Last Ride to Graceland (24 page)

“Good luck,” I whisper as she stands.

But just as Marilee is going in, the door to the other office
jerks open. The dentist looks down the hall and calls out, “Can one of you girls run down to the pharmacy?”

He explains that since this medical office complex is so close to the hospital, an all-night pharmacy is just below us on the first floor of the building. God knows what he's doing to Elvis in there, but whatever it is, he seems to think Elvis might need painkillers later.

What he doesn't realize is that Graceland is practically an all-night pharmacy in itself. We have little brown vials with white tops sitting on every table, and stuck in every kitchen and bathroom cabinet throughout the house. We have pills to ease you up and some to ease you down. Pills to make you big and some to make you small. I don't understand half the names or what particular brown plastic vial is meant to do what, but I do know this: if we flushed every brown bottle at Graceland down the toilet and into the water supply, the whole city of Memphis would go to sleep for a week. Maybe the whole state of Tennessee.

And so I hesitate for a second, standing there in front of the dentist with the Kleenex pressed to my mouth. I'd started to crumple it in my hand and hide the blood from him—hiding things is my natural tendency—but then I think no, he needs to know how rough his hygienist is on the normal patients.

So I very pointedly press the Kleenex to my lips and he very pointedly ignores it. He holds a piece of white paper out, pinched between his thumb and index finger, and says “Just in case there's pain later.”

Just in case there's pain later. If life with Elvis has taught me anything, it's that there's always pain later.

“All right,” I say. “I'll go.”

The idea doesn't hit me until I'm out the door and in the hall. That this prescription in my hand is a gift, because it gives me an excuse to go to a pharmacy alone, and in the middle of the night.

In other words, it gives me the chance to get an at-home pregnancy test without anyone finding out.

So I ride the elevator down to the ground floor and follow the signs to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy. It's predictably deserted at this hour, except for a man sitting alone in a wheelchair, staring into space, as if he has no idea who brought him here or who, if anyone, is ever coming to fetch him. And then there's the woman behind the counter, who seems bored to death. She looks down at the prescription that I hand her, and then at me, and I blurt out, before I can lose my nerve, “I also need an EPT.”

They're brand-new, but I've seen them advertised in magazines.
Cosmopolitan
and
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
. The ads show a woman who's the dead opposite of me, a young housewife with her husband beside her, and they're both smiling like they want nothing more in life than a positive test and a baby on the way, and then a hundred more behind it.

Peace of mind,
the ads say.
Our family found it with EPT.

This lady pharmacist knows that the girl standing before her is nothing like that beaming young wife in the ad. I'm nineteen, but I look more like fifteen, and it's the middle of the night in a twenty-four-hour pharmacy near the only hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. I'm bleeding from my mouth, which is unfortunate, but I'm not bleeding from anywhere else, which is
even more unfortunate, and this pharmacist looks at me like she can see my whole life in just one glance.

And then, as if the situation isn't sordid enough, it occurs to me that I don't have any money. No money for the painkillers and no money for the test.

“And just put it on the Graceland account,” I say, taking a chance. Graceland has credit all over Memphis, and the minute I say the magic word
Graceland
, the attitude of the woman behind the counter changes. She's all smiles as she plops the square white box that holds the EPT test kit onto the counter and goes into the back for the Parafon Forte.

Ten minutes later I'm back in the elevator. I read the side of the square white box and it tells me that with four easy steps I will have my results. Four easy steps and twenty minutes and then a circle will either form at the bottom of the test tube or it will not.

My whole life hangs on that circle.

CORY

I
wake up early, so early that I'm the first person in line for the breakfast buffet, which is really saying something when you're staying at an airport hotel. A whole flight crew comes in right behind me, looking so spiffy in their uniforms that I feel guilty about being in the lobby in my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. I eat fast, then pack up a couple of waffles and a bowl of grits for Lucy. After I feed and walk him, I'm going to have to leave him alone for an hour or two and just pray he doesn't eat the room.

