Live Hard, Die Young and Leave a Bloated Corpse

Aspirating on alcohol induced vomit: rock & roll; riding a Harley off an overpass into a church steeple: rock & roll; bloated, slumping over on the toilet from a doughnuts, constipation and prescription drug abuse induced heart attack: not rock & roll.  The King died young…but not well. 

I was a pup when Elvis died, younger than any of my own children currently and my impressions of him were cartoonish.  He was a animation more than a man, Bugs Bunny or Popeye, his “What’s up doc,” being “Thank ya, thank ya very much,” his bulbous forearms a slightly raised lip, both of which I impersonated quite well as a kid.

His death came to me on the morning news.  Pictures and film footage, black and white, a young Elvis in sports coat, another going into the military; a shot in color of a youthful, fit and heavily side-burned Elvis in black leather; various ages and weights in iconic bedazzled white coveralls and shades, karate stance with pointer and pinky finger extended.  More black and white scenes of young girls, delirious, crying with excitement; color scenes of older women, similar, but crying with grief.  None of which did anything to dispel the caricature of Elvis.  Three and a half decades later, for the most part, he’s still a cartoon character.

I probably imagined thitis, but I recall a court drawing style picture of Elvis’s deceased body, wearing sequined suit, slumped atop a toilet.  Memory says I saw it but reasoning says it’s too tasteless to have been on the news…back then.  Regardless, it’s the mental image of a worn and broken man and of someone aged (those are not the same, old is fine, at least it better be, Elvis died five years younger than I am today).

Thinking now, probably for the first time, of Elvis as a person, someone with family, who makes his own peanut butter and nanar sandwiches and puts his bellbottomed jumpsuit on one leg at a time makes his death much more alarming.

The specter of him slumped on the pot precedes an obese, balding man walking down a rural street in Montana, wearing stretch fabric Levi’s and a grimy V-neck t-shirt in the way an anvil crushed Wile E. Coyote  staggers off, his body a series of accordion folds, becomes whole again, Acme box in hand in the next scene.  I guess I never really grasped his humanity, a man who died before his time; someone with thoughts and emotions and strengths and frailties; a normal human being with a very unusual job and lifestyle.

The day I realized I was older than the biblical Jesus upon his death prompted a ‘what have I managed to accomplish’ reflection.  My first thought at outliving Elvis: “He really wasn’t old.”  While the King is dead, and has been for quite some time, his caricature has long lived in my mind and in the psyche of the world.  But considering him human I realize he was a young man with plans beyond live hard, die young and leave a bloated corpse.

August, September, Volktober…

Love washed over me 29 years ago; a little German girl, my age with curves, big round curves; a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle.  I became obsessed, looking and admiring, reading and researching, exciting my brain with information and boring those around me with its regurgitation.  That last part, the regurgitation, may be why boxes of ‘VW Trends’ and ‘Hot VW’ magazines mysteriously disappeared during a move early in my marriage.

Yes, Adolf Hitler played a part in her creation, calling on Ferdinand Porsche to design a peoples’ car (folks’ wagon), even presenting him with a sketch in 1934 that looks eerily like my red ‘67.  But none of us can be held accountable from whence we came; only what we’ve become.

Three other VW’s have come and gone, a ’69 Beetle, a ’73 Super Beetle and the sexiest of the girls, a bright red ’71 Karmann Ghia.  But it’s not the air cooled Volkswagens that captured my eternal love, it’s their cousin, a girl I met as a mere child, the car my Grandfather taught me to drive when I was just twelve.  A 1964 Opel Kadett, also a German made econocar, she was designed to compete directly with VW’s Beetle for market share.

Related to, but not the GT (mini Corvette) produced by Opel in the 60’s and 70’s, she looks more like a mini ‘64 Chevy II.  When I was 12, she was pristine.  My Uncle Frankie bought her new, drove her and then handed her off to his dad.  Grandpa Buck traded mechanical work for paint, body and interior and rebuilt the rest himself.  Buck died when I was fifteen and she was given to friends who drove her until she wouldn’t drive and parked her.  Frankie’s boy Steve happened across her one day and brought her back into the family.  A few years later I traded him out of her for some war metals that’d been handed down to me via Grandpa Buck, a U. S. soldier in Germany during WWII, that he’d gathered from Nazi prisoners.  It was a win-win for me, those things had given me the creeps for decades.

Were it not the actual car my Grandfather owned I’d never consider her a restoration project, she hadn’t aged well.  When she’s finally on the road again I’ll have lost money comparing investment to market value, but that doesn’t concern me.  She’s a link to my past, the car Buck loved (probably because my Grandma’s name was Opal), the car he taught three of his four grandchildren to drive in.  She may even be the car I teach my grandkids to drive in.

All this comes to mind because of an email from the Texas Opel Club, a reminder of Volktoberfest, a German car show in McKinney, Texas at the end of September.  I’d go for the VW’s but there’s been mention of Opels, probably just GTs, but one never knows, a type ‘A’ Kadett might crawl out of the woodwork.  At the very least I’ll get a day looking at old cars and catching up with my cousin Steve (the one too young to have been taught to drive in the Opel).  And with one email the countdown has begun: August, September, Volktober…