They say that everyone in the world knows where they were when they heard the news that the immortal ELVIS PRESLEY was dead. It was a shock felt around the world that brought about a universal mourning that rivaled the assassination of President Kennedy. I was a little kid when J.F.K was killed, but I sure remember seeing people crying and all the flags flying at half-staff. My family sat in front of the television for days watching the news and it felt like the world had stopped. Although ELVIS had not been gunned down by some madman, the sorrow at his death was as deeply felt and was perhaps more universal.

Despite his bouts with obesity and illness in the few years preceding his death, ELVIS was still a symbol of youth and vitality. It had been just over twenty years before that he had turned the world on its ear with a revolutionary style of music and a controversial way of expressing it. It had been less than ten years since he recaptured his crown in the “68 Comeback Special,” which led to his triumphant return to live concerts. God, it had been just over four years since the satellite broadcast from Hawaii, where, as Sonny West put it, “He was as thin as a rake and more handsome than any ten movie stars.” How could ELVIS PRESLEY be dead after living only 15,453 days?

I knew of ELVIS’ drug use and of his denial about his addiction—most people that were anywhere near him knew of it or had heard about it . . . now the world would be informed in giant headlines . . . In the final years of his life there had been unflattering pictures of him in the scandal rags and his abuse of drugs was no longer hinted at in these articles that also spared no denigrating remark about his appearance. But then he’d go on some crash diet and detox program and look fine again—for a while . . . He’d go out and deliver the performance of a lifetime and those around him were filled with hope that he had turned a new leaf and he would again be the ELVIS of old that we all knew and loved. But the binging and the purging on food and drugs ravaged his once amazing physique and drained the strength from his powerful constitution; he had crossed the point of no return several squares back and his fate was sealed. He labored to breathe and sweated profusely even when he was seated. ELVIS had always kept the temperature in Graceland low enough to refrigerate meat; now it was cold enough to freeze it. He was plagued with fevers and inflammation and his internal system no longer functioned properly, which led to more chronic ailments, which led to more prescribed medication and ELVIS’ trips to Baptist Memorial Hospital became more frequent and his stays there were longer. Linda Thompson would slip into hospital garb and hop into bed with him and all his friends brought him fast food and narcotics. He and Vernon even had a room together up there for a while after Vernon had his first heart attack. Linda Thompson, the woman who had been the most patient with ELVIS, and accepting of his ways and needs, finally had to call it quits and save herself . . . she maxed out all of her credit cards as a more than fair settlement for her years of devotion and stayed in touch as a good friend . . . she also got to keep the house on Old Hickory Road around the corner from Graceland . . .

As we know now, what we didn’t know then, every pill has some kind of dangerous side effect; that’s why narcotics should only be prescribed in acute cases, because the damage from the pills can often be worse than the ailment. Doctors mustn’t lose sight of their patient because they’re dazzled by their fame and seduced by their wealth—it is a violation of their Hippocratic oath to “Do no harm,” when they allow themselves to be manipulated and bribed into writing harmful scripts for addictive meds to patients that they know are battling a substance a abuse problem. People are often their own worse enemy and that’s why doctors are given the autonomy to deny or inflict drugs as their training dictates and not according to how big a house their patient can buy them . . .

When I was playing football, we saw firsthand how a doctor could abandon the ethical cannons of their profession for a higher purpose . . . Our team physician was a local doctor that was also one of ELVIS’ many prescription connections and he offered to help a valuable member of the team that had hurt his ankle very badly and wouldn’t be able to play, which definitely would’ve put our whole season in jeopardy . . . Well this mountebank convinced the coach and the player that the only way to jury rig the ankle was to illegally inject it with a painkiller just before game time. There was a lot of talk and finally the decision was made to do it. We would’ve been disqualified, the coach would’ve been fired and the doctor arrested if anyone found out, so we all crouched down as if we were in team prayer—and we were—to provide cover for the doctor to do his dirty business. We knew that it was wrong and it made us feel terrible; it was by far our darkest hour as a team and I know that the moment has stayed with us always . . . particularly for the kid that got the shot . . .