Because I've decided I'm going to Graceland. I'm going to make a first trip by myself and try to get the lay of the land before Dirk gives me the all-clear to come back with the Blackhawk. I called Dirk last night to give him the number for my disposable phone, and he said he'd call me today when he got his daddy “used to the idea.”

For some reason I failed to ask him exactly what idea he's trying to get his daddy used to. Dirk has been working on some kind of plan ever since I drove the Blackhawk into his line of vi
sion, and it seems like this car is proving to be the redemption of all sorts of people, not just Mama and me.
It's streaked its way across the South like a vengeful chariot,
I think, even though I know I'm only talking like a preacher's granddaughter again. I do that whenever I get nervous, or drunk.

I'm not drunk now, but I'm definitely nervous. I decide to take the shuttle to Graceland, leaving the Blackhawk just where it is. The fact you have to park your car behind a gate with a security code and a barbed-wire fence is just further proof that we are not on the good side of town.

But even if this location is kind of sketchy, there are still plenty of little old ladies lined up for the first shuttle to Graceland. They all look like good small-town church ladies, wearing their matching pantsuits in those Easter egg colors. I don't even know where you go to buy lilac or mint-green polyester pants anymore, but the ladies relax me a little bit, the way they chatter and chirp as they wait for the bus. They're excited. Happy. Most of them have probably been to Graceland before. Some of them probably come here every year. But it's still a treat, a special day, and when the bus rumbles up, I climb the steps and file back to the very last seat.

We don't drive far. The hotel billboard told the truth about that part, at least. The bus puts us out in a parking lot and we make our slow way across a white bridge, then follow a winding sidewalk until we find ourselves not in Graceland, but in a series of small connected museums located across the street from Graceland. Each section is dedicated to a different period of Elvis's life, from his hardscrabble childhood in Tupelo to his stint in the army to his movie era to Vegas.

The Sirius radio station that plays only Elvis is sitting out in the courtyard blasting “Love Me Tender.” I've listened to this station before. Of course I have. Poor as I am, I always manage to scrape together enough money to keep Sirius in my car. The annual bill comes through in January, which is lucky, since I always get a lot of gigs around the holiday season.

Last year I thought . . . I don't know what I thought. It was our first Christmas without Mama and I knew things would be different, and I wondered if Bradley would even pull it together enough to get me a gift. We met at a Waffle House early Christmas morning, which breaks my heart just to say it because I know that a better woman, a better daughter, would have found a way to make him a holiday breakfast. But I'd had a gig the night before and another one coming up that afternoon. It stinks to work like that on the days when nobody else is ever working, but I knew I needed to milk the holiday cash cow as long as it was mooing. Three lean months lay ahead, starting precisely on January 2, when my only choice was to either chase the snowbirds down to Florida or hole up and spend the winter eating ramen noodles.

So I think Bradley knew I had to take any work I could get through New Year's and he didn't make the slightest peep of protest when I said I'd just meet him Christmas morning for breakfast at the Waffle House out by the interstate, even though the only people there with us were hookers and truckers and a waitress who had brought her kids and their Santa toys to work with her. I gave him his gifts, a fishing cap from Cape May and a book about the Civil War, and he gave me an envelope, apologizing the whole time because it wasn't a store-bought gift.

But I was relieved. I peeked in while he was paying our bill at the register. Cash, more than ever before. Either he was feeling guilty that his wife had up and died on us, taking her casserole-­baking, muffin-making Christmas brunch skills with her, or because he'd never been entirely certain how much money Mama had given me every year.

Either way, this envelope held enough to get me Sirius and electricity and ramen noodles through spring. I hugged him good-bye and we went our separate ways—him to church for a holiday service, me to the bar to set up. I watched his car pull out of the lot just ahead of mine and sat there for a minute, my mouth feeling like it was full of onions and ashes.

