he isn’t anywhere near the real thing, but so long as he makes the moves and does passable versions of the songs, he’s their boy. Bad sex is better than no sex at all.
Sometime deep into the set, Michael goes into the audience and distributes sweat-soaked scarves to the “ladies.” At first the women pull the scarves off his neck. Then Michael sticks them in his jumpsuit, first by his chest, then in his crotch. The women cheer and laugh. Michael shoves his scarf very, very deep down and a flushed, somewhat younger woman reaches into the jumpsuit for it. “You can have anything you can find,” Michael says. I’ll bet she won’t find much.
After the scarf-diving incident we make our break for the door. A banner that I hadn’t seen before announces that the proceeds from this event are going to a local children’s hospital. Does that make it right? I don't know, but it’s a worthy cause, and I feel guilty for being so hard on Michael.
ELVIS DOES BETTY FORD
On our way back to the hotel Chip asks, and answers, the question of the hour: What if Elvis had lived? Would he be fatter than ever, completely strung out on medication and fried bacon fat? No way. Had he lived, Elvis would be doing Oprah, telling the tearful audience how he sank to the lowest low, not even realizing he had a drug problem until he heard about the Betty Ford Clinic on TV. After two months of potato peeling with Liz and Liza, the slimmed-down, tanned, feeling-good-about-himself, tuxedo clad Elvis would be killing them in Vegas, singing spiritual material and maybe a few standards, you know, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and that sort of thing ....
THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL, PART I
Saturday, August 15. Graceland. The Presley mansion stands behind the famous musical gates and a stone wall covered with graffiti. Twenty-some officially-sanctioned Graceland tourist traps sit in a mall directly across the street, a string of leeches draining black blood from a corpse. To one side of Graceland a sign announces building plans for a Graceland hotel with a thousand rooms; on the other side a Graceland trailer park (!) is under construction. Up and down the avenue people are trying to cash in; local garages offer the “Elvis Presley Special Tuneup $10.00.”
You can’t just drive into the Presley Estate. You have to go to the tourist traps to buy tickets for a shuttle over to the house. We came early to dodge the crowds and the heat (already unbearable at 7:00 am) and wound up with tickets for a tour three and half hours later. Sure, it was their busy season, but it’s one heck of a wacky coincidence that thousands of pilgrims had hours to kill and nothing to do but shop. (There were no chairs or picnic areas anywhere; you had to stay on your feet and keep moving.) Elvis music blasts over the public address system.
Here are some of the things you can buy at Graceland: Replicas of Elvis’ will; Elvis Special Deputy commission papers; Elvis playing cards; Elvis lighters; lots of weird ceramic Elvis objects; an Elvis beer stein; Elvis piggy banks; Elvis ash trays; I’ve Been To Graceland ashtrays; Memphis pennants; candles to burn at the memorial vigil; Elvis pencils; Elvis can openers; Elvis coffee cups; Elvis shot glasses; lots of copies of Priscilla “I’m Riding The Milk Train” Presley’s Elvis and Me; E.P. Boulevard keychains; Anti-Elvis sunglasses; Elvis 10th Anniversary clocks; Elvis nail clippers: bumper stickers reading “EP Boulevard,” “I’ve Been Inside Graceland,” “#1 Elvis,” etc.; Elvis pencil holders; fake $1,000 bills with the King’s picture on them; Elvis posters, postcards, glossy photos, t-shirts, warm-up Jackets. baseball caps, and visors; Elvis car tags (1 ELVIS with Tennessee markings); Elvis brush/comb sets and knick-knack boxes; Graceland magic wands; Elvis bells, pins, and souvenir spoons; Love Me Tender shampoo and body lotion; Elvis beach towels; and Confederate flags. Need I add that all of these items are brutally overpriced?
Graceland is an evil place – a place worse than Las Vegas, inconceivable as that might sound. Las Vegas exploits greed and need and desperation; Graceland exploits love. Elvis read heavily on religious themes, and now he is a religious theme. Graceland is his temple, and the temple has been overrun by necrophiliac pimps. Elvis’ disciples come to pay homage to sex and youth and danger, and instead they get their wallets gang-banged by accountants.
We look for the Cramps. We look for Little Kid Elvis. No luck. And on banners everywhere, the official slogan of the 10th anniversary: Ten Years Is Forever. What exactly does that mean? Ten years is forever, and gee we really miss him? Ten years is forever, and it’s surprising that anyone still gives a damn? Ten years is forever, not to mention profitable? TEN YEARS ISN’T LONG ENOUGH.
THE GRACELAND GESTAPO
Our Graceland tour guides are young and humorless. The female guides are of the big-toothed Farrah-haired Southern sorority variety: the males are large and surly. They all recite memorized speeches about various parts of the house with little interest but, in the case of the sorority sisters, plenty of bubbleheaded perkiness. Specific questions are met with a dazed look, followed by an audible click as peanut-sized brains latch onto an officially-approved rote answer that more or less touches on the subject of your inquiry. If you phrase the question differently, they repeat the same answer, word-for-word.
