The King's Last Limousine

"Here's the thing," a man from Burgaw County, North Carolina, is telling me. "It weren't like what people think." Burgaw is blue mold and cinch weed country and the guy's name is Slade. Just Slade. "That's enough anyway," says Slade. He's about forty and nowadays he grows tobacco for a living.

Slade's got this conspiratorial whisper when he's talking and he leans close to you. "You see, it wasn't all that razzle-dazzle that you read about in the paper. Hell, we grew up with the man." Slade is hanging back from the limousine; leaning against a wall. "It wasn't that at all." He speaks like he's letting you in on a big secret. "Look, when you're doing factory work and you're a kid--now this was cannery work, mind you, and they wouldn't allow no radios in the plant--you go a little bug-eyed. Come lunch, though, and we all used to go out in the truck where we could pick up the one station from Charlotte that played rock and roll. I'll tell you it saved our skins. It got us through till beer time." He winks. "And after that, well, after that we would get pretty wild.

After Elvis Presley died in August of 1977, there was in the media what could only be described as a massive breach of taste. There were five miles of crowds in Memphis. Tennessee, at Elvis's mansion, Graceland. In Nashville, when Elvis's father died, there were two miles of crowds. His father. His father didn't sing a note in his life. But he sired the King. He had proved that aristocracy could live, even in a place as retrograde as the Memphis of the 1950s.

Elvis sold more records the year he died than he had in the previous seven.

Now anything associated with Elvis has an aura to it. Graceland could practically be a national park for all the people who go through it. His last limousine is now a travelling exhibit. It tours the country, loaded on a trailer, and draws more people than any other automotive mausoleum except for the Bonnie and Clyde death car. It's something of America's new interstate sideshow. It's fitting that the new version of the ghoulish twoheaded fetus in a bottle should be this monstrous automobile. The crowds come from all over to see it and to buy souvenirs. It could be any city. This one happens to be in North Carolina.

The man who's running the exhibit is Glen Gadlock. He used to be one of Elvis's bodyguards. Some people hate him for making money off of a dead man. Some people think it's a public service. There are no fewer than two hundred people at any given time, milling around the limousine. The car is in a Ford dealership to attract crowds. It's there for three days. No one will say how much it's costing. Everyone is strangely quiet. It is a kind of strange wake, kind of a wake by proxy. Four years after the fact, it's still sort of a relic thing--a visit to the rock and roll catacombs.

Elvis Presley came out of the South, came out, as a truck driver once told me, "singing the pants off songs," but still, he came out of the South. If the furthest south you tend to get is D.C., then Elvis might not make a lot of sense, except as some sort of defiant yahoo, some blazing anachronism. After all, by the time most of us got to him, he looked pretty silly in those white jump suits with the high collars, and that plasticene pompadour. He was singing in Vegas then--our most improbable city--or out in Honolulu, doing "Heartbreak Hotel" with a three hundred instrument string section complete with French horns. It wasn't Elvis. We thought it was and that's why we thought it was stupid. All those hundreds of thousands of leisure suited fans he drew must have been stupid, too, if that's what they wanted to see. But they didn't see that Elvis either. Impossibly, like kabuki stagehands, no one saw the paunch and the glitter. Maybe it was mass hypnosis. Maybe it was wishful thinking. But what they saw was miles from what was going on onstage. What they saw was some twenty, twenty-five years ago. What they saw wasn't ridiculous.

"You know," says a woman who seems afraid to get too close to the car, a little respectful of the official looking velvet ropes. "You've got tv, and you've got movies and you've got records--but it's nice to have something that he actually touched, you know?" Something that was his." She's wearing a pair of nondescript blue jeans and a halter. She's in her late thirties. She hangs back in the crowd, which, as eight o'clock approaches, is well over three hundred. Everyone is meandering. There are Ford salesmen working the crowd. They jump like jackals when you drive up. They get ornery if you walk the other way without discussing the merits of a light pick-up. All of the sales force are women.

The limousine itself is impressive--for sheer size, to begin with. It is twenty-five feet long. It is white with a red interior of crushed velvet. The back seat is ridiculously far away from the driver. It is a Lincoln Continental and it was originally made for the movie Shaft. According to Gadlock. Elvis saw the limo in the movie and then decided that he had to have it. Who knows what was going through his mind? Maybe he wanted to be part of some cool new scene. Elvis started playing roadsides all over the south, and the audiences there were poor. Maybe he thought he could reach the urban northeast in this car. Maybe not. He was probably just bored with his other twenty-three cars. When Gadlock talks about Elvis simply calling the studio right after the movie and buying the car outright for $55,000, he gets a strange look in his eyes. It's not the money, necessarily; there's enough quick real estate and oil money in Gadlock's circles that sheer mass doesn't impress. Rather it's the directness. It's the being able to go straight to the top. It's the envy of anybody's who's ever had to stand in line. Elvis could out-cool Richard Roundtree by some sort of divine right.

