They say Saturday night in Highlandtown isn't what it used to be, but here at Teamsters Local 557 on Erdman Avenue, they're not exactly sitting in a semi-circle and saying the rosary, either.

Inside the cavernous union hall, ringed with American flags and solidarity slogans on the walls, some 500 people are picking crabs and drinking beer and dancing the Electric Slide. Obviously this party for Steelworkers at the Polyseal Corp. and ,, their families is off the beaten path of the Health Gestapo -- great clouds of cigarette smoke hang everywhere.

Suddenly, the DJ on stage, who calls himself the Wicked Pick, makes an announcement, which you can't really hear because an old guy with thinning, slicked-back hair is nudging you hard in the ribs and shouting over the music: "I was 20 years younger, ain't a broad in this place'd be safe."

Seconds later the lights dim, a thick cloud of smoke appears in the center of the stage and . . . good God Almighty, it's Elvis! Elvis in full '70s Vegas mode. Elvis when he hung out with Wayne Newton and spent his spare time speed-dialing every Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet within 50 miles of Graceland.

Actually, this Elvis doesn't have the gut, but he's got everything else: the dark shades, the lacquered hair and long sideburns, the blue jumpsuit with white trim and blue sequins, the thick blue belt, the white boots.

L "Ladies and gentlemen," intones the Wicked Pick, "Frank El!"

And right on cue, Frank El, aka Frank Wagner, 37, of Dundalk windmills one arm, gyrates his hips and launches into "The Wonder of You." Which is when it occurs to you that Frank El sounds more like The King than The King did.

You could say a hush falls over the crowd as Frank El performs, but if you said that, you'd be lying.

A folding chair crashes to the floor, then another and another. A roulette wheel clatters noisily somewhere in back. Then this one old girl (she's been hitting the Budweiser pretty good, you can tell) starts twirling alone in front of the stage.

Her friend, or maybe it's her daughter -- this is no time to rush up there with a pen and note pad and ask: "Say, is that your mom?" -- tries to guide her back to her seat.

But the old girl, she just pushes the other woman away and continues twirling lazily with this beatific, Stepford Wives smile on her face.

This is what Frank El has to work with. It's not exactly Carnegie Hall, is the point here.

But Frank El appears not to notice, moving briskly into "You Gave Me a Mountain" and "Burning Love." Pretty soon there are cries of "Do it, Elvis!" from the audience and people standing and holding up -- you talk about a Kodak Moment -- flaming Bic lighters.

By the time he takes the cordless mike and wanders into the crowd to sing "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck," there are 30 women encircling him, pawing at him, giggling, pleading for one of the dozen or so blue scarves that his light man, Sonny Mugrage, keeps handing him.

The scarf routine

Frank El and Sonny, they have this routine all worked out. To ratchet the intensity up a few notches, Sonny trails behind Frank El with an armful of scarves that have been sprayed with Elvis Cologne ("A fresh, contemporary, masculine blend of woods, herbs and amber!" according to the marketing literature.)

As he sings, Frank El takes a scarf from Sonny and wipes the perspiration from his face. Then he drapes the scarf lovingly around the neck of the nearest giggling woman, who lights up as if he just handed her the keys to a Ferrari.

Now who knows, maybe these women take these sweaty scarves home and end up using them to change the oil in their cars. But right now, it looks like the scarves are headed for a trophy case.

"God, you smell fantastic!" a woman says to Frank El.

"Please come home with me tonight, Elvis!" says another.

"You look at these women," Sonny says later, "they got tears running out of their eyes. It's unbelievable."

Yeah, that's a good word for it, unbelievable. The women move with him in a tight knot as Frank El riffs through a few more songs ("Return to Sender," "My Way," "Suspicious Minds" and an Elvis medley) and closes out the set with a sultry version of "Can't Help Falling In Love With You."

"You've been with The King!" the Wicked Pick shouts.

"Thank yew! Thank yew very much," says Frank El. And just like that, The King is gone.

Maybe he's even left the building.

And if you close your eyes and listen to the waves of applause and shouts of "Elvis! Elvis!" you can almost imagine it's a Vegas ballroom, circa 1977, with women in beehive hairdos and guys in lime-green leisure suits screaming for an encore.

Except then someone's leaning over you and dumping a tray of medium crabs on the table and a woman is saying: " 'Nother beer, hon?" and you remember it's Highlandtown.