Welcome
, I'd thought,
to the new normal.

And it had fucking sucked.

But that's what I'm remembering as I stop now, in front of this radio station that's plunked here right in the middle of the Graceland museum complex. The sign on the front promises
ALL ELVIS
,
ALL THE TIME
, and behind it is a diner serving the foods Elvis liked to eat, including the famously gross stuff. All those banana and bacon and peanut butter concoctions that pitched in together to kill him. It's a funny thing. Having this diner sitting here is like having a guillotine in the middle of a Louis XVI exhibit or a shooting range at the Abraham Lincoln birthplace, but even so, the diner appears to be a moneymaker. It's hardly past time for breakfast but the Elvis faithful are already lined up for lunch.

I turn slowly in the square, taking in the view from all directions. A four-lane highway separates this shiny new museum complex from the actual grounds of Graceland. I can barely see
the famous gates, big and brassy, festooned with musical notes. The airplane called the
Lisa Marie
is parked in its own separate lot, part of the package tour I've paid for, and I consider climbing aboard. Mama flew on it several times. It took her, I guess, to that broken-down runway that runs beside the Juicy Lucy. But Macon seems far from me now, and I look down at the phone in my hand. Dirk hasn't called.

I amble through the sections of the museum. They're cleverly done, with the music and clothes from each era greeting you as you enter, taking Elvis from the 1930s through the '70s. But it's not just Elvis. This place is like a museum of ­America—all our hopes and dreams and failures, laid bare for anybody to see. Perhaps I think this because so many of the visitors seem to be foreign. I hear a variety of languages around me: German, French, Japanese. They are systematic and studious, stopping at every bejeweled outfit, every black-and-white picture.

The whole thing culminates in a section about Elvis and his cars.

The theme is cute. They've set it up like a drive-in movie: clips of Elvis films play on a big screen reminding us—as if anyone who comes here is likely to forget—that the young Elvis was a god. I pause for a second, watch the segment of
Viva Las Vegas
where he first meets Ann-Margret.
She's just as hot as he is
, I think. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that Ann-­Margret was freakishly beautiful in the exact same way that Elvis was. She had the same finely chiseled features, the same powerful hips, ready to uncoil and snap at any moment, the same curling, slightly contemptuous lip. In fact, if you had dyed
her hair black, she would have looked just like him. She would have looked like Priscilla.

So he had a type,
I thought.
Big deal. Lots of guys do. So his type was . . . himself
. Okay, that's weird, but I guess this one fluke of Freudian psychology is why I'm standing here now, the keys to the Blackhawk in one pocket of my jean jacket, the eight-track in the other. Because I know that just as Ann and Elvis and Priscilla shared this certain resemblance, so do my mama and me. We're all peas from the same pod, and if Honey hadn't happened to remind Elvis of himself, none of the rest of this would have ever occurred.

It's funny to think of it like that, but true. If I didn't look like Elvis, I wouldn't exist.

I lean against a trash can, watch the clip play out. Ann-­Margret was the love of his life, that's what my mama always said. Well, in truth there's no “always” about it. In truth, she only said it once. She told me that Ann-Margret had been as talented as Elvis, and so when they met on the set of
Viva Las Vegas
it had been electric. Electric because she was his equal. And, I guess, it had also been impossible because she was his equal. They surfed and sang and danced and raced motorcycles and made what I can only imagine was the most combustible love on the planet, and yet eventually he gave her up and went back to the teenage Priscilla. All this happened long before Mama was at Graceland, but I guess she heard the gossip. She said Ann-Margret was the one who broke his heart, or maybe it would be more accurate to say she's the woman he used to break his own heart. He crashed on her like waves on rocks and then receded because he couldn't face the possibility of a wife just as famous as he was.

