Angie Carter

Our Silver Anniversary

Before Elvis, there was nothing.
—John Lennon

1.
August 16, 1977: I’m just a sparkle in my daddy’s eye, just a want in my momma’s heart. “An era has ended,” reports Mississippi’s Meridian Star.
What era? my parents wonder. They’ve just begun their lives together. Thoughts of me begin.
One year later, on the first anniversary of Elvis’s death, my mom sits swollen on the basement couch. The newscasts replay footage, providing special reports on Elvis’s rise to fame and then last year’s death. She mutters about the lack of programs, already impatient with the humidity, the August heat, the waiting.
I’ll be born late. I stretch fingers and feet against all the warmth and just want to stay inside that safe place, listening to the sweet velvety voice sing about temperatures rising higher and higher.
Why didn’t he wait one more year, hold on that much longer? Skipping out at an early 42. The era ending a year too early, before I could even take part, before I could tell him about our love. This slip of cosmic space catches us—him sliding out on a bathroom floor, me pushed into a hospital room.

2.
1945. A sticky day at Tupelo’s Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Here’s an effeminate boy in chaps and a too-big cowboy hat singing a song to Ole Shep, that faithful friend of a dog. Back home, a two-room shack and soon-dreams of the Grand Ole Opry. Here, in front of that chattering crowd, he stands ten years old and feels the mosquitoes bite, smells the livestock’s sour heat, looks for Mama clapping from the far right of the stage, sees a shadow behind her.
His mama tells him that when one twin dies, as his twin, Jesse Garon, did, the other gains the strength of both. She hopes this will inspire confidence, but instead it inspires fear. Jesse follows him always, hovers there.
Prove it, Jesse likes to say. I’m trying, I am, Elvis thinks. At eleven he takes a new guitar and starts a song that he’ll play again and again, shaping it into something of his own. When his family moves from Tupelo to Memphis, Tennessee, he knows somehow he’s closer.
Stroll down the Halleluiahs of Beale Street on a Sunday. See him, now thirteen and shoes too small, carefully stepping over the cracks of the sidewalk. Hear the twang of a country song drifting in the air. Listen to the blues spilling into the streets. So thirsty he soaks it up and never gets enough.
And sometime during the in-between he grows up, wants more. On a free afternoon in 1953 he decides to record his mama a birthday song. I don’t sound like nobody, he realizes, dropping his cash on the receptionist’s desk at Sun Studios. Here, with Sam Phillips as his producer, he’ll record his first singles: “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Baby Let’s Play House,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
Elvis realizes his dream in 1954 when he plays the Grand Ole Opry. But Bill Monroe hates his version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and the audience isn’t moving, yet.
Twelve months later the audience is more appreciative. How’d those hands feel? Stripping him of his clothes after the Jacksonville show. Did they scratch, leave raised red trails up and down his arms and back? The next morning, in the church downtown, a girl rubs the torn edge of Elvis’s sleeve between her thumb and forefinger as the reverend prays for Elvis’s soul. She’s already inhaled the sweaty dampness of his arm several times during the prayers before she faints with the realization that his body is real.
“The spirit of Presleyism has taken down all morals!” shouts an angry Rev. Carl E. Elgena of Des Moines in 1956. Less than fifty miles away my parents, only toddlers, kick their respective church pews and wait for the service to end. That same year Elvis arrives in Shreveport, Louisiana already a star. At the Louisiana Hayride he proclaims himself a mighty man and lets his hips freely navigate the space of the stage. Here the roar of girls’ screams starts and doesn’t stop for years and years. Growing louder, the sound forces its way up the Mississippi and across the plains and the cornfields, waiting to be reborn.
It’s been said it took centuries for the human race to forget that hip shaking dance, but only a minute for Elvis to remind us of it. “Some people tap their feet, some people snap their fingers, and some people sway back and forth. I just sorta do ‘em all together, I guess,” he offers as explanation. Ed Sullivan thought he could hold him back, filming him from the waist up. A failed attempt to save innocent eyes. Lord be! My grandparents scramble from sofas to change the channel, but already the children have leaned in closer and will never forget. All the more steamy, imagining those gyrating hips shaking there, moving, mine.