Which, on this Saturday night, with The King working the room, is not a bad place to be.

*

Who knows how to explain America's enduring fascination with Elvis Aaron Presley?

In Memphis, Tenn., two weeks ago, 40,000 people showed up to mark the 17th anniversary of his death. They held candles all night outside Graceland and many of them wept as if it were a family member who had just dropped dead in the kitchen that morning.

Some traveled to The King's boyhood home in Tupelo, Miss., and visited his junior high school and asked silly questions ("I heard he had real bad headaches as a child") of the locals, who rolled their eyes when the tour buses left as they had a thousand times before.

We'll leave it to the pop psychologists and cultural cryptographers to grapple with the Elvis Mystique and all its weighty ramifications.

This is merely the story of one man's devotion to an entertainment legend who went and ruined it all by dying before his time. It's the story of an Average Joe who experienced a midlife epiphany of sorts and became a figure alternately celebrated and reviled in post-modern America: the Elvis impersonator.

Family man

Maybe what strikes you most about Frank Wagner is how utterly unremarkable he is. He's been married 19 years to the same woman, Judy Wagner. He has three kids. He works as a production manager at Clendenin Bros. Inc., which manufactures nails and rivets.

Yet something fairly remarkable happened to Frank Wagner at age 19. That was the year someone at Graceland stumbled on Elvis' body, bloated and ravaged by pills, on the floor of a bathroom. It was the sort of tragedy that all but guaranteed Elvis immortality as a cultural icon.

The King was dead. And a young man in Dundalk promptly became one of his biggest fans.

"Why?" Frank Wagner repeats the question. "That's the strangest part -- I can't answer that. I had listened to his songs when I was a kid, but that's about it. Then he died and I remember crying. And I couldn't understand that, either, because I wasn't really a big Elvis fan.

"I just knew I'd miss him. You could see the charisma he had. His voice was incredible. He could sing a song about a tuna fish and people would listen."

At 16, Frank and Judy had slow-danced to "Can't Help Falling In Love With You" in front of a half-dozen people in the living room of Judy's mom's house. Frank had embarrassed Judy by singing the darn song, too. According to witnesses, it sounded more or less like The King in need of a testosterone booster, if you want to know the truth.

But now he became consumed with imitating the way Elvis sang, the tonal inflections, the way he moved, the hypnotic command he held over an audience. He wore his hair slicked back and his sideburns long, like The King. And for the next 15 years, imitating Elvis' stage presence became a harmless (and largely private) diversion.

Then, in 1991, there came one of those pivotal moments in a man's life. You know how these things go, or maybe you don't. Some men reach middle age and buy a candy-apple-red Porsche and take up with Bunny, their 22-year-old secretary with the va-va-voom body.

Frank Wagner entered an Elvis look-alike contest.

Actually, it was Judy who entered him in the contest, although she neglected to tell him about it until two days before the event, hoping he wouldn't become unglued.

So Frank promptly became unglued and then he went beyond unglued, into another realm of terror.

"I was scared to death," he recalls.

Nevertheless, on the day of the contest, Frank climbed into this black leather get-up and drove with Judy out to Eastpoint Mall. Which is when they discovered something that jacked up his blood pressure another 75 points: The Elvis look-alike contest had been changed to an Elvis sing-alike contest.

This would cause most people to begin hyperventilating and running around in small circles, in the manner of a crazed cocker spaniel, and it almost caused Frank Wagner to do the very same thing.

"It was the first time I ever sang in front of a real audience," he says now. "But I sang "The Wonder of You" and won it. There were about 500 people there. First prize was this $250 mall certificate."

Six months later, Frank Wagner befriended a DJ called the Wicked Pick. The Wicked Pick suggested that the two of them put together an Elvis show.

A seamstress friend made him a white jumpsuit with red trim decorated with sequins in the shape of eagles, which cost $400. He topped this off with a $200 belt made by the same man who made Elvis' belts, and the career of Frank El was officially launched.

Their first gig was at the UN Club in Highlandtown, which is not exactly the Copa, only it was the Copa as far as Frank Wagner was concerned. The place holds maybe 120 people for a show, but all 120 people are right in your face.

If you're going to bomb, the Eastpoint Mall is probably a better place to do it than the UN Club, which is what Frank El was thinking as he white-knuckled the steering wheel on the way to the club that evening.