It was the closest Mama ever came to saying Elvis had a weakness, that time she told me about how he let Ann-Margret go. But she said Ann kept loving him on some level, just like he kept loving her, for all those years they lived apart. When somebody called to tell Ann he was dead, she screamed. Screamed before she heard the words. She'd known it the minute the phone rang.

I watch the clip play out to the very end. Ann and Elvis really do sizzle on screen, especially in their first scene, where she walks into his garage and he rolls out from under a car and looks up at her. Pretty boy, pretty girl, but together?
Jesus Christ
, I think.
It almost hurts to look at them
. But then the clip ends and Elvis swivels on to someone else—Mary Tyler Moore in
Change of Heart
or Dolores Hart in
King Creole
. It hardly matters. The films are pretty much interchangeable. The girls are all young and pretty and hopelessly smitten, for who wouldn't have been, with Elvis in his prime?

I push myself away from the trash can and move on. Walk through the exhibits of sports cars and jeeps, motorcycles, and even the golf carts they used to race around Graceland. The Blackhawk will end up here eventually, I guess, and it seems fitting. It stings a little less to let go of it, walking through this museum and seeing how it will be valued. Maybe it will even be one of the cars that sits up high on a pedestal, with the doors flung open and mirrors strategically placed so that the tourists, forbidden to approach, can see inside. Dream of what it would be like to sit in those soft red leather seats, to feel that kind of energy vibrating beneath their fingertips.

I head out through the gift shops, which are large and stra
tegically placed. Elvis is singing in all of them and you can buy approximately a million things with his picture on it. I see a waffle iron that presses out his image on your breakfast and a Christmas ornament, a dangling replica of Graceland. The tag says twenty-six dollars. I look at it again. Surely I read it wrong. Surely most of these people passing through the shops—for they are crowded already, even though it's nine forty-five on a weekday—look to be working class, and I'd imagine they have plenty of other things they could do with twenty-six dollars. But no, that's right. That's the price and they're willing to pay it.

The people will do anything for even the slightest sliver of Elvis,
I think. That fact makes me sad, and yet that fact is also the one that's going to save me.

A bus is waiting outside. I pull a set of headsets off the huge rack holding dozens of them and climb aboard. We are one of the first batches of people of the day and the bus pulls out of the museum complex, crosses the road to where Graceland awaits. The fence with the musical notes swings open as we approach and the woman beside me squeals. We drive slowly through the grounds, past tall oak trees and a bright green rolling lawn.

I'm prepared for the fact that the house itself is not really that big. That it looks like lots of other houses, with a redbrick facade and a flat, understated entrance. Elvis bought it in 1957 for a hundred thousand dollars, which I guess was a fortune at the time. It was already named Graceland, after one of the previous owners, a woman named Grace, but he liked the name and kept it. As we file out of the bus, all clutching our headsets, most of the people trot right up to the door, but I linger a bit in the yard in front of the house, looking up. Despite the fact
there's a busy highway just past the musical notes and even an airport nearby, the house strikes me as a spot of calm. I can imagine Elvis, barely in his twenties, proudly handing the keys to Gladys and Vernon, certain beyond measure that he had done what everybody wants to do in the end: he had made his parents proud. What a paradise this must have seemed after the shotgun house down in Tupelo, like the three of them had vaulted as far and as fast as a family could travel. Now he and that father and mother are buried out back in the meditation garden, along with one of his grandmothers, and Dirk said there is a marker for his dead twin brother as well.

The meditation garden is the last stop on the tour. I can see people coming up the sidewalk that leads from the back of the house. Some of them are weeping. While the tourists who rode over with me on the bus were squealing and chattering, singing snippets of songs, the people now getting back on the bus at the end of their tour are sobered. They whisper. They point their cameras or phones toward the front of the house for pictures, but they take them quickly and then step back, as if they are ashamed of their own curiosity. They hang their headsets back on the pegs with reverence, and I pull my own up and over my ears as I head toward the front door. For some reason, I'm already wiping away my own tears, and I haven't even begun.