Within moments after deciding he would go to the impersonators' convention in Chicago, Elvis stepped off the curb in the middle of the block and twisted his ankle.

He fell forward on his hands and knees when he crumpled to the pavement. People rushed by on the sidewalk behind him. He could see them under his armpit upside down. Not only did they avoid looking at him, they avoided the very fact of him, as if they were sure he was drunk or stoned, or worse, maybe dying.

Well, he reflected when the pain died down enough that the sharp wave of nausea passed and he could gather the will to stand up again, he had wanted them to leave him alone. They were.

He limped across the street, hip-hopping like a man with a bad wound instead of just a bent ankle, until he reached a building on the far side, against which he leaned while he took deep breaths and began to regain his equilibrium.

He already knew he would have to cut off his mustache; that would just be asking for it. But he wouldn't have time to let his crew cut grow out. He could say he did Elvis as a GI, a tanker in Germany, circa 1958.

"At fifty-five years old?" they'd ask. "At sixty?"

"Well, sort of," he'd mumble.

He'd duck his head and laugh, and then they'd get it. When they heard him they wouldn't think it was such a dumb idea.

He'd tell them he was a radio Elvis.

He leaned against the building for a long time, until he was sure he could walk without limping too much. But when he started walking, he discovered he could hardly move, could put only the slightest weight on his right foot. So instead of going into a store and looking at people buy things, he hailed a taxi and headed home.

When he got out of the cab, he could hardly walk at all. The driver came around and helped him to the door of his building.

"Where's the doorman?" he asked.

"Ain't got one," Elvis said.

The driver turned his head abruptly and scrutinized Elvis's face.

"Did anyone every tell you . . . ?" he started to ask, but Elvis cut him off.

"All the time," he said. "I thought when I grew this mustache, they'd stop it, but they never."

"Aw, no," said the driver, opening the door for Elvis. "You don't look like him. But you sure do sound like him." The driver spoke with a foreign accent Elvis didn't recognize.

"Yeah," Elvis said. "That's what they say."

Once inside and up to his floor, Elvis's pain was practically to his knee.

"What a stupid thing to do," he muttered to himself. "It just goes to show you. If I'd just been paying attention, this never would of happened."

Elvis had cleaned up his act in the years since he'd disappeared. He had given up all drugs--including alcohol, which he realized now was the entry drug that was worse than any of them--and had taken to roaming the city on foot, taking it all in, ogling the people who had for years ogled him.

It wasn't easy at first. He didn't miss the adulation, exactly, being the center of attention. That didn't bother him. What bothered him, what was hardest to get used to, and what ultimately pleased him the most was being able to look back at people. Before, he could make eye contact only on stage. Now, he could stare at anyone he wanted as long as he wanted-making sure, of course, that he didn't antagonize a crazy or a junkie or just a plain mean one. Still, he was prepared; he carried a pistol with him at all times, even in the summer, a tiny .25 caliber automatic in a holster in his left boot, and he was still a crack shot because he practiced a lot. He'd use it, too, if he had to. He hadn't bought his freedom at such great expense--stealing from himself just as if he were one of his own entourage--to lose it all to some weirdo.

Within an hour, Elvis called a doctor. His ankle was swollen as big as a grapefruit, and now he couldn't walk at all. When he suggested to the doctor's receptionist that the doctor might make a house call, she laughed.

"Who do you think you are?" she asked. "The King of England? Doctors don't make house calls."

He knew that. He knew that. He hadn't been Elvis for a long time now, after all. He just had one of those lapses that he sometimes had, although he had not had many of them over the years and certainly hadn't had one in a long time. He ought to give thanks the guy didn't make house calls, given what was done to him by the doctors he'd had when he was alive.

Well, he had wanted to change his life, to go back to the way it was in the early days, before that fateful day in 1954 when he went through the orange door at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, and made that record. Who would have thought it?

And who would have thought he'd have tired of it, too, although he did pretty early. Still, for the first few years, it was wonderful. Fame and the power that came with it were, as the Colonel used, to say, delightful, and absolute fame and power were absolutely delightful. At least for a while.

