Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (39 page)

“
Mine eyes dazzle,"
Temple muttered.

Elvis had died young, but he certainly hadn't stayed
that
way.

She
wandered among the many faces of Elvis. Most
of them didn't look
like they had started out resembling
Elvis. No, first had come the
admiration, then the imi
tation.

She
would bet that most of them hadn't done any
more performing
than at a local karaoke bar before don
ning sideburns and low-slung belts like glitzy holsters.

A slight
Asian man danced through the crowd, on his
way somewhere in a
hurry. Five-feet-three, lean as stir-
fried chicken, he caught the look of the young, mercurial
Elvis better than the heavyset Caucasian men who outnumbered him forty to one.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Temple spun
around,
ready to snarl.

“Electra!
What are you doing here?"

“I
got invited back," Electra said smugly, shaking her shoulders. "By
Today Elvis."

“Today
Elvis?"

“
You
must have seen him around. The only guy with
white hair, like
Elvis's father Vernon had before he died.
He's the same age Elvis would be today:
sixty-four. Poor
Elvis, he won't have to
wonder if we'll still need and
feed him at sixty-four. Anyway, Today
Elvis was pretty
impressed by my Elvis
collection. Course, you don't
know
with these guys if it's you or your sweat-stained
scarf, but I never
could resist a younger man."

“
Elvis would be sixty-four?"

“Don't
look so amazed. He's still pretty young. Clint Eastwood is pushing
seventy."

“
It's
just that I've been looking at the photo-bios and
you get to thinking
that's reality. So you have a, like,
date with Today Elvis?"

“
He invited me to watch the rehearsals."

“Really.
I should do that."

“
I'm sure you can hide behind my muumuu when I
present
my pass. If anyone spots you, I can say you're
my
twelve-year-old granddaughter. Just wear your hair
in pigtails."

“
And
ditch the high heels. I know, Granny. Did you
hear anything from
Today Elvis about the identity of the
dead man?"

“No one here has a clue.
They counted noses and they know it's not one of them, that's all."

“So when's the rehearsal?”

Electra
checked the hot-pink patent leather watch on
her chubby, freckled wrist.

“Is that an—?"

“
Elvis watch from the fifties. Yeah. My mother
screamed at me for a week for spending my money on
junk. I don't wanta tell you what it's
worth today. Even
you might mug me for it."

“
You've never worn it when I've been around be
fore."

“
I don't wear my souvenirs. But these guys appreciate
this stuff.
Makes me the queen of the hop again." Electra
primped her hair, which had been rinsed a tasteful
lavender. "The rehearsal is in twenty
minutes, and only
the media is
allowed in. Besides friends and family of
the performers, of course.
Which is we. Us?"

“
Whatever. I can't be grammatical without a pencil or
a keyboard in my hands. Let's duck into
Priscilla's
dressing room so I can
change into my tennies, and then
it's off to see the weird wolves,
Granny.”

Quincey was absent from the
room, so Temple did a shoe-change, and in forty seconds flat her feet were
level instead of inclined.

“
You do look awfully young," Electra commented,
"without
those high heels."

“Don't even need pigtails,
huh?"

“
A bow on one side of your head would help."
"Argh! I
don't do bows.”

On that
declaration of independence, they left the
dressing room and
climbed the backstage stairs.
At
the top stood a man in black, legs spread, hands clasped in front, poker face
shaded by a snap-brim early-sixties fedora.

“You okayed for the
rehearsal area?" he asked.
Electra
flashed her yellow pass card. Temple flashed
what she hoped was an eager
teenage grin.

With
a grunt, the guard nodded them past.

“
This reminds me of the security the real Elvis
had," Electra grumbled as Temple led her through the clutter
of the wings to the steps leading down into the
vast
theater's house.

“
I can't believe you actually lined up and screamed.
Those girls in the photos look so—"

“
So uncool. Sweaters and bobby socks, and those cir
cle skirts that swept the floor when you sat and
that
everybody stepped on. That's what
Elvis should have
sang, 'Don't Step on My Pink Poodle Skirt.' "

“Hardly
suitable for Elvis."

“
He did love pink, though. Had teddy bears all over
his bedroom to the end, and his first
bedroom before
Graceland had pink bedclothes. Black and pink were
high-fifties-chic colors."

“
Teddy bears. He was just a big overgrown kid,
wasn't
he?"

“
In some ways. In some, not. You know, not all us
teen fans were pimply and awkward. The good-looking
ones got invited to meet Elvis. He had his pick, believe
me."

“
Groupies." Temple made a face. "Why do
those
young girls sell themselves so
cheaply to a bunch of egocentric drunk and/or drugged guys old enough to
know better and not much worth bragging about as
hu
man beings?"

“
It's obvious, my dear girl, that you have never
seen
an authentic sex symbol in
action." Electra's face as
sumed
a beatific look as she pulled down a plush fold-
up seat and plunked her
middled-aged heft on it.

