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Hazel Brock still packs the same tired luggage, its seams frayed and zipper stuck after years of chasing a rock star dead two decades but never really gone.

Never gone. Not as long as Hazel and her only daughter Rodonna are able, Lord willing, to make the trip from their northeast Alabama home to this suburb of Birmingham, spend a couple of nights as guests in the room upstairs and depart one morning for Graceland.

“A true Elvis fan will go a long ways,” Hazel says, sitting on a couch near the bust of Elvis crafted into a table lamp in the home of her friend, Elisabeth Cronin Russell. Hazel is fairly surrounded by the King in Elisabeth’s living room.

There are Elvis wall clocks that don’t keep time and never have. There are Elvis candles that don’t burn and never will. There are campy Elvis music boxes that don’t play music. There are Elvis statues on every flat surface not occupied by a candle or a music box or some other earthly embodiment of Elvis. Some of the statues favor Elvis; some don’t.

No matter. In the morning, Hazel, Rodonna and Elisabeth will leave Alabama as they have so many times before to make the pilgrimage to Memphis.

They will join thousands of other devotees coming for the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.

Hazel and Rodonna and Elisabeth will rent the same room at the same hotel. They will ride in the same van. They will stop again in Tupelo to peruse the same souvenirs at Elvis’s birthplace. They will listen to the same cassette tapes and tell the same stories that, like an original recording of Love Me Tender, never get old.

In the morning, the same scene that has played itself out since the summer of 1979 will play itself out again.

Sitting on the couch next to the Elvis lamp, Hazel flexes an arm. Arthritis, she says. She is 78. The humidity bothers her joints. She longs for her younger years, when she and Rodonna chased Elvis all over the South in a Greyhound bus.

“In fact, one time, we sold every one of our country music records to get money to go to Memphis to see Elvis. That’s how much we loved him. We quit goin’ to the beauty shop, gettin’ our hair fixed. We quit drinkin’ Cokes. We done everything but quit eatin’ to save up money to go see Elvis. That’s how we loved him. To be a true Elvis fan, I don’t know if anybody could do any more than me and Rodonna’s done.”

A noise comes from the kitchen. It’s Elisabeth.

She put these clocks on the wall. She collected these candles. She bought the music boxes and the statues and the lamp.

If anyone has loved and lionized Elvis Aron Presley, she has.

Kin(g)dred spirits

They met the January after Elvis died.

Elisabeth, Hazel and Rodonna found each other at Graceland, where they and countless others had gathered to observe the singer’s first after-death birthday celebration. Elisabeth told her new friends she was from Alabama. What a coincidence, Hazel and Rodonna said. They were too.

They found that they had much more in common. All three worshiped Elvis in life and in death. They had seen at least 27 concerts in 16 different venues. They had been coming to Graceland for a very long time, trading hours of patient sentry at the gate for one glimpse of the smile that made them melt. Elisabeth first came in 1971. Hazel and Rodonna made their first trip in 1959.

All three had met the man.

That sealed it.

That summer, in 1979, they piled in Elisabeth’s pink Thunderbird coupe and roared to Memphis for their inaugural Death Week trek.

Elisabeth, now 49, invited Hazel and her daughter to spend the week in Room 101 of the Day’s Inn on Brooks Road, the same room Elisabeth rented five hours after news of Elvis’s death was broadcast over the radio in the grocery store in Birmingham, and Elisabeth, a meat cutter there, dropped her knife and raced to Memphis.

She stayed three days. She attended the funeral. She saw the body. It broke her heart.

“It’s been 20 years since the day Elvis passed away and left us,” Elisabeth says now, the night before the pilgrimage she’ll make with Hazel and Rodonna.

Outside, her van is loaded. An airbrushed Elvis smiles on the spare-tire cover. His picture dangles from the rearview.

Her bags are packed. Elisabeth has 10 cameras, a hot plate, a dozen dresses and that rhinestone pin she wears every day, the one that spells ELVIS so brightly it could freeze a deer if the light hit it right. In her wallet are the 21 photographs of Elvis she carries always.

She has the boxes her husband, Louis, bought at the flea market. In them are 24 glass balls filled with water and glitter, mounted on a cheap plastic stand and packed in foam. A tiny Elvis is inside each ornament. Elisabeth looks at them longingly. She keeps a couple for herself. The others she will sell.

Her mind is drifting. This will be her 20th August in Room 101, which she has occupied twice a year since Aug. 16, 1977, when her hero collapsed in the bathroom at Graceland.

