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T H I S+W E E K
> Who took the grace out of Graceland?
The King and us
Way dead Elvis
D E P A R T M E N T S Sleeping in strange places
The Surreal Gourmet
Readers' Tips and Tales
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Tuesday, August 5, 1997 Banks of forgiveness
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THE SHRINE OF AMERICA'S STRANGEST RELIGION. BY CINTRA WILSON | "you're taking a black man to Memphis?" asked my shuddering friend Xed, when I told him of my impending trip to Graceland. Xed is West Indian and believes that nothing has changed for black people in America since the 1930s. "I wouldn't go. You could be endangering that brother's LIFE." I looked at my packing list -- socks, gum, thongs, pepper spray -- and considered the horrible possibilities. I told T., my traveling chum, that I would spare no expense to have his dreadlock ass airlifted out of Tennessee if any serious racial discomfort came down. And so off we went on our mission to the deathplace of Elvis Presley, 20 years after he left his earthly kingdom of Graceland for greener spiritual pastures. We had come to see the relics of the man who would be king of rock' n' roll, and the first thing we saw was the man who isn't Prince. The Artist (formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known As Prince) entouraged past us in the Memphis airport, a blur of fur and pressed velvet and gold-tipped walking canes. It gave everyone a nice jump; 8-year-old black children behind us were fanning themselves and pretending to faint. The Artist was so delicate and coifed and pretty with his pixie haircut and wrap-around Fendi sunglasses, he looked like he should be playing Cosby's wife on a TV series. Such is the price of androgyny when you're pushing 40. I remembered an interview with the woman who won't be Vanity anymore, talking about her relationship with the former Prince. "It was a fornicating kind of love," she said. She had become a podium-beating Baptist who went around to high schools trying to steer young women away from cocaine and premarital fornicating and toward Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The Artist has the über-celebrity-power-glow, the same photosynthetic properties Elvis had. More, even: The Artist is a serious musical entity, as opposed to just a charisma broadcasting system. Women close to Elvis had to become Scientologists to peel the King's expensive proprietary gloss off them. Miss Ex-Vanity, as a satellite of Prince, flew too close to the source and got scorched and needed Jesus to bandage her wing-stumps. The first thing T. and I did was visit Beale Street, the famous old Negro action street where the Blues was served one of its first late-nite plates of baby back ribs and crawdad gumbo. T. and I were vaguely nervous about being an interracial couple until we saw the rack of T-shirts: NO BLACK, NO WHITE, JUST BLUES. Cool, we thought, even though all the fat tourista people waddling around us were thoroughly Caucasian, down to their large fuchsia walking shorts and crinkly sport-perms. Stringing T. up by the neck from the nearest poplar tree for the crime of miscegenation was not a priority for these people, however. I wondered if we could still get arrested in Tennessee for oral sodomy, and pictured that scene from "The Great White Hope" where Jane Alexander and James Earl Jones' bedroom is broken into by club-waving policemen. Keep the drapes shut, I reminded myself. Not being a big blues fan, I was unfamiliar with Beale Street, although T. knew about it because of a Joni Mitchell song. I stared in wonder at the various framed photos of the block at its jumpingest in the '40s, when the streets were full of hot young African-Americans in slick pressed suits and wiffley chiffon, and how much fun it looked like to be black and wild and a part of this glorious musical movement that all the white people were scared of. "If you were black for five minutes on Beale Street, you'd never want to be white again," the line went, and it seemed true enough. Then it hit me: Everything on Beale Street now was some kind of commemoration for the energy that happened there 50-some years ago; the place was a vacant shell, whose decorations betrayed a great longing for an animal that had long since crawled away. We decided to stop in one of the "quaintly unique" juke joints and get some gumbo. "What do the locals do around here?" I asked a sassy waitress. "Pills," she said. "Hm! What kind?" "Oh ... Lemon Drops, Quaaludes, Xanax. Whatever." "Will you be here later tonight?" I asked. T. slugged me in the leg. There are only three real tourist attractions in Memphis: Beale Street, where the King stole his sound from the Negroes, Graceland, where Elvis sucked his last breath after a bout of pill-addled late-night racquetball, and an exhibit based on the wreck of the Titanic at the Pyramid, Memphis' main convention center. There had to be an Elvis-Titanic connection we weren't yet aware of. The next day we went to Graceland. The 20th Deathiversary was pretty much business as usual at the Elvis morgue, only more so. We stumbled through hordes of stupefied fans, none of whom had anything interesting to say about their idol. Like Beale Street, it was empty -- the spirit was gone. All these chasuble-bearing pilgrims had come to Lourdes, and it was just a big rock. All the photographs of Elvis ever taken are at Graceland. Elvis was photographed an average of five times an