Fools Rush In

Of course we went to Graceland.

I sang a medley of Elvis favorites (also at maximum volume) to get Petey and the still hung-over Derek in the mood, and we stopped on Elvis Presley Boulevard for a kingly brunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, and a small side order of lard. By the third helping I think Derek was really communing with the Big E’s burnin’ love.

I tell you, friends and neighbors, Graceland was like the United Nations, with people from all over the world and all walks of life: from blue-haired old ladies (“Elvis was a bad postured hooligan, if you ask me, but he did love his mother.”) to green-haired young punks (“I wanna see the toilet where he died. Do you think they flushed it?”). There were busloads of Japanese tourists with cameras, as per the stereotype, plus a carload of old drunks who see something amazing, think they’re hallucinating, and throw away the bottle. A number of minibike twins were also in evidence.

Instead of tour guides, they have cassette tapes of Priscilla Presley leading you through the house. It only heightened the quasi-religious atmosphere of the place to see everybody shuffling through the Jungle Room in complete silence, listening to their little walkmans. If you took your earphones off, you could hear a dozen out-of-synch Priscillas whispering, “I remember one time Elvis ate nothing but meatloaf… meatloaf… meatloaf… for six months straight… straight… straight…”A lot of people, including me, have already written about Graceland, and I know I’m not going to do it justice here. For a more complete examination of the Graceland experience, may I suggest the 3-D Viewmaster tour of Graceland, which I brought home to share the pilgrimage with friends and loved ones.

The Garden of Tranquility, final resting place of Elvis and his beloved Momma, and the Jungle Room, with its wall-to-wall to floor-to-ceiling green shag carpet get most of the press (oh, you laugh, but just imagine you’d died on the can in 1977 and your rec room was perfectly preserved ever after with all the decor you’d had then–who’s laughing now, “big wallpaper photo mural of the Earth as seen from the Moon” boy?), but for me, Graceland’s highlights were the little things:

• Elvis’ gun collection, including the silver and turquoise automatic he used to terminate his TV sets when Robert Goulet appeared on screen.
• His X-Files-esque license from some mysterious outfit called the Special Criminal Investigations Unit (and let me tell you, he looked like on bad investigatin’ mofo in his long hair, Nixon-esque jowls, and oversized purple shades).
• The walls around the outside of Graceland. They’re several blocks long, and every single stone is covered in graffiti messages to Elvis (“Aliens love Elvis,” “We came to see you but you were dead,” etc.) We tried to leave our own poignant tribute to the King, but the crappy Elvis pen we’d bought at his gift shop didn’t work in the heat.
• The “Sincerely Elvis” line of bowling shirts with built-in deodorant. Of course you could buy clothes with pictures of Elvis on them, but they also had this line of designer clothing “inspired by Elvis,” so that you could dress just the way Elvis did. The prices were a little too kingly for us peons, but I know all three of our heroes were sorely tempted by the black, fuchsia, and lime green bowling shirts that promised to bid score-robbing shoulder-bind adieu!