I can still remember when we decided to go for it. It was me, Larry Ruegert and Bobby Dawson.
Bobby had always been the coolest of the trio, and that morning he showed us how far he could push himself when he grabbed a real gun from under the cushions me and Larry were sitting on.
Hey! Let's do it guys, I can't fuckin' stand it anymore I swear.
Do what?
I was the only one who didn't know what he was up to, Larry knew, of course, he'd always been the long bridge that separated me and Bobby. Silent and compliant as always, nodding affirmatively while we talked he would never look at me and I suppose he was still in the High School corridor from where Bobby had recruited him as his help, or servant, or help/servant looser to give you a nice picture.
Bobby made his point by giving one punch on the TV set, and The King appeared, Tupelo concert, 1957, goldsuit. I couldn't hear any sound and it must have been planned by Bobby.
I know that you wanna hear it buddy but you won't...
He was getting into my nerves, what was on his mind now for crying out loud? Couldn't he just get to it? Let's cut to the chase Bob, what's the idea, what is it? And I can't even ask Larry cause he don't talk!
Larry looked at me and then at the hair on my arm that stood up as wire strings every time I would see Elvis doing his show. I've always been his hound dog, so to speak, and watching him on mute tortured me. You know what? I can go home and watch it anytime I want guys, what kind of farce is this?
This ain't just you goin' home and jerkin' off thinking 'bout The King, I mean we all do, we know what he meant to us, right Larry?
Yep.
I'm thinking big right now buddy - Bobby kept yelling at me - and I know how much you hate all those posers who try to be him. Jesus... try, just the idea of it makes me wanna puke bud...
You talkin' about impersonators? I asked him out of idle curiosity, and of course he was, that's why the gun. Was he fuckin' mad? I stood up, I really wanted to help him.
Bob, listen... You alright?
Oh c'mon... if you put it like that it seems we're talkin' about a profession here, and it's not, you know it and I know it.
Are you alright bob...?
Yeah! Why?
Bob? Do you want to kill those posers you're talking about?
Kill'em?
Yes Bob, kill them...
Git outta here man! C'mon... I just want to scare those motherfuckers, they need to pay for what they do anyway doncha think?
By that time I really believed it wasn't a bad idea, and that one wasn't a real gun guys. Well, first look I thought it was but Bobby told us it was just an air pistol, that's it. Plus we all needed to take some rest from fucking Dallas. Here I never felt I was in Texas for real, with all those Mercedes with their soft-farting motors and their black paint, so dull, roaming around like big roaches looking for a slice of bread to spawn and feed more roaches. People weren't any better either, a big bunch of white collars walking toward you like real heroes and ending up alone in their condos every night.
Bobby was waiting for me to get red, he was already boiling though, I could feel he wanted to go for it, and I presumed his real idea was to get crazy and have a laugh, but I was wrong, dead wrong.
If I was a traditional Elvis fan, Bobby was somebody who had fallen in love with the wildcat lifestyle of the 50s. Pomp cut, black boots and jeans jacket, our little Fonz, even if never that deep. As for Larry, I reckon you could say that he was happy enough if me and Bobby kept repeating "we" more often, in fact he would smile like a kid at that word. Thing was Larry didn't have friends and he had just got into a bad deal with us two, but he seemed not to notice, if he had been smart Bobby would have left him where he found him, he just needed a stoolie. But like many things I thought I knew better, even Larry was to be considered again as an individual, and with him Bobby and me, all the trio driving my mum's station wagon, heading Vegas on that summer.
Vegas
It took us four days and three nights to get to the Entertainment Capital of the World, to Las Vegas. Here we got to know everything about Elvis posers. Bobby stopped by a church made of timber, blue and red neon lights all over the roof. It was "The King's Church". Bobby drew out his gun and went in. Nothing in there but a big golden book on a wooden tripod. Page seven guys! Bobby shouted, we got all types of Elvis goddamn impersonators! And he read them all, fast, as if they belonged to a big list of rat subspecies: Look-alikes, Sound-alikes, Combinations, Professionals, Amateur, Fun-comedy...
All of a sudden a big bald man, maybe the priest of that church-museum, spoke with us: "There are also heavily – bearded Elvis as well, and four-year-old Elvis, and Elvis duos, Italian, Greek, Jewish Elvis, fat Elvis, lady Elvis and even a black Elvis. We got them all!
Bobby looked at the illustrations of that book, and then, the buster he was, he gave the bald man one of his looks: Say pal? What's with these pages in your book here? Do you need them? The man replied after a while, first he touched his balls and then he waved his finger in the air. Do you hear this? He asked Bobby, me and shy Larry.
