In December of 1977, I was taking my leave of a boring party when the host asked me to take one of his female guests home. The woman had had an argument with her boyfriend over something, and the boyfriend split, leaving the poor woman all upset and stranded. She lived north of Birmingham, so far out in the country that as I followed her directions, I became a little concerned with finding my way back to the interstate in the dark.
As best I can recall, the woman was thin and had blondish hair styled in a short cut. I think she wore a Christmassy outfit in green and red. I want to say she had little Christmas ornaments dangling from her ears, but that may not be right. One thing’s for sure, she smelled really good. Though I can’t describe the cologne she wore, I remember it as a subtle fragrance, sweetly permeating the inside of my ’69 Olds Cutlass as the headlights sliced through all that rural darkness. I was single, and getting lucky was always on my mind. So even though I thought her to be unremarkable, in those days unremarkable was just sexy enough.
She talked a lot. The term compulsively autobiographical comes to mind because she told me what kind of person she was and what kind of person she wasn’t in three or four different ways. And she told me what kind of person she liked and what kind of person she couldn’t stand in no uncertain terms. Other than her directions, I had tuned her out because I figured I was the kind of person who understood exactly why her boyfriend had left her back at that boring-ass party.
At some point during that ride, she said she was the kind of person who thought having sex was the most natural thing in the world. She suddenly had my undivided attention. After telling me to turn in front of a little white clapboard house, she asked me if I wanted to come in for a drink. I said, “I believe I do.”
I remember the house as being really small and white with a narrow front porch and an eerie light flickering through the blinds of one of the windows. There was no foyer, so after she opened the door and flipped on the lights, we stepped straight into a tiny living room/dining room/kitchen combination that stretched across the front of the house. A door in the center of the back wall opened into a narrow hallway. Across the hallway was a bathroom. I imagined that the bathroom was flanked by a couple of bedrooms. But I never did get that far.
I felt as if I had stepped into a mini-museum with the walls splattered in pictures of Elvis—Elvis as a kid in a cowboy hat, Elvis on a motorcycle, Elvis in a sequined white jumpsuit onstage in Vegas, etc. Most of the pictures were framed photos, but she had two full-sized, color posters thumb-tacked to the walls. I’m certain about the Love Me Tender poster in the kitchen, but the one in the living area could have very well been from any of the umpteen movies that the King made.
In the living area, one of those uncomfortable, thin-cushioned, plastic padded couches with wooden armrests had been pulled away from the wall and faced a matching chair and three ladder-back chairs from the kitchen table. A long table with tall legs sat in the center of this snug seating arrangement. At one end of the table, a three-foot statue of Elvis with a guitar looked as if he were serenading a half-dozen votive candles flickering into puddles on what looked like a big aluminum cookie sheet.
The woman draped her coat on the couch and said, “I keep telling my sister she’s going to burn this place slap to the ground one of these days.”
After she blew out the candles, I’m sure I stood there speechless for a while, trying to take the whole thing in. I finally came out with something like, “Y’all must really be Elvis fans.”
“Oh, we love Elvis,” she said.
With getting lucky still my objective, I thought I would say something that would endear myself to this woman, so while copping the somber expression of a funeral director, I said, “I was really saddened when I heard the news about Elvis’ death.”
In the silence that followed, something about her face changed. My skeptical nature tells me that my memory is flawed, and it was just her expression crinkling up in disapproval. But every time I think back on that moment, my imagination runs wild, and I see Lon Chaney, Jr. transforming from a whiny, passive Lawrence Talbot into the fierce and growling Wolfman ready to rip out somebody’s throat.
One thing I’m not mistaken about is the fact that this woman shrieked, “Elvis is not dead! Don’t you ever say that again!”
Women have been yelling at me for years. My mother yelled at me a lot. My sister yelled at me. Teachers, female cousins, and a girlfriend or two have all yelled at me at one time or another. My wife has damn sure yelled at me. She might not admit it, but she woke me one night yelling at me in her dreams. So I’m well acquainted with being yelled at by a woman. This wasn’t a yell, it was a shriek that sounded like it was coming from some demon imbedded deep inside this woman.
“No, ma’am. I’ll never tell you that again,” I said. Then I glanced at my watch too fast for the time to even register on my brain and said, “God, I didn’t know it was so late. I need to get going.”
