After a few months of worrying a lot and trying not to worry, Elvis started to wonder seriously if the feeling that he definitely was who he had once been would ever come back at all, except in out-of-focus flashes after a lot of pills.
It didn’t make any sense, thought Elvis; but somehow, the line that makes someone the same person from day to day must have snapped inside him when he wasn’t paying attention, which had been, he admitted to himself with a shameful shudder, a lot of the time. A knot had untied, a hinge had popped; he didn’t know the exact intricacies of the mechanics of the soul, he was simply a singer—or Elvis was, anyway; or had been—but in any case, however it had happened, the man he was now had just kept on going, unaware and untethered to whatever had once made him Elvis, and by the time he had realized it and turned back around, the real Elvis had somehow left the building.
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.