Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up by Pamela Des Barres, Michael Des Barres

fact I called one of the Tammy Wynette tear-drippers “Sleeping Alone”:
She wakes up every hour
And looks at the clock by the bed
She reaches out and touches
The pillow where her man lays his head
He’s been out all night
And the sun has been shining since the dawn
Thank God the night is over
’Cause nothing’s worse than sleeping alone
    The sun usually starts shining at dawn, doesn’t it?

CHAPTER FOUR
     
I
     
    At least Michael’s revels were bringing in some money—enough so we could make a pilgrimage/vacation to Las Vegas to see the treasured, obese King at the International Hilton. We checked into a grand, tacky suite with a bed the size of Nebraska, ate high on the turkey, lost twenty dollars playing blackjack—it was Splurge City! There were concessions all over the lobby overflowing with gaudy Elvis trinkets: cheap, highly flammable scarves, big, fake rings, TCB necklaces, color shots of the sweaty King spreading his white sequined tent wide like tarnished angel’s wings. The nasty, smirk-lipped bad boy with black penciled eyebrows had been swallowed up in rolls of blubber and acres of polyester, but we loved him still. We love you, Elvis, oh yes we do, we couldn’t love anyone as much as you.
    The book by his Judas bodyguards had just hit the stands, and Michael and I lay in our mammoth bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing Elvis was twenty floors above us doing unmentionable things. We could just picture him up there, contemplating his vast array of “medication,” deciding which combo of pills would do the trick tonight. Did he really inject himself in the groin with Dilaudid? We decked out hard, cruised through the cacophonous gambling din, and handed our tickets to the smug, smarmy seating dude, who promptly sat us in the back row. Wait a minute! Unfair! Michael leaned over to me and whispered, “Maybe I should give him a twenty?” We were sickeningly naive about Vegas slim-slam protocol,I suppose. “Do you think it might help?” I whispered back. It did. The creep moved us halfway down, giving us an oily smirk. As we sat through a macho, rotten-mouthed comedian, Michael leaned toward me again. “If I had given him twenty more, we’d be in the orchestra pit!” The lights dimmed and rose—Elvis in front of us! A lot of Elvis in front of us. But the voice had never been better. Enthralled speechless, we grabbed each other’s hands, ecstatic. We were right in the middle of one of our forevermoments, and we knew it. Elvis rubbed off layers of sweat, tossed the sopping scarves to beehived middle-agers, but even though I reached, I wasn’t close enough to rejoice in the King’s secretions. As he left the stage to don yet another sparkling tent, Michael laughed, “If I had given that bum a fifty, we’d be swinging on Elvis’s TCB pendant!”
    When we arrived back home from the neon desert, sated and dizzy with King-itis, I found potential good news in the mailbox. One of the acting photos I sent out landed on the desk of a corny ex-TV actor, and he wanted me to call him right away! He seemed to take a serious shine to me after our first hour-long meeting at the house of his famous girlfriend, and I had cloud-capped Hollywood hopes.
    In his high-pitched, squealy voice, he told me I “had something,” he was going to “discover” me, and give me a “coming-out” party on a fancy yacht, but alas, he turned out to be a pig with a capital
P
. I had had a few run-ins with power-mad, horny would-be movie moguls, but this one took the fucking cake. He took me to an intimate dinner with one of his once-upon-a-time-star pals, had professional shots done for me by an old-timey photog who raved about my presence in front of the camera and sat with me for hours promising to make me famous. My already weak self-esteem had been flattened by the nobody slob acting coach, so my naive and humbled ego was assuaged by these flattering tidbits.
    One lovely afternoon the actor and I were brainstorming about