About a third of the way through the tour one of our guides (we were passed along to about ten) asks what that little thing in Peter’s hand is. “It's a tape recorder.” “You haven't been recording this, have you?!” “Well, a little bit ...” Jesus Jumping Christ! Without any further discussion the kid whips out his walkie-talkie and five seconds later the Graceland Gestapo, dressed in the latest high-fashion paramilitary summer SWAT gear, bursts into the parlor, grabs the recorder, checks us over for other illegal devices, then informs us that our tape will be erased and the recorder held at the guard booth until we completed our visit. Apparently the paranoid Graceland execs fear that enterprising fans will tape the audio portion of the tour and sell it to the punters, cutting into the sales of Graceland’s own audio and videotape versions of the tour. (This was not explained to us, however; it’s just the only possible reason I can think of for such an idiotic policy.)
The forcible seizure has its good side. We are now able to get right in front at every exhibit on the rest of the tour, as our fellow pilgrims treat us with the same deference that airline passengers afford gun-toting terrorists.
Much of Graceland is closed to the public, including the bathroom where Elvis died. The house is not all that big, and it’s not even as tacky as I had been assured it would be – I mean, carpeting the walls is an interior design risk that I personally would not take, but to each his own. Surprisingly, Elvis had some decent paintings hanging on the walls, including a Warhol. We ask several of our sorority-pinned tour guides for information about the painting.
“Who?” “Warhol. Andy Warhol.” “Andy who? Where-hole?” “War-hall. He’s an artist.” “War-hole?” “An artist. From New York. He’s dead, too.” “You’re puttin’ me on, right?”
Some of Elvis’ cars sit outside. Although he gave Cadillacs away, Elvis personally preferred black Stutz Bearcats and Ferraris. (So he wasn't totally deranged.) Our tour guide tells us that the 1976 Stutz “hasn't been touched since Elvis’ death.” I ask how that’s possible, given that the car has 1986 plates. “Oh. Well, I don’t know. Maybe his father drove it.”
A number of handguns are on display in the Elvis trophy room. They aren’t labelled, but l am pretty sure I spotted a stainless steel .357 Magnum, a .44 Magnum, a Colt Python, a .38 Detective’s Special, two Centennial-issue .45s, and a few derringers. Most of the guns are fitted with custom grips and sights; some are ornately engraved. The barrel interiors showed signs of wear. This is the place where one is obliged to insert a joke about target practice on TV sets, I suppose.
In an extremely rare display of good taste, no tour guide is present at the last stop of the tour, the Graceland family plot. On the way out to the guardhouse we pass a large display of wreaths and tribute art sent by Elvis fans around the world. It all seems very heartfelt, even the big hound dog made out of flowers, and so it seems completely out of place.
OFF THE PIGS
It doesn’t matter what you think of Elvis. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that he was a good-hearted country boy or a corrupt sleazebag, a talented man who destroyed himself or a slow-witted working class boy crushed under the heel of capitalism. No one deserves to be exploited, especially after they’re dead, especially the way Elvis is being exploited. Elvis is a zombie in thrall to his masters, in thrall to the holders of his estate and the owners of his name. When Elvis’ daughter Lisa Marie turns 25 she inherits pretty much the whole ball of wax. If she has any regard for her old man she’ll weld the gates of Graceland shut and build a moat around the place. Then she’ll sue everybody. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen.
THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL, PART 2
After an eight-hour break (much of it spent on a fruitless quest for a meatless entree) we return to Graceland for the Candlelight Vigil. Every year thousands of pilgrims mark the day of Elvis’ passing by lining up next to the Wailing Wall and trudging up the mansion driveway to Elvis’ grave. We were expecting hysteria on this holy night, or at least some display of emotion. Instead all we see are hollow-eyed, poker-faced spuds who could just as well be touring the Prehistoric Prairie Dog exhibit at the Peoria Museum of Natural History. They cared enough to come, but they aren’t having a particularly good time. (Maybe getting screwed by the local merchants has something to do with that.) Thousands of fans line the streets, some standing in line, others sitting in lawn chairs set up on the sidewalks of Elvis Presley Boulevard (blocked off in the vicinity of Graceland). Despite the size of the crowd, almost no one is openly boozing it up. We aren’t sure if this is out of reverence to the King or reverence to all the cops around. It’s 10:00 pm and the temperature hangs at 98°.
AT THE WAILING WALL
Graffiti on the Wailing Wall: Dear Elvis, You are the Jesus on my pizza. Elvis: Spuds is taking over. Elvis, we’re burning our leathers in downriver Detroit. “Elvis,” you're the greatest thing since “Christ.” Elvis is the best person I ever nown. Don't stup on my blue suede shoes. Elvis, you are always on my mine. The king of rock and roll will always rain.
