"You've seen it. Now I'll tell you about it." He strode to the bedroom that housed the model, and Temple followed. Verina awaited them like a dark bronze statue. Once there, Domingo prowled around the huge display table, waving his arms, telling his dream.
Temple didn't need long to understand it. If Los Angeles were known as the City of the Angels, Domingo would make Las Vegas notorious as the City of the Flamingos, at least for a brief, shining moment. An ambition to make Las Vegas more notorious than it was and is struck Temple as oddly touching.
Why flamingos, she asked.
"Excellent question. No one has thought to question me before. I am too famous, too successful, too outrageous. Yet there is method to my madness."
He proceeded to identify his method. "The first truly visionary hotel-casino was founded on the Strip in nineteen forty-six by Bugsy Siegel. It was called the Fabulous Flamingo."
"Why?" Temple asked.
"Why what? Why found modern Las Vegas?"
"Why name a hotel in the middle of an empty desert the 'Flamingo'? Flamingos are long-legged, shallow water-dwelling birds. They belong on African lakes and in South American jungles and maybe in Florida souvenir shops for tourists. So why name a desert hotel after a flamingo?"
"How do I know?" Domingo was beginning to sound frazzled. "The flamingo is a bright, sinuous bird. Great for graphics. Perhaps a man nicknamed 'Bugsy' wanted to be associated with a more elegant creature than an insect. Why is not important. What is what art is all about.
What is what I do.
"I do not explain myself, I present my concept. The world explains it, defames it, photographs it, deplores it and myself. Editorials rant about the waste of good money, about how much water could saturate the desert for the cost of importing these thousands of cheap plastic birds, these lowly, mass-manufactured foreign imports that spear into good soil all over the Americas--South America, Central America, Mexico and the United States. These homely lawn ornaments that will not die! This is not for me to explain."
"All over the Americas? Canada too? And what about Alaska?"
"What?!"
"Do plastic flamingos populate these more-northern turfs, so to speak?"
"No! The actual flamingo does not breed beyond the snow line, or the timber line or even the sun belt. They are creatures of sunlight, that is the point. They are gaudy, New World storks; they represent fecundity and fashion. They will wrap Las Vegas in their otherworldly reality, in their shoddy, hollow shells, in their bright, impossibly lurid color. They are very spiritual things, these humble lawn ornaments."
The artist's model was neither particularly spiritual nor humble, but she stood looking on at this performance like an iron Madonna.
During this exhibition, Temple had come to realize that what Domingo said about himself was more important than what others said about him. His real object was performance art.
Wheedling civic big wheels into endorsing his wild, wicked schemes was half the fun. He was, at heart, a con artist.
And he was ideal for the role. In his photographs he looked like an odd combination of hipster, hippie and nineties guru, and no more than thirty-four. In person he was ambiguity personified. His age might be fifty, or even sixty, or a well-worn thirty-four. His brooding dark eyes, hedged by shaggy black hair, suggested an exotic foreign origin-- southern Italy, Greece, Central Europe, perhaps even Turkey. Or Native American.
His voice had an almost-foreign formality, but no accent, not even of a regional U.S. locale.
Domingo was a blackboard, a blank slate for the eyes and ears and hearts of his viewers to fill in as they wished, or felt impelled to do so. Con man, genius, gypsy, thief of time and pretension or merely a crazy artist? Who was he? Or, more important, what was he?
As Temple watched Domingo strut his stuff, seemingly for her alone, she realized that they were collaborating on a work-in-progress that Domingo started all over again with each city, each person, each landscape and landmark he drew into his whacked-out remodeling schemes.
"Now, Miss Barr!" His domineering voice demanded her full notice.
"Which place in this city do you wish to see inundated with birds of a feather called flamingo."
She jerked her attention to the toy Las Vegas on his conjoined tables. That was a work of art in itself, or certainly a high order of craftsmanship.
"I can't say right off. I've never thought in terms of flamingos before."
"No! That is why you are considered sane and safe, and I am not. That is also why I am a good deal richer than you, aren't I?"
"I have no idea of your personal finances."
The Dark Lady finally spoke. "Domingo is a multimillionaire for weeks at a time . . . before he reinvests in his artworks."
"Yes! I have reversed the art-world stereotype. I invest in my own art, rather than leaving that important function to others, to kingmakers and hangers-on and frauds."
Temple had been musing over the small-scale layout of Las Vegas. She felt like a Greek goddess, up at this Olympian height, gazing down on the puny affairs of mankind.
"Of course the obvious is the existing Flamingo Hilton hotel."
Temple pointed to the bright horizontal band aping the wraparound neon sign of flamingos imitating fan-dancers on the hotel's entry facade.
"Obvious, yes." Domingo came to brood over the tiny mock building. "Still, the finest sign of the old school left in Las Vegas. Is any of the original building left standing?"
"I'd have to find out."
"Then make it so."
"Oh, you watch Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns too."
Domingo's brooding intensified. He could have given the young Marlon Brando a run for his acting money.
"Popular culture must be watched with only half a mind. Garbage in, garbage out. I would like my flamingos to pay true tribute to this benchmark site, but I will not have them outshone by a nervous flock of neon flash-dancers. I must think. Where else do you see flamingos?"
Temple considered it bad PR to say that she could die happy never seeing a single plastic flamingo in Las Vegas, no, not even atop a swizzle stick.
"A fleet of wading flamingos in the Treasure Island moat might add a subtropical touch to the proceedings," she offered hesitantly.
Like most artists, Temple was sure, Domingo did not appreciate kibitzers.
"A pirate ship is sunk during the hourly sea-battle, isn't that the case?" he asked.
"No, a British Navy ship is sunk, briefly. Like the British lion, it only lies down to rise again.
Law and order go down to the pirate ship's guns."
"Then Domingo's flamingos will rise, in a sunset cloud, along the verges of the moat. It will be a Kodak moment for all the tourists. Do you think the hotel will agree to my installation?"
Temple decided to unveil her own piece of performance art. Unlike Domingo, she did not require a booming voice and big gestures, just the facts that were her job to know, and tell.
Her shrug was rueful and vague. "I have your press kits. The installation of a miniature Alps of soldered-together lira in the Trevi Fountain in Rome should impress them, along with the hundred herds of sheep in the courtyard of the Louvre. That the French would tolerate the droppings alone speaks well of the importance of being the object of your attentions. I know the hotel's hierarchy, and should be able to bow and scrape my way up it.
"But you must understand something, Domingo. This is not some hundreds-of-years-old city with a flagging economy and tourism business, and a need to sacrifice its ancient monuments to the latest international artistic whim. This is Las Vegas, a back-lot Baghdad-on-the-Mojave thrown up almost as fast as the pyramids in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. Bugsy Siegel may have given it a kick in the pants, but the mob and Howard Hughes built this city and now the corporations own it. Corporations don't need anybody.