Flowers for Elvis

SOMEHOW rock'n roll got old. It didn't seem possible that a year had passed since Elvis died--more than 20 years since he cut "Hound Dog," "All Shook Up," "Jailhouse Rock," and "Don't Be Cruel." But it was true, and that was how I came to be riding all night from Connecticut down to Tennessee with a busload of middle-aged women hell-bent on reaching the graveside of their dead king on the first anniversary of his death. That was how I came to meet Janey Cray, who swooned over Elvis when she was young and sweet, and who now spends sleepless nights in the cab of a tractor-trailer rig, squinting out over burning cigarettes at interstate highways as she roams from city to city, transporting sides of beef and chocolate-covered cherries in a refrigerated trailer. And that was how I came to be chatting with a man carrying a revolver in a pitch-black hallway in a Memphis Holiday Inn one August night, when all the power was out in a city with all its policemen and firemen out on strike.

But I jump ahead. The story, and in a way the bus ride, started all those twenty years ago, when Elvis mixed black music and white music, added some rhythm he had learned growing up in the Pentecostal church, swiveled his hips, put his heart into it, and started the rock rolling. The story starts before rock'n roll became an American institution, before it splintered into hard rock, bubble gum rock, acid rock, punk rock, jazz-rock, folk-rock, and that most castrated form of rock, if it can be called rock at all--disco. By the time I got on the bus this summer there was really little left of the original rock'n roll. When Elvis first sang he was a rebel; when the Bay City Rollers "rock 'n roll" now they're barely even cute--bubble gum is cloying. Elvis was outrageous in the '50s because he never held back, but outrageousness has become a style all its own, and it really isn't very shocking any more. Punk rock is just a crazy scam. Even good disco is tediously predictable. Neither the Sex Pistols nor the Bee Gees will ever draw large crowds to their graves.

But Elvis did, and does, and so I went as a reporter on the Elvis Presley Memorial Bus Tour, courtesy of a Connecticut newspaper that could just as well have used wire reports from Memphis, but for some reason wanted a man on the spot. I boarded the bus with a typewriter in one hand and a bag in the other, to be greeted by the trip leader, a 45-year-old widow who hadn't left western Massachusetts since the early '60s. She invited me to sit down next to her. I obliged, and as the bus pulled out she revealed to me a secret stash of Cokes, cheese twists, bananas and Twinkies she had brought to eat during the 24-hour ride to Tennessee. Then she began to show me pictures of her boyfriends from home. Jesus. I squirmed and looked toward the back of the bus. Twenty middle-aged women's faces, pointing towards Tennessee, looked back at me. I slouched down in the chair and tried to remember jokes my mother might have liked. Twenty-four hours. Jesus. I got claustrophobic. Twenty-four hours. I tried to stay calm. On the New Jersey Turnpike the tension broke when we passed a good-looking truck driver and one woman in back shouted, "Check it out!" The rest of the passengers hooted and waved. They were away from husbands and families and they were feeling it. I smiled. It was a high school field trip.

Down through Delaware and Maryland these mothers and even grandmothers on the lam from home for a few days checked out the truck drivers, waved at cute boys, and nudged each other incessantly. After dark they started in on a round of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." As the night drew on they moved to moodier songs, including some of Elvis's. Twenty middle-aged women singing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" on a Greyhound bus. Although there were men on the bus, there were only three besides myself. One had been dragged along by his wife--he hunched his shoulders as though he were trying to make himself inobtrusive, and he didn't talk much. The other two were elderly gentlemen who had somehow gotten the impression that the tour was stopping for a show at the Grand Ole Opry. It wasn't.

It was about 3 a.m. after the songs had died away and most of the passengers' heads were nodding over their chests, that I got to know Janey Cray. I was sitting awake, thinking of my next day's story, and she was sitting awake in the seat across the aisle, watching the road. She was a grandmother, I found out, and she was traveling with three friends--a neighbor, a sister, and her best friend since second grade. She was overweight, she had deep crows' feet around her eyes, and her throat rasped when she laughed. But her clothes were put on carefully and neatly, and she must have been a doll in the late '50s, before the wrinkles set in and the double chin appeared. When she looked me in the eye I saw why she was going to Memphis. Her eyes shone with a memory and a question. She needed proof. She wanted either to see Elvis and light up the old magic one more time, or see his grave and know finally and for certain that the magic was over. "It's almost like I want to find out that he's not really dead, that he will be there in his mansion and nothing will have changed," Janey said. "Elvis was a young man when he died, you know," she added. I nodded. He was rich, overweight, and 42.

