Elvis at My Father's Cafe.

When I was too little to remember...

Elvis would come into the little greasy spoon cafe my father ran in Florence, Alabama...  the same little town in Northwest Alabama that Sam Phillips was from.  This was in North Florence, at a place where seven roads meet, called Seven Points.

My sister told me all of this. She was a teenager then. 

I'm sure my dad knew Sam. My dad was "Pete" Bevis... and he knew everybody. Florence was just a sleepy little Southern town back then... And dad had the nobody is a stranger, everybody is a friend personality.

(When he died the funeral director said it was the most people at a visitation that he had ever seen. The parking lot was full and cars were lined up and down both sides of the street outside.)

My father, who thought he was a ladies man, and apparently was pretty "good" at it, must have been amazed at Elvis, who really was a ladies man, not just a wannabee.

He (my father) was, by some accounts, shacked up thirty miles away in Waterloo, Alabama with another woman, when my mother's water broke and it was time for me to be born. His older brother had to go looking for him and tell him the "good" news... that I was born.

I know my mother loved him like crazy though, because after he died she would go lay on his grave and tell him how much she wanted to be with him. She said he was the most handsome man she had ever seen, and I guess that included Elvis, too.

After he would eat though, Elvis would go back across the street, where a young woman he was attracted to worked at a five and dime store. Of course, she was the real reason he was in the area to begin with... not my father's greasy hamburgers.

Elvis and the woman had apparently met when Elvis played the old Armory across the river from Florence, in Sheffield, Alabama. I guess he just looked out and picked the one he wanted, as he was prone to do, and it just happened to be her.

He later went on to become the "king"... and she later went on to die in a terrible car crash in California... not having been picked to be "Priscilla."

And me... that little kid - I just went on to work a common man's job, and to write when I could and felt like it. Just as I do now.

All of the above of which is... my way of telling readers that I am going to take a one year "leave" of absence from writing as I usually do...

and finally spend the coming year working on and finishing a book I have been "piddling" with for several years now.  I've put it off too long now. The research is long done... and It's time to finish what I started.

So I bid the readers of what I usually write a "fond adieu" as I commit to write my very own book in my own unique way...

about a man who inspired many, and angered many...

and finally died as we all must.

I myself, was never a great fan of his. But I know a great story when I see one. And his life was one. And after I read that very first book about him, I was hooked and couldn't stop.

I like to imagine that I was in that greasy spoon one day - five years old - and he came in while I was sitting on one of those round swivel chairs, going round and round and drinking a huge, free milkshake,  and he smacked me on the head with a smile and said with that Tupelo accent, "Drinking up all the profits, huh, kid?" 

Then he'd get his order and wolf it down and head back over to where the babe awaited him... ready to swoon into his arms... when her break time came.

And after he left I'd ask my dad, "Hey, Dad, who was that just left the building?"

And he'd say... That's Elvis, Son. That's The King."

Now I know as well as you do...

That the world doesn't need yet another book on Elvis.

But this being America...

we can all do pretty much what we want

(including like Elvis did, breaking racial barriers with a new music...)

and including writing things no one may want to read...

It happens all the time...

It even happens here.

But I ask readers to bear with me...

As some of you may want to read it...

crazy as it will be...

And another announcement will be made...

how maybe you can.