They were, at least, until he figured out he'd given his life away and, without a miracle, wouldn't ever get it back again. The moment he realized that, he knew what he would have to do, knew the terrible price he would have to pay to get it back again. He knew he would do it, too, when the time was right.

He called a cab now, and went slowly and painfully back downstairs, using a walking stick he'd picked up on one of his daylong ramblings around town. He kept the stick--a crooked NYC version of an Irish shillelagh--propped against the wall in the corner behind the door. By the time he got back home again, hours later, he was on crutches and his right foot was in a cast. He'd pulled the middle ligament, right under the patella, and the doctor said he'd be in a cast for a month.

"It's just as if the ligament were a weed, and it was pulled up out of the ground, with a lot of the dirt hanging off the roots," the doctor said, pointing at the irregularity beneath the ankle bone on the x-ray of his right foot.

Well, Elvis didn't know; maybe it was an omen. The crew cut would cause enough attention, even without the mustache, even with the gray colored out with Grecian formula, but a cast and crutches? That might be pushing it too far.

Once he was back in his apartment, his ankle was hurting pretty bad, and since he wouldn't let the doctor give him anything for pain, of course, he poked around looking for something to distract him. The best he could come up with was the newspaper, which he had not finished before going out that morning. He'd been reading the paper, in fact, when he'd seen the story about the Elvis Presley Impersonators' Convention in Chicago and thinking about it had driven him outside earlier than usual.

"The first EP Impersonators International Association Convention in Chicago," it said, "will be held June 8-9. It is expected to draw many fans and more than 150 professional impersonators of the King." Elvis read that paragraph over again now. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea, after all, for him to go. And while he was on the subject, maybe it was a lousy idea, too, for these people to be making a living by looking more or less like he'd looked back in those days. It was as if they'd sucked it all out of him, like them body snatchers, and into themselves, made themselves into him. But 150 of them?

And, of course, at the convention they would all be Elvises of thirty to forty-two.

As far as he knew from watching the television and reading the papers, there wasn't one of them who did Elvis at the age he would have been if he'd kept on living, which he had but which no one knew except the National Enquirer and a few other papers like that, which nobody believed but just the people.

He knew it made show business sense, but it still irritated him that he had to keep aging, turning gray, getting skinny--which itself wasn't so bad--getting wrinkles, when those 150 fake Elvises got to freeze time, at least for a little while, until nature, too, rendered them unfit for the racket. The way it had been doing to Elvis himself, he reflected, his foot throbbing just enough to keep him from slipping into a severe depression.

"Don't come crying to me," Elvis said aloud to these faceless, nameless EPIs. "I couldn't help you if I wanted to, which I don't." The big question was, of course, why were there Elvis Impersonators?

He propped his foot up on the coffee table, on top of a big book of Indian photographs by John Running. Gosh dang, it hurt!

Sure, he could go to the Elvis convention, all right, the exact age he should be, with a crew cut and a cast and crutches and even his mustache if he felt like it to make him stand out even more, and they'd be on him like white on rice. Somebody might even be smart enough to figure it out.

Maybe that's what he wanted.

He didn't think so, but maybe it was.

Well, he'd sleep on it, and see what tomorrow would bring.

He tore the news article from the paper--"Elvis Impersonators Hold Own Convention"--folded it carefully, and slipped it into his billfold before he went down the hall to his blacked-out bedroom. He'd just have to sleep on it.

So in his dream he was at the convention in the Palmer House in Chicago, and he hadn't shaved off his mustache even. Everybody looked at him because his foot was in a cast and he was walking on crutches, but nobody gave him a second look after the first one because he obviously wasn't an Elvis; he was obviously just a fan. He might be a manager, but he was probably just a fan. He could be one of Elvis's retinue, even though only a few of the EPIs had them, and they were small. But he wasn't an Elvis; anybody could see that.

