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.