TALKING ABOUT HOLLYWOOD was where MacLeod drifted from delusional tall tales into a schizophrenic episode. When he launched into a naughty story about he and Ann-Margret, I heard myself barking, “You had a fling with The Vamp?” He stared at me for an uncomfortably long time while I calculated how many darkened rooms I’d have to negotiate to see daylight again. “No, Elvis did. Sinatra even walked in on us!”

Paul MacLeod had blown his pronouns.

So why the obsession with an outlandish poor boy from Tupelo who was manipulated by business partners but was so honest with the rest of the world? Was it Vegas and the jumpsuits and the over-the-top showmanship of his Fat E years? Was it his ability to look sideways at the weirdness of the hippie and flower power movements and beat them at their own game? That actually may be part of it.

Carnivals, the Mardi Gras, and the Junkanoo are all great escapes because they are great excesses to counterpoint the drabness of daily life. The reason you don’t feel foolish at the world’s great carnivals is that everyone else is dressed like a fool or festooned in beads and paint as well. That’s where Elvis was different from the rest of us; he was a one-man, self-propelled, weapons-grade carnival. He didn’t need a movement behind him. Whether he was on stage, on the movie set, in the White House, or riding a motorcycle down Memphis streets fairly nude with Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis was both the humble origins and wild excess of carnival. Everyone who got sucked into his vortex knew it. The mass media of the new age knew it, too.

When the former prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, visited the White House in 2006, his one cultural request was to be taken to Graceland by President Bush. Koizumi, a self-described “Elvis Fanatic,” is a member in good standing of the Elvis Fan Club of Japan, reportedly the most outrageous Elvis fan club in Asia. And there is a fan club in every country free enough to indulge that sort of thing. By all reports, the former prime minister of Japan does a good Elvis impersonation. The proprietor of Graceland Too, I’m sad to report, did not. Imagine if a bull elk in full rut decided to sing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

What his weird outlier of a monument did get right was the simple, explosive array of stuff crammed, wedged and violently shoehorned into one huge display. Paul MacLeod had hit a nerve that my bar mate Jesse simply couldn’t. And now he and Elvis can compare notes in that vast dance hall in the clouds.

What about the rest of us? For those of us nearer the center of the Elvis bell curve, the effect is more subtle, but it’s there. We don’t dress up daily, but the white polyester is still one of the most popular Halloween costumes every year. His songs are played on commercials and at baseball games. Elvis clocks, the ones with the swinging hips, have replaced the lava lamp as the badge of kitschy décor.

It is not enough to be a character, and a lot of modern performers don’t get that. Elvis embodied the wild excess of a man born desperately poor in a small place, but who makes it big, really big. He’s certainly not the only one, but name another cultural icon you’d be comfortable serving fried chicken to if they showed up unannounced. The larger than life Elvis was just being himself, only bigger. Elvis was a stage act, but it was an authentic presentation. That’s why we love it and can’t seem to get him, so many years after his death, out of our heads.

At some point in the half-century since Elvis exploded on the scene, he went from rock star to cultural icon and then skidded into idiom, simply sewn into American culture to the point where we are almost unaware of it.

To most of us, saddled as we are with mortgages and careers and families, Elvis is proof that we just might, should the situation demand it, go over the top.