He stopped at the bar in the Palmer House and ordered a Perrier with a twist. The bartender looked at him pretty closely when he ordered, but he really looked him over when he gave him his drink and Elvis said, "Thank yew."

"Say," said the bartender.

"Yeah," said Elvis. "That's right, man. But I'm a radio Elvis." He smiled his serious, sincere, sure-enough smile, the one Wayne Newton stole off him the night he thought he was dying, and he said, "You're the king now." Right. In his dreams.

He smiled the smile the Colonel used to call his greeter's smile. He was wearing straight-leg Levi's, 501s, a gray-and-white striped shirt, and a double-breasted blue blazer with big gold buttons. He had his left black roper on, one of those high-topped highway patrol boots that were so easy on his feet. His right foot was in the cast, of course. He didn't have a big silver buckle on his belt, either, or a scarf around his neck, etc.

Some Elvises came into the bar in clown suits. The CEO of EP Impersonators International had warned him about that. "Like any business," he had said, "there are a lot of clowns running around. We want to help establish the guys who are serious performers of this creative art form."

"Art form's ass," Elvis said into his Perrier. "Give me a break."

The clowns all ordered champagne and sat around their table sneering and smiling and looking out from under heavy eyelids.

Elvis's own eyelids, unburdened by medication, stress, and the bright lights of the biz, were no longer very droopy. He looked, in fact, almost bright-eyed.

At 10 A.M., he left the clowns alone in the bar with just the bartender to appreciate them and headed down a long hallway toward the meeting room for the Stage Presentation Competition. He wondered why he was doing this. Was this a bad idea?

In the corridor on the way to the SPC, two Elvises passed him on the right in a hurry. They were going so fast they would have passed him even if he hadn't been on crutches.

"We're going to be late," one of them said to the other.

"I can't walk any faster in these damn pants," said the other one.

Elvis marveled. These two EPIs clearly didn't have their minds right. The people hurried to Elvis; Elvis didn't hurry to the people.

There was a temporary stage at the far end of Lake Erie Meeting Room A, obviously set up just for the competition. A couple dozen Elvises were lounging around in the back of the room eating Danish pastries and drinking decaffeinated coffee. One or two Elvises were off by themselves putting their game faces on.

Elvis went down the middle aisle and took a seat on the front row, only feet from the front edge of the temporary stage.

He studied all the performances as carefully and as attentively as if he were going to have to give out the ribbons when they were through.

Since he didn't, however, and since his cast ankle began itching like crazy in the heat of the small room, he gathered his crutches and hurried out as soon as the last scarf had been slung off the last sweaty neck into the small audience, made up mostly of EPIs themselves. Is that how he had looked? He doubted it. In any case, it was a loaded question, because they all looked as different from each other as he thought they looked from the old him. Or the young him, whichever it was.

He, of course, looked less like himself than any of them EPIs did, since they were, for the most part, roughly the age he was at the time he disappeared, and he was now a lot older, not to mention skinny.

But that wasn't it, not the external appearance. There wasn't an Inside Elvis Look-alike as far as Elvis could tell, there wasn't an IEPI, so to speak. The closest one was the only black Elvis--which was certainly fair enough, given where Elvis got half his music and all his moves from--whose external appearance was--not even counting the color difference--the least similar. He, at least, sounded like Elvis, except for a more resonant timbre than Elvis had ever commanded.

On the way back down the hall toward the Palmer House bar, Elvis passed a man wandering around whom Elvis recognized from the television as a syndicated newspaper columnist. It was all Elvis could do to keep from going up and introducing himself and thanking him for all the nice things he'd written about him over the years. While Elvis truly did not understand any of it very much, he supposed he understood a guy like him the best, since it appeared to be the music that drew him.

In the cab on the way back to the airport, Elvis wondered again about the fact of EPIs in the world and reflected on what it all meant. For some reason, probably mostly economic and also, of course, by accident of birth, most of the EPIs had been chosen for their roles as much as they had chosen them.

