Elvis Lives (Until This Day, Alas, When He Died)

Celebrating a Deathday™ (August 16, 1977), U.S. Federal Narcotics Agent-at-Large Aaron "Elvis” Presley died on this day, after catching his death of cold in a driving Kentucky rainstorm. The one-time, leisured-suited singing sensation and avowed peanut butter and banana sandwich “junkie” was just 42 years old. ‘Twas love of country — not music, but rather the stars and stripes themselves — that caused Presley to put down the microphone — and, presumably, his sandwich — and pick up the telephone to offer his services to President Richard N. Milhaus, who obliged his request. The mutton-chopped Milhaus and beloved sideman Spiros T. Agnew were fighting enemies in and out of the states, and Presley answered the patriot's call, which is to say a chorus of voices in his head. Presley almost single-handedly created the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs™ and, with plasticine badge in hand, the credentialed agent went to work, testing the hallucinatory powers of various ingestibles, whilst keeping an eye on hippie elements and the scourge of America — the Black Panthers or possibly the Beatle Brothers™. Alas, ‘twas in the midst of a seven-day stakeout, thumbing for rides along the lonely Kentucky back roads, where the undercover Presley, labouring without a proper pair of galoshes in the cold Kentucky rain, would fall ill. A preacher man attempted to come to his aid, but he expired. The former hip-swiveling “Heartbreak Kid” broke a lot of hearts indeed — including a few of ours here at the station house — when he was laid to rest at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to Aaron "Elvis" Presley, drug crime-avenging Citizen Secret Agent Man™.