SEE
THE完 PERFECT完 AMERICAN な
FOR A WHOLE LOT MORE ELVIS! OR VISIT HIM HERE IF YOU CAN'T WAIT RIGHT HERETO SEE HOW I TURN OUT! (IT'S NOT LOOKIN' GOOD) : THINGS ARE GONNA GET A LITTLE STRANGE.
SEE YA IN AN HOUR OR SO FOR
"2 PM- TO 4 PM"
AND PLENTY
FUNEREALVIS VIDEOS
ABOUT:
ME, IF I'M DEAD?, DRUGS, AND MY GANG
4.00am Elvis called Billy Smith and asked him to play racquetball with him. As Elvis and Ginger emerge from the house to go to the racquetball court he points out to her where her future painting studio would be as they walk under the covered walkway.Billy comments that he is sick of it raining and he just wished it would stop. Elvis says, "Ain’t no problem... I’ll take care of it." Elvis raises his hand towards the sky and to Billy’s amazement the rain just stopped. He looks at Elvis and Elvis just has that boyish grin on his face and that twinkle in his eye. "See, I told you.. If you’ve got a little faith you can stop the rain."
Elvis and Billy start to play racquetball, no competitive game ensued, Ginger and Jo watch Elvis from the observation pit as he clowns around on the court with what could be interpreted as no more than a warm up. Elvis began showing off trying to perform little trick shots with each successful one making him turn to make sure Ginger had seen it. After a while Elvis began to lose his concentration and as he took a swing at the ball he missed and caught himself hard in the shin with the racquet. At this point he limped off the court and came behind the glass partition to sit down with Ginger. He looked at his leg and it had a welt on it from the impact. Billy threw one of Elvis’ own phrases at him, "If it ain’t bleedin’ it ain’t hurtin’," to which they all laughed and Elvis replied by jovially throwing his racquet at Billy.
After trying to recover he got up and went over to the piano where he started playing I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen and finally Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain.
After this session on the piano he got up and walked over to the electric exercycle and spent a few minutes on that.
6.00am They then leave the racquetball building. Jo goes back to the mobile home out the back of the house and Billy goes upstairs with Elvis and Ginger.
6.10am - 6.40am Billy helped Elvis wash his hair and then he dried it for him. Elvis was annoyed and upset that Ginger was not coming out with him at the start of the tour. He told Billy that maybe he should invite Alicia Kerwin out for the first part of the tour, but Billy put it down to idle talk and Elvis gave no real reason to make him think he was going to do anything about it. The subject of the book came up again and went just as quickly with no new thoughts from Elvis as to how he was taking it. His anger with Red and Sonny making him think out aloud of the plot he had schemed in his mind to lure them to Graceland under false pretences and to harm them into withdrawing the book. Then with that thought gone again his mind turned to the tour with Elvis trying to inspire himself by repeating the predictable mantra he was becoming known for, "Billy, we’ll show ‘em, we’ll make this the best tour yet." Whilst Billy dried Elvis’ hair, Elvis idly glanced at one of the books Larry Gellar had bought him. It was Frank O. Adams’ "The Face Of Jesus" about the Shroud Of Tourin.
Billy left just before Ricky Stanley bought Elvis his first med attack pack.
6.40am - 6.45am Is an estimated time for Ricky bring this package up. The package is thought to contain a varying amount of Seconal, Placidyl, Valmid, Tuinal, Demoral and an assortment of other depressants and placebos. Times quoted vary all over the place depending on which source you listen to, the most recent and also one of the most respected volumes of work is Peter Guralnicks’, "Careless Love" with its obvious painstakingly researched information. This quotes:
Elvis was still awake a couple of hours later when Ricky bought him his second "attack," but when he called down for the third. Ricky had disappeared, even though he was supposed to be on duty till noon.Goldmans’ Elvis quotes:
Around eight in the morning, Ginger was awakened by Elvis calling downstairs for more sleeping medication.It then goes on to say that Ricky bought it up. So...
8.40am - 8.45 am Ricky brings Elvis his second med pack attack.
8.00am - 9.00am Elvis, The final Years by Jerry Hopkins quotes Aunt Delta as knocking on Elvis’ door to deliver the morning newspaper and a glass of iced water.
Elvis had a third med pack attack delivered. The time for this is hard to place.
Elvis called down to Ricky Stanley for him to bring it up. Ricky was not to be found.
It is possible that there was no third pack at all. If this is the case then Ricky may well have thought he could slip away thinking his duties were done and gambling that he would not be called anymore by Elvis as Elvis would be asleep till later on in the day.
Another guide to the time is that Nurse Tish Henley was already at work at Dr Nicks’ practice.
Most likely is that Elvis wanted Ricky to run the same errand as he had done a few hours earlier, picking up the prescription from Tish Henley and picking it up from the pharmacy for him.
Guralnicks’ book, Careless Love, says Elvis asked Aunt Delta to make the call to Tish Henley.
Goldmans’, Elvis, says that Elvis called Tish Henley. Quote:
This morning, apparently, he feared that he would not experience the desired effect because just fifteen minutes after Ricky left his room, Elvis was on the phone to Dr Nick’s office, where he found Nurse Henley. He explained that he was going to have a trying day, what with Lisa going back to California and his own departure imminent: It was vital that he receive some extra sleeping medication so that he would be equal to the days demands. She agreed to help him.In Hopkin’s, The Final Years, we get a twist in this tale. After the book says Aunt delta bought the paper and iced water up it goes on. Quote:
Elvis told her he was going to sleep until seven that night, then leave for Portland, Maine, about midnight. Between getting up and leaving, he said, he wanted to see Nurse Cocke to say goodbye; would Aunt Delta call the nurse and ask? Aunt Delta did and soon after that Elvis called Marion Cocke himself. She said she’d come to the house when she finished work.