After years of continuously taking pills, the side effects overcame ELVIS and he began to suffer from a host of maladies that required him to take medication. So along with the meds that he felt he needed to cope with his intense life, he was taking scheduled narcotics to relieve problems that were only exacerbated by the combination of pills in his system . . . something was about to give . . .

I’ve heard Charlie Hodge over the years claim that ELVIS had bone cancer and it is always dismissed as if Charlie’s saying it to cover. Nobody was closer to ELVIS than Charlie and they had no secrets from one another—not since he had comforted ELVIS after his Momma died when they were soldiers together . . . But if ELVIS’ stage manager and best friend isn’t a credible enough witness, you need only to take a look at the facts for yourself . . . Well documented is the amount of strong pills ELVIS took every day, which included mass amounts of Dillaudid, often described as heroin in a pill. It is a heavy schedule two, narcotic that is prescribed as a severe painkiller for end-stage cancer patients . . . ELVIS took these daily . . . He had hypertension, a twisted colon, an enlarged heart and even with packs of powerful drugs coursing through his body, he still was frequently assailed by pain down to the bone that overwhelmed him . . . No matter what the reasons were, the reality was that ELVIS was terribly afflicted in the last years of his life . . .

I’ve always raged at the disingenuous quacks that sell out their profession and their patients to make a buck, but I’ve never blamed them for ELVIS’ downfall. In times of such grief, there is an inherent need to cast blame . . . first on the doctors then on the people in ELVIS’ life and finally on ELVIS personally. It wasn’t the fault of these doctors, because ELVIS would’ve gotten it somewhere; it wasn’t Ginger Alden’s fault for not staying awake until he returned from reading in the bathroom; his young adult stepbrothers, who were in the grips of their own struggles with chemical dependency, were not responsible for the actions of a grown man. In all of ELVIS’ relationships, he was the powerful one. He was stubborn and single-minded and believed that he was always in control, but he wasn’t and it was nobody’s fault and there’s no one to blame . . .

In the end it is a lesson about the power of drugs; they can reduce doctors to peddlers and kill the users. ELVIS was by no means a weak-willed person without courage. Time and time again he had overcome personal and professional setbacks by the sheer force of his determination and drive and his life was a monument to courage. But just as we had on a cold day in Memphis when we played our hearts out as if our lives depended on winning, and lost, ELVIS was defeated by a foe more powerful than he was. As Dave Hebler noted at the time, “No one is out of reach of the drug culture and anyone can be ruined . . . even ELVIS PRESLEY.”

If ELVIS made a mistake, it was trusting doctors. When he was in need of help, he turned to them and they gave him drugs; when he was lost in depression he reached out to them and they gave him drugs, and when he was assailed by the effects of the chemicals, and in desperate need of detoxification, the doctors prescribed him more drugs . . . And while the doctors can’t be blamed for ELVIS’ slow demise, they should’ve certainly been held accountable for their illicit practice of being on call to dispense drugs for a price and their sentences were a tragedy as well, because they were set free to continue making big bucks as licensed drug pushers and minister more patients into early graves.

Dr. Nick has been the most vilified member of ELVIS’ connections, but there were a host of others right there with him. What I find particularly infuriating is listening to “Needle Nick” tell his version of how he came to prescribe one man thousands of pills every month. The bastard got loans that he never repaid, was given a house and jewel encrusted perks, and then goes around claiming that he was doing ELVIS a favor by charging him tens of thousands monthly for sugar pills . . . as if ELVIS died from saccharine abuse . . . I guess the apex of my anger was going out to the Hollywood Casino in Tunica, Mississippi in 2000 and seeing Dr. Nick’s collection of ELVIS’ artifacts on display. As I looked at the items in his possession, I could just see him rushing back to Graceland to loot the shelves and drawers for all he could . . . I mean you tell me how he came to possess belongings that ELVIS was using until the day he died, like his personal copy of Autobiography of a Yogi and other treasured books and precious stones . . . But the piece-of-shit de resistance was a glass case that displayed his medical bag, which contained prescription bottles made out to ELVIS dated the day of his death. I’m proud to say that I became so irate and abusive that I was given a security escort out of the place . . . I wished that I could’ve done more . . .