The couple in front of us start talking. Actually, the woman in front of us starts talking and talking and talking faster than a broker trying to unload sinking stock; her husband stares at the ground. Somehow we wind up on the receiving end of her nonstop monologue. Like most pilgrims, she has been in town all week and treats us like congenital idiots when we reveal it’s our first time at Graceland. Peter goes off to find some tribute candles and Chip and I spend the next half-hour looking at each other out of the corner of our eyes as the woman babbles. She discovers that Chip lives in Ohio and proceeds to catalog all the people she knows from the Buckeye State (all of whom are, we are told, “touched in the haid”), starting with her Italian neighbor. She doesn’t like Italian names. “Well, you know how Italian names are.” “Long, complicated,” Chip says, looking elsewhere. “And they all end with a vowel.” "Exactly." “Well, the line is moving, from where we are now we’ll be there in an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, it really all depends on who’s up there, I mean some of them get up there and stop, they get up there and stop, and they bawl and spoil the peach, you know what I mean? Well, I seen it, they got a paramedic up there, an ambulance, and let me tell you, people need it, swooning and all, it’s embarrassing.” “Well, you won't see that from us.”
Then she tells us about the nostalgia concert at Mudd Island. “This woman behind us, when [some country and western guy] sang that song he did for Elvis this woman behind us just started squallin’ and bawlin’ – it was embarrassin’ – I couldn't take it. And this other guy I knew from Ohio, he came over to my house and rang the doorbell, he’d ring the doorbell 20 times before you could get out there and answer the door! He was crazy! And ...” “What part of Ohio did he come from?” “What part of Ohio did he come from?” she asks her husband, who doesn’t answer. Probably trying to decide if he has enough cash saved up for a good divorce lawyer. “He was real funny, we just loved him, and he’d aggravate my kids, we have twins, they’re 14 and they know everything – you know, like 14 year olds are – and he was so aggravating to them and I just loved it. They claimed to hate him. In fact, he was even mean to my dog. My dog, he likes to chew on everybody, and Paul would come in there and sit there and talk to me and just hold the dog’s mouth shut. He was crazy!"
“If this goes on for two hours, I’m going to die,” Chip says to me. “No, they get up there and stop, they get up there and stop, that's what they do, trust me.” “We gotta go. I dressed wrong. It’s way too hot out here.” “You certainly did dress wrong. You gotta dress like you're going to hell, know what I mean?” “Oh yeah,” Chip and I answer in unison.
SUN STUDIOS
Sunday, August 16. Hotter than you can possibly believe hot can be. Sticky, too. It’s our last day in Memphis and we’re determined to have fun (i.e., stay away from Graceland). By this point I’m pissed off at Elvis, pissed off at Graceland, pissed off at the heat, pissed off in general. Today we visit Sun Studios.
Studio Manager Dave Aron and his partner reopened Sun last spring. They’ve restored the studio to its ‘50s configuration, stocking it with beautiful period instruments, including a very rare Gibson ES-295. “Scotty Moore sold his 295 two years ago for $15,000 – a pretty exorbitant price for a guitar,” Aron says, “but you gotta consider the rarity of the guitar itself, plus it was Scotty Moore’s and it did play on everything Elvis did on the Sun label, so I guess he had some justification there...not much, though.”
Somebody asks if “new artists" come in wanting Aron to “set up the same sound.” “Well, I’ve pulled it off many times. It’s not too difficult.” Aron mentions that Ringo Starr and a bunch of other rock star types have recorded there recently. “We’re a fully functional recording studio, and we cut tracks practically every night, except for Elvis Week.” A bonehead asks, “Why would Ringo Starr come here when he could go someplace with new electronic stuff?” Aron, showing remarkable restraint, replies, “Why would Bob Dylan and U2 come all the way out of their way to see this place? Because it’s Sun. They can always find a state-of-the art facility, but it will never be the same as Sun.” Studio time at Sun goes for $60 an hour. They record on 12-track and are going to 24-track soon.
Peter meets a guy named Vladimir – another DC area musician – who drove straight down to Graceland, pausing only to pour 35 quarts of oil into his aging Cadillac convertible.
HUMES HIGH – NO FLASHES, PLEASE
When Elvis went to school Humes was an all-white senior high. Now it’s an all-black junior high. The Humes tour is hosted by monumentally bored 13-year-olds. It is exactly like going on a tour of any American school anywhere, except for the Elvis art, and it is very, very funny, thanks to our guides’ deadpan recitation of tour speeches in the most mono of monotones. Elvis Presley doesn’t interest most teenagers in the slightest. Especially black teens In Memphis, who every year watch the curious spectacle of white people flooding into town to praise the man who made black rhythm and blues “safe” for Middle America. (Graceland is easy to find, but the Memphis hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered is not.)