What? Went Bob.
This. Can you hear it? The bald man said quietly reaching a cigarette with his fat lips.
We heard the Vegas noise, low and endless: traffic horns, recorded voices from casino attractions, laughters, roaring horse-powers, everything, the chaos. The crazy chaos of the world we live in, the man said. This is why I got all those Elvis surrogates in my book. I like people to know they exist to cope with them. I don't really care if they walk the streets of this town or the red carpets of the casinos, I'm a student, I've studied Elvis all my life, I learn things and get pleasure from them, I don't really judge them boys.
Bobby started shaking his head while saying "no man has the right to, no man has the right to..." He could have been one of those preachers defending the only and real interpretation of God, theirs, maybe Larry's of course, but not mine, I was more like that bald student I suppose.
No man has the right to impersonate him, you see what I'm saying you stupid fat fuck?
Hey! Sad the man showing his palms to Bobby's pistol. I tried to grab its plastic barrel but he grabbed my hand fast. No, no don't try to fucking calm me down dude! I can't hear this pussy shit!
And he shot him on the big belly and we ran, crazy. We mounted up on the car and they laughed for fifteen minutes. Only when Bobby noticed I was sitting serious in the back he went all proud, c'mon man... Did you forget what we came to do here?
The bald Elvis student had shat in his pants. It was just a plastic bullet, nothing lethal. I laughed mildly and Bobby smiled on the rear-view mirror, we were on holidays after all and even Larry gave us a killer smile.
We pulled over by a big casino, his late chubby face was frowning on a big yellow sign. Viva Elvis by Cirque du Soleil shined up there beyond the the jets of water rising up from a gigantic fountain. What we could do was to listen to a nice recorded show, no clowns, no posers, just Elvis voice and six glasses of nice Three Olives Vodka each, toasting to "only the good die young", muttering drunk as hell Are You Lonesome Tonight.
On the second day we split up getting lost in the city. Bobby went to play craps at the Sahara hotel while Larry disappeared in a mall with at least fifty different shops in it. That night, that turned out to be the last one in Vegas, we didn't see no fakes in the street except for one sneaking into a garage of some residential area.
Bobby and I ran after him like two snails, tripping over somebody's lawn, we were too mellow to get that Elvis. Larry appeared behind our backs holding Bobby's pistol. He aimed at the poser but he got away too fast, the alarm rang all around the property and we got out of there.
While driving to the motel Bobby fell asleep and I kept looking at Larry's eyes on the rear-view. His gaze was lost outside the window, and imperturbable as ever he was checking the bits of the sandy horizon popping out of the streets on the right side. That day the temperature in the Mojave desert had a record high of fifty-two degrees, but at night a cool breeze blew into the city and all outside its perimeter. I chose to drive somewhere else. I was a bit sick of all those crazy lights and all those fake pyramids and monuments, luxury brothels, electronic croupiers, tourists and fucking black Mercedes roaming around just like in Dallas. Vegas didn't exist anymore and I reckon that too much concrete had been poured on that small oasis you drove into after miles and miles of warm nowhere. But, as I like to repeat, that cool breeze affected my negativity and made me smile from happiness for all the laughs we had and the idea of a journey with an uncertain destination.
On that track of thoughts, ready to consider how chasing Elvis posers was fun - and we didn't see too many of them around – a pink 1954 Cadillac coupe De Ville passed us on the 515 headed east.
I sped up to sixty miles per hour and reached the big shiny car thinking if that one was the most complete version of him ever. Well, through that polished glass window I saw a loner, one man driving somewhere east. He was a poser alright, he had the 1973 white jumpsuit on and long pomp cut. He didn't look at me when I lowered the passenger's side window nor when I shouted at him "hey you!". he just kept looking straight at the dark road ahead. But I wanted more, I had found my own chicken to pluck. Hey man! Do you make a living out of it??
Finally he turned to me and said "yes" without talking, he had told me that with his eyes only and then he reached for his radio and put on 1977 "My Way", King's version of Sinatra's hit. At that point my nerves started burning. A job? What The King did was to be remembered for money and not for the glory of it? Yeah, those posers were just a bunch of bums with no respect for themselves. Shame on them. All those things! A pink Cadillac for Chrissake! I don't know, maybe because I was still tipsy, I decided to wake up Bobby and to unleash him against that clown. The first thing he said when he saw him was "the fuck!", and he went to the front seat where he shouted "hey, pull over motherfucker!". When he started waving his pistol that guy made his move and left us behind with all his three hundred and forty horsepower rumbling away in the dark desert.