Gadlock practically sneers when he talks about a rich man from Texas who wanted to buy the limousine right after Elvis died. "He offered somethin' like half a million dollars. As if that would do anythin' This was Elvis's," he says. "Half million. Bullshee-it."

The limousine now belongs to J. D. Southern--a member of the Stamps Quartet that backed Elvis for so many years--and one of the King's closest friends. "Elvis gave him a bunch of rings and coats and things," Gadlock says. "And this car too. This is the very car J.D. drove in the funeral procession."

Gadlock has the responsibility for the limousine. Gadlock used to be one of Elvis's bodyguards--a big deep-voiced beefy man with a Tennessee suntan. He is dressed garishly--silk shirt with palm trees and white bucks. On his finger is a huge gold ring. The ring is made up of huge letters; the majascules arranged in the shape of a piano with diamond rings. It spells "STAMPS." "Elvis gave this to me," he says. He speaks softer when he talks personally. Gadlock is standing behind a souvenir table. Someone wants to know how much the 8 x 10 glossies are. Someone behind the table asks color or black and white. The customer decides a t-shirt is better. Or maybe a belt buckle. Or maybe a "Love McTender" penknife.

"I still remember that night," says Gadlock. "We were backstage--and Elvis needed a new pair of glasses. I ran all over town and finally got this man to open up his shop to get them. It wasn't anything big. But you know," he says. "Elvis remembered. He was like that. At the end of the tour, he drew me aside and gave me this ring. Only seven of them were ever made. He was like that."

There's too much flourescence in the damn Ford dealership. You start picturing all this looking at the color glossies. A big bloated Elvis. Elvis backstage. Elvis demanding that somebody buy him his glasses right now. Elvis handing out rings in gratitute, saying only a few words. Elvis who blewup his television with a .38 police chief special because he didn't like the programming. Elvis who didn't live near anybody. The guy who had no peers. By the sixties there wasn't even any competition. Elvis who locked Priscilla away in Graceland until she was old enough to marry him. Why America loves burnouts is a difficult questions. Why he was in his one-man purgatory is anyone's guess. But that's where he was.

The music that accompanies the car exhibit is a soundtrack, a collage of songs, played--the dealership never missing a trick--on a Delco car stereo speaker. "Love Me Tender." "Heartbreak Hotel." You have to love "Heartbreak Hotel," even if the man next to you is being an idiot, and poses next to the car in a mock Elvis stance that's more embarrassing than funny. It's just a great song. The guy thinks he's the life of the party. In the open back seat of the limo is a shirt and flashy fender guitar. Never played. Never worn. They both belonged to Elvis.

"You'd be amazed what people will do to get near this car," says Gadlock. "They'll offer you money and booze, they'll offer to come to your room." That's with a wink. "Hell," he says, "if they want to come to my room, that's fine. But I don't want it to have anything to do with the car." Gadlock, who tells everything under twenty-four and female that they're looking "awful pretty today," is adamant about that. There's a weird ethic going on here with this car. "Hell, now, I wouldn't sleep with Raquel Welch if she wanted it just to sit in the car." It's practically--no, it is--a bona fide matter of honor. A bona fide matter of honor right here in his prefab Ford showroom in the middle of nowhere.

It sounds ridiculous, but all day people have been trying to touch the damn thing. There is something going on here. A lot of people are here and a lot are embarrassed. Some are curious, and some of us are disdainfully amused and aloof. That pose doesn't last long, though. A couple drove up in their pickup truck from Tennessee, six hours away. It's not surprising. It's a Friday night, and there probably isn't a whole hell of a lot going on in Knoxville for the weekend. The couple is in their forties. He's one of those incredibly wiry men and looks like a coal miner, only there's no coal mining in Knoxville, so he's probably a farmer. He's got cinch weed killer in the back of the truck. He's wearing a Chevy hat and chewing tobacco. There's nothing worse in the world than farming sometimes. His wife is all wrapped up in a windbreaker; a modified beehive hairdo. When they come in they seem embarrassed by the pretty, heavily made-up Ford girls, with their insincere cooing over all 124 cubic inches of a new Granada. But eventually they come over to the car anyway. The stand there. Elvis is singing an incredibly overproduced version of "Look Away to Dixieland," and no matter how corny that song may be it will still get to you if you still know how to breathe--it's one of the great cries of noble defeat, like Dylan's "Sarah" or "Wild Horses." One of those songs. Only more. There's something undeniable about the civil war, and the couple just stands there. When the song's over there's a lull before Elvis goes into "Blue Suede Shoes." The man's been dead for years, but the wife smiles. She starts talking about the Rambler he used to come pick her up with when she was his sweetheart. Before they got stuck here. Before the tobacco growing got so ridiculous that it took a quarter of a million in loans just to get a crop in. Before all those bad crops in the early seventies, too. He doesn't say anything. There was a time when Elvis seemed to be saying, as Harry Crews said, that you didn't have to take it in Dipshit, Tennessee, just because you lived in some dumb grit town. For a second you can feel the elation that was Elvis; the man who gave a whole region a little bit of pride. And then it's gone and the whole thing's just too damn sad. All of it--this couple traveling six hours to see a goddamn Lincoln Continental, the Delco car ad display, the shiny Granadas. All those idiots buying t-shirts and pictures of the grave.

