For reasons I cannot explain

There’s some part of me wants to see

Graceland.

~ Paul Simon

We reached Memphis in the evening and found secure parking for the Bug at a Holiday Inn not far from Beale Street. Both of us were hungry, and we wandered through a cold drizzle looking for food. Harry chose Pig on Beale, a bar that advertised good barbecue. We were not disappointed, especially washed down with southern pecan beer, which tasted like fizzy pecan pie.

When we bundled up and went outside, the sidewalks were eerily vacant except for a cop guarding the intersection. Restaurants and bars were all but empty. But we were in Memphis, and I wanted to make the best of it.

I heard a piano across the street and a sultry singing voice.

“Let’s go see what that’s about,” I said. Harry agreed.

There was no cover at Rum Boogie Café, so we went in. We were among three or four other people in the place and found a table close to the band. Harry ordered a white wine and I had a cabernet.

The singer at the keyboard had her black hair done in ‘50s style with Tootsie Roll bangs. Her voice was raspy and haunting in an Etta James sort of way, and she sipped Red Bull through a straw as she evoked Bessie Smith and belted out peppy old tunes that made me think more of New Orleans than Memphis. The trombone, trumpet, stand-up bass and drums followed her lead. The musicians looked like they were having fun and flirted with the small audience. At the break, Harry was still nursing his wine, so I ordered one of the bar’s signature rum drinks, which seemed more fruit juice than alcohol, and we settled in for a second set of Davina and the Vagabonds.

It was nearly eleven when we made our way back to the hotel, dodging icy patches but both of us in good spirits.

“How far do you want to go tomorrow?” Harry asked.

“A couple miles,” I said.

“A couple miles?”

“Yes—to Graceland.”

I’m old enough to have been in love with Elvis Presley. I papered my bedroom walls with pictures of him torn from magazines. Some nights I kissed the photos before going to sleep, dreaming that some day I’d meet him in person. It was 1956 and I was all of nine when Elvis was scheduled to appear on the Ed Sullivan show. I sat cross-legged on the rug as close to the black and white TV as my mother would allow. Mr. Sullivan saved Elvis until near the end of the lineup to keep viewers watching. Because it was Sunday night and I had school the next morning, my mother threatened to send me to bed before he appeared. But she couldn’t have wedged me from the TV with a crow bar.

Finally there he was. Girls in the audience squealed with delight. I felt a wave of euphoria. I could barely breathe. Elvis began singing “Hound Dog,” strumming his guitar in front of him. When he got to the chorus—“You ain’t never caught a rabbit”—he slung the guitar to his back, twisted a leg and gyrated his hips. Caught up in an unbearable ecstasy, I jumped up and ran screaming to my room.

Remembering that moment now, I suppose what I experienced was rapture, a mystical communion with the divine. I have not felt anything like it since.

When I grew up and Elvis joined the Army and later put on a lot of weight, my obsession wore off although I still like watching his movies and videos of his concerts. On our way to Graceland, I expected the home of the rock icon to be all sequins and glitter like the costumes he wore in his later shows. But I was surprised to find a grand southern colonial faced with stone. The house was built in the 1930s for a doctor and had an air of gentility about it. White fences like those at Kentucky thoroughbred farms lined the property, and horses grazed on new grass in the meadows with blankets on their backs in the unusually cool morning. Grand old trees stood sentinel on the front lawn. The house is in view of the road, not down a winding private drive as I’d envisioned. Elvis in his private life, as in his professional one, offered himself to public view.

Our tour wasn’t allowed upstairs, but the main floor and downstairs are a memorial to 1960s and ‘70s style and culture with a touch of elegance. White leather sofa and chairs in the living room, a dining table set for a formal meal, and downstairs a bar and television room (several televisions, in fact) with a mirrored ceiling.

Behind the house, Elvis had a building constructed for a racquetball court, now turned into a museum for Elvis memorabilia. The exhibits of gold records, movie posters and concert costumes left me pondering what it was about this man that set the world on fire. Elvis was born in January 1935, the year of the dog, according to the Chinese zodiac. Dogs are good natured, sincere and loyal. Most everyone likes a dog. But there had to be something else—something very special about this puppy.

When we passed the small graveyard outside, I saw a tiny marker with the name Jesse Garon Presley and one date—January 8, 1935. I had forgotten that Elvis had a twin brother who was stillborn, leaving him to be an only child. Maybe Elvis was living two lives, or a life big enough for two men.

I still regret that I never saw an Elvis concert in person, and the Graceland tour left me nostalgic and undeniably sad. Harry and I walked slowly to the Bug, both of us listening to Elvis’s voice piped over a loudspeaker into the parking lot.

“This next song is the saddest song I know,” Elvis muttered in his Memphis drawl.

“Hound Dog,” I said to Harry. I was thinking about the Ed Sullivan show and my nine-year-old adoration.

The music began and Elvis sang out, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog….” And there it was again—the rapture. After all those years, that girl was still inside me. I don’t remember getting to the Bug. Maybe I floated there. Maybe Elvis transported me. If I’m honest, his voice transports me still.