Barnaby Sandwich recently attended the twelfth and last of his Summer `06 Weddings, this one in Memphis, Tennessee. (All of his friends are now married, including the priests and the eunuchs.) This wedding, like all the others, was an intensely moving expression of love and community; and it ended, like all the others, with Barnaby, intensely drunk and blubbering, stammering out at length his gratitude and best wishes, while holding onto something—in this case, a magnolia tree—for support. Fortunately there was plenty of seltzer to get the vomit out of his lapels.

Picture it: a pig roasting in the cinderblock pit, a bar set up on the lawn, a plywood dance floor built under the trees, the old folks sitting on the porch, and smiling down on everything the butter-yellow Southern moon. On the plywood floor, a dozen pretty girls in pretty white dresses danced in a circle and sang along to the latest popular songs: "I ain't saying she's a gold digger/ but she ain't messin' with no broke niggers." Memphis!

While in town, Barnaby felt obliged to pay his respects to the local heroes and dead. So he put on his most unmistakeable Canadian flag t-shirt, had breakfast near his hotel and a large lunch at Gus's World-Famous Hot and Spicy Fried Chicken, and took the bus to Graceland. Perhaps it was the eight delicious pieces of hot and spicy fried chicken with cole slaw on the side; or perhaps it was his earlier breakfast of scrambled eggs with biscuits and gravy and pancakes and fried green tomatoes; or perhaps it was the gallon of sugar-saturated sweet tea; or perhaps it was simply a hangover—whatever the reason, Barnaby arrived at Graceland in poor shape, sweating, trembling, and wishing to God that he were not too jittery to vomit.

A pale shade of green, Canadian Barnaby snaked through Elvis's house, smokehouse, shooting range, trophy room, and racketball court in a state of mystification. He listened to the down-home, honey-dripping voice on his audio tour for about ten minutes before slipping the headphones off, concerned that they would cross his eyes. He walked down rows of gold and platinum records, "Golden Boot" awards, and movie posters for "Elvis Meets Girls in Bikinis" and "Elvis Joins the Tongan Navy." He looked at the legions of other tourists, who seemed neither worshipful nor skeptical, but merely docile, filing around in order and looking at every exhibit in turn. Under glass were displayed Elvis's karate belts and boxing gloves. On his desk were displayed a few of his books: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, for example, and Gods from Outer Space by Erich von Däniken. Over the speakers played his mediocre music. Barnaby clutched his head and went outside to sit down.

After a few minutes he collected himself and went into the ice cream parlor, to restore himself with two scoops of black walnut ice cream in a large sugar cone. Feeling much better, he browsed in the gift shops, through souvenir lunch boxes, plastic sunglasses, and furry vests. In the second of the three shops, a fat grandmother from Tallahassee spent a hundred and twenty one dollars on badly-made tchotchkes and announced, to her granddaughter and to the cashier, that she was done shopping because her car was full. Barnaby restrained himself and bought nothing but two postcards: one showing a recipe for peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and the other showing Elvis shaking hands with Richard Nixon. He felt slightly ill, but he was exultant: he had figured the whole thing out.

This is how he explained it to the silent, annoyed bus driver: "You see," Barnaby said, "I couldn't understand it at first. I mean, if you judge Elvis as a musician, or even simply as a human being, then what in God's name is the fuss all about? And besides, the whole thing was so morbid—the emphasis of the whole place is on his personality, on the detritus of one sad and sordid human life, and the exhibits of records and movie posters merely serve to prop up his importance as a man. And as a man, who cares? But that's just the point! That's exactly the point! That's why he's more important now than ever before—he was the first 'American Idol!' He was the spearhead of the current cult of celebrity, the very first anointing of a commoner as a sacrificial god. He represents us and dies for us—we exalt him and love him, and then kill and contemn him, in a cathartic expression of our own collective malformed identity. That's why they talk so much about how many records he sold—it's not about money, it's about the numbers! The more people buy his records, the more famous he becomes, the realer he is, and at the same time, the more unreal; the higher he flies, the more dramatically tragic the fall! Especially if the poor shnook was taking phony karate lessons and reading Erich von Däniken books."

"This is your stop, asshole," the busdriver replied. Barnaby bounced on down to Beale Street to have a beer and listen to some tourist harmonica. Afterwards, on his way back to the hotel, through the dead-empty Memphis downtown, Barnaby discovered a graffito on a lamppost that seemed to prove his point so thoroughly that he shivered with delight. It said, no joke, "Trust Jesus & Elvis." And it said this several times.

The next day Barnaby had a couple of peanut butter and banana sandwiches and some fried pickles at the Blue Plate Café, read the paper in Confederate Park, and strolled south along the fragrant, gorgeously landscaped banks of the Mississippi River. After a little while he walked a few blocks east and went into the National Civil Rights Museum. There he followed the timeline through room after room and century after century, reading texts and looking at documents and pictures, from slavery to lynching, from lynching to segregation in the army, from segregation in the army to firehoses, from firehoses to sit-ins and freedom rides. The museum had as much good news as it did bad, but it was the bad, it turns out, that had the more vivid effect on Barnaby; because ultimately the timeline reached the nineteen sixties, past simulated jail cells and presidential telegrams, and suddenly Barnaby turned a corner onto two glassed-in motel rooms and realized for the first time that the museum had been built inside the very motel where Martin Luther King was murdered. Barnaby looked through the window at a wreath marking the very spot where the man had stood, and then, like a mummy with unbending knees, he walked out of the Lorraine Motel, across the yard, and into the second building, where he went into the restroom and cried. After he had finished and washed his face, he went up to the second floor, where he discovered a series of exhibits on the investigations into the murder; this was too much for him, and he hurried out, hyperventilating in the humid Memphis air, running through the empty downtown, finally sitting down by the Mississippi to hide his face and bawl one more time.

After he had collected himself, Barnaby went to get something to eat, and he addressed himself in a whisper to his hot and spicy fried chicken: "Obviously if anyone can ever be proven to have conspired, by all means lock them up," he said, "but it seems to me that the more important point is that whether or not anyone actually discussed it or made plans, enough people wanted him dead. It simply reached a critical mass. And why then? Because of the rotten underside of Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon—a great reformer is allowed to orchestrate landmark changes in racial inequality, but if he starts talking about poverty in general and the Vietnam War, he turns up dead. Black people buy records, too, but there's a lot of money in bullets, and communism is bad for business."

"Sir," said the waiter awkwardly, not sure if Barnaby was talking to him, "do you want another sweet tea?"

"No," Barnaby said, "a beer, for the love of Christ, a beer."