Elvis Presley was born 73 years ago this past Tuesday in a whitewashed wooden shack in Tupelo, Miss. A decade from now, Elvis will have been dead almost as long as he was alive.
And if you drive down the 2400 block of Fleet Street to the alley called Port, you might think the spirit of the King never sailed from Baltimore at all.
That?s the corner where Miss Bonnie?s Elvis Bar used to be, right behind the Ukrainian Catholic Church and its fabulous onion domes. Bonnie?s dive, consecrated to the hillbilly truck driver who changed the world, was no less a shrine. Good-timers came from across the state ? not just traditional Presley strongholds like Glen Burnie and Essex, but Towson and Columbia, Annapolis and Fallston ? to have some fun.
“I?d drive down Fleet Street in my truck delivering [industrial] rags and uniforms and see that big mural of his face on the side of the building,” remembered Richard Snyder, 53, a photographer from Pasadena who patronized Bonnie?s.
“It always reminded me of the time I went to seem him at the Capital Centre [May 22, 1977] by myself,” said Snyder, who at the time partied with a crowd whose tastes ran toward Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. “I couldn?t get anybody to go with me, so I still have an unripped ticket to an Elvis Presley concert. I framed it.”
Today the building is a renovated waterfront real estate miracle. I?m sure whoever lives there is pleased with the place, and surely someone has told them that they sleep on sacred ground.
Lavonda “Bonnie” Hunt kept house there, living above the bar the way so many immigrant grocers in Baltimore ? from 19th-century Germans to Eastern European Jews to Koreans ? have done for years and years. Downstairs she collected images of “The King” in a personal and intimate fashion that the Hard Rock Cafe chain cannot.
“No matter which way I turn,” she liked to say, “he?s always looking at me.”
Bonnie died in 1993 at the age of 62, and her legacy was sold and gutted. But while she lived, it was a place propelled by the kind of passion that makes a couple of 11-year-old girls run away from home.
“We began hitchhiking from my parents? house in Brunswick,” said Kathy “Cass” Kennan, remembering her bright idea from 1962. “We tried to make it all the way to Memphis to visit Elvis at his mansion.”
The girls made it as far as Winchester, Va., less than 40 miles, where police called their parents. Kennan said she got a whipping, but it was worth it just to say she tried.
In those days, young women were nailing themselves into shipping crates and mailing themselves to Graceland disguised as Great Danes.
At the time, said Kennan, who raised her family in Pigtown and now lives in Florida, “I?d sit for hours on a porch swing listening to Elvis music and hold a broom like it was a guitar.”
In May of 1977, about two months before Presley?s death, Kennan and hundreds of Elvis fans from across Maryland camped for 40 hours outside the Baltimore Civic Center (now the 1st Mariner Center) for tickets. The May 29 show was one of the low points of Presley?s career, with the overweight and somewhat incoherent star leaving the stage for the first time in his career before meekly returning a half-hour later.
“I was interviewed by a News American reporter, and they asked me why I would wait like that,” said Kennan. “And I told them, ?Because he?s a hunk-and-a-half and-three-quarters.? ”
Just over the Howard County line in Bowie, restaurant owner Bob Thompson sings Elvis songs most weekends at his Old Bowie Town Grille on Chestnut Street.
Thompson was 15 when Elvis died at the height of the disco fad. Demographics say he should be dressing up like KISS onstage. But Elvis is where his heart is. The sensation of channeling Elvis Presley, he says, cannot be properly explained.
“It?s an amazing thing,” said Thompson, who also sings Presley tunes at the Old Bowie?s Wednesday night blues jams. “It?s all for the love of Elvis.”
To get an idea of how Presley might have aged, rent a 2002 movie directed by Don Coscarelli called “Bubba Ho-Tep.”
Bruce Campbell plays the geriatric Elvis, a shell of a man fighting impotence and a homicidal mummy from ancient Egypt.
“How,” asks the hero, “could I have gone from the king of rock ?n? roll to this?”
Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books ? fiction, journalism and essays ? include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at [email protected].
