One More Thing (18 page)

You may remember a time when the most common headline to see on a tabloid newspaper in the checkout aisle of the supermarket was that Elvis Presley had been seen alive. And you may remember that sometime around 1994, all these newspapers stopped saying that around the same time.

The papers had been making it all up. None of the pictures were real, and none of the details had anything to do with anything.

But they were right, too.

“People just can’t accept the fact that the King is dead,” one woman sighed to her son when he pointed to such a headline in a Kroger checkout aisle in 1986, back when children were confused by newspapers that contradicted other newspapers.

Behind them in line stood the dead king himself, holding Wonder Bread, peanut butter, Tylenol, and a magazine about something else entirely.

It had in fact been Elvis who couldn’t accept that he was alive, who at a certain specific point could no longer understand on
any level how this fat and tired man in Memphis, this man who combed his thinning hair and slept in his freckled skin, could possibly share the same name and memories as the most mythical creature that the world in his day had known.

It wasn’t simply that he had gained weight, or gained years, or transformed in any natural human way that would have made sad but rational sense to anyone. It was something deeper inside, something that told him that, as strange as it sounded, there wasn’t any true, unbroken line anymore directly connecting the man in whom he stood and Elvis.

Elvis
.

Elvis!

ELVIS!

Who, really, could be Elvis?

He could trace it only as far back as a particular Monday morning when he poured himself a bowl of cereal as he did every day, turned on the television, sat down on his sofa, and then found himself suddenly overcome by a loud, hollow echo of a feeling—starting, somehow, in his ears—that told him that the old feeling had been gone for some time.

He spent the next few days waiting for this new feeling to fade away, but as the hours and moods came and went, the feeling didn’t.

He wandered the hallways of his Elvis-themed home, squinting into the framed photographs on the walls. The black-and-white photographs looked like Elvis, but not like him. The color photographs looked like him, but not like Elvis.

He looked in the mirror, and the person he saw looked like him, and it looked like Elvis. But it didn’t look like
he
was Elvis.

He wrote down his name on a pad of paper and stared at it:
ELVIS
. It looked like the Roman numerals for a made-up number, a number of a jumbled, indecipherable value, which was at least closer to how he felt than anything else so far.

It was strange to think that he wasn’t Elvis anymore, but it was even stranger to think that he ever had been.

After a few months of worrying a lot and trying not to worry, Elvis started to wonder seriously if the feeling that he definitely was who he had once been would ever come back at all, except in out-of-focus flashes after a lot of pills.

It didn’t make any sense, thought Elvis; but somehow, the line that makes someone the same person from day to day must have snapped inside him when he wasn’t paying attention, which had been, he admitted to himself with a shameful shudder, a lot of the time. A knot had untied, a hinge had popped; he didn’t know the exact intricacies of the mechanics of the soul, he was simply a singer—or Elvis was, anyway; or had been—but in any case, however it had happened, the man he was now had just kept on going, unaware and untethered to whatever had once made him Elvis, and by the time he had realized it and turned back around, the real Elvis had somehow left the building.

But Elvis wasn’t going to give up something as big as being Elvis without a fight.

If Elvis wanted to feel like Elvis again, thought Elvis, he was going to act like Elvis.

Elvis came up with a plan.

He would set out on a live tour across America—the grandest of his age. He would wear a suit of sparkling jewels—something that only a king of rock and roll could wear. He would sing each and every one of Elvis’s hits, one after another, while standing in front of a giant flashing sign that said ELVIS—just so there would be no mistaking, for him or anyone else, who he was.

He did it. And each night he felt like Elvis again, for a couple of hours.

But then the day after each show, he would feel worse than before. In the tender light of early afternoon he would realize all over again that the person onstage the night before was still not quite Elvis; except now, he would realize in a panic, the situation was far worse: now that all these thousands of people had seen this not-quite Elvis and had been told in no uncertain terms that this
was
Elvis, that meant this new, almost-Elvis was replacing and erasing—show by show, ten thousand by ten thousand—the Elvis that he did know, for sure, had once been real, and true, and not this.

He wanted to die. No, that wasn’t it: he wanted to breathe and eat and remember, to laugh at funny movies and practice his karate. But the more he kept living his life trying to be this other person, the more he knew he was harming that person; and he loved that other person more than he loved himself; and he knew that wasn’t crazy, because everyone else did, too.

He told the Colonel that it was time for Elvis to die. He wasn’t as articulate as he should have been, given the sensitive nature of the request, but luckily, the Colonel understood. The Colonel always did. “I’ll take care of it,” said Colonel Tom Parker, and
on August 16, 1977, the body of Elvis Presley was found dead in Graceland.

Elvis woke up in Las Vegas. For a while he couldn’t tell if he was in heaven or hell, but when he realized he was in Las Vegas, he knew he’d be okay.

Now that the king was dead, the man could do as he wished.

Elvis wondered what a regular person who wasn’t Elvis would do now, and he reasoned that person would get a job. He looked around for something that paid well enough for work he would be able to do.

Before long, he found such a job, and became an Elvis impersonator.

Once again, he was the best in the world at something he loved.

“You’re incredible!” people would tell him after his shows. “Incredible!”

“Thank you, thank you very much.”

