IN PATTY CARROLL’S WORLD BEYOND WORDS

By Andrei Codrescu

Me and my people we’ve been working for decades to try to understand the cults of Elvis and Dracula. My people, Romanian-European skeptics with Enlightenment roots, have a hard time understanding why Americans, the freest and richest people on earth, have fits of ecstasy and chills of religiosity when auditing or viewing the aforementioned icons. I’ll dispense with Dracula for now, because he’s mostly imaginary and centuries old, and I’ll direct my baffled and disturbed vision toward the growing god-like figure of Elvis. In 1966 when I arrived in the U.S.A., Elvis was a Las Vegas caricature to my generation, symbolically irrelevant and physically grotesque. Our idols were long-haired and skinny and filled with angry metaphysical anguish. When Elvis died and the Sixties ended, the excessive kitschiness of the next decade demanded an antidote and Elvis made his comeback via the tabloids, taking his place among a pantheon of freaky manifestations, including UFOs and zombies, who were coming back from the dead at a staggering rate. The ironic purging continued into the Eighties, but the figure of Elvis detached itself from its freakoid peers and started gaining momentum and altitude. The ascendant Elvis figure rose high enough to penetrate the ivory (more like pressed woodchips by then) of academe in the mid-nineties. At that point, Elvis became a multi-layered, multi-tentacled cultural phenom that knew no bounds. Not only was Elvis suddenly the key that unlocked the mysteries of mid-century of America, but, it turns out, there were some people for whom he had never diminished or increased in stature. There were people for whom Elvis was God in the beginning, in the bad-movie middle, and in the overwight and sad end. There were people who measured the stages of their lives in Elvis, who remembered important history by the Elvis song contemporary to it, who led a life ritually marked by Elvian ceremonies.

I was an Elvis novice until I was invited to deliver the concluding remarks at the Second International Elvis Symposium at the Memphis College of Art, a gathering of pop-scholars, theologians, artists, and fanatics. The Symposium coincided with the annual anniversary of Elvis’s death, an occasion hosted by the official governors of the Elvis legacy trust(s) connected to Graceland and in no way connected with the Elvis fringes represented at our conference. I traveled to Memphis in an airplane full of Australian Elvis fans of a certain age and, for the most part, of a certain girth, wearing a variety of Elvis T-shirts issued over the years. Two of them conversed with me at length about where they were and what they were doing upon the release of important Elvis songs. One of them, a grandmother in her late sixties, claimed that on hearing “It’s Alright, Mama,” she had to get married the next day. Those were the days. The scholars and weirdos gathered under the huge blow-up rubber doll of Elvis in front of the Memphis College of Art, taught me many things. I had been aware for some time of the cabalistic significations of the name “Elvis”: “lives,” “lives,” “evils,” but not quite tuned in to the depth of occult tales they spun, or the depth of mystical feeling attached to them. Due to my singular job of delivering the “concluding remarks,” I had to listen to everything, including vastly boring academic lectures and, more amusingly, the speculations of a former Secret Service guard for Richard Nixon who believed (with slides and clippings) that his boss had assassinated the King. From this seemingly endless quagmire of paranoid academic and popular suppurations there were only two ways out: suicide and Patty Carroll.

The fact that Patty appeared at just the right time is a miracle I attribute entirely to Elvis. I knew of Patty’s work, I admired her photographs, but I had no idea that she would visit the conference for the purpose, it turns out, of saving my life. Patty had brought her camera, as she had for a long time, to photograph Elvis impersonators, many of whom were her friends. When she invited me along, I had no idea that she was an insider of the annual Elvis Impersonators’ Ball and that she had had a long and abiding interest in the people who became Elvis every year. Some of them were Elvis all year and some of them were hoping, no doubt, to impersonate Elvis post-mortem. What would the ghost of Elvis make of of people squeezed into his suits mobbing the pearly gates I cannot imagine. On the other hand, death was not an issue: for the world-wide Elvi come to Memphis to be Elvis, life eternal was already theirs. Anyway, going backstage with Patty was like being allowed into the world’s most exclusive club with Mick Jagger, or the King Himself. Elvi of every description greeted her with hugs and salutations. Patty and Patty’s camera were surely something in this world, something beloved, something like Blue Suede Shoes, if such a thing can be. How else explain the adoration of child Elvi (whom she had seen grow up and whose parents she knew), Japanese Elvi, female Elvi, and even wheelchair-bound, handicapped Elvi? Patti knew them and had photographed them and had listened to their stories. They were her community, they trusted her, and they were going to do their best on stage because she was there. After my privileged visit backstage, I sat in the audience while Patty did her camera thing. The spectacle was amazing: each Elvis had fans. The younger Elvis had fans, the older Elvis had fans, and so did every other kind of Elvis, including the lesbian and the Japanese Elvis. It was as if every community on earth, including sexual subcultures and foreign countries, had sent their ambassadors to present their version of the King. It was a competition in the best sense of the word: spectators wept, sweat-soaked handkerchiefs were snapped up in awe by outraised hands, people fainted, spoke in tongues, had fits and orgasms. Had Elvis himself appeared during this orgy of Elvis-spirit he would have ranked but tenth or eleventh. I needed about five beers to feel the Spirit, but when I did I understood something profound: the Elvis impersonator community was religious but unlike any other religion. The people who worshipped the King did so by taking turns being Him. Other church goers are possessed by their respective divinities, but few, if any, have the joy of anything as performing frankly sexual Elvis songs for their liturgy. Patty’s photos of these singularly inspired devotees constitute a sacred text of their own. You can go into each picture and hear stories or, if you’re not up to it, you can just lower yourself into the faces herein and hear the passionate call of the Beyond.

My “concluding remarks” at the Second International Elvis Coonference were highly colored by the humanity of Patty’s camera. The Nixon guy made no impression. Now that he book is here, I’ll start working on getting my people to understand. About Dracula: Patty, are you interested?