“This isn’t that look! This is the Memphis Mafia look. Maybe this will give you the right idea.” He whipped a pair of ultradark sunglasses with heavy black plastic frames from his breast pocket to his face.
“You still look more like Men in Black than Mafia from Memphis.”
“And you still look like a million dollars, T. B.” Crawford flipped up his shades to leer. “What are you doing over here anyway?”
Temple ignored the leer; it came with the territory when one ventured into Crawford Buchanan Country. “Just checking out the new game in town.”
“Then stick around a few days. I’ll be emceeing the world’s biggest Elvis Presley imitator contest. Well, some call themselves ‘impressionists,’ and some callthemselves impersonators, or even actors, but imitators seems the most honest description.”
Temple let her head swivel to survey various passing Elvi from the rear. “Looks like you’ve got every stage of Elvis from debut to death around here.”
Buchanan followed her glance with a sneer. That was C.B.: always a leer for the ladies and a sneer for the guys. She hadn’t seen him for so long she’d forgotten how despicable he was.
“There are only Three Stages of Elvis,” he was saying—pontificating. “Young Elvis, suits and guitars and pompadour hair; Comeback Elvis, the Man in the Black Leather Suit; and Touring Elvis, otherwise known as Vegas Elvis, the big galoot in the glitter jumpsuits and hernia-truss belts. Nobody much cares about movie Elvis, and neither did E.P. himself when he was alive.” “That’s right.” Temple frowned as she teased her memory. “I’ve seen a lot of fifties Elvis, and a lot of seventies Elvis, but what did he do during the sixties?” “Ran for cover like everybody else in American music when the Beatles came over and usurped Ed Sullivan from our barefoot boy with cheek of sideburn. You know why he’s called Comeback Elvis?”
“No, and the answer better not be a dirty punchline.” “T.B.! Would I inflict blue material on a class act like you?”
“Any time you thought you could get away with it.” That earned another leer, and an explanation.
“See, the Colonel—Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager and, some would say, Svengali—sold Elvis to the movies for that whole decade. No tours, no live music, just rinky-dink rock ‘n’ roll romance movies. Travelogues, Presley himself called ‘em. Then Elvis went and got himself into the hands of a really good director for a TV special in 1968 that was supposed to revive his singing career. He was poured into this black leather biker suit and really poured on the performance power. That’s what launched all those tours in the seventies. ‘Course the Colonel soon squeezed the juice out of the comeback kid and got him on the treadmill of a stock touring show again. What a guy! You could always count on the Colonel to give an audience as little as he could get away with.”
“I’m impressed. How did you learn all this stuff about Elvis and the Colonel? You must have boned up for the emcee job.”
“Naw. I used to be a deejay back when music was on vinyl and only musicians were on drugs.”
“A disk jockey? That far back?”
“Ah … I worked in small towns, behind the times. Why, how old did you think I was?” Buchanan’s crooked smile grew crookeder under his black-dyed hair. Merle Conrad hadn’t mentioned Vanity as a deadly sin, but she should have.
“Gee. I dunno. As old as Dick Clark?”
Buchanan paled.
“Isn’t that a compliment?” Temple asked innocently. “Isn’t he supposed to be extraordinarily youthful-looking?”
“For the mummy of King Tut-tut!” Buchanan’s trademark snirk (what Temple called his patented combination of sneer and smirk) was fighting not to become a snarl. “That guy’s generation and mine are not even kissing cousins. So don’t worry, T.B. I’m young enough for you.” He leaned so close she could inhale the noxious scent of whatever goop was making his hair look both stiffened and greasy.
“Well, I’m too old for you.” Temple said in farewell, turning and hiking away before he could offer one last parting snirk. Poor Quincey! Someone had to help that girl, and her mother was too much of a victim herself to do it.
She was facing into another trio of oncoming Elvis imitators, and they were eyeing her like she was a fifteen-year-old fan.
Better to face dead men walking than Crawford Buchanan any day.
Chapter 8
Working on the Building
(A rousing gospel song Elvis recorded in 1960)
Temple finally decided that the Kingdome itself was a cross between the Coliseum in Rome and an Opryland Hotel.
She wandered through a semitropical Southern garden, past pillared gazebos, yet remained beneath an overarching glass dome. On the dome’s perimeter, in niches high above the milling crowds, stood white marble statues of Elvis, attired like collector Barbie dolls in bejeweled jumpsuits concocted by the world’s most famous designers. The neon role call of names above the designer-doll Elvi read like a mall sign in shoppers’ paradise: Donatella Versace, Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Bob Mackie, Gucci, Dior.
The circle of elevated Elvi regarded the vastness erected in their honor with cataract gazes: the blank white eyeballs of classic Greek statuary. The face of Apollo (he wasn’t copyrighted) stood in for Elvis’s. Actually, the time-tested, white-marble medium used to memorialize long-gone gods such as Apollo and Pan fit Elvis’s full-lipped, Roman-nosed profile like an Attic glove, although the ghostly yet solid chorus line of Elvi also (and rather wickedly) reminded Temple of Pillsbury doughboys in candy-decorated astronauts’ suits.
Just when Temple thought that Las Vegas had pulled out all of the stops, shown its best hand, exceeded the spectacle speed limit, outgrossed and grossed out, say, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it would concoct another baked Alaska of entertainment: an overdone confection of fire and ice, a high-calorie extravaganza of fairy dust and fever like the Kingdome.
The real wonder was that the Kingdome had managed to evoke Elvis in all his incarnations without presenting one genuine artifact of Elvis Presley’s roots, history, performing career, or personal life.
He might as well have been a dead god for anything material of him that survived in this mausoleum of ersatz mementos.
Above the roar of moving, talking people, a sound expanded like an invisible cloud over all their heads. It was not rock ‘n’ roll, although it was as hard to ignore.
High, piercing female shrieks.
Holy Hunk-a Burning Love! The hotel designers had even imported Elvis’s screaming fans! Temple clapped hands to ears. In this vast, marble-lined stadium, shrieks bounced off every hard surface, and the only softening surfaces here were the plants and the people.
The hubbub troubled no one else. Las Vegas tourists had long since learned to tune out programmed sights and sounds if they were discussing vital issues like the locations of loose slot machines, or looser women.
Temple hurried toward the stage where the sound probably originated, on the theory that it could only be better close up.
But when she arrived at what would be the mosh pit nowadays, she looked up at a dark and empty stage. No show at the moment, no screeching fans.
She released hands from ears. The screams had subsided.
Just when she thought it was safe to breathe normally again, shrieks resumed, so loud that the set of cymbals near the unattended drums vibrated in sympathy.
The sounds were coming from behind, and below, the stage.
Temple knew theatrical geography. She darted up the dark stairs at stage right, then dodged walls of ponderous velvet curtains and the toe-stubbing array of fly anchors in the wings behind them. She flailed in the dark until she found a stairwell leading to the dressing rooms below.
In that narrow, dark passage the screams turned positively painful. Temple burst into the bright light of a deserted hallway and followed the sounds to a dressing room.