No entertainer has ever had more loving declarations bestowed upon them or hateful maledictions leveled against them—only blood thirsty dictators surpass “THE KING” in this regard . . . After ELVIS died there was a wolf pact made among the pundits and scribes that nothing would be too cruel to write and neither his memory nor his family were to be shown the barest modicum of human consideration. After a brief listing of a few of his hundreds of hits and a superficial paragraph that gave a few highlights and several mostly inaccurate fast facts about the most significant entertainer that the world will ever know, every aspect of ELVIS’ drug use was dissected and put under the microscope so it could be graphically detailed down to the last milligram—from how many pills he took a day to the weight of his colon at the time of his death . . . Even now, a quarter of a century after it was at all newsworthy, the story of ELVIS’ use of drugs and his physical decline is the only element of sensation the media types are able to get their minds around when analyzing and categorizing the life, times and career of a man whose magnetism and artistry overpowered a world as he rewrote the musical paradigm and became worshipped as a living God . . .

I was so excited when the “E True Hollywood Story” announced that they were going to do a special on ELVIS. Well I was disappointed and disgusted as I endured two hours of listening to the moron fringe of ELVIS’ stooges go on and on about his drug intake and bodily functions, not to mention having to bear those obsessive geeky windbags speaking as historians—which means the only thing they know about ELVIS is what they’ve read or made up—go on about his weight gain and his drug intake . . . It is unfortunate that the telling of ELVIS’ story has been left in the hands of the anal retentive drones of the Fourth Estate to whom bowel movements and intestinal functions are riveting topics to chronicle . . .

I remember when the excerpts from the bodyguard book appeared in Star Magazine the first week of August in 1977. Although ELVIS was still selling out every show, including setting single night attendance records playing for New Year’s Eve crowds of upwards of 80,000 people, in what he acerbically called “Space Museums,” he had been off the national radar for some time. But when people read the scandalous allegations made by his one-time closest confidants, ELVIS was on the cover of every rag and mag around the globe. Not only was the story inside the book compelling, the story that surrounded it was equally captivating. ELVIS’ loyal fans, which have numbered in the hundreds of millions for nearly 50 years, en masse hit bookstores everywhere and glued or honeyed the pages together so that no one would ever read these horror stories. Bookstores nationwide posted guards, but still the fans managed to take care of business . . . I guess some of those security guards were ELVIS fans too . . . Failing that, they just bought out the shelves and took great joy in defacing, shredding, and burning those books. In fact, they may have been the biggest contributors to early book sales, because, despite the exposure the story was getting and the interest it generated, sales were limping along . . . till about mid-August . . . then they took off . . .

After ELVIS What Happened? reached its pinnacle—or nadir—ELVIS’ people started coming out of the woodwork to get some of the gravy and told their tales of the thousands of days and nights, or the minutes that they spent in the midst of the great man. Some were dismissed, because they only wanted to tell the world about what a wonderful, compassionate man of philanthropy and humanity ELVIS was . . . there was no money in that . . . But there were plenty who were willing to step up and swear to what they had to in order to pick up thousands of pieces of silver from publishers that were intent on telling ELVIS’ story their way. With the guidance of the writers they went as low as they could go to scrape the bottom of the barrel for their stories and there found an audience. It was amazing how people in one sentence declared their great love for him and on the next page wrote that he pissed the bed . . . and they were just warming up . . .

