Infinite Elvis
Volume 1
I’ve always wanted to be Elvis.
For years, growing up, when people asked, I told them that I wanted to be an Elvis impersonator. I remember researching the job and presenting its salary and estimated work schedule in front of the class. We were sitting in the computer lab where I later watched pornography for the first time.
Everyone else chose to become a star on network TV or to play quarterback in the NFL. Not one yet has, to my knowledge, achieved those professional goals. There were 17 kids in my graduating class. I think I would have heard by now.
For Christmas early on, I got ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits on CD. I practiced “Heartbreak Hotel” inside my mother’s Windstar van in the christian church parking lot after service. We had just invaded Iraq.
For the fall school music special, I put on a greasy wig, worn by a different kid with Elvis dreams the year before. This tasteless gimmick, despite the fact my mom had greased my own hair and combed it right. “Remember to shake your hips,” my mother said when she dropped me off.
I remember waiting for my cue beneath a double pompadour and fake leather jacket, thinking how strange it was to be standing alone in the high school lunchroom kitchen.
When it came, I ran out on the basketball court in the dark.
I really tried to be Elvis. To sell it. The smolder. The mic stand bends. The tiptoe lean backward. The works. There were fresh, shiny coins in my penny loafers. I was 10. Maybe 11.
They didn’t let me do the whole song, but I remember everyone laughing at me, which I still cannot accept, or understand.
I want to write a play called Three Elvis Impersonators Share a Hotel Room Near Lincoln, Nebraska. That’s the tentative title. The problem with the play is that the title’s the best part about it.
It’s set at a cut-rate casino hotel during the Christmas rush. The type to book the country’s preeminent Elvises into the same hotel room. The play picks up just after check-in.
The three different eras of Elvis are here: 1956 phoenix ascending Elvis, the black leather 1968 “Comeback Special” Elvis, and the heaving, near death, white jumpsuit-era Elvis.
In the first two acts, they come and go between sets. The lineup goes in reverse chronology, so as to de-age Elvis and leave the crowd feeling young. In their comings and goings, they argue about the best way to make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. About which hair cream would be authentic to Elvis. What his order at Waffle House was. His favorite gun.
In the third act, Fat Elvis fails to make it back out for the encore, which is a problem because Nebraska loves her heavy Elvis, her wavering, gospel-spewing, pistol-waving, Nixon hand-shaking Elvis.
The guy behind Fat Elvis has meticulously pursued his craft. The last time we see him, he wound up bloated, paranoid with pill fever, karate chopping down the hotel hallway after his set in the lounge, retreating to watch professional wrestling on local access TV.
The other two Elvises return to the hotel room after their own sets to find Fat Elvis in the bardo, his jumpsuit unzipped to the tile, his body slumped back and his head resting against the wall above the toilet.
I still don’t know yet if he’s alive or dead.
I fell in love with a bartender who once tried to work at Graceland.
She applied to be a janitor there. She ran the TV remote at a cash-only bar a few blocks from my apartment. On winter nights I stayed long enough to jump start her car at close. She let me listen once while she sang in the shower. She had a green stick-and-poke dancing bear on the pit of her thigh, and she had a Velvet Elvis hanging on a wall in her apartment. It was in the kitchen above a playing card table always covered with a crowded ashtray and red Budweiser cans. The King of Beers. Diesel is what we called it. A cat named Spooky was said to live there. She even showed up in the pictures, but I never saw her.
I was always there at odd times, among other things, looking up at Elvis. She lived alone, but there were always other people around. It was Skinner and this guy called Sci-Fi. He made cartoons and smoked cigarettes beautifully. Sometimes, this noise musician showed up. He dyed his clothes with tea bags, and washed his hands and neck in gasoline before his shows. He assaulted the piano and howled.
Everyone worked at bars or in kitchens or stocked shelves and showed up at the bar or her apartment after. Except for the noise musician. I don’t know what he did besides rot on the couch. I found him once with all the shades drawn, already days down into an acid hole, and all he wanted was mango juice.
“Fresh mango juice!” he cried out.
It wasn’t even his apartment.
She never got the gig at Graceland, and I never got the gig with her.
