Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (17 page)

Although
the "Fat and Forty" Elvis of the tabloids had
only
had a short run at the very end of the performer's
career, this
version of Elvis was present everywhere in
the dressing room. Where else could
broad-bellied,
middle-aged
Everymen find a role model who had re
mained
beloved and sexy to legions of female fans to
the bitter end?
Seeing these out-of-shape Elvises reflected in the
fac
ing mirrors and each other made
Matt understand one
reason for the
entertainer's life after death: such imper
fections and failings had only further endeared him to
his fans. Reading of Elvis's Messiahlike appeal had
puz
zled Matt until today. Here, the
degraded Elvis image
was embraced as enthusiastically as the idealistic
one of
endless youth and fitness and energy,
most of it running
on amphetamines.

Christianity had been the world's first religion to
worship a God with a vulnerable face: one facet of the Trin
ity was divinity made flesh. In a sense, like a shaman
who takes upon himself both powers beyond ordinary
humans and failings even greater than ordinary humans
face, Elvis had become larger than his life. And Matt,
from his reading, guessed that he knew it, which ex
plained his thirst for spiritual enlightenment, even his
grandiose belief that he could inspire young people to
avoid street drugs when he himself gobbled prescribed
drugs at a rate that stunned medical experts after his
death.

“
Awesome, isn't it?" Temple commented under
her
breath. "The essence of Las
Vegas. Or old Las Vegas,
anyway,
before the Bellagio and the Beluga came along
to turn this old town into
a literal cultural oasis."

“The
Beluga?"

“My
nickname for the new Belladonna hotel-casino.
Though
it could describe some of these guys in jump
suits."

“
That's what's so interesting. Elvis was slim for
most
of his career, but because
middle-aged guys emulate
him, he's
like a fly trapped in amber or a tabloid pho
tograph: immortalized at his
least flattering moment."

“Maybe
that was his most average moment.”

Matt nodded. "He'd
always had a prodigious appetite.

He was almost hyperactive.
That's how the performance moves started. His left
leg
was always
jiggling off excess
energy even in high
school, and onstage it kept time to
the
music and started the whole pelvis thing when the
girls began screaming. He could tuck away enormous
amounts of fatty fried food that would send any heart
surgeon into cardiac arrest just to hear about it.
When
he got past forty, he was too
used to conspicuous con
sumption to
stop. I think his high metabolism also al
lowed him to tolerate large doses of drugs. But in a way,
fat killed him. The first evidence I can find of
him taking
any kind of prescription
drug was his mother's diet pills; she wanted to lose weight when his career
began to take
off, and she didn't like her appearance in
photographs."

“
What kind of diet
drugs?" Temple asked. "Like fen/
phen?"

“
No, no.
Amphetamines. Speed. Doctors handed them
out to everyone in
the fifties and sixties before anyone
knew much about the physiology and psychology of
addiction. Then when Elvis was drafted into the army, he
was given Dexedrine to
stay awake on night guard
duty—"

“And
uppers and downers when he started working in Hollywood, I bet. I have heard
about that.”

Matt nodded. "I can even sympathize now that I'm on
a
night 'performance' schedule. It's a lot harder to un-
wind at two
A.M.
after
the Midnight Hour live, than after
anonymous
private counseling sessions at ConTact."
"So what do you do to
relax?”

Matt laughed uneasily. "Lately? Like last night? Stay
up until five
A.M.
reading Elvis books."

“You
know, this is the first time I've ever found Elvis interesting. Who'd think
stuff like a nervous tic and a
few of your
mother's borrowed diet pills could both
make you and break you?"

“
Yeah. As I read this stuff,
I keep wondering, when
did it go wrong? What, or who, could have saved him?
If anyone
could have."

“
And if they had,"
Temple added with a sweeping
gesture, "would
we still have had all this?"

“I
don't know. I don't even know which one of these guys, if any, might be my
Midnight caller."

“The
only way to find out is to look, listen, and ask a lot of nosy questions. I'll
play PR frontwoman. Follow me.”

Matt
wouldn't have known who to approach. Face it;
he
wouldn't have approached any of these intent men
busy being born-again
in the image of a dead superstar.

But
Temple just kicked her snappy heels into high gear and clicked over to a
neighboring pair of white-
suited
Elvises who were exchanging a small tube of glue.

On the
concrete floor, the heels' approach was as ar
resting as the sharp stutter of
castanets. Temple's pred-
ilection for politically incorrect footwear was a
subtle
way of knocking on people's doors as she approached them. Then
they saw her red hair and were as good as
snagged
by her elfin charm.

Like
all small creatures, she couldn't afford to be in-
visible.

