Disgraceland: Taking Care of Your Cash in a Flash

Tens of thousands of years from now, if there’s still a human race, Elvis Presley will be the Christ of his own religion. The language he sang in will be dead, none of his recordings will survive, and scholars will chuckle at the Brylcreemed plebs who’ll anxiously expect his Second Comeback. What’s more (if the Christ analogy is anything to go by), the King of Hips will be the bedrock of an economic empire that will make the Catholic Church look like a penny-ante poker ring.

And if there’s ever to be an Elvis Vatican, it’s Graceland, the country estate now visited by over 600,000 of the faithful every year. Graceland is the most unashamed tourist trap money has ever devised, the home that Elvis bought with all that teenage-girl allowance money. I came across the place on a driving trip to New Orleans with my German buddy Gerhardt, and I generally use the excuse that mental exhaustion combined with the August heat of Tennessee forced us off the highway and onto Elvis Presley Boulevard.

Let's get one thing straight: the people who turned Graceland into a shrine to the Presley godhead had the same sense of humility as the Egyptian pharaohs. Nanoscopic details of Elvis' life cover the walls of the place like the hieroglyphics of King Tut's tomb, and like the Tut Hut, Graceland also carries a curse (courtesy of P.T. Barnum) that decrees that any fool to cross its threshold will be separated from his money faster than you can say "twenty-dollar hackeysack". Visiting the Graceland complex is like stepping into a financial punji trap.

Among the various sites to see were the Elvis souvenir shop (although we saw better-quality Elvis crap for sale in rest-stops in Kentucky), the Elvis car museum (a treasure trove of Cadillacs and sparkly dune buggies), and the "Lisa Marie" (his private jet, not Michael Jackson's estranged wife). The main prize of course was the mansion itself, which was less of a mansion than a suburban bungalow converted to full-time rumpus room by one of humanity’s most committed kooks.

Being the gape-mouthed shmucks that we were, Gerhardt and I shelled out a tenner apiece for the mansion tour (since then the price has been upped to $16). They give you a tape recorder with headphones, and the idea is that you listen to the tape and follow the bouncing ball as you walk around the house. Unfortunately, the bastards who devised this scheme must have been high on Percodan while reading over the blueprints, because I ended up gawking at the shooting range while being told about the squash court in ten languages, making it impossible to rewind the thing to get back to the right spot.

The recording featured colour commentary by none other than Mrs. Priscilla Presley herself, queen by default (and dee-vorce) over this here land that grace forgot. Her saccharine-sweet homage to the divorced King's memory practically clogged the gears on the tape machine with syrupy, lucre-fuelled gratitude. All those posthumous royalty cheques have turned the ex-Mrs. Presley into the most doting biographer Elvis ever had – you'd never suspect that they so much as flung a paper plate at one another during their three-odd years of wedded bliss. I submit to the jury that whatever beef she had with the Sideburned One, she sure got her own back on him by turning his house into a veritable money vacuum: while recording this tripe, they probably had to stop every five minutes so Prissy could laugh her way to the bank and back.

As might be expected, the details on the cassette were bland, dealing with only the most stereotypical Kingly trivia:

"Here's where Elvis watched his three TVs."

(No mention of him shooting the screens in with his Colt .45 when he saw the Beatles perform on Captain Kangaroo.)

"Here's where Elvis played piano the night he died."

(A bowlderized account of his death, purged of all the nasty details. Plenty of proof when you think of it that Elvis definitely bought his ticket for real that night: if one were to concoct a phony death that was sure to make newspaper headlines across the globe, who the hell would rubber-stamp a scenario picturing himself naked on the toilet, straining a tenaciously turgid turd?).

"Elvis is seen here receiving an award from President Nixon."

(Gadzooks, Beelzebub himself, and they’re politely shaking hands! This from the young rebel who once gave Ed Sullivan harrumphing fits with his low-angle loin-lashing?).