One of the widely perpetuated, inaccurate notions about ELVIS is that he was dumb. In interviews he answered questions carefully, always worried about offending someone or sounding like a braggart when he discussed his unprecedented popularity or unbelievable wealth or multitude of romances. He shrugged his shoulders and chalked his success up to luck, not talent, and came off as bland, even inarticulate. He had a self-deprecating humor that he used to downplay his greatness and show that he didn’t take it all too seriously. As he said over and over, “I’m just an entertainer.” He may have only done fair to middling in his study of the “Three Rs,” but in every respect ELVIS was a genius. He had a keen mind that when turned on was without limits. If a bar of a song captivated him, he would play or rehearse it over and over again for hours. His ability to hold the lyrics to hundreds of songs in his head, or memorize a song after a take or two, or learn speeches and poems after hearing them a couple of times, or retain the numbers and positions of every player on every football team and even commit an entire movie script to memory in just days, was nothing less than astonishing. His reading tastes ran the gamut of philosophy and religion and his books were dog-eared and worn because he perpetually studied them trying to absorb the content and enrich his soul. A man who traveled everywhere he went with trunks of books can only be so dumb . . . What we learn is knowledge; what we do with it shows our intelligence; in this respect, few have achieved his level of brilliance . . .

As for his place in history, when the Arts & Entertainment Network polled the world’s leading historians to list “The 100 Most Influential People of the Millennium,” ELVIS was chosen 57TH right in between feminine martyr Joan of Arc and feminine activist Elizabeth Stanton. He was heralded for his accomplishments in the same breath as Newton, Marx, Mozart, Einstein, King, Nostradamus, Gates, Michelangelo, Salk, Disney, Shakespeare . . . J.FK didn’t even make the list. ELVIS will be the only one on that list who will make it onto the list of the most influential people of this millennium as well, as his popularity will grow through the centuries . . .

Undoubtedly the most horrible thing ever written about ELVIS was that the best thing he did for his career was to die, as if his popularity was in decline and he was a has-been, until his death rekindled interest in him. As with so many cruel things written about ELVIS there is no factual merit to this assertion and it is a statement colored by the media coverage of the time that never printed how ELVIS wowed audiences night after night, or twice a night, they’d only constantly report on his infrequent off nights to make it seem like he was never on. His album, Moody Blue, hit the Top 40 before and after his death, and on the disco-ruled Pop Charts the single “Moody Blue” made the Top 20. His last release “Way Down,” just missed the Top Ten on the Pop Charts, in the U.S and the U.K, and was #1 on the Country Charts before and after his death. In June 1977, CBS followed ELVIS around on his sold out tour and filmed the special “ELVIS In Concert,” which was due to air in October, to coincide with the release of the live album, ELVIS In Concert, and his opening at the brand new room at The Hilton Hotel. On the day that he died he was to begin another sold out concert tour that would’ve had him return to Madison Square Garden . . . P.S, when the single, “My Way,” from his Top 20 album, ELVIS In Concert, came out in November of 1977 it also went Top 20 around the world . . .

Wow! Sold out concert tours, a Vegas showroom grand opening, hit studio and concert albums and singles, and a television special . . . gee I hope I wake up someday and find my career in the dumper like that . . . In fact there was every indication that ELVIS’ popularity would’ve only grown to greater heights again in the ‘80s, when the whole Urban Cowboy craze hit and Country Music crossed over onto the Pop Charts like never before or since . . .

As it has taken only a few bare facts to dispel these common vicious slanders, there’s time to speak directly to the bathroom wall scribes and barroom sages who, in their piss-poor attempt to be tongue & cheeky, add suffering to the pain of the millions that love him and mourn for him, and cause grief to his loved ones who have to deal with the personal loss of this precious man. To write or say that this young man’s life was valueless because he was no longer capable of performing as dynamically as he had in the past or was no longer as sleek and handsome as he once was or was caught in the grips of a ruinous vice that destroyed him, reaches a level of inhumanity that would shock cannibals. It also goes to show you just how intuitive ELVIS was, because he knew that he the newshounds would rip him to shreds if he ever came forward openly to get help for his drug dependency. Today a Bret Favre admits his addiction to painkillers and he’s lauded as a great American hero; Burt Reynolds is seen as a survivor for enduring of his dependency on drugs; celebs in rehab become hot topics and then are hot properties when they get out, but ELVIS is still raked over the coals and flamed for his downfall as if he did something sinister . . . After doing interviews to squelch the rumors that he was a supernatural being, ELVIS knew that he was expected to be superhuman and therefore would not be granted human consideration for his human frailties, so he buried them deep.

