_The King works in strange ways. I reached the age of forty without thinking of Elvis Presley much at all, maybe less than any American who witnessed his entire reign and could boast, if grandchildren ever asked, “Yes, I saw Elvis—live.”

It all made so little impression that I was married to a woman for years and never realized, until after the divorce, that she had the same birthday as the King. Elvis was long dead when I married again and discovered that my Southern-fried bride came equipped with a curious religious relic: a dried red carnation from one of the floral arrangements pilgrims had heaped on Presley’s coffin at Graceland. She plucked it herself and had it framed over a postcard painting of Elvis in his prime.

That was just the beginning. I’m not a superstitious man—one who records coincidences with an eye to divine intentions. But in the years since I first became aware of the Elvis cult, I have acquired some unusual friends.

One has authored two Elvis books, the most recent an account of his adventures as a middle-aged Elvis impersonator (I, Elvis by William McCranor Henderson). He got into impersonation as a kick, to honor a book contract, and now I think he’s hooked. He makes appearances in a big, slick ducktail wig and a white bodysuit, and throws salmon-colored scarves at the audience.

Another friend has become Elvis Presley’s most respected biographer. The first book of his two-volume life of Presley was published in 1994 (Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick), and he’s widely recognized as The Leading Authority, period. Yet another, the versatile Fetzer Mills, actually landed a job on the security force at Graceland and gave us the VIP tour in his EPD (Elvis Police Department) uniform. Last Christmas he sent us a cassette of him singing his Presley favorites, backed by the Memphis session musicians who helped to make the Sun era so great.

These are not casual connections of mine but actual friends, the kind who might offer to adopt your dogs if you died. My wife takes it for granted, of course, that life will bring you into contact with a lot of people who dress like Elvis or write about him. To me it’s uncanny, like turning my radio dial and hearing “Love Me Tender” on every bleeding station.

Elvis, departed and risen, keeps after me like he never did in life. I feel like the loser who was invited to the Crucifixion but stayed home to mend his nets, or whatever Galileans did on weekends. I was around; I could have been there. But I just didn’t get it.

Have you noticed how in Ben-Hur, and all Hollywood’s action epics in-the-time-of-Christ, the important thing is always happening off-camera, or just at the edge of the frame? Charlton Heston or Victor Mature or Richard Burton is going about his very butch business of racing chariots, subduing Nubia, or selling slaves, and he keeps passing these crowds of people whose faces are all shining with an inner light, who have just come from hearing The Master. (“Why are you smiling, boy?” “I have heard Him, sir.”)

I feel like a self-absorbed centurion who was marching to another drumbeat while the main event of his lifetime occurred just across the road. Did I miss the main thing, too, and was it Elvis?

As a kid, I was an uncomprehending witness. I saw Elvis’s first national TV performance on Stage Show—hosted by the Dorsey brothers—a program my father never missed. I saw the famous Ed Sullivan debut. The music was okay, but a sexual and racial breakthrough? I was a child. How could I comprehend that I was witnessing the birth of a world religion? Later, we had nothing in common, Elvis and I. Since all my repression was self-generated, I couldn’t see Elvis as a liberator. I didn’t worry that greasers like Elvis were getting all the sex, because I wasn’t getting much anyway.

A class thing separated us, as well as a city/country thing. I was a teacher’s son, deep country but not cool country. I knew only one boy who greased his hair creatively. He was a city kid, living with foster parents, who called himself Tony Price (a great name, but in class the teachers called him David Eck). Tony was authentically tough, much tougher than Elvis, from what I’ve read. Ultimately, he kicked Bill Hamilton in the crotch with his motorcycle boot and sent Bill to the hospital with bloody urine; the principal expelled Tony, and his foster parents sent him back to the agency.

It never occurred to me to emulate Tony, or Elvis either. Maybe I fit the standard profile of the teenager who missed the point of the ’50s, if the point was Elvis and Marlon Brando, James Dean and Jack Kerouac. Elvis never seemed dangerous, to me. If I’d heard Greil Marcus’s argument—that the mainstream press made Presley a scapegoat because Yankee middle-brows just naturally fear, despise, and stereotype the Southern working class (a vendetta culminating with Elvis, Albert Goldman’s merciless biography)—I might have adopted Elvis as an underdog.