"See, I never want the act to look bad," he says. "Whether people like Elvis or not, I never want The King to look bad. That's probably my biggest fear."Worse than terrible

So naturally, as soon as they introduced him and the lights went up, something terrible happened.

No, check that. This was beyond terrible. This was about the worst thing that can happen to a performer short of discovering that you've somehow managed to wander out on the stage nude from the waist down.

"The sound system went dead," Frank recalls. "It stayed dead for two or three minutes."

A man has two choices when something like this happens. He can either beat himself over the head with a Heineken bottle until he's unconscious, and therefore immune to further humiliation, or he can improvise.

Frank El decided to sing "Heartbreak Hotel" a cappella. He also decided to have the audience clap along, which, if you're holding a dead mike, is sort of like having people clap at your funeral:

Since my baby left me (clap, clap)

I found a new place to dwell (clap, clap)

Down at the end of Lonely Street

At Heartbreak Hotel.

Somehow it all worked out. The audience, fairly boozed-up at this point, it being 11 o'clock and all, got into it immediately. And by the time the sound system came back on, Frank El's confidence was restored and he finished the set on a fine, adrenalized high.

Frank El gives new meaning to the term laconic. But you ask him about that night at the UN and a soft smile crosses his face.

"That was a big moment," he says. "I felt I could do a little better than I did. But having no experience and not knowing how to deal with [an audience], I did all right."

From that point on, there was another dimension to Frank Wagner's life that he could never have envisioned that night long ago in Judy's mom's living room, singing Elvis tunes in a choir-boy's voice.

In the daytime now, he worked with nails and rivets.

Nights and weekends, he became The King.

*

Depending on your point of view, Elvis impersonators are either laudable artists in their own right or pathetic wretches trading on the memory of a once-talented but now extremely dead entertainer.

Either you see them as loyal disciples paying deserved tribute to a grand cultural icon, or as beefy guys in faded rhinestone jumpsuits who should get a life instead of chattering about upcoming gigs at the Holiday Inn in Jersey City.

But Frank Wagner stopped worrying long ago what people think of him and his act.

"Most people seem to like the act," he says softly. "But every once in a while I'll have kids come up to me and say: 'I think Elvis [stinks].' I just let it go. You might be doing something in your life that I don't like, but I'm not going to criticize you for it."

His biggest fan

What's important to Frank El is that Judy is his biggest fan, and that the kids, particularly Krystal, 17, don't walk around with paper bags over their heads because Daddy's an Elvis impersonator.

"I think I bore the kids with it now," Frank says. But Judy disagrees. "The kids love it!" she says. "Krystal walks around now saying: 'Hey, my dad does Elvis!' "

Frank even showed up at one of his kids' Sunday school show-and-tell sessions in full Elvis get-up, which of course brought the house down. You pity the poor kid's dad who was an accountant or something and had to follow that act.

On the face of it, maybe it sounds weird, a 37-year-old guy showing up at nightclubs, birthday parties, civic functions, malls, Little League openings, etc., dressed as Elvis.

But there's a purity of logic at work here, and to Frank Wagner it goes like this: If you loved the music as much as I do, maybe you'd understand.

"Every time I hear Elvis today, it sounds as good as it did when I was 16," he says. "It makes me feel like I'm 16 again. It always makes me feel good."

Then Frank tells you about the time two years ago, when he and Judy celebrated their anniversary at a joint called Jaspers in Annapolis.

As the story goes, Frank and Judy are on the dance floor and people are starting to notice this casually dressed guy with the Elvis hair and sideburns, gyrating his hips and shooting these kung-fu moves that The King used on stage in his later years.

So somebody goes and tells the DJ to play an Elvis song, even though this is not an Elvis kind of place, this is more contemporary, '80s and '90s music.

Suddenly "Jailhouse Rock" blares over the sound system and Frank El goes into his full Elvis mode, hips jutting out, hands twirling, the whole nine yards.

The effect is like Moses clearing the Red Sea; a path opens in the middle of the dance floor as people return wordlessly to their seats to watch this Elvis guy shake it out.

"That was wild!" Frank El is saying now to a visitor. "You know what it's like to clear a dance floor?"

The visitor says the only way he could clear a dance floor is by phoning in a bomb threat.

Frank El laughs softly, and then his eyes get this far-away look and he grows serious again.

"But that's what I mean," he says. "I get the same feeling from the music every time."