Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (20 page)

Another ladyfriend stopped combing and teasing.
"Yeah, I remember that guy. Looked a lot like Elvis
before
his final downslide. You know, pretty damn good,
really, considering all the pharmaceuticals he was downing. That guy was
so particular about every detail, more
like a fan than an actor."

“Yeah.
There was something . . . ritual about him. Had
to have the music played just right. Real nervous before
he went
on—"

“Just
like Elvis was."

“Hell,
we're all nervous!"

“
Anyway, he was something. I never seen anybody so
into
Elvis. Like it was his . . . career, or something."

“
Grim, yeah. Offstage anyway. Like his life
depended
on it."

“
But he's not registered for this
competition," a
cheeky chipmunk Elvis put in optimistically.

This Eerie Elvis guy was sounding, even to Matt, like
the ghostly gunfighter riding into town at the last moment
and blowing everyone else away: Lee Van Cleef
at his most smoothly sinister. Part hero, part villain.
Not
much different from Elvis, really.

“
Maybe it was charisma," a hairdressing wife
said
dreamily. "Elvis had it by
the bushel. Some people have
that air about them.”

The guys were quick to dismiss the mystical approach,
just as Elvis's Memphis Mafia had loathed his explora
tions of Eastern mysticism with L.A. hairdresser Larry
Geller.

“Nah,
this Kyle-whoever was just damn good at being Elvis."

“
But he's not registered for the competition,"
Chip
munk Elvis repeated.

“
No. He dropped out of sight a couple of years ago.
Fast.”

Elvises
nodded in mirrored multiples.

“
Like something had caught up with him,"
Distant
Elvis said slowly.

“Maybe
the Memphis Mafia," one joked.

“
Yeah, John," Chipmunk Elvis goaded Distant
Elvis
with an air of long practice.
"The Memphis Mafia is on
the
loose and taking out bad actors. We better watch
out."

“
What do you think of those guys?" Matt asked.
More
shrugs. "The Memphis Mafia? They were okay.

Too many relatives riding on Elvis, though. And the Ma
fia boys, they added a lot of pressure to his life for
all
they took care of things for him."

“
Squabbling like jealous two-year-olds," a
significant
other added, shaking her
sheenless strawberry-blond
fright
wig. "Boys will be boys, and Elvis's entourage
sure proved it. From that standpoint, I don't
blame Pris
cilla one little bit for
trying to get the guy to settle down
into a normal domestic life."

“Tame
the King? No way!”

Matt could see that these adult men weren't much
different from the employee-pals who became known as
the
Memphis Mafia. They were lost boys too, trying to
preserve a Never-Never Land of adolescence that was a
far cry
from what it should have been. They needed their
Peter Pan, even if it took fistfuls of amphetamines to
keep him flying. No matter that he'd crashed and
burned
and died alone in a Graceland
bathroom over twenty
years ago, he still wasn't allowed to stop.

The
King is dead, long live the Kings.

Temple must have felt some of the frustration he did
when
confronting the self-destructive lifestyle and in
destructible legend of Elvis Aaron Presley. "Thanks,"
she said, ending the mass interview. "You were
very
helpful. Good luck to you all during the competition."

“Hey!
Are we gonna be on ... whatever show?"

“We'll
be back," Temple promised with a jaunty, noncommittal wave.

So
they all turned back to the mirrors and the job of becoming the best damn Elvis
they could be.

Temple
was quiet until they were opposite Quincey's
dressing
room again, and had no chance of being over
heard.

“
KOK. This Kyle Purvis guy sounds like one hell
of an impersonator." Temple eyed Matt
soberly, then
wiggled her eyebrows for comic relief.

“
It's hard to tell how good these guys would be on
stage.
The one who talked about Priscilla's reasons for
leaving Elvis, he struck me as having the natural equip
ment,
maybe the temperament for the role."

“Seemed
kind of low-key for the King of Rock 'N' Roll."

“
Okay. Let me have it," Matt said with
resignation.
"You think he is Elvis."

“I
think somebody wants somebody to think Elvis is walking these halls. It could
be this Kyle Purvis."

“
Kyle Purvis. King of Kings," Matt scoffed.
"Some
how, I don't think so.”

Chapter 19

You Ain't a Hound Dog

(Sales of the Elvis version of "You Ain't
Nothin'
But a Hound Dog" exceeded six million
copies in 1956 alone)

Every time I turn around in this Kingdome joint, I hear
someone
say that they owe it to Elvis.

I
have never heard of a dead dude before with so many IOUs still out.

I owe nothing to no one, but that is the advantage in
being nothing but an alley cat. Nobody expects anything
of
me, so I have an unlimited range of astonishment.

Right now I am determined to get into someplace
where
I should not go.

My only hope is the Marie-Antoinette hairdo on this
little
doll Quincey. If it is sufficiently cumbersome, she will
be so occupied in getting it safely through the
open door
that she will not notice me flattened against the floor and
wall next to the door. Like Elvis in his latter
years, I do
not flatten as well as I used to.