For your ten bucks you get no explanation why Elvis' motto in later years was "Takin' Care of Business in a Flash". Could it have been the prescription that kept him perky the night he bit the big one whilst throttling a Mars bar on the crapper at dawn? Of course not; for the sake of the little old ladies in tennis shoes who visit Graceland, that didn't really happen. He was kept awake by a fascinating article in Better Homes & Gardens and got so excited about interlocking bricks that his stool was squeezed up his aorta, causing heart failure.

Tabloid voyeur that I am, I just wanted to see some evidence of the King's legendary sexual je ne sais quoi, but we didn't even get a peek at the bedroom where in all likelihood Elvis first introduced Priscilla to the contents of his trousers. Though she didn't mind putting every detail of Elvis’ life on display for the passing hoi polloi, no amount of long green could get her to expose those saucy details on that cassette. There’s nothing worse than a zip-lipped strumpet, I say.

Since the bedroom was a no-pry-zone, the best part of the tour was the gallery where they displayed all the useless shit that Elvis collected over the years. Imagine if someone took everything out of your closets and drawers and put it up in display cases, except that instead of boring old you, you're Elvis, and not only are you as weird as Crazy King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but you've got half the taste of that Eurotrash pretender and twice the cash. Elvis' guns, police badges, booty-whompin' karate outfits, jumpsuits, guitars, and just about every piece of paper he ever touched were packed inside a dark maze that could give a minotaur a headache. The most striking piece was an oil painting done by a devoted fan, depicting a highly homo-eroticized Presley in a white silk outfit with matching scarf around his neck, skin glistening like olive oil, gazing benevolently down upon the viewer with the slightest hint of a pout on his Statue of Liberty lips, like some gay saint. In the Elvis Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, the ceiling was well taken care of.

After the tour we checked out the car museum, filled with Elvis’ collection of automobiles, motorcycles and other internally combusting toys. Seems the King was queer for anything gas-powered, whether it was a barbecue, lawnmower, or his private jet. There was a separate tour of the plane too, but at that point, we figured that Priscilla and her battalion of lawyers had gotten enough money out of us already, so we split for cheaper climes.

The Graceland Tour does much to explain why Elvis considered his own life the embodiment of the American Dream. Here was a simple Tennessee cracker with no work skills beyond driving a truck, but thanks to his ability to work girls up into a lather, the good life was his: watching three TVs at once, eating a half-pound of bacon for breakfast with a maid to cook it for him, giving away cars as gifts, and living the spoiled existence of an entertainment aristocrat. Whether intentional or not, the Graceland experience drove the point home minute-by-minute. In ten thousand years people will still love Elvis, and Graceland will still love their money.

So we pulled out of the parking lot that evening a bit poorer and none the wiser. It was already 8 p.m., and Sun Records was most likely closed to the gawking public. Besides, THE UNQUESTIONABLE LAW OF THE ROAD said we had to reach New Orleans that evening. With Gerhardt behind the wheel and me behind a dozen Budweisers, we burned down Highway 51.

Even on the Interstate at night, we noticed the difference between dusty old cornbread Tennessee and steamy Mississippi. Hours after leaving Graceland, tired from too much diuretic American beer, I was mumbling something Catholic in my stupor when Gerhardt woke me up with "Hey man, we're in Mississippi. Don't talk to me about Lourdes", which sounded funny in his Kolonel Klink accent. Mississippi! Poorest and most backward state in the Union; home of countless bluesmen and women without whose influence Elvis would have remained a truck-driving corn-cracker 'til the day he died. “Here's where it all began,” as them what writes the liner notes to the records say.

It was time to pay the water bill on that Budweiser, so we pulled off the highway on an exit that was miraculously free of McDonald's restaurants and bright neon gas stations. It was a small, unlit road, leading towards what sounded like Biblically-proportioned plagues of insects and frogs. The chorus of swamp life woke us up to the fact that we were now, finally, knee-deep in what could be called the South. This was most definitely getting closer to IT.