3.
First sight: As a child I first see him on that commercial for the commemorative Jailhouse Rock plate, all those boys in tight black pants swinging down poles in the jail. Elvis prances and shakes across the stage in his black and white stripes, urging me to join him in a jailhouse romp.
I forget all about him until I’m fourteen and at home with a bad flu. All afternoon TBS plays the Elvis marathon: Viva Las Vegas, King Creole, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, G.I. Blues, Blue Hawaii, Clambake. My fever steadies around 100, but my dreams begin: over and over again, Elvis dances a dance, sings a song, and leans in to kiss Ann-Margaret. By the time he’s left Las Vegas and gone to the clambake, I’m right there with him. That girl he leans in to kiss is me.
Introductions: A spring semester at college I enroll in an Elvis course offered through the African-American Studies Department and taught by a renowned Elvis scholar. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, I watch films and TV appearances, listen to his songs. The result: a 42-page critical study of Elvis’s recent resurrection in fictional works. My only ever A-plus. We begin the semester discussing young Elvis, pre-1968 Comeback Special, and end with Dead Elvis. My Elvis love begins with the scrawny sweet-voiced singer of “Loving You,” grows to embrace the larger, older superstar belting out “Suspicious Minds,” leaves me with this ghost, the realization that Elvis is everything and everything is Elvis. The twang of Bill Monroe, the growl of Big Mama Thornton, the blues of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Not only in Las Vegas wedding chapels, but in Alice Walker’s short stories, Japanese films, Sonic Youth’s lyrics, my heart.
Our First Date: Sunday, October 13, 2002, at the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix. Elvis—The Concert! World Tour. My limited edition soundtrack the 12,735th of 15,000. Elvis is in the building, projected three stories tall on screens behind the original Sweet Inspirations and the old Taking Care of Business band from his Vegas days. Some clips are painful, the mumble of words, that double chin filling the screen. Up here in the balcony I’m staring straight at his face. His eyeballs. The pupils of his eyes! So large I could stand right up in them.
“Elvis has left the building,” the bass player announces to our applause. I drive home through the dark desert realizing that I will never see the real Elvis in concert, never catch the sweaty scarf or stroke those shoes. “Heartbreak Hotel” plays from my car stereo, now prophetic, as if he knew I would be here, this night, missing him. That night in my dream we dance, he in his Thunderbird suit with two of the four front chest chains torn. Sweaty. Eyes sunken. But when he smiles, oh when he smiles. It’s him! The huskiness of his voice when he says my name. The line of his nose perfect, his high cheekbones perfect, his white teeth perfect. Who’d I take to a deserted island? You, Elvis, you. What do I want? Just to have you sing Ah, now honey and to know you mean me.
First Jealousy: On That’s the Way It Is, a documentary of his Vegas shows, he sings “Loving You” (the slow version) and leans over the stage to kiss the women. I count sixteen kisses, the longest lasting fifteen seconds. I replay it, again and again, his lips and her lips and what looks to be one hell of a kiss before he sings that he’ll be faithful, he’ll be true. My stomach sinks. All those women. How many? I can never know.
Our Song: He sings “Can’t Help Falling in Love” from the 1968 Comeback Special and here it is, I know, his message to me. Hair a mess, sweat running down his neck, the tight black leather suit. On his first tour to the Pacific Northwest back in 1957, he told an interviewer that he didn’t know if rock and roll had a future, but it was sure fun for now. Here he’s grown to be a man, and after this show he must know that the power of those first hip shakes will continue to reverberate through the world, through time. Goosebumps across my skin, a shiver. Warm tears stream down my cheeks, his kisses. Some things are meant to be. I know that he knows, that in some other dimension he’s thinking of me, of our future.
Heartaches: I hear “Trying to Get to You” and I know it’s really a song to his brother, the only one who might have understood him. And Jesse, if he’d lived, where would he have stood in those shadows? Would we choose between them as they fight on the stage for the most screams, snarling in sync, wearing their matching jumpsuits? In “Blue Moon,” Elvis coos him to sleep. Jesse’s death is the long black train of “Mystery Train,” the reason Elvis repeats “Train, Train” twice in the chorus. Jesse follows him to Hollywood as Elvis’s character’s twin in Double Trouble, as Elvis’s blonde counterpart in Kissing Cousins. Elvis thinks of Jesse’s body in that shoebox, buried in an unmarked grave in the Tupelo community cemetery, but never can find the grave, never find him. Elvis, honey, I know the world couldn’t have handled two. I just want you to hear me, wherever you are: it was enough just handling you.