With all of this information about, and the more information that seems to come about, we all get more and more confused as to what events did and didn’t take place. The easiest thing for me to do is just dump the lot onto you and leave you to interpret it as you may wish. But I don’t do easy, so I’m gonna try and fathom what is most likely to have happened and if possible when it happened.
8.45am - 9.00am Aunt Delta knocks on Elvis’ door to deliver the morning newspaper and a glass of iced water. Elvis told her he was going to sleep until seven that night, then leave for Portland, Maine, about midnight. Between getting up and leaving, he said, he wanted to see Nurse Cocke to say goodbye; would Aunt Delta call the nurse and ask? Aunt Delta said she would.
9.00am - 9.05am Elvis wants to have a third med attack at hand to take in a little while after he has read some of his book. He doesn’t want to be disturbed in the bathroom so he requests it before he goes in. No third pack had been scheduled so one will need to be obtained. Elvis calls Ricky to get him to go pick up the meds from the pharmacy, but Ricky is unavailable. Elvis got on the phone to Dr Nick’s office, where he found Nurse Henley. He explained that he was going to have a trying day, what with Lisa going back to California and his own departure imminent: It was vital that he receive some extra sleeping medication so that he would be equal to the days demands but that he couldn't find anyone to go to the pharmacy. She said she would call her husband and instruct him to make up a packet from their home behind Graceland and bring it over to the house for him.
9.05am - 9.10am Elvis calls his Aunt Delta and tells her that Tom Henley, is bringing a packet of medication over to the house, could she see that he gives it to her and then could she bring it up to him? She wasn’t to worry about calling Nusre Marion Cocke, Elvis says he’ll do that himself right now. Meantime Tish is giving instructions to her husband over the phone about what to take over to the house.
9.10 - 9.15am Elvis makes the call to Nurse Marion Cocke and she tells him she will pop in to see him after she finishes work the evening.
9.20am - 9.30am Aunt Delta meets Tom Henley at the door and takes the packet containing the medication from him and goes upstairs to give it to Elvis. Elvis takes this from her and puts it in the bathroom.
Elvis picks up his book and comes back onto the bed and begins to read. Whether it’s a few seconds or a few minutes, Ginger wakes up and finds Elvis reading the book. He tells her, "Precious, I’m gonna go in the bathroom and read for a while." "Okay," said Ginger, "just don’t fall asleep." Elvis replies, "I won’t."
9.30am - 9.45am In the bathroom Elvis takes the packs of medication. There may have been a small period of time between taking them, but it is most likely that Elvis took the packs at the same time or within a very short time span. The effect was to get him to sleep and Elvis would have known this, so he didn’t want to fall asleep after the first pack and then not use the others.
Elvis sat upon his commode and opened the book.
The medication now started to work inside Elvis.
9.45am - 9.55pm Though Elvis was unaware, his body now started to die. The heart had stopped, arrested by the extreme increase in the beats it had produced. Any last remaining air in Elvis’ lungs would no longer get into his blood stream and the brain slowly closed itself down without it.
Later on a Toxicology test and two other tests would be carried out, one under the name of Ethel Moore.
They would discover the following results shown in the table above.
How some of it was included in the medication packs is only open to speculation.
One of the first signs for Elvis would have been similar to food poisoning in that his stomach would be upset. This may have been the reason he decided to sit upon his commode. The drugs reacted quickly and Elvis’ heart began beating extremely fast, a searing pain in his chest caused him lean forward and try to stand up. Taking two, maybe three short steps forward, he gradually dropped to his knees, his chest paralysed by the heart attack then he passed into unconsciousness. With one last involuntary body action Elvis vomited, the stomach releasing what it could of the poisons and leaving his tongue protruding from his mouth.
Roughly eight to ten minutes, after the brain began to be starved of oxygen, Elvis was dead in every physical way.
9.55am - 1.45pm Rigor Mortis slowly set in. Living muscle cells expend energy to transport calcium ions to the outside of the cells. The calcium ions that flow into the muscle cells promote the cross-bridge attachment between actin and myosin, two types of fibers that work together in muscle contraction. The muscle fibers ratchet shorter and shorter until they are fully contracted or as long as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) are present. However, muscles need ATP in order to release from a contracted state (it is used to pump the calcium out of the cells so the fibers can unlatch from each other). ATP reserves are quickly exhausted from the muscle contraction and other cellular processes. This means that the actin and myosin fibers will remain linked until the muscles themselves start to decompose. Temperature is a factor in how quickly rigor mortis sets in, Elvis liked to live in a climate of low temperature, driven down constantly by the air conditioning. But rigor mortis can begin to start after a short period of just ten minutes. The first muscles affected are the facial muscles, as they slowly began to contract on Elvis the jaw tightened up and Elvis’ teeth began to set into his protruding tongue. The rigor then slowly sets in throughout the rest of the body.
And he lay there, undiscovered for approximately four hours.
1.45pm - 2.15pm Ginger calls her friend Cindy Mies, David Stanley's girlfriend, from the phone next to the bed to find out if she is going on the tour. After chatting briefly she learned that Cindy would be going. After talking to Cindy, Ginger decides to call her mother to tell her that she would be coming home directly and to let her know when she was leaving and when she planned to be back in Memphis at the end of the tour. She spoke for about 15 minutes and after she finished it occurred to her that Elvis may still be in the bathroom, maybe he'd fallen asleep in there after all.