"Here's the thing," a man from Burgaw County, North Carolina, is telling me. "It weren't like what people think." Burgaw is blue mold and cinch weed country and the guy's name is Slade. Just Slade. "That's enough anyway," says Slade. He's about forty and nowadays he grows tobacco for a living.

Slade's got this conspiratorial whisper when he's talking and he leans close to you. "You see, it wasn't all that razzle-dazzle that you read about in the paper. Hell, we grew up with the man." Slade is hanging back from the limousine; leaning against a wall. "It wasn't that at all." He speaks like he's letting you in on a big secret. "Look, when you're doing factory work and you're a kid--now this was cannery work, mind you, and they wouldn't allow no radios in the plant--you go a little bug-eyed. Come lunch, though, and we all used to go out in the truck where we could pick up the one station from Charlotte that played rock and roll. I'll tell you it saved our skins. It got us through till beer time." He winks. "And after that, well, after that we would get pretty wild.

After Elvis Presley died in August of 1977, there was in the media what could only be described as a massive breach of taste. There were five miles of crowds in Memphis. Tennessee, at Elvis's mansion, Graceland. In Nashville, when Elvis's father died, there were two miles of crowds. His father. His father didn't sing a note in his life. But he sired the King. He had proved that aristocracy could live, even in a place as retrograde as the Memphis of the 1950s.

Elvis sold more records the year he died than he had in the previous seven.

Now anything associated with Elvis has an aura to it. Graceland could practically be a national park for all the people who go through it. His last limousine is now a travelling exhibit. It tours the country, loaded on a trailer, and draws more people than any other automotive mausoleum except for the Bonnie and Clyde death car. It's something of America's new interstate sideshow. It's fitting that the new version of the ghoulish twoheaded fetus in a bottle should be this monstrous automobile. The crowds come from all over to see it and to buy souvenirs. It could be any city. This one happens to be in North Carolina.

The man who's running the exhibit is Glen Gadlock. He used to be one of Elvis's bodyguards. Some people hate him for making money off of a dead man. Some people think it's a public service. There are no fewer than two hundred people at any given time, milling around the limousine. The car is in a Ford dealership to attract crowds. It's there for three days. No one will say how much it's costing. Everyone is strangely quiet. It is a kind of strange wake, kind of a wake by proxy. Four years after the fact, it's still sort of a relic thing--a visit to the rock and roll catacombs.

Elvis Presley came out of the South, came out, as a truck driver once told me, "singing the pants off songs," but still, he came out of the South. If the furthest south you tend to get is D.C., then Elvis might not make a lot of sense, except as some sort of defiant yahoo, some blazing anachronism. After all, by the time most of us got to him, he looked pretty silly in those white jump suits with the high collars, and that plasticene pompadour. He was singing in Vegas then--our most improbable city--or out in Honolulu, doing "Heartbreak Hotel" with a three hundred instrument string section complete with French horns. It wasn't Elvis. We thought it was and that's why we thought it was stupid. All those hundreds of thousands of leisure suited fans he drew must have been stupid, too, if that's what they wanted to see. But they didn't see that Elvis either. Impossibly, like kabuki stagehands, no one saw the paunch and the glitter. Maybe it was mass hypnosis. Maybe it was wishful thinking. But what they saw was miles from what was going on onstage. What they saw was some twenty, twenty-five years ago. What they saw wasn't ridiculous.

"You know," says a woman who seems afraid to get too close to the car, a little respectful of the official looking velvet ropes. "You've got tv, and you've got movies and you've got records--but it's nice to have something that he actually touched, you know?" Something that was his." She's wearing a pair of nondescript blue jeans and a halter. She's in her late thirties. She hangs back in the crowd, which, as eight o'clock approaches, is well over three hundred. Everyone is meandering. There are Ford salesmen working the crowd. They jump like jackals when you drive up. They get ornery if you walk the other way without discussing the merits of a light pick-up. All of the sales force are women.

The limousine itself is impressive--for sheer size, to begin with. It is twenty-five feet long. It is white with a red interior of crushed velvet. The back seat is ridiculously far away from the driver. It is a Lincoln Continental and it was originally made for the movie Shaft. According to Gadlock. Elvis saw the limo in the movie and then decided that he had to have it. Who knows what was going through his mind? Maybe he wanted to be part of some cool new scene. Elvis started playing roadsides all over the south, and the audiences there were poor. Maybe he thought he could reach the urban northeast in this car. Maybe not. He was probably just bored with his other twenty-three cars. When Gadlock talks about Elvis simply calling the studio right after the movie and buying the car outright for $55,000, he gets a strange look in his eyes. It's not the money, necessarily; there's enough quick real estate and oil money in Gadlock's circles that sheer mass doesn't impress. Rather it's the directness. It's the being able to go straight to the top. It's the envy of anybody's who's ever had to stand in line. Elvis could out-cool Richard Roundtree by some sort of divine right.

Gadlock practically sneers when he talks about a rich man from Texas who wanted to buy the limousine right after Elvis died. "He offered somethin' like half a million dollars. As if that would do anythin' This was Elvis's," he says. "Half million. Bullshee-it."

The limousine now belongs to J. D. Southern--a member of the Stamps Quartet that backed Elvis for so many years--and one of the King's closest friends. "Elvis gave him a bunch of rings and coats and things," Gadlock says. "And this car too. This is the very car J.D. drove in the funeral procession."

Gadlock has the responsibility for the limousine. Gadlock used to be one of Elvis's bodyguards--a big deep-voiced beefy man with a Tennessee suntan. He is dressed garishly--silk shirt with palm trees and white bucks. On his finger is a huge gold ring. The ring is made up of huge letters; the majascules arranged in the shape of a piano with diamond rings. It spells "STAMPS." "Elvis gave this to me," he says. He speaks softer when he talks personally. Gadlock is standing behind a souvenir table. Someone wants to know how much the 8 x 10 glossies are. Someone behind the table asks color or black and white. The customer decides a t-shirt is better. Or maybe a belt buckle. Or maybe a "Love McTender" penknife.

"I still remember that night," says Gadlock. "We were backstage--and Elvis needed a new pair of glasses. I ran all over town and finally got this man to open up his shop to get them. It wasn't anything big. But you know," he says. "Elvis remembered. He was like that. At the end of the tour, he drew me aside and gave me this ring. Only seven of them were ever made. He was like that."

There's too much flourescence in the damn Ford dealership. You start picturing all this looking at the color glossies. A big bloated Elvis. Elvis backstage. Elvis demanding that somebody buy him his glasses right now. Elvis handing out rings in gratitute, saying only a few words. Elvis who blewup his television with a .38 police chief special because he didn't like the programming. Elvis who didn't live near anybody. The guy who had no peers. By the sixties there wasn't even any competition. Elvis who locked Priscilla away in Graceland until she was old enough to marry him. Why America loves burnouts is a difficult questions. Why he was in his one-man purgatory is anyone's guess. But that's where he was.

The music that accompanies the car exhibit is a soundtrack, a collage of songs, played--the dealership never missing a trick--on a Delco car stereo speaker. "Love Me Tender." "Heartbreak Hotel." You have to love "Heartbreak Hotel," even if the man next to you is being an idiot, and poses next to the car in a mock Elvis stance that's more embarrassing than funny. It's just a great song. The guy thinks he's the life of the party. In the open back seat of the limo is a shirt and flashy fender guitar. Never played. Never worn. They both belonged to Elvis.