My Conversations with the King

It is the spring of 1977 and Elvis Presley is dying. But he does not want to die. He just wants the pain to go away. To whom can he reach out to? Not his fiancée. Not his Memphis Mafia. Certainly not to Colonel Tom Parker, his manager.

Why this pain? How is it that he can explain it to no one? Who can actually help him?

He turns to his Rabbi for help!

Elvis Presley is desperate to leave show business and just be a normal person. Unfortunately for him, he is an immense star and cannot just disappear into the ether of society. But what if he could? Better yet, what if he actualizes it and lives to be an old man?

"Conversations with the King" (approximately 77,000 words), my second novel, tells the story of an unhappy Elvis who with the help of a Rabbi from his childhood, disappears into a world so ordinary that he is never found. That is, up until a chance encounter with his next-door neighbor who is a journalist. This neighbor, Stanley, figures out that he is living next to the long presumed dead Elvis Presley. This is the scoop of a lifetime. But not quite yet!

In exchange for his silence, Elvis agrees to tell Stanley the whole story of how he did not "die", to be told only after his death. In this process a great friendship evolves. So starts a long series of conversations between the two. These talks reveal the secrets of why Elvis ran away, how he did it and how he maintained his privacy in plain sight all these years.