Look Homeward, Elvis

One of the coolest things about Graceland is not the famous Jungle Room with leopard- and tiger- and zebra- and marmoset-skin print furniture and rugs and such. It's not the admittedly impressive Hall of Records with every #1, silver, gold and platinum record Elvis ever made. It's not the swimming pool or the man's grave or the awesome tacky Americana uber-kitsch.

It's his garage.

There's an engine from a motorboat, propeller and all, hanging from the ceiling. Elvis and his buddies would set up a shooting range out there and just go buck-wild taking out paper targets. It's the most white trash Tupelo throwback you could think of, sandwiched between a few Cadillacs.

And you thought I was kidding.

It's nice to know you can't go home again, but you can't really leave, either.

Graceland

Carl Sandburg

Tomb of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for
six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the
newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)