The King Lives Elvis Week Keeps Memory Alive; As If It Needed Help

Strolling up Union Avenue on a late-summer afternoon, the image darts into the corner of your eye like an unexpected encounter with a ghost.

There He is - hair swept up in a greasy pompadour, lips pouting, head tilted in that bite-me pose - staring out from a doorway between an abandoned building and a bar. Elvis?

Oh, come on. It must be the insufferable heat. But the face next to him makes the discovery even more surreal. It’s a young girl, her tender eyes circled in coal-black liner, a tower of black hair piled on top of her head like a Vegas card dealer. Priscilla?

Yes, it’s them, frozen like plastic figures on top of an overdone wedding cake, the King and his Queen. They are captured forever in early publicity photos still hanging in the window of Blue Light Photography, the store where, 40 years ago, Presley had his first glam shots made. It’s as if the sexy young star could hop out of his Caddie and walk in the door at any moment.

“When I was a kid, I swept floors here and I saw him a lot,” recalls owner Rick Caccamisi, 48. “We’d get a call that he was coming, and everyone would get so excited.”

Forty years after Memphis’ most famous citizen rose out of poverty to make rock history, and nearly 20 years after his death on Aug. 16, 1977, Elvis Presley’s spirit still saturates this city like the fat in a fried peach pie.

Because it hasn’t had the luxury of constant makeovers undertaken by wealthier Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis is much the same as when the King reigned. Many of the old buildings that lined the streets in 1956 are still here, the places where Elvis sang, recorded, dreamed.

Most tourists plop down $10 to look for him at his famous mansion to the south, Graceland, where his body rests in a powder-white tux right next to the crypts of his mama and daddy out by the swimming pool. During Elvis Week, a carnival of Presley-mania that kicked off Saturday, thousands will queue up here, carrying candles and sharing memories.

But there’s another way to celebrate the essence of Elvis. It’s a little quirkier and perhaps a bit less pristine than the carefully guarded image projected by Elvis Presley Enterprises, which owns and operates Graceland. This underground trail, however, is truer to what shaped the soul of the rebellious teenager who would be King. With a little bit of background, which we’re only too happy to provide, music lovers can find places that put you in touch with the man behind the legend.

For instance, there’s the housing project, Lauderdale Courts, where a teenage Elvis awkwardly sang love songs to his girlfriend on the stoop and where poor kids still play hide-and-seek under clotheslines. Up the street, vinyl records still line the shelves of Poplar Tunes, the old record shop where Presley hung out after school, scoping the latest 78s. At Lowell Hays Jewelry, his favorite jeweler is glad to show you the diamond pins, custom-made in the shape of a gaudy lightning bolt, that Presley ordered by the dozens.

Just as each of these haunts tells a different Elvis story, so, seemingly, does just about everyone you run into.

Denise Martin, 33, is drying off her kids after a dip in the swimming pool Elvis built after hitting it big in 1956 behind his pre-Graceland home, a brick ranch on Audubon Drive.

“Sure, we all know it was Elvis’ house,” she says with a kind of guarded pride about the home of her mother-in-law, Janice Chandler. “We think about it, especially during Elvis Week, when people come by. I was just sitting out by the pool a while ago, and I thought to myself, ‘Damn. Elvis sat here.”’

Down at the Arcade Diner on South Main Street, patrons are starting their morning with heaping plates of bacon, eggs and grits. It’s easy to miss the small silver plaque on the wall: “Elvis Presley’s Booth.”

Waitress Martha Monk’s Elvis memories have nothing to do with shakes and fries. She recalls him from working in the office of “Dr. Nick” - Elvis’ infamous prescription-scribbling physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos. “Elvis would come in at night, when nobody else was there. We’d talk with him. He was nice. He always had that Memphis Mafia with him.”

The Arcade Diner, “Dr. Nick,” the Memphis Mafia … ah, it seems like only yesterday.

If you’re considering a pilgrimage here, take along a map, a big dose of curiosity and a ready handshake. Digging up the people and places of Elvis’ life isn’t all that hard. Elvis may have left the building, but you can still find him here.