“Uh-oh,” my father says, relaying another one of his myriad days in retirement. “Elvis is walking across the TV with a cowboy hat on. I’d better change the channel.”
Elvis movies have always had an unshakeable rap, all of them universally panned, both then and now. Westerns, musicals, some weird slapsticky things.
They all genuinely suck.
Especially the ones when he’s supposed to be singing. For whatever reason, it seems as if it were neigh on impossible for Elvis to accurately lip-sync along with his own recorded voice.
I think the films all failed because basically Elvis loses all of his magic, his weird primordial American charm, at the exact moment that you ask him to become anybody else.
We’ve got one Elvis movie here, a VHS tape here called Elvis: The Great Performances.
On the tape, Priscilla Presley wanders around Graceland, pointing at Elvis memorabilia while supplying the old familiar myth. (He’s driving a truck, when he decides to stop at Sun Records to record a 45 as a gift for his mother…) They pair the story with the best footage ever captured of her dead husband, a man still known a half century after his death simply as “The King.”
We simply cannot comprehend what a shock to the global culture that Elvis was. The raw controversy of Elvis, the popular hero worship and subsequent moral panic that he set loose upon a nation enjoying the first commercial televisions ever made.
During live performances, on talk shows and variety programs, every time the camera inevitably cuts back to the audience, they capture a sea of teenagers absolutely losing their ever-loving minds in the mere presence of Elvis. I think it’s as close to a pure, unredeemed spiritual awakening as we’ve ever been able to capture on film.
Remember also that Elvis was a particular kind of country cut-up, making faces and crossing his eyes for the camera. They dressed him up in golden jackets to sell records, and hired Ed Sullivan to play the pitch man. He lauded Elvis’ moral character to the world, and more importantly, America.
He even called him a “decent and kind” boy.
Writing about Elvis in any serious way is pure fallacy. The man’s been splayed and splintered down into antimatter. The collected Elvis bibliography on Goodreads defies mere exploitation. (THERE ARE SO MANY MEMOIRS BY LOST LOVES AND LIFELONG FRIENDS AND EVEN HIS KARATE INSTRUCTOR!)
Look at some of these.
Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley
I Just Can’t Help Believin’...: Conspiracy Theory Book One - Elvis Presley
I Called Him Babe: Elvis Presley’s Nurse Remembers
All the King’s Horses: The Equestrian Life of Elvis Presley
Schmelvis: In Search of Elvis Presley’s Jewish Roots or The Elvis-Jesus Mystery: The Shocking Scriptural and Scientific Evidence That Elvis Presley Could Be The Messiah Anticipated Throughout History
I only stopped looking through the list because I could feel it starting to pull me into its panoptic mystery, its endless sprawl.
Elvis was the first thing I remember really wanting to know more about, to study on my own.
I knew back then and still know that he shared the same birthday as my grandmother. I knew that he died on August 16 in the same year that my mother graduated from high school. I knew his band was The Blue Moon Boys and I knew the members of that band: Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D. J. Fontana.
These were just things that I knew, the first things that I ever learned.
Now I am forced to face down the fact that when I was first asked to think for myself, I immediately started thinking about Elvis.
And I haven't stopped.
During a shift at the start of the pandemic, a coworker with my mother’s name showed me this video which claimed that Elvis was alive and well and preaching somewhere in Arkansas. We were sitting in the breakroom, hiding out from the horde. At the time, we’d resorted to Elvis conspiracies to keep us talking during those bleak shifts at the grocery store. Now, in the breakroom, everyone just stares at their phones in silence.
“It could be him,” she said, doing some wild kind of arithmetic to get their ages to match up. She wrote out numbers with a black marker on a piece of cardboard.
Based on her evidence, I had to agree with her. It could have been him.
The King. Alive and well in Arkansas.
Soon after that, she got married and transferred to one of the stores in Las Vegas.
I wonder if she ever found him out there.
Impersonating Elvis has remained a lucrative, if difficult, career.
Those who pursue it are known now as ETA’s.
Elvis Tribute Acts.
Just think of it: a whole legion of people, walking right now amongst us, able to always surmise the right time for Elvis to finally arrive.
Fantastic read!