After a slide show, we are led into the Elvis Room, a small classroom that has been more-or-less remodeled to more-or-less resemble Elvis’ American history class. We wait for our next guide to arrive. And wait. And wait. Finally the single most bored teen I’ve ever seen (outside of my mirror a few years ago) slinks into the room. He recites his speech with his eyes locked somewhere about ten miles to the east. “Here is a locker of the type Elvis used during that period. Lockers were orange at the time.” A football helmet and jersey sits in a beaten-up locker in the corner. “Ummn,” I delicately inquire, “That football helmet in the locker – Elvis, well, he really didn't play football, did he?” “N00000.” “Okay.”
Then, with a voice as flat as an open can of Coke left in a refrigerator for a week, our guide utters the words we’ve heard a hundred times in the last two days: “Take your time and browse around the exhibits.” His eyes slide to the doorway; his body slowly follows – “And take pictures if you like...” – he’s halfway through the door now – “As long as it does not...” – his voice, a ghostly echo from the hallway – “... require a flash.” And he’s gone, never to return.
BELOW THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL
That night we drive across a nightmare bridge high above black water into the absolute darkness of Arkansas. No other cars, no moonlight, no streetlights, just the highway. Frightening things are on the roadside – forests of dead trees, junkyards filled with burning cars, dyspeptic trailer parks, chemical factories, black smokestacks, or worse yet, nothing at all. Far, far ahead, something huge and black squats in the gloom, blacker than the night sky. Something with three heads. We look for an exit, which we never find. Finally we turn around in the middle of the highway. At midnight we return to Graceland.
THE PASSION OF LITTLE KID ELVIS
Milling with the pilgrims, brushing past $160 silk warmup jackets with TCB patches, jostling tourists from Maine, thinking, withering, head swimming. It’s midnight and it’s 100° and you have to stay in the shops to keep cool, but when you’re in the shops you’re in the thick of the badness, the heart of the evil.
A blast of white light shoots into the store. The light grows stronger – a dozen wavering, blinding flashes and kliegs. Photographers and camera crews face the storefront, all looking down at something just below the window. I press my face against the glass, hoping against hope, and there he is – bathed in light, his greasy blonde pompadour shooting off sparks, his white jumpsuit dazzling, whiter than Arctic snow, whiter than Ozzie Nelson: Little Kid Elvis.
Outside he’s entertaining the troops, explaining his mysterious calling. Elvis is a part of him even though the King died before he was born. Elvis is inside him. All along his manager/presumably-father nods his head in agreement and utters words of support. Someone gives Little Kid Elvis a rose and he poses with it, sticking the stem in his mouth like he’s dancing the tango, and someone asks him a question and he replies, “Murrwwflltf mmmmnnmil, thh, mtuiffrnmnhl!”
Elvis is inside him. Something about those eyes, something about the way he stands, something about that hair, something about his cockiness, something about his fright. Little Kid Elvis presses his thumbs against his eyes and screams “Let me out, let me out, let me out!” and every light in Graceland explodes.
Elvis is inside him. The sky turns crimson and purple and a hundred clawed black fists punch down into the Earth, rip out hunks of land, let flesh melt between their burning fingertips. Little Kid Elvis stands unharmed. He walks through the stone wall, up to the family plot, and digs up the King’s grave with his bare hands. He rips open the lid of the casket as twin thunderbolts crash into the mansion and set it ablaze. He lifts the withered corpse from its resting place and tears its head from its body. Standing in the midst of the Inferno, Little Kid Elvis pitches the severed head across the street into the tourist traps, where it explodes in a flash of pink and black, followed a half-second later by a huge discordant tone, every off-note ever sung all at once, and then Graceland is gone, nothing left but a smoking black pit.
Elvis is inside him. It’s all over. The tormented soul can sleep. Flames engulf the child. He sneers.
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT GREED
But that last part didn’t really happen, did it? Just a little vision I had as I lay crumpled in the middle of Elvis Presley Boulevard, overcome by the heat. Little Kid Elvis held the rose between his teeth and shutters opened and closed and tape rolled and everyone smiled. “Isn’t he cute!” more than a few pilgrims said as they waddled back to their recreational vehicles. Yeah, he was cute. And the more time passes the less Elvis (Prime or Anti or any other variation) will mean to anyone. The 10th anniversary was a landmark, and it’s all downhill from there. Sooner or later the profits at Graceland will turn into losses and the whole filthy enterprise will fade into oblivion, like a strip mine that’s been played out.
But for now, we’ll leave Graceland the way we found it – hot, sticky and corrupt. Elvis may not be smiling wherever he is, but Little Elvis and Little Kid Elvis are. And a fake smile is better than no smile at all. ■