“
From what I read, Elvis wasn't born bad and beau
tiful;
he deliberately modeled himself on his favorite
actors, those urban bad boys Marlon Brando and James
Dean and Tony Curtis. And he started putting those
bumps and grinds into his act when he
saw the girls'
reaction to the moves he probably picked up from black
performers he saw on Beale Street."

“
That's the thing. Underneath the act was this shy
guy
our age who was acting out what we all wanted to be:
independent and bold, and rebellious and, hey,
even rich
and famous. Teen dream. Didn't your generation have something
like that?"

“
We had a choice between satanist rockers and TV-
show family sitcom guys who sang a little. Elvis's
bad-
boy act was minor-league compared
to the decadent rock
that came along after."

“
It was a time. It was a place. It brought city and
country together, white hillbilly music and black
blues.
It brought black and white
together before the Civil
Rights
movement made it official. Elvis usually had
black groups in his band." Electra looked at Temple over
her reading glasses. "But then you don't know
a thing
about the Civil Rights movement either, do you,
whippersnapper?"

“
I know, I know! I'm just a shallow yuppie. I missed
all the major social upheavals of the sixties. I couldn't
help it. I was
just a baby.”

Mollified that Temple had admitted total ignorance of
her life and times, Electra settled down and gazed hap
pily toward the huge empty stage. "The Colonel
always
sent Elvis to the
funniest out-of-the-way arenas when he
was on tour, even after he became a megastar. Places like
Portland and Buffalo and Baton Rouge and Wich
ita."

“
Maybe it was a strategy to make Elvis available to
more than his big-city fans. Where did you see Elvis?"

“
Carlsbad, New Mexico, February fourteenth, nine
teen fifty-five. I weighed a hundred-and-eighteen
pounds
for probably the last time in
my life. The waist of that
circle skirt I wore would hardly fit my thigh
nowadays.

They
dis Elvis for getting fat, but who doesn't?"

“
Gods, supermodels, and rock stars aren't supposed
to. And maybe they take all those drugs to make
sure
they don't."

“
We never even dreamed about taking recreational
drugs back then. Cigarettes and whiskey and rock
'n'
roll music, they were the wicked
ways teenagers wanted
to get into. If
we took anything, it was the officially
sanctioned uppers that Elvis
started with, his mother's amphetamine diet pills. My mother had some too, and
I `borrowed" em."

“And
it was all so innocent."

“Yup.
Magic pills from Dr. Family Physician.”

Temple
gazed toward the stage. The fifties seemed so
quaint,
like they really were lived in black-and-white.
On stage, a band was
assembling. Drummer, a real piano man, guitarist, backup singers, they all
dressed in some amalgam of fifties–sixties clothes.

Electra leaned over to whisper in Temple's ear, even
though no one sat near them. The rows of empty seats
were sprinkled with guests of the performers who took
pains to sit as far away as possible from each other.
Maybe they thought they might give away the trade se
crets
of their Elvis, like Mike's lip trick with liquid latex.

“Most
of these guys started singing along to karaoke
machines, or used their own tapes. Performing with a
live band is a major step up for them. They're
beginning
to understand what Elvis was
up against for the hundreds
of performances he gave from nineteen
seventy to seventy-seven.”

Temple absorbed the information. She didn't sing a
note, didn't ever want to do more than hum along to
"The Star-Spangled Banner" or "Happy Birthday to
You," all a loyal American or decent friend should
be
expected to do. Molina, though, the humming homicide
lieutenant, she could stand up on the Blue Dahlia
stage
and belt out a melody to whatever riffs the backup bandwas
ruffling. Took nerve. And if the nerve wasn't there anymore, maybe it took
pills.

Then a bouncing baby Elvis was bursting into stage
center, his fringe jiggling and the gemstones winking
like
a drunken fleet of sailors on shore leave. That's what
Elvis's white jumpsuits reminded Temple of, not comic-
book superhero uniforms like the books said, but
little
boy's sailor suits,
wide-legged, jaunty, innocent, only
Elvis's
had been embroidered with glitter. Suddenly the
teddy bears that lined
his bedrooms made sense.

She
watched the heavyset guy who resembled every repairman who'd ever been sent to
her apartment to fix something, down to the swag of heavy belt at his hips,
tool-belt-as-gunslinger-holster substitute.

Elvis was not only blue suede shoes, he was blue-
collar superhero. The guy who went from high school
into the navy or the army. The average Joe, not Joe
College. And his garish onstage taste celebrated the
common
person's idea of glamour, half Hollywood, half gas-station fire sale.

The music, though, that was timeless, classless. The
words were nonsense, the beat was liberating. Gotta
dance.
Elvi came and went, a lot of them the chunky
sailor-suited
model so endearingly kiddish despite so
many being on the other side of forty. The sleeker ones
did Comeback Elvis in black leather biker suits
that
shone like silk-velvet tafetta in
the spotlights. Velvet El
vis made a
spectacular entrance in her midnight jump
suit. Temple knew that the costume would light up like
a
gasoline-slick rainbow under the actual performance's
special light gels, but even underlit the look was dyna
mite.