Gladys, who loved him the most, as all good mothers love their children, would feed him grilled Hawaiian bread sandwich after sandwich of peanut butter with chopped caramelized bananas, or gently mashed fork bananas, sometimes with bacon, sometimes without.
He dreamed of peanut butter and Gladys would feed those dreams with Fool’s Gold loaves made each of one pound peanut butter, jelly and bacon lovingly folded, like Graceland, into two foot slices of Italian bread, cut by Gladys into pyramids so the crusty part would never hurt her Little King’s mouth.
He would go to bed with peanut butter on his breath, on the roof of his mouth, his tongue pressed to his palate so that the peanut butter would never dissolve. He would greet the dawn with peanut butter morning breath, peanut butter on his lips and peanut butter cloud swirls on his cheeks, peanut butter like ant trails on his satin pillow cases and King size sheets.
Gladys would be in the kitchen plopping a tablespoon of buttery peanut butter into a skillet before adding two eggs and Canadian bacon.
The peanut butter shaving cream Elvis used would still be on his neck and Gladys would kiss it off in vampire pecks that still made him squirm. She would curl his cow lick in place, as she kissed his forehead smelling the scent of the peanut butter pomade that gelled his beautiful pompadour. . And when she died, and he died, it was those peanut butter kisses he missed the most in his world.