**
We followed that poser for more than a week through three different states. We lost him in Arkanso, at twenty miles west from Little Rock. We had been good at not losing him before and the few times we did he returned to us almost by accident: late at night in a bar drinking beer or in one of those mornings when we woke up early and saw his car parked in the same motel. I could have bet that we were chasing him, but fate was chasing us. When I got the chance to hold my look on his eyes I thought that man was kind of shy and didn't like company. But how was this possible him being a poser? it was his job wasn't it? Elvis was an entertainer, the entertainer, and a lousy poser should imitate that too right?
We fell asleep in the last of the thousand motels behind a town unknown. That night I closed my eyes and dreamed of that man singing "My Way" and saying "yes" with his eyes while driving his Cadillac side by side in the dark: For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself than he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!
And I thought about him, sweaty and double-chinned, donating to people that last tribute to an era he himself had started and that we thought it was never over until he was dead. But he was found unresponsive on his bathroom floor at the age of forty-two. Me? My father had found me crying in my bedroom. I was sixteen years old and I think I grew up altogether since then.
Elvis would get his drugs and the damned Demerol from his doctor so that he wouldn't feel like a street junkie. When I first got to know about his drug abuse I thought it was alright with the fact him being a rockstar, especially because of what we were used to seeing in the seventies. Years later I started to read about him and all the evidence of his evenings when he couldn't sing and move the way he used to anymore, of when he would stay on stage for less than one hour and it was impossible to understand what he was saying. I remember that I had a theory back then and it's kind of the same even today, only much stronger: what had happened was to be explained by putting all the blame on society, on the unbridled consumerism of an image, another drug that had been abused by the market at the expense of a man who no longer had the strength to keep up with it. Moneymakers had been coping with a deluded talent by feeding him drugs, so that he could enjoy the company of a public that at the end of the day made him feel even more lonely and out of a world that success had always denied him. For these considerations I couldn't help hating those posers, and during that trip I felt more convinced of this: they were a posthumous resurgence of the evil that had killed him, I knew it for a fact, and for the same reason we had to make their lives harder.
**
Tupelo
Elvisceration, that's what me and my friends were into. As you would read in any American dictionary up to date: "to eliminate any or all Elvis impersonators". Even if I knew that Bobby would have enjoyed such a harsh expression for me it meant only "to take care of Elvis posers", and as we all agreed as three domesticated lynxes in a diner down in Memphis, everything had to be done according to a plan that had found us all on the same side in the end. As usual the compromise was between me and Bobby, while Larry was distracted on his milkshake and on something unpredictable for both of us. The arrogance of the best fake that I had ever seen was to be punished with a collection of three tools in a room of our private use: a chair, a rope ( or any other material that would serve to tie him up properly ) and seven or eight bottles of Memphis whiskey, Elvis favorite, with no cola (important). After we had been following him for so many days we had learned where we could find him again. Come to a new town his habits were to buy cigarettes to the first shop, going to the movies – Paramount when there were any - the day before continuing his journey, and dine on the hood of his coupe parked in a motel usually halfway to his new destination.
That night we drove behind his tail for five hours in a row. The son-of-a-bitch was heading for Elvis birthplace, Tupelo Mississippi, around midnight and on a very rainy night. He stopped at a motel, got himself a room where he stayed for a couple of hours, and then he got in the car to drive into the city. I wanted to sleep for three days when I waited so long for him to reappear behind the corner between Reese Street and Elvis Presley Drive. I was furious, gripped by a protective instinct towards the house where he was born sixty-three years ago, right over there, a sanctuary that was to remain pure and clean of those abscesses of a civilization rotten to the bone. When I heard the heavy rumble of his coupe approaching from the opposite lane I held the hard rope in my fist and my eyelids began to vibrate with anger. I woke up Bobby who had been snoring with his head resting on the dashboard. "What...", he went, and I lifted my chin to make him look at those headlights turn off in front of "I can't fucking believe it Bob!", that's him? he mumbled, Affirmative, and that's Elvis house!, Oh... fuck!, Bobby didn't even know where that was.
"Let's get him, what are we waiting for?"
