The Great Elvis Hoax

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ | Editor of The Avenger

BROWNSVILLE, Texas – Breathes there a man with soul so lost, someone famous once wrote, perhaps having met the city’s milquetoast blogger, Jim Barton. When he is not sitting for his next portrait of the quintessential couch potato, Barton surely is tending to his ailing wife or maybe he’s blogging the day’s diseased tripe. He’s at it again.

On his laundromat bulletin board of a blog, not to be confused with enterprise news, Barton lashes The Avenger with the biggest lie yet: The one about The Avenger being fired from The Brownsville Herald for “submitting” a fake story to do with some Elvis convention. It never happened. Not that way.

The Elvis Hoax Story came more than a decade after I’d left The Herald. It was the brainchild of my college friend Paul Infante, who died in 2015, and it came after a hoax about some “cigar-shaped spacecraft” seen over Houston. At the time, I was living in Fort Worth and Paul was selling dental supplies while living in Spring, just up the road from Houston.

The plot was concocted as one plots a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The “press release” was written about that Elvis gathering in Brownsville and Faxed to newspapers across South Texas. The Herald bought it, perhaps because it was to be the site of the convention, and the next thing we knew, it was Big. Paul had been listed as the contact, under the name of Paul Le’Infant. He did catch some flak, but never enough to make him stop laughing. We both pictured dusty, little Brownsville tugging at its lapels and say, “Hey, we made it to the Big Time!”

When The Herald looked into it, they called Paul, who then forwarded my telephone number to the reporter. The reporter called me and I told him he had the wrong number. A story was written about all this and published by The Herald. It quoted Bill Young, the spokesperson for the City of Brownsville, as saying he feared someone dashing down to see the Elvis impersonators dying on the highway in a weird crash. The paper also quoted some woman from Corpus Christi saying she and her galpals had made plans and wasn’t it cruel to do such a thing?

That’s the story. It can be easily verified by simply going to The Herald and asking for a copy of the article. Jim “El Pendejo” Barton would likely have to pay for it, so he may not do it.

But he should.

Lies are bad for you, Jimmy Boy…

 

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