I've Gone to Graceland

I made it to Memphis on the last day of my temporary driver’s license under a black sky threatening storm.

I thought I’d get the most out of my last driving day by taking back roads from Little Rock.  In many respects my choice merely added hours of boredom: on this side of Arkansas the back roads lie canal-straight to the horizon through open farmland flat to the other horizons.  The day was humid, dim under the low cloudlid that seemed like a swollen belly drooping ragged teats that occasionally spattered rain.  The green land seemed too lush for domestication, sprouting high grasses where not tended, sloppily trimmed to agriculture like a man with a bad haircut.  As I drove past towns and houses words slid off them; they were neither pretty nor ugly, old nor new; they were simply ordinary, simply there.  Small gas stations, big metal barns, family cottages, unevenly mowed lawns.  And yet I was still glad to have avoided the highway.  Not only did I feel safer when the rain turned briefly blinding, but I felt I had more legitimately seen Arkansas.

Meanwhile, I received word from Mexico City that my friend Brett had overnighted my replacement driver’s license to me at my AirBnb address in Memphis.  With that in mind—including a day likely spent waiting for the mail—I got as many Memphis goals out of the way yesterday as I could.  The first of those was to go to Graceland.

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Well, after all, in Mexico I had visited the preserved home of a renowned national artist at the Frida Khalo Museum.  The least I could do for my home country was the same.

Hardly the same, of course.  Graceland does, it’s true, have a preserved house, in which renowned national artist Elvis Presley passed his domestic hours, but in America the house is surrounded by a veritable city of huge grey-and-blue boxes that comprise a sort of Elvisian theme park, with restaurants, multimedia exhibits, and a ticketing booth like a bus station.

It’s also horrifically expensive.  You do not buy a ticket to the house, or even the grounds, but to one of various “tours,” ranging from the “Elvis Ultimate VIP” tour ($159.00) through the “Elvis Experience Tour” ($57.50) to the lowly “Graceland Mansion Including Planes” tour, which I chose ($43.75).  You then file through an airconditioned terminal, sit in a dark waiting room where you watch a video on Elvis’ life, and finally board a shuttle bus that takes you eleven feet to the attraction you’ve come to see.  On the way you’re handed a rubber-cased video pad with attached headphones, that will be your audio-video tour guide as you move room by room through the experience at a standardized pace.  I slung the pad over my shoulder and forgot about it.

From the outside the mansion is quite handsome in the classic stone colonial style, with a white-pillared entry and shutter-framed windows.  But this disappointment doesn’t last long.  As soon as you enter the front door, the tackiness you expect engulfs you. 

I realize my blog is only adding the billionth exact duplicate of each of these photos—and poor iPad versions at that—but really, there’s nothing else one can do with one’s amazement as the queue moves from velvet rope to velvet rope through the house.  Not shown above are the TV lounge, the music lounge, the squash court, the green-carpeted stairs, and of course the grounds that include the family gravesite in a pillared peristyle with a pool and a statue of Jesus whose pedestal says “PRESLEY.”  Whether one’s tongue is in or out of one’s cheek, one has to click.

Indeed, there was a fine line between the overt absurdities of the young millionaire’s indulged whims, and the subtler nonsense afloat in the zeitgeist from which he picked.  Some rooms in the house were done quite “straight”—by 1950s standards.  The wood paneling, the carpeted stairs, the preponderance of mirrors, the china figurines on glass—in such things Elvis is reflected less as the creative force, more the victim equally with his culture of a runaway prototype domestic industrialism.

What I found missing from Graceland was the artist’s art.  Of course Elvis songs play constantly in the background in the theme park, and over the tour-pad headphones whenever I checked, and I ate my meatloaf lunch in the “Vernon’s Smokehouse” cafeteria to the tune of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” etc. on the sound system, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  The mansion has several pianos, but no writing room or sound studio; the museum hall downstairs has framed invoices from the house’s remodelling but no penciled lyric sheets or handdrawn musical notations.  Whatever came out of this young man that changed the world—and something surely did—America chooses to recognize it only in its effects, only in its remunerative capacity.  Only in its mirrors.

I had been routed at last to the gift shop when the skies opened up and a severe downpour came slashing across the theme park.  The parkinglot was a long walk away and the rain wasn’t letting up.  So I spent my last half-hour at Graceland trapped in the mecca of merchandise, eating a $5.00 ice-cream cone from the Elvis-themed sweet shop and humming helplessly along with Elvis tunes.  Eventually I ran for the parkinglot anyway, where my Miata was ankle-deep in a good old Tennessee puddle.