Afterward, when he walked down the street, people would wave at him: happily, affectionately. And, most exciting of all: casually.

“Hey, it’s Elvis!”

He would wave back, the same way, and they’d both smile and forget about the moment a moment later.

He was finally who he had long wanted to be: a person for whom Elvis Presley was a major part of his life, but not everything.

And then there was the undeniable and all-American pleasure of being well paid for a job he found easy.

It wasn’t the best time of his life; he had, after all, once been
Elvis—
Elvis!
—but it wasn’t the worst time of his life anymore, either.

It was a time of his life.

Elvis died the second time in 1994, this time of a heart attack in the early morning hours at the breakfast counter of a diner on South Las Vegas Boulevard. A waitress found him over a grilled-cheese sandwich with an untouched half a grapefruit to its side. The only identification he had on him said
Elvis Aaron Presley
with the birth date
1/8/35
and the address of Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.

This was something that happened from time to time in Las Vegas.

The second time, Elvis died happy.

And that was the moment—almost to the hour—that the tabloids stopped making up stories that Elvis had been seen here or there, and started making up things about people everyone already knew were alive, a tradition that continues to this day.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Or maybe when something that big is out there, a presence that size, it just doesn’t go undetected. It has to be sensed, and said, by someone, in some way.

If I Had a Nickel

If I had a nickel for every time I spilled a cup of coffee, I’d be rich!

Here’s how I’d do it.

1. SETUP AND EXPENSES

First: the coffee. At Costco you can get a 12-pack of 34-ounce cans of Folgers coffee for $65.99. Each of those makes 270 cups, which comes out to 2.04 cents a cup. An industrial-strength filter-free coffee brewer capable of brewing 40 cups at a time costs $119.99 at Costco. Five of these will be a one-time expense of $599.95. Costco also sells a 1,000-count box of 12-ounce paper cups for $116, which comes out to 11.6 cents a cup and to 1.16 cents per use of cup (based on a conservative estimate of ten spills per cup). I do not have a Costco card, but I can borrow one from a friend.

In terms of a workspace, a 1500 square foot space downtown with easy-to-wipe floors rents for $750 per month. While this is technically the kind of work one could do at home, I believe in keeping work and home life separate when possible for psychological reasons, especially in an enterprise such as this one,
which I can easily envision driving a person insane. Mental health is an issue I take very seriously.

The single biggest one-time expense that I anticipate would be the construction and installation of a waist-high circuitous conveyor belt that would deliver cups of coffee from one side of the room to the other at a speed of four miles per hour, allowing proper time for me to retrieve and spill coffee cups on one end of the room while an assistant restocks and refills the coffee cups at the other end of the conveyor belt. I would estimate $14,400 for construction and installation (this is a ballpark estimate because none of the custom-conveyor companies I consulted understood the nature of the request) which can be amortized over the length of the enterprise.

2. STAFF

I would require one full-time assistant dedicated to preparing the next batch of coffee while I am busy spilling the current one and one additional full-time assistant simultaneously dedicated to cleaning the debris of the previous group of spills while I am on to the next. This system of cleanliness and order will help provide a situation of maximum safety, sanitation, and efficiency, as well as maintaining the all-important positive psychological environment. (Once again, mental health is an issue of paramount importance to me.)

Alternatively, I could conceivably enlist two unpaid interns who would receive college credit instead of monetary payment, but then I’d have to spend time writing their evaluations: time I
could have
spent spilling coffee.

I am presuming minimum wage (and would in fact become very angry if one of these employees asked for more than minimum
wage for this job, likely out of proportion, especially given the stressful work enviroment I anticipate for this enterprise). Staffing would come to a total of $116 per day.

3. MISCELLANEOUS & UNANTICIPATED COSTS

Rubber pants and other similar miscellaneous expenses too numerous and minor to list in full detail here should add up to no more than $1000 per year.

Cleaning materials when purchased in bulk from Costco should average no more than $50 per day.

Theft of company materials is likely to run as high as $1000 per year. (While I believe in paying minimum wage, I don’t expect my workers to like me for it.)

Psychological counseling to handle the effects of devoting my life’s work to this crushingly bizarre and isolating activity of no relevant value or connection to the wider world should run me approximately $750 per week.

4. NET INCOME

Finally, the fun part: time to knock these babies down and watch the nickels come pouring in!

Assuming that at full operational capacity with a functional 4-mph conveyor belt that averages one spill of coffee per two seconds over the course of an eight-hour workday, we’re looking at approximately 1800 spills per hour and 14,400 spills per workday.

At 5 cents per spilled cup of coffee, that comes to $720 per day, or $3600 per week, or $180,000 per year, allowing for two weeks of vacation per year, during which I envision myself going somewhere calm and cold.

5. TOTAL PROFITS

The total cost per spill associated with this process comes to 2.9 cents per cup, or $417.60 per day, or $104,400 per year. The remaining expenses total $52,232.00 annually.

These figures combined, and then subtracted from the previously calculated $180,000 net income from spilling approximately 3,600,000 cups of coffee per year at a compensation of five cents per spill, leave me with a total profit of $23,368 per year, before taxes.

6. CONCLUSION

So, maybe I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d get by.

A Good Problem to Have