I was an eyewitness to ELVIS’ decline, but I didn’t know it then . . . The group would leave the Travelodge for a 6-week tour and they’d be back in 2 or 3 weeks or sometimes just days later . . . They’d all be mute about what happened when they rolled in, and the next day there’d be a blurb about ELVIS checking into Baptist Memorial Hospital for pneumonia, exhaustion, fatigue . . . etc . . . If someone looks poorly you think that they’re sick; not dying . . . I thought he needed a long rest . . . Even those who were around him every day and knew the full extent of his habits, and had been there for some close calls, couldn’t believe that ELVIS had died . . .

Tuesday August 16, 1977 was a very special day indeed and I took the day off so that I could bask in the festivities . . . In the mid-afternoon I was sitting over at the family business with my dad making plans for a fun-filled celebration that evening . . . you see it was my mom’s birthday and we were going to have a party for her, so we were calling friends and making all the arrangements . . .

At just about 3:00 p.m., our neighbor Helen Hiatt was driving south down ELVIS PRESLEY Blvd. when an ambulance came roaring up behind her down the middle of the street with the lights and sirens on. She pulled over to the side of the road to let it pass, then turned onto Bluebird Road, a block north of Graceland, and headed home without seeing where the ambulance went . . . Sometime after 3:00 p.m., my friend George Cohen Jr., was leaving Loeb’s 7-11 in the plaza and happened to look across at Graceland. At first he thought he saw the RCA truck in front of the mansion, but in a moment he realized that it was an ambulance . . . as he walked across the street for a closer look, the ambulance turned on its siren and went screaming down the hill. Someone ran out into the street and stopped traffic and the ambulance fishtailed as it came through the gates at a high rate of speed and headed north up ELVIS PRESLEY Blvd., in the direction of Baptist Memorial Hospital. There were a couple of dozen people in front of the gates and the word was that someone had a heart attack. Since ELVIS was only 42 years-old, the consensus was that Vernon had been the stricken party . . . the few who claimed that it was actually ELVIS were ignored and accused of trying to stir up rumors . . . George returned home minutes later and told his family that Vernon had a heart attack.

We were getting ready to leave early for our big night when my mom called with the news that ELVIS was dead. I can’t say that it caused any shock, because I didn’t believe it. In fact when my dad told me, I shrugged and replied, “Again?” You see, this wasn’t the first time an erroneous report of ELVIS’ demise circulated around town, so this was just more of the same in my mind . . . But once we switched on the TV set it became obvious that this wasn’t a false alarm and I broke out in a cold sweat as hot tears ran down my face. I sort of stumbled out the door and ran to my car. In the parking lot I saw two women crying hysterically and it made me shake. I drove down ELVIS PRESLEY Blvd. and stopped across from the mansion and just stared through watery eyes; I even pulled my camera out of the glovebox and snapped a couple of pictures of the placid street scene. The cars were cruising along like nothing happened and everything seemed normal . . . maybe it was a mistake . . . but within minutes people began arriving at the gates weeping; cars drove by with their lights on and honked, while some pulled over along the dirt shoulder of the road to cry.

All at once I realized that ELVIS’ family, friends and fans, as well as his regular entourage, would be descending on the mansion and I jumped back into my car and went to the Travelodge, where I knew that I would be needed on my day off . . . The scene in the lobby was frenetic, as everyone seemed to be running in place; no one knew what was going to happen next, but we all knew that there were going to be some terrible days ahead. We were young tough guys and all, but we were having trouble swallowing our emotions, so we averted each other’s eyes and spoke very little. After going over some of the flight arrivals and reservations, I stepped outside and saw that the skies were filling up with helicopters hovering over Graceland; police cars roared by with their sirens wailing and the Civil Defense Warning sounded even though there was no storm or bomb in sight . . . the activity was beyond surreal . . .