Aside from the black guy he had seen at the competition, there was a Mexican one, too, a kid who lived in L.A. who gave new meaning to the word "impersonator." He didn't look like Elvis, didn't sound like Elvis, didn't even sing in English, and yet his dedication to the role seemed deep. There was a five-year old Elvis, too, a Korean Elvis, and a girl Elvis. It was something to see.

"I didn't want to be Elvis anymore, and so I stopped and became whoever I became. But the only thing that changed was . . . . Well, was everything. Because when I gave up the belt buckle and the spangles and the gaucho pants, I gave up most of the things that made me Elvis. That made me, really, I guess, the first Elvis Impersonator."

This thought struck Elvis right between the eyes.

"Well I'll be damned!" he said aloud. "I will be damned!"

Still . . . still, he was the real Elvis, too, wasn't he? Somehow he was, even though he had given himself away. And all those EPIs, they weren't the real ones. Were they?

The whole thing was absurd. He remembered reading once about someone in New York impersonating the Russian President Gorbachev on his first trip to the U.S., taking in even Donald Trump, which must have been a rush, and another one, more recently still, in California on Gorby's second trip here.

That kind of impersonating made better sense to Elvis, because Gorbachev was alive and everybody knew it, and so impersonating him meant you had a chance for a moment or two of getting someone to believe you really were someone you were not--much like he had done when he was Elvis. But these EPIs now, they were impersonating someone that everyone reasonable knew was dead. And that was kind of spooky, because obviously they didn't expect anyone to believe they really were who they were pretending to be.

So why were they successful?

And how successful were they?

Maybe they were believable only to those people who didn't believe he was dead. So, all these guys were making a living by fooling people who were not taken in by the story that Elvis was dead. Reasonable people knew Elvis was dead; fringe people weren't convinced. Resistant to the big hoax, they turned right around and fell for the little hoax. Was that the deal?

Elvis's head spun.

It was all too much for him.

If he kept this up, he'd have to fake his death again to escape from this new life. Ha!

"Say," he said to the cab driver. "You think Elvis is really dead?"

"Huh?" said the cab driver.

"I said, 'Do you think Elvis Presley is really dead?'"

The cab driver didn't speak for a while. Then he said, "You mean, do I think Elvis Presley is still alive?"

"Yeah," said Elvis, not sure at all that's what he meant.

"Sure," said the cab driver. "You hear him on the radio every day."

Sure. Radio Elvis. But that wasn't the answer. By that test, Teddy Roosevelt was still alive because of those old films of him marching into the camera in the days of the Panama Canal or dressed up in that old-timey bathing suit taking a cold bath outside in a slatted wooden tub. By that test, Bing Crosby was still alive.

Elvis leaned back in the car seat. He touched the button on the door and lowered the window so some cool air could blow on his face, which had begun to feel feverish. His ankle itched, and when he turned it wrong, it hurt bad. He bent to scratch, and his fingers met plaster.

"Listen to this!" the cab driver said suddenly, turning up the car radio, and Elvis heard his own voice coming back to him through the sounds of traffic, across the lost years. He saw himself as he was then, young and full of life and promise, with all the world before him, and all of time, too, as only the young have, forever, until suddenly one day the end leaps abruptly into sight, the horizon narrows, and it's zero inside.

He was a radio Elvis!

In his prime he had been the best EPI of all because he had invented the game. When he was gone, the doors opened for all the second-tier EPIs to try out for Number One. The trouble was, Elvis Presley was so hard to do that only Elvis Presley himself could really do him. But without him, there could be only what there was.

Elvis reached down then and slipped his hand into the top of his left roper where he could feel the butt of his little .25 caliber hammerless automatic pistol, made in Waco, Texas. He fingered it gently, knowing even as he slept that he wasn't going to be able to get on the plane with it.

Well, he thought, better them than me. Better them than me. Also, he thought, the pain wasn't so bad now that he'd had time to rest a while.

Excerpt from Radio Elvis and Other Stories Copyright © 2002 by John H. Irsfeld. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.