At that invitation even Larry opened his eyes and in the rear-view mirror they seemed to me calmer than ever that I felt the need to hear him speak for once. "Bobby, you ok? You wanna stay in the car?" He said "no" and then he returned on that tall dark shape that was now crossing to the other side of the street rather than enter that sacred property. There was a house with planks of wood painted black, perhaps as old as the one in front, but less simple and somehow gloomy. The man looked around and took from his pocket a bunch of keys hanging on a key-chain in the shape of a large chrome guitar. Even Elvis didn't go that far. We left the car once we could sure bet that he had closed the door behind him. Bobby sniffed the air to make clear that he was a dangerous beast that needed violence, than he pulled up his jeans collar and gave me a smile full of wrinkles like a real 50s badass. Grab the stuff ok? He told Larry who had just dropped a bottle of whiskey on the asphalt so that Bobby had to go there and give him two slaps on the head. I walked to the entrance of the birthplace and museum and remembered when I had set foot there in seventy-eight for the first time. In that year it had seemed like every house of a poor family, but the time without him had made it the best home that an American could ever choose for himself.
What about the other house in front of it? That guy was able to buy a property in one of the most expensive streets in America? And if so why the hell was he a copycat? And weren't them all imitators penniless? I turned and looked up, the tiny King's home on my back. Now there was a window on the first floor, right in the middle of that sloping roof facing the street. The dark beyond it hypnotized me until a light was turned on in there. Bobby and Larry joined me at that moment making a big mess. I told them to shut up. The shadow of the guy paused up there a little bit. He must have seen us for sure but he didn't disappear, he left the light on and stood looking at us in silence for a few minutes. Then Bobby shouted at him: "hey why don't you come down and open the door, we wanna talk to you ok??" The man opened the window, he had long hair that covered half of his face and seemed to be eating a yogurt with a teaspoon.
What do you want? He asked in a low voice, but we heard him alright as if we were up there in the room with him. "We want to talk to you..." I intervened this time anticipating Bobby who was already pissed off. Why? Ask the guy, leaning forward a little more to show us his big white face. We are interviewing all Elvis impersonators and we have followed you for so many days sir... We think you deserve the first prize, six hundred dollars in cash, you're the best so far and we're tired to travel!
Bobby gave me a bewildered look but he decided to follow my lie by staying silent the time it took for that guy to disappear from the window. What are you doin'? He asked impatiently. You wanna get in? I replied trying to stay calm. I hoped that the guy would have opened the door and let us in, I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, I guess I needed to give an answer to some of my questions about him.
And the door opened and revealed the white jumpsuit. It was unbuttoned with a big belly standing out of the pants with gold embroidery. Come inside you two... As soon as he said it I realized that Larry was no longer with us, he was gone. Bobby called him but got no answer, just the constant sound of Mississippi crickets. I shook my head and by so I suggested Bobby to forget about Larry, that we had to get in now and take that occasion.
We set foot in a narrow corridor with empty white walls. The man was quite tall and walked throwing his feet on the wooden floor as he didn't care about nothing. Maybe it was part of his act, well a lousy one I got to say. We ended up in a small kitchen with the door and the screen door addressed to a small back garden. We sat. The man offered us something to drink, Bobby took the opportunity to get a glass of scotch and I told the man that I wanted the same he wanted. He moved the hair from his face, he looked a lot like the King, the face of a Greek statue just like his, same eyes, same mouth, same tan dating back to when he died in the same jumpsuit. I felt confused, not knowing whether or not to get angry with him. Whoever would have seen him around would have told him for sure that he was exactly like Elvis Presley and his life would have been, in one way or another, tied to that figure. He opened a Coke for himself and for me, then he said something that disappointed me a lot: "there was a time when I was crazy about Pepsi, then I changed my mind." The King had said it maybe in one spot or somewhere else after he had taken a truckload of dollars from Coca-Cola at the expense of Pepsi. I didn't like that at all and little by little I felt the satisfaction of seeing just another stupid impersonator in him. He went on like this for a while, producing sentences of interviews and speeches on the image of an entertainer along with the more traditional Elvis funny lines.
At that point Bobby hit him and I'll always remember everything that happened after that. Bobby pretended to look for something under the table, then he grabbed an empty chair and threw it at him. I don't know, but I think that maybe in hindsight that gesture upset me and made me feel part of something wrong, the same wrong stuff that I could see on TV, the same thing that we had rebelled against in Dallas before starting our journey, a meaningless exaggeration. But like I said I think I've developed this thought when it was all over, and in those moments I felt only slightly less than neutral towards Bob's violence.