She said something. Maybe she asked if I was still interested in that drink she’d offered. If she did, I’ll bet I declined a hell of a lot faster than I accepted in the first place. Then I was out the door and into the yard, imagining Anthony Perkins in a wig and a long grey dress, coming up behind me with a butcher knife.
As I pulled out of her driveway, I didn’t notice whether she was standing on the porch or not. But if she was, she probably shrieked, “You’re going the wrong way, you damned fool.” Because I was going the wrong way. When I finally calmed down, my inner compass took over, and I turned around and found my way back to the interstate.
I’ve made several failed attempts over the years to turn this shaggy dog anecdote into a short story. I could never get past the “so-what?” factor. So, some guy took some mysterious chick home. Then he gets freaked out because she’s an Elvis worshiper. So what? I’ve wished several times that I’d had the courage to ask the woman about her passionate devotion to Elvis. I’ve always wondered if she, her sister, and some of her friends actually gathered around that shrine while lighting candles and offering prayers up to the King.
While I think of that Elvis display as the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, I realize that my interpretation of the events of that evening have undoubtedly been muddied by the passing years and colored by my avid interest in horror movies. I’m sure the combination of the dark rural location, being surrounded by Elvis pictures, the crude little Elvis shrine, and the woman’s shriek just creeped me out.
Something very benign and sweet may have been going on in that little house for all I know. So the woman, her sister and their friends loved Elvis. Good for them. Maybe they loved Elvis a little more than I would consider healthy. Not my business. Still, I wonder about it to this day.
Back in 2006, I saw a notice in the newspaper that Dr. Gregory L. Reece was having a signing for his book, Elvis Religion: The Cult of the King at the Eclipse Coffee and Books in Montevallo, Alabama. I got him to sign a copy for me, and I told him a little about my Elvis story. He said that while researching his book, he had heard a few similar stories. In fact, he had an Elvis experience of his own. His encounter involved a woman adorned in Elvis jewelry at a Memphis hospital emergency room. She told him she had moved to Memphis to be close to Elvis and that she took great comfort, knowing that when her loved ones died, they would be in Heaven with Elvis. He could tell that this woman was much more than a fan, but their separate business at the emergency room separated them before he was able to find out more about her.
Reece’s encounter with the woman kicked off a campaign to discover the depth of this Elvis spiritual movement that ended with his interesting book. Reece didn’t find an actual Elvis religious movement. But there’s something going on out there that kind of feels like one.
All those bogus stories of people seeing him in laundromats and doughnut shops after his death aside, the King’s been dead for forty years, and he’s still all over the place. At this writing HBO has a two-part documentary called Elvis Presley: The Searcher scheduled for the spring of 2018. Since his death, he’s had six albums and seven singles that hit number one on some chart or other in the U.S. or the UK or both. And how many singers who’ve been dead for forty years have 500 fan clubs worldwide? If somebody wanted to start an Elvis religion, those might be some pretty good places to start.
I look at TCB with a lightning flash and see a potential religious symbol not unlike a cross or a star or a crescent moon. And didn’t the Memphis Mafia follow Elvis around like disciples? Then there are the Elvis imitators that keep popping up everywhere. For example, the Krewe of the Rolling Elvi at Mardi Gras is an army of side burned Elvis wannabes on motor scooters. Those guys make me wonder how many covert Elvi are walking among us with jumpsuits secretly dangling in their closets at home.
The 300 professional Elvis impersonators registered on eimpersonators.com remind me a hell of a lot of priests in that they’ve been performing the same routine in the same outlandish garb for decades. Instead of feeding the faithful the Host, they conclude their leg-shaking, karate-kicking services by distributing pastel scarves dipped in their sweat. Of course, the Elvis faithful have their Mecca in Graceland, the pop culture shrine that millions trek to from all over the world. Among historic residences in the U.S., only the White House has more visitors than Elvis’s Memphis home.
The whole thing got me to thinking. What if that woman and her sister did belong to some wacked-out Elvis cult? What would it look like if to this mix I added a charismatic leader with some deep pockets, a devoted cadre to help sell the faith, and a sacred text containing a theology with rules for the faithful, explained in myths and stories about the King?