One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(40)

But Elvis wasn’t going to give up something as big as being Elvis without a fight.

If Elvis wanted to feel like Elvis again, thought Elvis, he was going to act like Elvis.

Elvis came up with a plan.

He would set out on a live tour across America—the grandest of his age. He would wear a suit of sparkling jewels—something that only a king of rock and roll could wear. He would sing each and every one of Elvis’s hits, one after another, while standing in front of a giant flashing sign that said ELVIS—just so there would be no mistaking, for him or anyone else, who he was.

He did it. And each night he felt like Elvis again, for a couple of hours.

But then the day after each show, he would feel worse than before. In the tender light of early afternoon he would realize all over again that the person onstage the night before was still not quite Elvis; except now, he would realize in a panic, the situation was far worse: now that all these thousands of people had seen this not-quite Elvis and had been told in no uncertain terms that this was Elvis, that meant this new, almost-Elvis was replacing and erasing—show by show, ten thousand by ten thousand—the Elvis that he did know, for sure, had once been real, and true, and not this.


He wanted to die. No, that wasn’t it: he wanted to breathe and eat and remember, to laugh at funny movies and practice his karate. But the more he kept living his life trying to be this other person, the more he knew he was harming that person; and he loved that other person more than he loved himself; and he knew that wasn’t crazy, because everyone else did, too.

He told the Colonel that it was time for Elvis to die. He wasn’t as articulate as he should have been, given the sensitive nature of the request, but luckily, the Colonel understood. The Colonel always did. “I’ll take care of it,” said Colonel Tom Parker, and on August 16, 1977, the body of Elvis Presley was found dead in Graceland.


Elvis woke up in Las Vegas. For a while he couldn’t tell if he was in heaven or hell, but when he realized he was in Las Vegas, he knew he’d be okay.

Now that the king was dead, the man could do as he wished.

Elvis wondered what a regular person who wasn’t Elvis would do now, and he reasoned that person would get a job. He looked around for something that paid well enough for work he would be able to do.

Before long, he found such a job, and became an Elvis impersonator.

Once again, he was the best in the world at something he loved.

“You’re incredible!” people would tell him after his shows. “Incredible!”

“Thank you, thank you very much.”

Afterward, when he walked down the street, people would wave at him: happily, affectionately. And, most exciting of all: casually.

“Hey, it’s Elvis!”

He would wave back, the same way, and they’d both smile and forget about the moment a moment later.

He was finally who he had long wanted to be: a person for whom Elvis Presley was a major part of his life, but not everything.

And then there was the undeniable and all-American pleasure of being well paid for a job he found easy.

It wasn’t the best time of his life; he had, after all, once been Elvis—Elvis!—but it wasn’t the worst time of his life anymore, either.

It was a time of his life.


Elvis died the second time in 1994, this time of a heart attack in the early morning hours at the breakfast counter of a diner on South Las Vegas Boulevard. A waitress found him over a grilled-cheese sandwich with an untouched half a grapefruit to its side. The only identification he had on him said Elvis Aaron Presley with the birth date 1/8/35 and the address of Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.

This was something that happened from time to time in Las Vegas.

The second time, Elvis died happy.


And that was the moment—almost to the hour—that the tabloids stopped making up stories that Elvis had been seen here or there, and started making up things about people everyone already knew were alive, a tradition that continues to this day.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Or maybe when something that big is out there, a presence that size, it just doesn’t go undetected. It has to be sensed, and said, by someone, in some way.





If I Had a Nickel





If I had a nickel for every time I spilled a cup of coffee, I’d be rich!

Here’s how I’d do it.





1. SETUP AND EXPENSES


First: the coffee. At Costco you can get a 12-pack of 34-ounce cans of Folgers coffee for $65.99. Each of those makes 270 cups, which comes out to 2.04 cents a cup. An industrial-strength filter-free coffee brewer capable of brewing 40 cups at a time costs $119.99 at Costco. Five of these will be a one-time expense of $599.95. Costco also sells a 1,000-count box of 12-ounce paper cups for $116, which comes out to 11.6 cents a cup and to 1.16 cents per use of cup (based on a conservative estimate of ten spills per cup). I do not have a Costco card, but I can borrow one from a friend.

In terms of a workspace, a 1500 square foot space downtown with easy-to-wipe floors rents for $750 per month. While this is technically the kind of work one could do at home, I believe in keeping work and home life separate when possible for psychological reasons, especially in an enterprise such as this one, which I can easily envision driving a person insane. Mental health is an issue I take very seriously.