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by Miracle Jones
Turn Elvis sideways and you will see shimmering, deflated mylar—a popped balloon of a pop cartoon. Was there ever a real Memphis man inside the paunchy karate rube? He winks at you and sneers something provocative and so you lean in closer. But he is just mumbling another old Monty Python routine, high on pregnant lady urine. Thank TCB that he does not know how to use his thermonuclear charisma to shape US foreign policy, to command infrastructure, to build an army, to start a space cult.
In “Last Exit to Memphis” and “Careless Love”—the back-to-back ‘90s biographies by music historian Peter Guralnick that exhaustively chronicle the life of the Tupelo Tornado—we learn that Elvis was truly something new: not a renegade hypertalent like Diana Ross or Sinatra, but instead a completely un-rebellious and pliant sideshow attraction who was therefore exploited in a thousand dimensions at once by Colonel Tom Parker with such sufficient overpressure that together they reshaped space and time. In the process, an entire weird human life was erased, godified, and turned into abstract performance art. This operation was utterly consensual. If you are looking for a hero in the Elvis story, it is Colonel Tom Parker (who should have been played in the movie by Tom Waits), who not only worked his own way up from dog catcher to the world’s most fearsome talent agent, but who also enabled Elvis to keep making music right up until his porcelain apotheosis. Col. Tom never stopped challenging Elvis and making him work, knowing that it was the work that kept him alive. The fact that we still care about Memphis Flash at all proves that there is still dangerous radiation emanating from their conjoined catastrophic snowjob, yet not one demented fact about the real human man who became the Atomic Powered Singer makes me love him any less, in the same way that I will always love the French Revolution, IHOP, and Caligula.
ENUMERATED ODDITIES EXCAVATED FROM GURALNICK:
1. His mighty Southern heart could only be soothed by a masturbating ape.
After touring non-stop for years, Elvis and his shifting lineup of shithead sycophants (“The Memphis Mafia”) completely ran out of safe topics for conversation, like any abusive family. They had fucked each other over so many times to gain position in the hierarchy that basically any topic could lead to violence, which meant that the team was ravenous for any safe emotional territory or willing scapegoats. There was a guy named Lamar that they liked to pick on (famous for leaping up into the air and shouting “It’s a hit!” after every single take of every single song), but Lamar had to sleep sometimes. It was for this reason that Elvis started buying hominoid pets, making sure to always have a fresh ape handy so that there would be something to provoke his seething cracker army out of their dangerous silence. Elvis’s favorite diplomatic distraction ape was named Scatter, and Scatter’s favorite party trick was to look up the dresses of non-ape women while athletically jacking off his little red penis. Scatter also liked to fuck pets and farm animals. If you ever found yourself at Graceland you were going to 1). watch this ape masturbate after sexually molesting you or your dog 2). talk about how funny it was all night. A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE MASTURBATING APE
2. The US Army got Elvis addicted to drugs, not the music biz.
Elvis didn’t even really drink before he went into the army. Wouldn’t even let the people around him drink! After he was drafted as a tank commander, however, the army started forcing Elvis to take amphetamines to stay up on rotation and he decided that 1). he really liked amphetamines 2). how could they be bad for you if the government made them mandatory? He bought amphetamines in bulk and gave them out to everyone he knew, certain that they were a safe new miracle drug with zero permanent side effects.
3. His actual favorite thing to do was hang out down at the morgue and read medical textbooks.
Elvis did not have a formal education, but this did not stop him from deciding that he was a doctor who was capable of practicing medicine on himself and everyone around him. He carted around a Physician’s Desk Reference wherever he went and made it his personal goal to memorize the symptoms of every disease, in addition to the side-effects, specific names, and proper dosage of every abuseable drug. If Elvis had ever actually written a song, it probably would have been a jaunty rhyming sailor’s shanty about achieving the right balance between speed, sleeping pills, and laxatives. After the death of his mother, Elvis also discovered that no one would ever kick him out of the Memphis morgue, meaning that he had a free pass to hang out with the local morticians and illegally gawk at any dead body that captured his fancy. Here was a typical Dream Date with Elvis: he was gonna take you out for a hamburger and then force you to watch a corpse get embalmed while doing karate moves and telling you all the symptoms of a prolapsed colon. He loved to see a withered cadaver pinken into simulated health and he was therefore constantly on the look-out for embalming fluid that would work on the living. When Elvis finally became a career drug addict, his medical knowledge came in handy: he prided himself on being able to mimic the symptoms of any illness in order to get whatever specific drugs he wanted. If you gave him the drugs for the disease he was performing, he would buy you a car.