“Hi,
fellahs. Lookin' good. Have you a moment to
answer
some questions? I've got a radio guy here."
Elvi turned their heads in matched-Doberman tandem
to eye Matt as
if he were raw meat.

“Live?"
one asked.

“No,
these are just preliminary questions about the competition, about playing
Elvis, about the King." Matt gave Temple an A-plus for avoiding the phrase

“
Elvis imitator." Exactly what they called
themselves, or
were called, was a sore point with many semi-pro Elvis clones.

Matt
decided the ball was in his court.

“So.
How long have you two been Elvis impersona-
tors?" he began.

Like
twins, they answered for each other.

“Jerry's
been honing his act for three years," said one

“Mike's
been in the biz for at least two."

“
What's involved?" Matt asked, pulling over an
empty
chair.

Mike and Jerry exchanged glances. They were class
A
exhibits of what Matt saw was the most common Elvis imitator model: short,
stocky urban guys with big dreams.

It
wasn't that they looked like Elvis very much to start
with; it was that they wanted to. He'd guess that they
could sing a little, but not enough to forge an
indepen
dent performing persona. They needed Elvis for instant
identity, as much as he needed them to carry on
his
entertaining legend.

“
What's involved? A lot," Mike said. This
close, you
could see the sand-blasted
surface of the cheeks not hid
den by
the sideburns. Acne scars, but nothing severe
enough to be visible from stage. "First we gotta get our
act
together. Get the right songs for our voices, get the
props and costumes, get in touch with the Elvis imper
sonator
network—"

“Get
the noive," Jerry added, giving a belly laugh that
shook his broad Elvis belt like a rhinestone surfboard hit
by a
big-mama wave.

Mike wore glasses. Not sunglasses, but real glasses.
Elvis
looked weird with see-through lenses on his face.

“I,
urn, ditch these for the show," Mike said, suddenly self-conscious.

“I'm
sorry," Matt said. "Didn't mean to stare. I'm just studying
everything. I'm new to all this.”

Mike stripped off his modern-day frames. "Yeah,
well,
we're used to people thinking we're nuts. We don't
start out anything like Elvis, most of us. That's the chal
lenge."

“
You mean, the greater stretch the impersonation is,
the more accomplishment?"

“Something
like
that,"
Mike
agreed.

Jerry leaned forward, intent. He had a TV sitcom Jer
sey
accent, and fire in his eye.

“
The thing is, you gotta love
the King, or you got no
business even trying to do this. You gotta respect the
man."

“
A lot of people don't," Matt pointed out.
"Didn't
they really put him down
at the beginning of his career?
Call
him a white-trash, no-talent hick who had nothing
to offer but dirty
dancing?"

“
Yeah.”

Mike was getting pugnacious, twirling his nerdish
glasses
by one earpiece. He'd be a good on-air interview, Matt was horrified to find
himself thinking. Was Temple right? Was he being corrupted by his new media
role?

“
Yeah. They said all that at the beginning, and it
was
better than what they said at the
end, that he was a
drugged-out,
used-up fat fool who threw his life away.
It's just kinda funny that in between all that bad press the
guy reinvented pop music in this country—in the world!
He put it all together and brought it
on home: rhythm
and blues, gospel,
country, pop. Man, the Beatles, that
Dylan
guy, they all were big cheeses after Elvis, and
they all said they owed
him a lot."

“
Yeah," Jerry added. "Elvis grew up poor,
but those
church folk in the South,
they knew how to sing. He
heard it at
church, he heard it in the bars on Beale Street,
on the black radio. No one had put it all together like
he did. It was never the same after Elvis. He's
the King
of Rock 'n' Roll.”

The present tense was not lost on Matt. Elvis lives:
an eerie anagram of the performer's name that even he
had
noticed. And now it had come true.

“
Are there any black Elvises?" Matt asked.
From the
corner of his eye, he glimpsed Temple making a startled
motion after sitting statue-still and letting him
conduct
the interview.

He had been thinking of the black churches he had
used to drop in on, and the glorious use of music in the
liturgy, the most inspired blending of music and worship
since
the Middle Ages, he would bet.

But
Jerry and Mike were bristling.

“
We ain't prejudiced," Mike said. "It's
just that Elvis
mostly isn't a black
thing. They got their Johnny Mathis
and
the old blues guys and gals. They were great, don't
get me wrong. But
Elvis just isn't a black thing."

“
But," Matt mentally riffled through his
previous
night's reading, "wasn't
Elvis accused later of ripping
off
the black musicians? And didn't he dress black in
high school? He was hanging around Lansky's on
Beale
Street, which outfitted black
guys and musicians. He was
put down for it then."

“
Yeah, yeah. That stuff was there. That's why he
was
a friggin' genius. But ... what
can I say? We don't get many black Elvises. We don't keep 'em out. They just
don't
show up."