Challenging authority was not my hang-up. From underage drinking to light vandalism to dissing teachers, I practiced most of the bad attitude in the adolescent repertoire, back before drugs hit the schools. Just convict me of a hopeless, middle-class failure of imagination. I tried to dress like a college kid and wore my hair in a hideous semi-flattop. My glasses were thicker and uglier than Buddy Holly’s.

The music scene, like the dating scene, came to me ever so slowly. I didn’t dance if I could avoid it. I was tall and shy, and I had some problems with the way rhythms traveled from my brain to my feet. I hated to see rock ’n' roll replace slow dancing, because I sweated so fiercely; any girl who tried to Twist within three feet of me would have to change her clothes. Ten minutes on the dance floor and I looked like I’d worked a night shift on a banana barge.

The first wave of Elvis idolaters were thinking with their glands and with their feet. If you missed that first wave, the second one required some musical sophistication. Presley’s comeback TV special in 1968 included a rockabilly blues segment that Greil Marcus calls “the most mature and passionate music Elvis ever made.” But Elvis was not what was happening in 1968. When it comes to cultural prescience, I didn’t handle the ’60s much better than the ’50s. I was working in my office in the Time & Life Building when three of my friends tried to recruit me for the long drive up to Woodstock. I’d just watched the awful traffic jams on TV, and I declined emphatically.

When I finally caught up to Elvis—in his earthly incarnation—he was forty years old and stumbling to his own pharmaceutical crucifixion. It was July 13, 1975, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center. The songs were achingly familiar. They moved us because we were thirty, the age when nostalgia first strikes. We beheld the King himself, a legend just slightly smaller, at that time, than Dylan or the Beatles. It had to be Elvis, because an impersonator would have looked more authentic. The singer was swollen; someone in the next row said he was wearing a corset. Through our binoculars it appeared that his chest fat was pushed up into the V of his shirt, like a little ascot made of flesh. His voice was hoarse and his body language, to put it kindly, had lost its eloquence.

Elvis live was not a conversion experience; Elvis dead became a pathetic tabloid mutation that forced me to sneer. In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of The Death, I wrote a column deploring the Graceland cult as the state religion of the degenerate “voodoo republic” that’s replacing Mr. Jefferson’s dignified democracy. I added gratuitously that poor Elvis, without the testosterone growl in his larynx and the feral curl in his lip, would have made his living as a forklift operator.

But mysteriously, unmistakably, my tone has softened. A decade later, in a column on Elvis and Mickey Mantle—America’s twin gods for the sweet, lost summer of ’56—I hear myself testifying for the defense:

Can you make a grown man or woman cry over the way you looked, the way you moved, forty years ago?..We love them because they were, for a shining moment, something bigger and finer than most of us ever dreamed of being.

But pilgrims don’t kneel in the cold rain at Mickey Mantle’s tomb. Or at the grave of Carl Perkins, who wrote and first recorded “Blue Suede Shoes.” Perkins died this winter still explaining why his career fell so far short of the King’s: “I was bucking a good-looking cat called Elvis who had beautiful hair, wasn’t married, and had all kinds of great moves.”

The question of why they’re still crying in the chapel—why one icon explodes like a supernova while all the others fade—may be a debate for theologians of the 22nd century, when a guitar crowns those steeples that once held up the cross.

I can only bear personal witness. No one ever tried to convince or convert me. Like those Christians Charlton Heston kept meeting on his way to the Forum, Presley’s disciples proselytize with their own serenity and conviction. If you need to explain it, they imply, you haven’t got it.

I walk through my own house, and there’s no sign that people raised as Christians live here. But the funeral carnation from Graceland still sits on the mantel; from the windowsill, a wooden cut-out Elvis sneers at me over his shoulder. On the kitchen corkboard my wife has pinned the salmon scarf from a performance by our friend Bill, in his wig and sequined bodysuit. Above it is the Elvis clock, the same one you see in ten million American homes, with Elvis’s blue-and-white-checked trouser legs for a pendulum. The best symbol for our poor mortal lives is the sand running through the hourglass. But Elvis keeps time; he’s waiting, and he has all the time in the world.