THE DAY WE pulled into Memphis the city was hot and troubled. Just walking in the sun would leave clothes soaked with perspiration. The hotels and restaurants were overcrowded with pilgrims to Graceland. The policemen and firemen were out on strike, and the National Guard was patrolling the city in jeeps. In Washington, the House Assassinations Committee was hearing testimony on the 1968 slaying in Memphis of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Into Memphis on August 15 rode the Elvis Presley Memorial Bus Tour out of Connecticut and western Massachusetts, uninterested in anything but the visiting hours at Graceland and the lengths of the waiting lines there. The leader of the policemen's union had threatened to shut the city down in the contract dispute, but no one on the bus had any second thoughts about going in. As we crossed into Tennessee, Janey's best friend Jan told the bus driver, "Sweetheart, we're going into Memphis no matter what. I didn't come all this way for nothing. I may never come back again."

We arrived outside Graceland the day before the anniversary of Elvis's death, to wait in the sun in a quarter-mile line for hours for a chance to file quickly by Elvis's grave, at the side of his mansion, near his kidney-shaped swimming pool. Along the line volunteers from a county rescue team patrolled, watching for victims of heat exhaustion. And hawkers patrolled, too, selling everything from autographed pictures of The King to silk scarves he wore to color film. Across the street--Elvis Presley Boulevard--there was still more. The shops that have sprung up in the past year sell everything from Elvis wastebaskets to Elvis swizzle sticks to ceramic guitars with Elvis's picture on them. And they do a brisk business, like the local florists, who were bringing in van after van of bouquets and floral arrangements, covering the grave site and spreading arrangements across the lawn, too. The flowers kept coming until they were one more marvel for the fans to photograph, until the bunches blurred together.

The people in line were almost all devoted fans, but emotions and good intentions got lost in the shuffle. It was almost hard to believe Elvis was buried there, beneath the pillars and fountains and bouquets. Many almost forgot he was there. One girl from Springfield, Mass. had come intending to pray for Elvis, but at Graceland she was so busy taking pictures that it slipped her mind. And Janey expected to cry when she saw the grave, but she was too numbed by the crowd and the spectacle to even get choked up. It was like seeing Old Faithful or the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument--everyone walked up quickly, took pictures, then left.

ONLY AFTERWARDS did the tour members' mood change. Most seemed relieved to have seen the grave, to know where their idol lay. He had sung to them when the world was fresh and bright, and he had kept singing when the greyness of middle-age rose all around, but finally he was silent, and they were left to face the future without the reassurance of his music. After visiting the grave most of the women visited Elvis shops, as though Elvis ash trays and posters and glasses would fill the void. They came away with armfuls of souvenirs.

That night, back at the hotel, there was still time for them to be girls, so they got decked out and headed down to the Holiday Inn's restaurant and lounge to pass the evening. There was a city-wide curfew in effect because of the strikes, and that provided the perfect excuse to sit and get smashed, which they did. Janey seemed a little sullen; it had not been a good day for hero worshippers. By midnight, the girls were back in their rooms, and it was about 12:30 when a drunken security guard at one of the electric power stations across town went berserk, throwing switches at random and putting all of Memphis into darkness on the eye of the first anniversary of Elvis's death, as if in great, silent tribute to the boy who dared to rock. The tribute was lost on most of the girls, who bolted and locked their doors, and sat or slept quietly within. I wandered the dark halls, accidentally meeting the hotel guest carrying the revolver, who told horror stories about hotels and blackouts and police strikes and brazen robberies. While I listened I wondered about Elvis--whether the truck driver-turned-rock 'n roll star could ever have broken big with his raw, exuberant, straightforward style if he were young in the larcenous and jaded '70s.

And on the balcony of her room, Janey Cray, the grandmother, the truck driver, the die-hard Elvis fan, looked out over the vast, dark expanse of Memphis. Then she mixed another drink, and settled back into her chair.