4. He loved making teen porn of his teen bride.
Elvis did not fuck his underage wife Priscilla until they were married, denying her his sweet truckdrivin’ cock until they were yoked together by the grim fatality of destiny, a ritual that was only possible once they were sick of each other. He wanted her close to him despite their abstinence, and so he connived to let her finish high school in Memphis instead of Germany, separating her from her parents and moving her into Graceland to literally groom her. He dyed her hair, he picked out her clothes, he taught her how to wear make-up. He also prescribed amphetamines for her so that they could stay up all night together talking about yoga, and then he handed out sleeping pills to her so that she would go right to sleep without any teenage whining. She was so desperate to have some kind of sexual relationship with him that she started taking explicit photos of herself at school with a Polaroid camera. She did this so often that the employees down at the local drug store where she bought her film knew that she was somehow being exploited, but they were shit-scared of getting roughed up by one of The King’s thralls and so they kept selling her everything she needed to produce private child porn for her Guitar Man. Conspiracy theorists should take note: Elvis and Priscilla definitely fucked at least once.
5. Elvis loved mammas but he could not fuck mammas.
After getting married, Priscilla immediately got pregnant because Elvis wouldn’t let her take birth control. Birth control as a drug was still too new to be included in his Physician’s Desk Reference and so, as a doctor, he wasn’t for sure yet whether it had any ill effects. As soon as Prissy delivered her baby, Elvis confessed to her that he was totally unable to have sex with anyone that he knew to have ever passed a human through their vagina. Elvis, the subject of the new Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis, found motherhood to be sexually gross as hell, and so his relationship with his new wife was suddenly over. For those doing the math, the only time that EP and PP were ever sexually active was the extremely brief window between finally getting married and Prissy getting knocked up. This was six months, tops. It should be noted here that Priscilla could kinda see what was gonna happen re: Elvis being grossed out by motherhood and so she deeply considered getting an abortion. Elvis was very supportive of this, but they did ultimately have the baby. Elvis was pro-karate, pro-motorcycles, pro-onesies, and pro-choice. In an intriguing turn of events later in life, Elvis injected the urine of pregnant women into his veins in order to lose weight. Was this the embalming fluid for the non-dead that he had been seeking all along? He did not lose weight.
6. More re: babies:
One time, Elvis was entertaining a young lady and she decided to sit in his lap in a sexual way. As a result of the prowess of her seated gyrations, Elvis grew tumescent before fully achieving a capsheaf of explosive ardor in situ. He opened up his jumpsuit up to take a look at his own wasted milt. “Aw, man, look at all them dead babies,” Elvis said dejectedly in his buttery-smooth Elvis voice. The woman remembered this for the rest of her life.
7. He once aspirated his own tooth cap.
Elvis liked to do his own stunts. If a Hollywood studio told Elvis he was a racecar driver, BAM, he was a racecar driver. The true secret of Elvis is that he always did exactly as he was told by anyone with any kind of power. He absolutely revered structure, authority, and tradition. During the filming of the Jailhouse Rock sequence in the film of the same name, he clanged his head on a pipe or something and then accidentally inhaled the crown of his tooth. Nobody believed him that this was possible until he started to turn blue from his own ragged breathing. They operated on him immediately, separating his vocal chords and fishing out the tooth cap. He was fine, thanks to amphetamines and the studio telling him that he was fine.