But
these thoroughly modern misses have no idea how cumbersome big hair is, and I
am counting on this as my
advantage, since I
have watched the Divine Ashleigh sis
ters
try to sashay their Persian fluff through various ap
ertures. They cannot pay too much attention to the
surroundings.

I must wait a long time before the door opens again,
during
which time I hear the distant strains of "Suspicious
Minds" being hummed by an awful lot of guys
with no ear
for music. At last I hear
something from within the mys
terious
room. It is little Miss Quincey intoning, "Bye-bye,
baby. Be good
now.”

And then she is backing out of the doorway, bent over
with
the weight of her vertical coiffure.

I slither inside on my belly like a snake, or like Little
Egypt shedding her veils when performing,
wondering if
I have solved all
the mysteries rolled into one: Elvis is
alive
and well in a storage room in the Kingdome.

The
door snaps shut behind me, and my strategy to use my dark coloration as
camouflage has never been so suc
cessful. I
am in the utter dark, invisible to all, including my
self. I cannot so
much as see my tail in front of my face, not that I should ever want to do any
such thing.

Tails belong in the rear, where one cannot trip over
them.

Now
who can Miss Quincey have left in the utter dark, locked up, and still call
"baby"?
A ghost comes to mind. I do
not believe that normal
physical
deprivations, such as light and companionship, would harm a ghost. Still, even
a ghost is no one unless
he or she is
seen in the right places, and it would seem cruel to condemn a spirit, no
matter how restless and in
need of containment, in dark isolation.

On the other hand, Elvis had Dracula tendencies: stay
ing up all night and going to bed at dawn; tinfoiled bed
room windows, whether at home or on the roam, to keep
the light out; luring young, beautiful girls to his
bedroom,
where he engaged in much of what humans
call "neck-
ing," no
doubt resulting in what humans call "hickeys" and what vampires call
faucets.

This would certainly explain the "Elvis is not
dead" no
tion. If he really
were a vampire, all he would need is
some
native earth—in his case, Mississippi mud—and a
nice
hidden, dark location in which to stash a coffin. His
documented midnight visits to Memphis mortuaries cer
tainly lend credence to the vampire theory. If
only I could
go on talk shows without
a mouthpiece! But since I do
not
deign to speak to humans, my media career will have
to be confined to
cat food commercials.

So I crouch just inside the door, envisioning rooting out
a
six-foot vampire with a depilatory problem.

Faint heart never won a fair fight. I guess I can go fang
to fang with anything living or undead. I silently pad
deeper
into the dark. The floor is concrete, as it is in all
backstage dressing room areas. It is also cold on the toot
sies. In fact, it is cold and it is damp, which
lends weight
to my theory that Elvis is a vamp.

I hear a sudden machine-gun burst and flatten to the
floor.
Elvis kept those on hand, too.

Odd,
though, no fire flashes have lit the dark.

My heart is pounding against the cold concrete to
which it is pressed. In the restored silence, I can hear
every beat, but little else. Another raucous outburst shat
ters
the silence. I had hoped a vampire would stick to the gentlemanly and Old World
weapons of fang and nail.

In an odd way, the sound effects resemble the chat
tering of an extremely noisy and noisome bird. Of course,
this bird would have to be the size of a private jet to make
such
a racket. . . .

This is when I first seriously begin to get nervous about
my
situation. We all know that it is eat or be eaten in this
predatory world. And there is nothing that so
upsets an
ace predator than the notion
that there is a variety of
one's usual
prey that is big enough and hungry enough
to turn the tables on the natural
order.

Let us just say that I would not like to meet up with the
likes of a bald eagle without the intervention
of an avarian
enclosure at the zoo.

Scrabbling
sounds echo off the empty walls. Now,
scrabbling
sounds are an interesting phenomenon. It im
plies something animal (or at least avarian) rather than
vegetable or mineral. It implies some rudimentary
intelli
gence, but nothing human. The scrabble could be as small as a
mouse, or as big as a housecat, or an elephant, I suppose.

So what scrabbles in the dark and also carries a ma
chine
gun?
Although
smell is not one of my primo senses, I put my nose into action. I sniff things
that I do not consider eating
material but humans do: fruits. Large birds will snack on
certain
fruits, I believe.

My blood chills. I hope the fellow inhabitants of this
room are not parrots. They are not likely to eat me, but
they can have
nasty tempers and their beaks can do a
lot of damage. But Quincey said "Bye-bye,
Baby," not
"Bye-bye,
Birdie." And—by the way—was that not the title
of
the Broadway musical satirizing Elvis?
I keep coming back to Elvis. Maybe Elvis just keeps
coming
back to me. Who could blame him?
I cannot stand it. Ghosts are made to be banished. I
am tired of having this specter hanging over my head,
which it very well may be. I return to the door, guided
by
the hairline of
light underlining it. Then I veer right and
leap straight up, and repeat the maneuver, batting out a
mitt on my
descents. I am not fumbling for a doorknob in
the dark, though I might be able to turn it if I got the
right
spin
on my pinkies. I am going for a simpler feat, but the
object of my gymnastics is like looking for a needle in
a haystack, or a button in a Burlington Coat Factory. Or a
single
stud on an Elvis jumpsuit.