When Elvis was first cutting records in Memphis, back before pills and Colonel Parker really got their hooks into him, he used to shop at a black men’s clothing store on Beale Street. The store was owned by a black man, and the clothes were aimed at young jiveass black men: ruffled shirts in painful colors, wide-legged pants with glittery stripes, jackets decorated with a king’s ransom of rhinestones. Blue suede shoes.
No other white people ever shopped there. Elvis never forgot the fact that the owner had let him take clothes on credit back when his tastes outstripped the size of his wallet, and he patronized the store until it closed in 1968. Bought the owner a Cadillac, too.
Of course Elvis loved the clothes at this store, but there was another thing that fascinated him: an eight-foot albino python the owner kept in a tank near the shoe display. Elvis could never quite get it through his head that the snake wasn’t poisonous. “Looks just like a big ole worm,” he’d say. “But if it bit you you’d fall down dead in two seconds.”
“Naw, Elvis,” the owner kept telling him, “only way that snake could hurt you is to get ’round your neck and squeeeeeeeeeeze.”
Elvis never listened. Well, maybe he did just a little. He’d always had a taste for things that made him feel endangered without truly being dangerous, movies with plenty of blood and guts, books by men who’d traveled through deserts or to the North Pole and written down every awful detail, snakes that weren’t really poisonous but could still squeeze you to death.
After his momma died, though, Elvis no longer cared so much whether things just seemed dangerous. For years now he has been edging closer to real danger in ways he can still deny from day to day. Pounds, kilos of bacon. Peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches fried in butter. Dilaudids and Seconals and Nembutals and Placidyls and Quaaludes … the names themselves are soporific to him now, making the back of his brain seem to lubricate with anticipation, much as his mouth waters when he smells food.
There was never a time in his life when Elvis couldn’t get all the drugs he wanted. But sometimes even he has to level off a little in order to enjoy the next ride down. When that happens, when he begins to crave his handful of pills, the desire is like a big white snake moving slowly in his gut.
He loves the pills so much that the man who supplies them, Dr. Nick, was recently able to talk him into lending the Presley name—previously unsullied by product endorsement—to a chain of racquetball courts. Even in his fog, Elvis can see the pathetic humor in that idea, which fortunately never came to fruition. He loves the pills so much that once, when a doctor tried to talk him into cutting down, he threatened to go out and buy his own damn drugstore.
Onstage in Vegas in 1974, Elvis told his audience, “In this day and time you can’t even get sick—you’re strung out! Well, by God, I’ll tell you something, friends: I have never been strung out in my life except on music. When I got sick here in the hotel, from three different sources I heard I was strung out on heroin. I swear to God. Hotel employees, Jack! Bellboys! Freaks who carry your luggage! Maids! If I find, or hear, the individual that has said that about me—I’m gonna break your neck, you sonofabitch! That is dangerous, that is damaging to myself, to my little daughter, to my father, to my friends, to my doctor. I will pull your goddamn tongue out by the roots! Thank you very much.”
Then he sang “Hawaiian Wedding Song.”
These days Elvis spends most of his time in his bedroom and adjoining bath. When maids come in to clean these rooms, Elvis sits awkwardly in the chintz- and doll-filled chamber that is always kept ready for Lisa Marie’s visits. The maid has to open Lisa Marie’s windows afterward to get the lingering smell of him out of the pale pink room: a heavy smell of hair oil and sweat, for Elvis has a lifelong fear of water and hates to bathe. Often there is a faint chemical edge to his odor, the excess nostrums and toxins coming right out of his pores.
He is supposed to leave on tour tomorrow, twelve days, twelve shows without a night off. The list of cities alone would be enough to kill a lesser man: Utica, Syracuse, Hartford, Uniondale, Lexington. Fayetteville, Tennessee. And more. He doesn’t want to be anywhere but this bathroom. He’s told everybody he’s not going, but nobody believes him. The colonel says he can’t afford not to go, and the hell of it is that this is true: Elvis spends so much, and his money has been so poorly managed, that he’ll be broke within the year.
By the mid-seventies, the snarling voice that ripped through “Heartbreak Hotel” was gone, and there was only a touch left of the “Love Me Tender” croon. Now he has lost it all completely: no control of his breathing, a strain to hit the notes, a thick druggy glaze over the emotions that used to seethe just below the surface. He performs songs like “Unchained Melody,” songs he can just belt out from deep in his considerable gut. He talks to the audience, particularly when they are unresponsive, trying to win them over. He has given away thousands of dollars’ worth of diamond rings and guitars to strangers in Vegas nightclubs, just trying to rekindle that look of unconditional love he used to see in all their eyes.
It’s all Elvis has ever wanted, really, unconditional love from everybody in the world.
Sam Phillips had Elvis’s first Sun records pressed at Plastic Products, a vinyl plant and warehouse in a bleak part of Memphis. “That’s All Right” was pressed there, backed with “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Thousands of black circles dripping with sex, menace, and magic rolled out of Plastic Products and into the clamoring world. Today the building stands vacant and derelict, humpbacked like a giant barrel half-buried in cement, a footnote of corrugated steel behind high chain link.
When rattlesnakes convene for denning, they first form a bolus—a ball-shaped cluster, like a collection of rubber bands. Every member of the bolus keeps moving, the pulsing amalgam growing as more snakes arrive. One man peered into a cave and saw a bolus more than four feet thick. There are bigger claims, too, if you want to believe them.
Writer J. Frank Dobie reported the story of a hired man sent to bring in two grazing mules. The man’s boss heard a scream, then a fainter one. He found the body in a gully amid hundreds of rattlers. The snakes were forming a bolus. The man, who must have stepped into the gully without looking, was already dead.
—GORDON GRICE, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators
Elvis sleeps through the day (rising usually between four and eight P.M.) and cannot abide the least sliver of light, so his bedroom windows are shrouded in musty cloth. The bathroom, though, is a shag-carpeted chamber of light with a big black toilet, modular and low-slung, that Elvis privately thinks of as the Toilet of the Future. He spends a good bit of time leafing through girlie magazines on that padded throne, not masturbating—he hasn’t had a hard-on in months—but just looking. He’s sitting on the Toilet of the Future right now, reading not Penthouse or Cheri but a book about sexual astrology. Elvis is a Capricorn and supposedly likes to be aggressive. His worst quality is an inability to take no for an answer. And that used to be true, actually, back when anybody still dared to tell him no.
Right now the only thing telling him no is his own bowels. He’s been sitting here for hours, it feels like. Sometimes he has to take an enema or soak in a hot tub until his belly softens up. His digestive tract, slowed to a crawl by downers, cannot handle the massive amounts of soft processed food Elvis shovels into it each day.
He strains, feels something deep in his gut stirring but refusing to dislodge itself. And then the pain tightens around his heart and begins to squeeeeeze.
Elvis hopes there will be peace in the valley for him, but he fears there won’t be.
The colon is approximately five to seven feet in length in a person Elvis’s size and should have been about two inches in diameter. By [Shelby County M.E.’s investigator] Warlick’s estimate, however, Elvis’s colon was at least three and a half inches in diameter in some places and as large as four and a half to five inches … in others. As [pathologist] Florendo cut, he found that this megacolon was jampacked from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the tranverse colon. It was filled with white, chalklike fecal material. The impaction had the consistency of clay and seemed to defy Florendo’s efforts with the scissors to cut it out.
—CHARLES C. THOMPSON II AND JAMES P. COLE,
The Death of Elvis
Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.
—H. P. LOVECRAFT, Supernatural Horror in Literature