"Alright fuck-o why did you do it huh??" The man had fallen on the floor and like a fragile giant he was wiping the blood from his nose. Once he got up he found us both standing in front of him, Bobby posing like a boxer and me with my arms crossed. Hey! Do what? You get the fuck outta my house or I'll kick your fucking ass! Heard those words of defiance Bobby pulled out his air gun and pointed it at his face. The man showed us his palms, backed off and crashed on the stove, ok, ok... easy now boy... He seemed neither old nor young while he kept looking at us without a trace of regrowth on his hair and those eyes that must had been somewhere else for a long time. I asked him how old he was and he said fifty. Bob looked at me with questioning eyes and I said that it was no big deal and that I just wanted to play with him a little bit. That poser had studied the thing by heart: in 1985 also Elvis would have had 50 years. With the support of Bob I had him half naked and saw two stupid tattoos on his arms with the face of the King, the usual impersonator's crap. Then I was seized by an idea and asked him if they were real or not, he said "sure", so I took the gun from Bob's hand and planted it on his forehead. I was following a path of madness towards an even madder doubt that had slipped in my mind. Wash them away!, I shouted, but he pretended he didn't that. So I told Bob to find water, alcohol and a sponge and wipe them away. He thought that it was another way to torture him and went straightaway to the bathroom and came back with all that was needed. He put the stuff in front at his feet and and I made sure that joke of a gun was still on him. Bob rubbed them off until they both disappeared.
Elvis never had tattoos on his body, at the time, as many Southerners of Jewish origin or tradition, to alter your body or skin for fashion was something that went against their habits.
I was filled with excitement for a dream that could not be true, and in any case that evidence did not prove anything. I went on making all the questions that concerned the private life of the King, and he answered them all properly. I wondered if he was lying or not, and if so, what was the reason?
It was a fact that he didn't know what was going through my head and all those tests might had seemed to him as if they were designed to make him a good impersonator and, most of all, out of the risk of being shot from an "air-pistol".
After more than an hour of interrogation and threats he lost his strength and sat on the chair. Bobby was back to sleep, his lazy head on the table, snoring. Now it was just me and him. I offered him a cigarette and lit it up. Why did you sing "My Way" that night in the car?
He said nothing for a while, he was exactly how I imagined the King in his most intimate moments, maybe after a crazy party in Graceland. Cause I like it man... , he then concluded; that's it? I insisted. This time he answered my question singing, and I had goose bumps, big goose bumps.
For what is a man, what has he got? If not Himself than he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!
It was a lame imitation, tired, but passionate somehow. It was the same part that I had remembered that night at the motel after I heard him sing it for the first time as he drove his Cadillac.
What's your name son?
Danny.
Ok, Danny I'll tell you what happened but then you have to go away.
The night of my death I killed a man, a poser as you call it. I invited him to a party in my house, I offered him a large dose when we were alone, he went to the toilet and he died in the toilet. At that moment I had the first real opportunity to get me another life kid, I'd had enough of being famous if you ask me...
I was shaking in my chair, but still didn't believe a bit to what he was saying. Why the hell do you dress like a poser now? Because you see Danny, when I did what I did eight years ago I realized that the only way to start a new life without being recognized on the street was pass for what I was, just like all that people out there, trying to be Elvis Presley. If I had pulled into a gas station with my normal clothes and a different haircut someone would freak out and I'd be back to the life I left, you know?
That "you know" was Elvis Presley's own "you know", I swear to God!
I did it my way, call me an outlaw if you want, I'm finally back to live the way every man deserves...
I said fuck and at that moment somebody knocked at the door.
Bobby woke up and asked me what we had to do with him. I don't know, I said, I think that's it... We can go home now Bob... I only knew that I was told the best lie I've ever heard in my life. Bobby grunted and went to the door while I and the man were looking into each others eyes in silence, both with a hint of a smile on our lips. Then I heard Bobby yell at someone, it was Larry of course who was left out with all the stuff we had brought with us. I heard Bob behind me tell him that I wanted us to go home and that if Larry asked him it was all a big waste of time after having come all this way and having made all that mess until BANG!
Larry shot the man in the heart with a real gun. I lost control and started to scream like a girl. Then I watched Larry trying to figure out what was wrong with him. Bobby stood there, his eyes full of fear, I think he peed in his pants. On the floor the corpse of a man next to his last cigarette still smoking.
**
We never told anyone what happened in the summer of 1985. Bobby enlisted in the Marines, the most predictable thing he could do, Larry found a job at a cinema in Dallas and probably America will find him on the front page the morning after the massacre.
I stayed here in Tupelo, a small house with a porch from which you can hear nothing but the dogs barking and the eternal sound of crickets in the long nights.
I chose to live here, half an hour away from his two homes, because I didn't want to be too far from what he was before and what he was then. The man who I think was really Elvis Presley is probably still lying on his kitchen floor, or under some stone with the name they found on his fake driving license.
