she commented as if Matt weren’t there, or were hearing impaired.
Obviously, her current assignment had narrowed her world to the Elvis and the not-Elvis.
“I’d never want to,” Matt said. “Elvis had a very troubled life, and death.”
“I’m not so sure.” Quincey sat back down at the dressing table mirror to fine-tune her mask of makeup. “That he was troubled?”
“That he’s dead.”
“Really?” Temple interjected. “What makes you question that?”
“It’d be so cool, that’s all.” Quincey blotted her tearose-pale lipstick. “Okay. You guys ready to go on an Elvis tour?” She stood up and eyed Matt again. “What’s his cover?”
“It’s no cover,” Matt said a little indignantly. “I’ve got a radio show. I might be interested in having some of the Elvis imitators on.”
“Local?” Quincey’s tone dripped boredom.
“Syndicated.” Temple sounded like someone laying down a royal flush on a poker table.
“Ohhhh.” The exaggerated eyes gave Matt new respect. “National exposure. That’s what these guys all dream of.” As if she didn’t. She rolled her eyes, an athletic feat under the circumstances. “Like A Current Affair is the big time.”
“Well,” Matt said, “they’re not likely to get Sixty Minutes.”
“Not unless Elvis really is alive and well in Las Vegas,” Temple pointed out. “Let’s go find out.”
Matt’s few glimpses of life behind stage, accomplished only since he had moved to Las Vegas and in Temple’s presence, still hadn’t accustomed him to people running around in states of undress.
Here, at least, there were no leggy chorus girls fleeting through like mobile Venus de Milos. No, there were justincarnations of Elvis, elbowing past each other as if encountering mirrored images of oneself in disguise were the most normal thing in their world. And it probably was.
Matt’s recent fast-forward skitter through a raft of picture books of Elvis’s career helped him identify every imitator’s place on the Elvis spectrum. None mimicked the “dirty-blond” natural-born Elvis of the mid-fifties. All were black and beautiful to a degree, depending on age and physical fitness and actual resemblance to the King.
“Ooof!” Even the stage-savvy Temple seemed awed by the proliferation of Elvi. “Where do we begin?”
“These are the community dressing rooms,” Quincey said. “Us few girls get separate rooms.”
“ ‘Us’?” Temple jumped on the word. “There are more Priscillas down here?”
“No. I’m the only one. But there are three female Elvises.”
Temple’s eyes wordlessly questioned Matt.
“I just want to meet the men,” he said hastily. “I mean, the voice—”
Temple got his message, so she nodded at Quincey. “Let’s start at the end of the hall and work our way back. Show us to the first dressing room and we’ll take it from there. I’d love to know whose jumpsuit got axed.”
“It’s been the talk of rehearsals,” Quincey agreed. “Some hotel security guy finally came after you left and took it away, so someone should have noticed it was missing by now. And—” She paused outside an open door before leaving them, suddenly dead serious. “I should warn you. These are nice guys, mostly, but a little bent. I mean, they, like, worship the dead guy. So don’t say anything anti-Elvis. Somebody might stick his ringed fist into your teeth, and these guys wear Godzillasize rings, let me tell you.”
With that word of warning, they entered the first dressing room.
A miasma of hair spray hung in the hot air along with a multiscented wave of deodorant. Heavyset, bluecollar-muscled guys were primping everywhere, patting down sideburns as big as tarantulas, arranging crosses and lightning bolt pendants on springy cushions of chest hair, smoothing shocks of black hair into place, some teasing a few fitful locks down onto the forehead, like the little girl who had a little curl of nursery rhymes. When she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid.
That was certainly true of the real Elvis, Matt thought.
The round yellow bulbs that framed the chain of mirrors lining both sides of the long room made the assembled colored stones and gold studs on the various costumes glitter like neon miniatures of Las Vegas hotel signs. Matt recognized several versions of the famous American eagle jumpsuit, the denim-blue and silver-studded model, the Native American motifs. Most were white, or the occasional black version.
For a while during the sixties, he had read, Elvis had dressed in black pants, white shirts: street clothes, but already mirroring the sharp opposites his jumpsuits would embody. The jumpsuits themselves were the pin-nacle of Elvis’s transference of boyhood needs and loves into popular culture icons. Inspired by Elvis’s early love for comic-book superheroes in fancy jumpsuits and capes, they had been tailored to the sixties and seventies fashion explosion of innovations in normally staid men’s clothing, like bellbottom trousers and necklaces for men. Although they looked excessive to the modern eye, they had merely been a show-biz version of the new male peacock emerging. Matt recalled that even Nehru jackets and vaguely priestlike white collars had been popular then, along with crosses of every description.
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 remained beloved and sexy to legions of female fans to the bitter end? Seeing these out-of-shape Elvises reflected in the facing mirrors and each other made Matt understand one reason for the entertainer’s life after death: such imperfections and failings had only further endeared him to his fans. Reading of Elvis’s Messiahlike appeal had puzzled 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 Trinity 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 explained 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 jumpsuits.”
“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 photograph: 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 consumption to stop. I think his high metabolism also allowed 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.”