4.
If I had to pick only one it might be “One Night of Sin,” or “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” but most likely it’d be “Trying to Get to You.” All three are songs that his audience and band often requested he “play dirty.” It’s the dirty versions that I like, and the loud, slow, acoustic outtake of the 1968 Comeback Special is my preferred version of this song. It goes something like this: Elvis starts slow, a band member hollers and whoops. A growl, then a howl, as the straight “I’ve” blows up into wide-open “Ahh’ve” and he begins the description of his journey over mountains and through valleys trying to get to me. “One more time!” they holler in the back, “Do it again,” and here he goes, moaning. He teases, waits, almost stops. “One more time!” they call once more. The band begins to slow it back down, before he commands “One more time!” over and over before the music picks back up again. “Ahhhh—ya!” someone hollers. All the miles don’t mean a thing, he assures. On this take there aren’t any screaming fans, just Elvis and the band making all that noise. The words never matter as much as how he sings them, the way his voice moves with the music, so that it buzzes in my bones, hums in my hips, leaves me out of breath just for listening.

5.
Graceland looms. On a business trip to Memphis, my grandfather drags my mother along, trying to keep up with my aunt running down the sidewalk toward the home of her love. Posters, teddy bears, underwear, cards, perfume bottles, and flowers litter the ground by the gates. Peering in, my aunt tries to see a Cadillac or maybe Priscilla pushing little Lisa Marie in a stroller. She crouches behind my grandparents who are busy arguing with my whiny mother and carefully uses a nail file to dig up a 4” by 4” square of Graceland’s new grass sod. Secured in her purse, this patch of grass travels to its new home, takes root in a front yard despite my mother’s threats to feed it to the horses. My aunt and her cousins play Elvis records and take turns dancing in front of the full-length mirror, my mother watching from the hallway.
50 Million Fans Can’t Be Wrong! turns on my player today, and I feel what it would have been like in their skin, their flipped hair-dos and new support bras and slumber parties, Elvis still so very young and alive. Who, other than Elvis, can say they have Graceland Grass growing in their yard? The Lanphier family in Newton, Iowa, could have made such a claim. Who lives there now? Do they even know? I go back to find a square of holy grass in a just-mown yard but it all looks the same. The 60s ranch looks like the one next door. Maybe I have the wrong house, but then I notice a rebellious patch along the mailbox. I run my hand through some grass the mower missed, imagining you might have stepped here once thousands of miles away.

6.
Twenty years later in Vegas, Elvis still doesn’t forgive Sullivan for that TV show. “Thought they could keep it in, save you all from these weak knees!” he laughs before breaking into a dirty and loud version of “Hound Dog” to set the record straight.
The FBI clips out an article entitled, “Elvis Faces Wiggle Ban” from a Louisville, Kentucky paper. Documents this along with the prank calls, extortion and kidnapping attempts, paternity suits, complaints of immoral behavior and “exotic dress,” letters from mothers concerned about Elvis spreading like a venereal disease among their children. Bodyguards show up for the shows in Vegas. A postcard from Hunstville, Alabama, dated January 10, 1964 threatens to kill Elvis first, Johnny Cash second, Tommy Moese third, President Johnson fourth, George Wallace fifth.
Already the summer of 1973 foreshadows the darkness of his future. I love my fans, Elvis always says, and he means it. Aloha, Hawaii! Tonight he plays for a worldwide telecast, and tomorrow he’ll sleep for 24 hours straight before the Colonel wakes him, rushes him to another show.
I watch the scene on my special edition DVD, worried Elvis will fall over. His thighs are as big as my calves. Twenty pounds shed in two weeks for this show. His body in profile stands skinnier than it was twenty years ago when he sang at the Louisiana Hayride, yet his double chins fill the screen. Did the 1.5 million who tuned in worry, or were they glad to see their star? Did they wonder, as I do, if it’s my fault? Elvis sings that the Lord gave him a mountain he may never climb, and I can’t help but wonder if that mountain is really the fans’ love, my love, Elvis’s love for us. In the crowd women cry and lighters flicker. Who let him take it this far? You should be in bed, I think, not filming this special that sings to me thirty years later. His mama’s dead, distant relatives show up at his door now, the Colonel makes deals Elvis doesn’t know about, Dr. Nich fixes concoctions to keep him singing on stage longer. We love you! the fans scream and I think. And so he kisses, he hugs, he sings one more song. He grew up with them, they grew up with Elvis, and the reciprocation of this love grows larger, stronger. You can’t control what you love.
His image isn’t copyrighted yet; there is no Elvis Presley Enterprises managing and marketing him, just Colonel Tom. No trademark for the “Taking Care of Business” lightning bolt. No tickets for touring Graceland. This is the jungle room on the left, notice the theme of leopard and zebra printed furniture. No catalog, no Elvis-themed weekend specials through TWA to Memphis. It’ll be awhile yet before Dead Elvis makes more money than the living Elvis ever dreamed of making.
Fame like a wave he rolls on, buying Cadillacs for his friends, a new house for his parents. He names his private plane the Lisa Marie. It doesn’t seem there can be enough. And then the rumors start, he collapses at shows and goes to the hospital for “recuperation.” He’s afraid to get out of bed in the morning, scared to go to sleep, unable to sleep alone. He misses his mama, maybe he misses his wife. He just can’t believe that all of this is because of him.
He begins to close his shows with what will be, in five years, the last song: Sinatra’s “My Way.” In Pontiac, Michigan, in front of 62,000, Elvis busts the seams of his jumpsuit.
His way out was more disappointing than how our stars used to do it. No overdose in bed, a bare body tangled in sheets. No sleek car crash, blood on the pavement. Over and over Elvis resurrected himself: comebacks and TV specials beamed by satellite across the globe, weight gain and weight loss, new suits and new songs. This night he can’t sleep, and so goes to read The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus in the bathroom so as not to wake Ginger sleeping in his bed. Linoleum or tile? The light on or off? Piles of dirty towels? We won’t know. The book falls to the floor.

