Elvis Walked Into a Memphis Guitar Shop in 1974 and Bought One for a Homeless Stranger

In August nineteen seventy-four, a man named Curtis Boatwright stood inside a Memphis guitar shop the way he had stood there for three weeks — without money, without a working guitar of his own, simply close enough to the instruments to feel less far from the life he had lost. Elvis Presley walked in for a guitar pick and found a man playing a borrowed instrument with his back to the door. He told him not to stop. By the end of the visit, Curtis had a guitar of his own, a repair arranged for the one his father had given him, and a sentence he repeated for the rest of his life: before he asked anything else, he made sure I knew I belonged exactly where I was standing.