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Performers draw on superhuman amounts of adrenaline to enthrall their audiences, and stay awake hours after performing to come “down.” Speed would have aggravated Elvis’s naturally hyperactive metabolism and performer’s lifestyle. He was soon also taking downers to sleep, the typical Hollywood doctor cocktail. The two medications create a manic/depressive roller coaster. Everything excessive that Elvis became had its roots in his impoverished youth, but was later enacted with the grandiose extravagance of a speed addict. The vampirish hours of a rock star made him into a man who reversed day and night, sleeping at dawn and rising to start the day at dusk. It was convenient for everyone around him, including women, to follow the same schedule, so Elvis enthusiastically converted them to the wonder pills too.

He was an overprotected mama’s boy, a shy and sensitive soul ripe for loneliness, ostracizing, and bullying. He found identity in embracing his differences, in dressing like the black musicians who made Memphis’s Beale Street a musical legend. Like many an outcast teenager, he took on a protective aggressive coloring. He hid his vulnerabilities behind the accoutrements of a fifties “hood,” those black-leather-clad urban bad boys with the greaser hair, sideburns, and attitudes. He even dyed his hair and eyebrows black, covered his blond eyelashes in mascara. He ached to play football, but his overprotective mother forbid him to. The coach hated his long hair and wouldn’t let him play without a buzzcut anyway. Years later, Elvis organized his Memphis Mafia into a football team. He was quarterback, of course.

An only child, he often gave the rare toys, a wagon or toy car, his family could ill afford to other children. As a wealthy and famous adult, he became famous for dispensing Cadillacs and other luxury cars by the dozen to friends and strangers, perhaps 280 in all. His impulses were always generous. Beneficiaries could be girls after only one date, poor workers on his one-time ranch, strangers, members of the Memphis Mafia. Jealousy swirled around Graceland when Elvis was on a buying jag: who would get the gravy? It wouldn’t always be whoever most deserved the extra calories. His donations to charity were less quixotic and his generosity was inbred, not merely a speed-assisted profligacy. He arranged a liver transplant for one of his record producers, for instance.

Of course his music, the synthesis of white hillbilly and black blues music that got him attention, developed during his teen years on “lonely street,” which was broader than Beale Street in Memphis, and included the “race music” on the radio and the gospel music in the church Gladys and Vernon attended.

When the Jaycees named him an outstanding young man of 1971, Elvis Presley reveled in the achievement because it was more than another performing benchmark. It was a testimony to character and personal worth. He was already outstandingly indentured to prescription medications by then, and Priscilla would leave him in a year. It was already the beginning of the end, but a proud moment. As he said in his acceptance speech, he’d fulfilled every dream he’d had as a child worshipping comic book heroes who would doff their impotent ordinariness, don a gaudy jumpsuit, and fly to everyone’s rescue.

That was the problem, he had fulfilled every dream. Only the nightmares were left.