7.
My first year on this earth ends with accusations.

Geraldo Rivera of ABC’s 20/20 interviews Dr. Nichopoulos on September 6, 1979:
Rivera: The records we have, Doctor—and I say this as gently as I possibly can—indicate that from January 20, 1977, until August 16, 1977, the day he died, you prescribed to Elvis Presley, and the prescriptions were all signed by you—over five thousand Schedule Two narcotics and/or amphetamines. That comes out to something like 25 per day.
Dr. Nichopoulos: I don’t believe that.
Dr. Nichopoulos’s license was suspended for ninety days and he was placed on three months probation after the interview. Later, a fourteen-count indictment charging him with unlawful dispensing of controlled substances was filed by a Shelby County grand jury. Should I blame him? Blame Colonel Tom for hiring him? But blame will not resurrect my King. The questions began too late. If only, somehow, I could have arrived here earlier...reached him earlier. To warn him. To let him know our worry, our anger.

8.
Think about the beaches of Normandy and the American invasion as a new thing. Coca-Cola and chewing gum and Marilyn Monroe’s milky cleavage across the big screen. Think Communism is our greatest evil, Martin Luther King has not marched, the Kennedys have not won our hearts, Marlon Brando is a new rebel. Money in your pocket burns to buy a record.
See that boy, with the pimples and the pomade clumpy in his hair, wearing the too-new clothes (creases still in them from the store shelves). He waves that mic like a scepter across the stage, urges the audience to shake, promises them he’ll do anything they want to do. The women melt to the floor as he moans and calls them honey. Those shoes, those shoes, those shoes.
The audience yelping and hollering, hungry, knees weak. Like the black bluesmen singing their songs. Like the evangelical minister spinning and jumping with the spirit. All the same force, the same pulse. His eyes cross, he flashes a smile and lets go with that voice. Feel the rhythm’s throb through the air. This isn’t a fox trot, not a gentle sway in the Methodist church basement. This is a dangerous itch someplace new. Bring in the police to supervise the show. Make sure he keeps those hips still, that they keep their clothes on. All hell’s broke loose. Sin and evil spitting upon our youth! Revolution on the way.

9.
Was it really the aliens that took you, like the papers say? I know better, sure I do. Flip through the tabloids anyway. I like to know where they might think you are: golf courses, Texaco stations, Burger Kings, hiding out in Italy (I doubt that!), buying some jeans at JC Penney, cruising down a deserted highway. February 4, 2003 had you at a Baines, South Dakota playground. Before that, you worked at a McDonald’s in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The believing just feels too good to stop. I know but don’t accept that you aren’t something I can see, except in retrospect. I hope that it was your body in that casket, that you did get some rest, that you are up in heaven with your mama and your little brother, but I do like thinking of your face on Mars. Your snarl, that lip, an imprint in the history of the universe.