hour his entire adult life, and all of them were represented there in one form or another, whether they were stenciled on a shot glass or nail clipper or spare-tire cover or ornamental plate. Elvis was, without doubt, one of the cutest 22-year-old boys who ever lived. He had the lightning-bolt ability to deliver the Joy -- like Michael Jackson used to have in his childhood. The Beast smothered both men, overstimulating them into frightful husks of self-abuse: Michael and the King and Elizabeth Taylor all saw their Godhood topple and became victims of the physical manifestations of their own inner lack. They fucked themselves up, since the world could do naught but love them. No wonder Lisa Marie felt so at home with Jacko. He's her DAD, regardless of the difference in testosterone levels. We began to realize that the Elvis parable was the Good Ol' Boy vs. the Beast of Fame, a truly Decent Boy sucked into a fiery hurricane of flashcubes and whipping sheets of cash, tempted by every earthly mistake that money could possibly buy. "I got the Titanic-Elvis connection," remarked T. "Elvis hit the iceberg of human frailty." Graceland boasts several attractions: the mansion itself, a car museum, the King's pet airplanes and a 21-minute film called "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," at the end of which Elvis, nearing the demise of his life and career, with sweaty mutton chops and hair festooning his porous, bloated head like seaweed, and a spangled Mayan calendar stretched over his deep-fried paunch, is shown singing "Glory Glory Hallelujah," with thunderously overwrought isometrics of Feeling, as girls and women weep hysterically, clutching at their chests, trying to peel their skin off to be nearer to the King. I couldn't understand how this superprofessionally tight Vegas-game-show-horn-section music was doing it for anybody that hard, but his power really impressed these ladies. There was no irony in their Elvis love. Even though at this point he was clearly Another Elvis, not the guy who went to the Army or married Priscilla or gleamed like sexual mercury on the black and white screen, but this unhappy fat Southerner, spaced out on Demerol, working overmuch to musically emote like your Ouzo-stricken Greek uncle at a wedding reception, the fans still loved him to the point of religious exhaustion, every sopping lyric, every fat American inch. On the last day of our Memphis visit we were the only two people in attendance at the 4:30 showing of the "secret" documentary film "Elvis: The Karate Years," by "filmmaker" and former karate pro Wayne Carman. It was shown on a pull-down screen in the middle of a dark bar called Hernando's Hideaway. The film mostly consisted of an interview with Carman, who had worked out with Elvis for three years during the period when Elvis didn't enjoy anything as much as downing a zodiac of pharmaceuticals and beating up his bodyguards. The soundless film (the cameraman was reportedly so star struck he forgot to turn the sound on during the recording) featured a very jittery King, in sunglasses and personalized karate kimono, lecture-demonstrating to a group of young karate disciples how to gouge out eyes, chop windpipes and step on the groins of their opponents. "He had great hands," said Wayne, who sat next to us through the showing, insisting that the headless man seated behind Elvis at the lecture was himself. Wayne had just finished a self-published book called "Elvis' Karate Legacy," which is due out as soon as he figures out which color he wants the cover to be. We tried to imagine what would have happened to Elvis had he not died 20 years ago, and agreed on the following. After a continuing downward trend of pill abuse and obesity, Elvis would have finally hit the breaking point when his fiancée, Ginger Alden, ran off with someone like Larry Hagman or a straight version of Wayne Newton. He would have found a health guru and, following a well-publicized blood-laundering in the Betty Ford Center (where he would have been visited and supported by all those politicians' wives with the same problem -- Kitty Dukakis, etc.), he would have embarked on a strict fitness and diet plan with a zeal unseen in him since the '50s, including an all-new fealty toward a headstrong Baptist Jesus, which would force him to loudly renounce his entire '70s persona. His confessional interview with Barbara Walters would have reached every home in America, and King Elvis would have been redeemed even more. He would have begun work on a new TV series, "Power Eagle, Spirit Cop," in which he played the kindly, half-Navajo sheriff of an Indian reservation, doling out American justice and earth-conscious common sense, never ceasing to be amazed at the wondrous patterns of natural life or the cruelty of men toward other men. "Thank you, Power Eagle, for rescuing my son from the landfill. I insist that you accept this magical beaded rain feather," the pretty, braided squaw would say. "Haw, shucks, Tipping Stork, you know I don't believe in all that old-timey injun stuff. I was just doin' mah job." A thunderbolt would crack over the teepee. All the Indians would laugh and laugh as Elvis walked out of the deerflap door into the sudden rain. Elvis would flash a trademark sneer and shuffle on his fringe jacket, jogging toward the truck.
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________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY JOHANNA GOODMAN |
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