“How sad it was.”

A memory-filled trip

Friday morning.

Five hours to Graceland.

The pilgrimage commences as Elisabeth climbs into the front seat, kisses her husband, nuzzles her dog and points the van west.

A widow, Hazel and Rodonna Brock Locklear, the 48-year-old divorced daughter she lives with in a house between two mountains in Fort Payne, Ala., settle in for the 235-mile drive to Memphis. They’ve stocked up on junk food and trashy magazines, fetched sequined dresses from the dry cleaners and packed enough Aqua Net to hold a lion’s mane in place.

The women budget about $300 each for the 10-day stay each August. They spend it all.

They chatter endlessly on the road. They go through six Elvis cassettes and barrel 70 miles an hour through rain on U.S. 78.

When Elisabeth met Hazel and Rodonna that January in 1979, she knew she’d met friends for life.

Hazel and Rodonna live in the hills of Fort Payne, the boyhood home of the country music group Alabama. There are so many textile mills the area is known as the sock capital of the country. Elisabeth drives the 100 miles from Birmingham to Fort Payne to pick them up, and she will take them home after they leave Memphis on Aug. 18.

Hazel tells Elisabeth about the days she spent at Graceland with Elvis and his kin. She reveals photographs. Elvis on a horse. Elvis with his father. Elvis with his uncle. Elvis at Libertyland. Elvis on stage. Elvis on a go-cart. Elvis with Hazel’s daughter, Rodonna.

The snapshot was made in Memphis in 1964 when Rodonna was a waif of a teen. Rodonna went to see a movie at a theater. Elvis motioned her over. He touched her narrow shoulders. The flashbulb popped. Rodonna can still see it today. She can still feel his hands.

Elisabeth’s tales are different. She can fill hours describing her collection of Elvis this, Elvis that and Elvis the other.

She has Elvis underwear and Elvis outerwear. Velvet paintings hang on walls.

An extra bedroom is papered with Elvis’s face. In the room is a solid white couch. “Elvis had a solid white couch, so I had to have one too,” Elisabeth explains. A shower stall goes unused, stacked to the ceiling with Elvis puzzles. “Elvis towels. T-shirts. Elvis Christmas ornaments. Elvis Christmas bags. Elvis calendars. Oh, Lord.”

A shed outside is filled completely with books, magazines and newspaper clippings.

She has a dog named Priscilla.

She had one named Elvis, but it died.

They arrive at Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo at 4:30 p.m. and rush the door of the gift shop, prepared to spend.

Elisabeth relieves the gift shop of three new decals, which she plans to put on the hood of her van.

Rodonna buys a scarf. Elvis’s bearded face is on it.

All three pilgrims get stamped with the following words: Elvis Presley birthplace Tupelo Mississippi.

Rodonna and Elisabeth get stamped on their wrists. They blow on the ink to dry it before they leave.

Hazel gets stamped on her forehead.

A world of our own

“Look.” Elisabeth points through the drizzle at the street banners on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis. Elvis 20, the banners read. Still rockin’.

“Still rockin’,” Elisabeth says, and her thoughts turn to how she might take one home.

As thousands upon thousands of pilgrims will this week, Elisabeth and her two companions arrive in Memphis to the sights and sounds that are so familiar it seems as if they are not away from home but actually are home. What is it? What charm does one man exact on the pilgrims who flock twice a year to Graceland like the swallows to Capistrano? How does one rock and roll singer born in a two-room shotgun in Tupelo make three women from Alabama fret over the price of paper towels at the Wal-Mart the night before they leave but think nothing of forfeiting $300 for a never-before-seen videotape of Elvis Presley?

Elisabeth fell to it the night she saw Love Me Tender at an Atlanta drive-in. She has not been the same since.

“Now I love Jesus Christ first,” Elisabeth says. “Then my family second.” The King comes next.

“Elvis is like a friend, a brother.”

Then Hazel says: “We had some great times with that man.”

The van passes Graceland. The pilgrims from Alabama fidget. Rodonna’s small voice says “There it is.”

Elisabeth opens the door to Room 101 at the Day’s Inn. She has never missed a January or August here. Hers is the bed by the window. She rumples the sheets.

“Welcome,” she says girlishly, opening her arms wide, “to my world.”

To reach reporter Kevin Robbins, call 529-2388, or E-mail robbins@gomemphis.com