8. His most profound spiritual experience was seeing Josef Stalin in a cloud.
So Elvis refuses to despoil Priscilla and instead makes her stay up all night reading bullshit self-help books until it is time to take their sleeping pills. He is a seeker on a spiritual quest. His entourage is disgusted, because all they want to do is eat fried food and fuck buckle bunnies down at the roller rink. Instead, Elvis spends an entire year in bed reading mall books and asking everyone that he meets WHAT IS TRUE but he doesn’t really get anywhere as far as achieving enlightenment. One day, as they are driving through the desert, he is glumly sneering at the setting sun when all of a sudden he claws at his own eyes and falls out of his chair. “Y’all see that, man?” he screams. “Y’ALL SEE THAT?” He points to a cloud that everyone agrees is the spitting image of Josef Stalin (hard to say if this is true—everyone agrees with pretty much everything that Elvis says at all times). Anyway, Elvis stops the bus and runs out into the desert weeping and shaking. When asked what Josef Stalin means to him exactly, he reveals that this cloud is a sign that he has been too tyrannical with the people around him. He says that he saw Stalin melting into Jesus, which means that he must somehow become more like Jesus (uh-oh). The end result of this spiritual experience is that he becomes convinced that he can control the sprinklers on the golf course behind his house with his mind. It is possible that this vision of Josef Stalin melting into Jesus has something to do with his later one-man war against Communism during the Nixon administration.
9. Elvis was King of the Cops:
Elvis was addicted to collecting police badges that signified that he was an official cop in any given jurisdiction, in the same way that some people collect national park pins. He didn’t want to just be an honorary cop: he demanded an actual badge and assurances by the police that he was legally allowed to present himself and act as a member of the force. Cops went along with this in return for cars, trips on his private jet, karate lessons, etc. Elvis carried these badges with him everywhere like Pokemon cards. His famous clandestine visit to Nixon was spurred because he was on a bender and wanted a DEA badge, which was the most rare Pokemon available at the time. It is important here to note that unlike his forays into medicine or mortuary science, Elvis Presley was actually a licensed DEA agent by federal law. He was actually a Shelby Country Sheriff. He was actually a captain in the Memphis police force. He was actually a captain in the Denver police force. He was actually an LAPD lieutenant detective.
10. CHICKS DIG SWEAT.
According to Larry Geller—Elvis’s hairdresser and part-time spiritual guru— everything changed for Elvis the night they went to see legendary soul singer Jackie Wilson together in Vegas. Elvis was specifically impressed by how sweaty Wilson was able to get on stage. After the show, Elvis demanded Wilson’s secret and Wilson revealed that before every performance he took a bunch of salt pills and chugged a bunch of water. “It’s just that easy!” said Wilson. “And chicks dig sweat.” It is unknown if Elvis decided to adopt this regimen for himself, but his subsequent Vegas-era levels of public sweat sort of speak for themselves. It should be noted that Wilson had a massive heart attack on stage not long after this and slipped into a coma for nine years before dying. Elvis, of course, also died of a massive heart attack, which is usually attributed to drugs and his poor diet. Yet all suspicious minds must wonder: what if gobbling salt pills before every show in order to seduce ladies with glands like sticky glacier waterfalls was the real hard livin’ showbiz culprit behind his surprise demise?
11. Elvis was a huge Monty Python nerd.
Elvis loved Monty Python, watched it obsessively, loved to quote the skits all night long while getting high with all his friends and girlfriends. He would make people learn the routines so that they could do them together. He called people Squire just to see if they “got the reference.” He watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail four times alone in the theater. Elvis died before he could see Monty Python’s final film “The Meaning of Life,” which contains the song “Every Sperm is Sacred.” This song would have blown Elvis’ fucking mind. “Look at all them dead babies” he would have whispered to himself. He would have raised his gun to the TV (Elvis was always strapped with about five guns) but not pulled the trigger. He would have felt a huge weight leave his chest. He would have lowered the gun and decided to TCB IN A FLASH. He would have donated a thousand Cadillacs to Planned Parenthood.
12. Elvis would have only become weirder if he had stayed alive.
Thanks to his sweat addiction, we missed out on forty more years of Elvis reigning as Demon Duke of the Puzzle People. Elvis never wrote a song, but here is a poem that Elvis wrote in 1974 while recuperating from a bowel obstruction. He eventually used this poem as his answering machine message:
As I awoke this morning
When all sweet things are born
A robin perched on my windowsill
To greet the coming dawn
He sang his song so sweetly
And paused for a moment's lull
I gently raised the window
And crushed his fucking skull.
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(c) Miracle Jones 2022