The Ford agency is in the middle of nowhere. Like many cities of the "new" south, there's a beltway ringing the town. You have to ride fifteen miles to get here. It's nothing but car dealerships and light industry. There's no reason to be here unless you're here to see the car. You just don't happen by.

The Ford dealership expects to draw twenty thousand people in the four days the car is there. They're trying to push the new small Fords. Things are unwell in Detroit. Elvis is dead, too. Gatlock claims it's a break even situation. He says nothing makes him more mad than hearing people accuse him of making a living off a dead man. "J.D. never would, never will do that. They were friends. There's no respect in that." He mentions the plastic Elvis clones in New York. "Hell," he says. "It still won't be Elvis." He points to the people. "Hell, they'll know for God's sake. They'll know it's not Elvis. You can walk like him, talk like him, sing like him, look like him--it won't be Elvis." What will be missing? Charisma? Memory? Promotion? Mabye grace. Who knows?

The limousine will travel all over the South. It goes to dealerships and fairs and auto shows. Anywhere. Anywhere people want to be reminded that not everyone has to take it wherever. "I just loved him," is what most people say. After a while, you can barely see for the myth. It was so quickly generated. So quickly canonized. When you ask people why they came they are reluctant to talk. It takes a while before it sinks in. They want to be left alone. Here, in the terrible neon on the plush vinyl-smelling carpet, surrounded by sensory input--they want to be left alone. They just want to remember.

I was in Hamilton Bermuda when Elvis, the real Elvis--the one with the improbably cool middle name of Aaron--died. It isn't as glamorous as it sounds. It had been a desperation flight from the country, and, at the time, Bermuda, just six hundred miles off the coast of South Carolina, and with Massachusetts perpetually hanging over its head, was the most exotic place in the world you could fly to from Boston for a hundred bucks. It was late August and the Square was too strident. There are only so many times you can sit through the midnight movies or eat ice cream on Bailey's shaky chairs. There are only so many people reading poetry by the Charles you can stand--especially if you're working in a wheelchair factory. It behooved you to make the hundred bucks. You have a shit job and after a while you feel like shit. One afternoon in Hamilton, someone came by under the palm trees muttering and shaking his head. My friends thought it might be another assassination--it was that kind of muttering. When we found out it was Elvis who died, we didn't much care. In those days we lumped Elvis in with Sinatra and the rest of the "entertainers."

Still, everyone seemed broken up by the whole thing. It didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. We thought it was pretty stupid. We though his mourners were even more stupid. We felt like we had some undeniable sense of cool when it came to music. Repairing wheelchairs, we did nothing but listen to "Sticky Fingers" and sneer at the managers. They hated us, but we hated them, too. And we had "Bitch" and "Sway" and Bob Wier and Captain Trips. We thought Elvis was bullshit. We had Mick and Keef. They saved our skins.

One in the morning: Outside the Ford dealership, the guys from Gadlock's crew are getting ready to leave. The dealership has been opened extra late to accomodate crowds. Inside you can hear Elvis doing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" over the Delco system. Another one of those haunted Civil War songs. One by one the flourescent lights go out. There's a weird orange sodium vapor lamp glow over the city ten miles away. The cicadas are going crazy in the heat. It is terribly still and terribly wide open. There's been a bag lady outside the window all night, and everyone's been making fun of her. God knows how she got out here on the beltway. It's too elaborate, probably. As you're leaving she wants to talk to you, and almost everyone talks loudly and ignores her. If you stop she tells you she wants to enlist you in her plan to resurrect Elvis.

"They've hidden the body in the trunk," she says. "You know, we could get it out. You and me." Probably, Sure. "They don't want anyone to know," she says. "They're hiding him from us." Say nothing, Walk away. Gun down the expressway and leave this, another scene of southern gothic, behind.

In the trunk? Christ, Probably. The question is: Who the hell knows if he would want to come back?