10.
Vernon Chadwick: organized the first International Conference on Elvis in 1995 while a professor at the University of Mississippi, gave a discussion on the connection between Melville’s Polynesian novels and Elvis’s Hawaii movies, questioned the barriers between native and civilized man, edits In Search of Elvis, didn’t get tenure, still searching.
Beeny: runs the Elvis Is Alive museum near Wright City, Missouri, created as a shrine in 1991 to house the proof that Elvis lives. Not always a believer, Beeny fills the museum with the results of his independent investigations and his personal realization that Elvis is alive. The proof: a DNA test comparing an Elvis DNA sample purchased from a Memphis doctor and a DNA sample from the liver of the man buried in Elvis’ grave, results not matching. All this for no admission charge, because unlike Elvis Presley Estates, Beeny wishes to share and spread the truth, rather than make a profit.
Joni Mabe: earned from the University of Georgia what would be the first M.F.A. in visual arts with Elvis as its subject. Selections from the 30,000 artifacts and artistic creations from Joni Mabe’s Traveling Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis: Elvis whiskey decanters, Elvis bedroom slippers, Elvis prayer rug, Elvis hair, Angel Elvis (with love handles), toenail found in the shag carpet of the Jungle Room at Graceland in 1983, wart removed from Elvis’s wrist in 1957 or 1958, one vial of Elvis sweat, “Smelvis—Cow Paddy in shape of Elvis,” Elvis fan dresses, Elvis mosaics, an Elvis Button Coat (covered in 3,000 buttons that she made with her button maker and weighing over thirty pounds), a Hillbilly Cat Wood Plaque made out of walnut, a replica gold lamé jacket, her Elvis Customized Moody Blue Dress that says “Elvis I love you” across its back, an Elvis doll made from a milk carton, and an Elvis car tire shrine. Instructions for her “Official Elvis Prayer Rug”: take the rug into the bathroom at night, lay it down with the Elvis side up, look into his eyes, kneel, ask Elvis for healing of back pain/arthritis/other minor ailment, repeat for forty days and forty nights, finish by sending Joni forty dollars and your prayers will be answered!
The Rev. Howard Finster: folk artist from Georgia, “Man of Visions,” experienced first heavenly vision at the age of three, painted sermons after receiving a vision at sixty instructing him to dedicate his life to sacred art, believed Elvis was a God-sent messenger. Finster’s work includes sculpture gardens, woodcarvings, silk screens, Coca-Cola bottle sculptures, and paintings that concern themselves with prophecy, the gates of Heaven, Biblical stories. His series of Elvis album cover paintings promote Elvis as a symbol of fertility, a prophet promoting sexual activity so that the human civilization might continue.
Canadian Dorian Arthur Baxter: Anglican minister, started impersonating the King in the 80s, goes by “Elvis Priestly,” dresses in Anglican robes and wears his hair like Elvis, says he first heard the word of God in Elvis’s gospel songs.
Pelvis Lesley, the lesbian impersonator; El Vez, the “Elvis interpreter;” and The Flying Elvi, a group of skydivers.
And finally, Shirley, from “Anywhere, U.S.A.,” who posted the following on an Elvis sightings website: “With all the impersonators running around and making jokes about seeing Elvis, I would just like to know that he is okay and alive. I see him in my mind and heart everyday and that keeps him alive to me, at any time and any place.”

11.
When I hear Are You Lonesome Tonight? even feeling sad feels okay. People wonder how I can love you so when I was born so late, and I tell them that it’s possible to know someone through their story, their echo, their song.
I acknowledge the divorce and the guns, the weight problems and the drugs, but embrace you for those failings. Just as your sexuality and youth caused riots throughout the concert halls of the South and couldn’t be contained in that box on the Ed Sullivan show, so your loneliness and fatigue filled the stage in Vegas and echoed from your Moody Blue album. The entire world resurrects you over and over, again and again, and in all your many variations and evolutions of self—postage stamps to a newly remixed version of “A Little Less Conversation” to a supposed hideout in Wales where many believe you cruise the countryside—you still mesmerize.

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