Graceland, Too: Like French Mustard

Last night, Colin and I took Andy, Caroline, her British Boyfriend Liam, Jeremy and Flanagan to that mecca of Mississippi weirdness, Graceland, Too. I've written about Graceland, Too before (there's an entry on No Formal Training). For those just joinging the fun, Graceland, Too is a private home in Holly Springs, Miss. that has been turned into a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week shrine to Elvis Presley. The man that owns it, Paul McLeod, has dedicated his life to his collection. The first time I went, I thought Paul was a little, well, nuts, but with more visits, I've grown more used to him.

But last night...last night was just weird.

We got to Holly Springs right around midnight and stopped off at the one open gas station for a pee break and so that Jeremy and Liam could purchase some pork rinds. We had tried to explain Graceland, Too to our first-time visitors, but it's one of those things that you just kind of have to see to believe.



After seven or eight visits, you sort of know how the tour is going to go. Paul is going to talk a lot about money and numbers. He may throw in a few morbid details. He'll speak really quickly, and the dentures, they will flap. If there's a girl in the group that he's never seen before, he may make some gentile passes at her and sing Elvis songs while doing some light gyrations.

But last night, we veered from the usual format.

I'm not sure what tipped us off that the tour woulnd't be business as usual. It could have been when Paul brought out the binder full of laminated photos of himself with lots of automatic weapons pretty early in the tour. Usually, the special experience of seeing this binder is reserved for rowdy Ole Miss kids who can't keep their mouths shut. The tour as a whole was a little more morbid than usual, and we shuffled through the house, smiling nervously and accomodating Paul when he decided to burst into song in a lame attempt to seduce Caroline and I. We were a little relieved to get to the living room where the photos are taken, if for no other reason than that it gave us a little break from the tour.



After the photos were taken, we were all standing around in the living room, and Paul started saying that in his tenure as the world's biggest Elvis fan, he's seen some pretty crazy things go down. We aked him to tell us more, but he claimed that he couldn't, what with all of the pretty ladies in the room. We laughed and told him to tell us anyway, and he got a little quiet. "Ok," he said, "I'll tell you, but the pretty ladies need to go on into the next room."

Caroline and I went into the next room, trying to stifle our giggles and overhear what was going on the other room. We couldn't make it out, so we chatted, sure Paul had sent us out of the room unnecessarily.

But when the guys came into the room, something had changed. They went from looking like this:




To looking like this:




(In case you can't tell, the first one is attentive and mildly freaked out. The second is close to all out horror.)

Caroline and I weren't quite sure what was going on, and I couldn't find a good time to ask one of the guys. We endured the rest of the tour silently, trying not to make eye contact with eachother. As the tour was winding down, Paul became more blatant in his efforts to get Caroline to stay in Holly Springs and "give him 100 babies, all named Elvis Aaron Presley".

At the end of the tour, we stood in the crowded foyer while Flanagan wrote a comment in Paul's guest book on behalf of all of us. Then Jeremy farted. Loudly. And it was just the break in the silence that we all needed. We said our goodbyes and rushed out of the house and decided to meet at the gas station where the whole trip had started for a debriefing. I still wanted to know exactly what had happened when Caroline and I had been banished from the room.

We crammed into a booth in the diner part of the gas station, drinking overly hot cups of coffee and eating Krispy Kreme. The boys elected Jeremy to be their speaker.

(and just as a warning, this part is going to be a little, um, Adult. Like, NC-17. I'm just telling the story as it happened. So, if you're uncomfortable with that sort of thing, quit reading. Mom, you may want to stop here for a second and pick back up in a few paragraphs.)

Ok...this is thouroghly creepy, so I'm going to type it as succinctly as possible.

Apparenly, there was a prostitute from Texas who made her way to Graceland, Too and decided to stay for a few days, and Paul had to call Jerry "The King" Lawler to get rid of her. Since Paul is a man with very flappy dentures, the boys missed a lot of the story and were only able to catch bits and pieces. The telling of the story ended with the phrase "...like French mustard." Then came the visual part of the story, where the boys were shown, um...well...evidence along the same lines as Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress, carefully hidden from the pretty ladies by a fleece blanket with a picture of Elvis on it.

*shudder*

(Ok...Adult portion over. Resume reading with your innocence intact.)

The ride back to Memphis was largely silent, punctuated by outbursts of giggles from everyone in the car which turned into group expression of the sheer grossness of the evening. For a little while, I was worried that Andy wouldn't ever speak to me again.

Even this morning, I'm still not sure if I can declare last night a good time or not. I slept until 11 a.m., like you do when you're unemployed.

I won't be updating again until Monday, though, because Colin, Andy and I are headed out of town this weekend to go to Easter Beer Hunt with Matt Trisler. I'm pretty excited about it, and I should be working on getting ready to leave tomorrow instead of writing the world's longest, creepiest blog entry.

I'm, ah, going to get on that now.

santa covered midget coffins,
Kerry