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By Root 1578 0

surface, for the first half of his life, Elvis could push himself to behave like a normal teenager, positioned somewhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But his own self-perception, his default, was about fourteen or sixteen. As such, he continued to be attracted to fourteen-year-old girls up until his death at age forty-two, though for the most part, he saw them as innocents to be protected and wanted them to remain virgins.

Unconsciously, he felt fourteen-year-old girls were replications of himself, and he believed they constituted his missing part. But on a more conscious level, Elvis saw most women as either mothers or playthings. One part of his mind felt and experienced sexual energy as locked in with the concept of procreation—a woman was there for making children. The other half of his mind perceived women just as toys, or as little more than hormonal releases.

“Because of this fact,” says Whitmer, “Elvis could never, ever develop any kind of serious, deep, meaningful relationship with anybody else. It’s as if he said, ‘I cannot stay in a marital, loving relationship with anybody but Gladys.’ ”

Many twinless twins dwell on the sidewalk of life and have high incidences of divorce and sexual and psychological difficulties. “It all goes back to issues of control,” Whitmer asserts. “They just don’t have a sense of identity that can be joined with someone else in a significant higher union. They all say, ‘I am my best friend’ or ‘My dead twin is my best friend.’ They think, ‘I can’t really be married. It just doesn’t work.’ And many of them do get married and many of them stay married, but it’s a very superficial, tangential relationship.”

The stillbirth of his twin, and his unnatural closeness with his mother, then, rendered Elvis a hopelessly poor mate for life.

When Vernon returned home from Parchman in early 1939, some folks around Tupelo regarded him as a criminal, shaking their heads and remembering when he was a deacon in the church. “Back then, people were leery and they were not as forgiving,” says Billy Smith. “If you were in jail, you were an outcast. Friends thought, ‘It’s best not to socialize, because people will think you’re a lot like him.’ It made it very difficult.”

But Vernon also took advantage of his situation, going off with Travis fishing, shooting, and jelly beaning around while Gladys was forced to get a job at Long’s Laundry. Vernon was just “vaccinated against work,” in the view of his friend Aaron Kennedy. “Never sick a day in his life, just sick of work.” Gladys and Vernon fought rounds about it, and finally, she shamed him into applying to the Federal Works Project Agency, a New Deal program, where he was assigned to the Sanitation Project in Lee County. By that summer, he’d be reclassified as a skilled carpenter on the project and bring home $52 a month. His continued good behavior after Parchman resulted in another suspension—this one for ninety days in August—and the governor granted him an indefinite suspension of his sentence that November.

With such a weight off the family’s shoulders, the Presleys spent a lot of time with relatives, getting together for potluck suppers, where Gladys would sometimes churn ice cream in an old-time freezer. They also made their own entertainment with after-dinner singings, or simply listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. Sometimes they had overnight guests, Elvis sleeping on a little pallet on the front floor with his parents, and the guests on a makeshift bed in the kitchen.

It was about this time, age four, that Elvis began to recognize a connection between music and sex, and demonstrate the sexual power that music had over him.

“I remember one night we went up to Gladys and Vernon’s,” Annie Presley said. “We were all sitting around singing, and Elvis was singing with us. Elvis had his little hand in his pocket, dangling his ding-a-ling. Vernon all at once just stopped singing. He could say anything and never crack a grin. So Vernon said, ‘Son, if you’d just quit playing with that thing a little bit, you might could sing.