“What kind of diet drugs?” Temple asked. “Like fen/ phen?”
“No, no. Amphetamines. Speed. Doctors handed them out to everyone in the fifties and sixties before anyone knew much about the physiology and psychology of addiction. Then when Elvis was drafted into the army, he was given Dexedrine to stay awake on night guard duty—”
“And uppers and downers when he started working in Hollywood, I bet. I have heard about that.”
Matt nodded. “I can even sympathize now that I’m on a night ‘performance’ schedule. It’s a lot harder to un-wind at two A.M. after the Midnight Hour live, than after anonymous private counseling sessions at ConTact.” “So what do you do to relax?”
Matt laughed uneasily. “Lately? Like last night? Stay up until five A.M. reading Elvis books.”
“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever found Elvis interesting. Who’d think stuff like a nervous tic and a few of your mother’s borrowed diet pills could both make you and break you?”
“Yeah. As I read this stuff, I keep wondering, when did it go wrong? What, or who, could have saved him? If anyone could have.”
“And if they had,” Temple added with a sweeping gesture, “would we still have had all this?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know which one of these guys, if any, might be my Midnight caller.”
“The only way to find out is to look, listen, and ask a lot of nosy questions. I’ll play PR frontwoman. Follow me.”
Matt wouldn’t have known who to approach. Face it; he wouldn’t have approached any of these intent men busy being born-again in the image of a dead superstar.
But Temple just kicked her snappy heels into high gear and clicked over to a neighboring pair of white-suited Elvises who were exchanging a small tube of glue.
On the concrete floor, the heels’ approach was as arresting as the sharp stutter of castanets. Temple’s pred-ilection for politically incorrect footwear was a subtle way of knocking on people’s doors as she approached them. Then they saw her red hair and were as good as snagged by her elfin charm.
Like all small creatures, she couldn’t afford to be invisible.
“Hi, fellahs. Lookin’ good. Have you a moment to answer some questions? I’ve got a radio guy here.” Elvi turned their heads in matched-Doberman tandem to eye Matt as if he were raw meat.
“Live?” one asked.
“No, these are just preliminary questions about the competition, about playing Elvis, about the King.” Matt gave Temple an A-plus for avoiding the phrase
“Elvis imitator.” Exactly what they called themselves, or were called, was a sore point with many semipro Elvis clones.
Matt decided the ball was in his court.
“So. How long have you two been Elvis impersonators?” he began.
Like twins, they answered for each other.
“Jerry’s been honing his act for three years,” said one
“Mike’s been in the biz for at least two.”
“What’s involved?” Matt asked, pulling over an empty chair.
Mike and Jerry exchanged glances. They were class A exhibits of what Matt saw was the most common Elvis imitator modeclass="underline" short, stocky urban guys with big dreams.
It wasn’t that they looked like Elvis very much to start with; it was that they wanted to. He’d guess that they could sing a little, but not enough to forge an independent performing persona. They needed Elvis for instant identity, as much as he needed them to carry on his entertaining legend.
“What’s involved? A lot,” Mike said. This close, you could see the sand-blasted surface of the cheeks not hidden by the sideburns. Acne scars, but nothing severe enough to be visible from stage. “First we gotta get our act together. Get the right songs for our voices, get the props and costumes, get in touch with the Elvis impersonator network—”
“Get the noive,” Jerry added, giving a belly laugh that shook his broad Elvis belt like a rhinestone surfboard hit by a big-mama wave.
Mike wore glasses. Not sunglasses, but real glasses. Elvis looked weird with see-through lenses on his face.
“I, urn, ditch these for the show,” Mike said, suddenly self-conscious.
“I’m sorry,” Matt said. “Didn’t mean to stare. I’m just studying everything. I’m new to all this.”
Mike stripped off his modern-day frames. “Yeah, well, we’re used to people thinking we’re nuts. We don’t start out anything like Elvis, most of us. That’s the challenge.”
“You mean, the greater stretch the impersonation is, the more accomplishment?”
“Something like that,” Mike agreed.
Jerry leaned forward, intent. He had a TV sitcom Jersey accent, and fire in his eye.
“The thing is, you gotta love the King, or you got no business even trying to do this. You gotta respect the man.”
“A lot of people don’t,” Matt pointed out. “Didn’t they really put him down at the beginning of his career? Call him a white-trash, no-talent hick who had nothing to offer but dirty dancing?”
“Yeah.”
Mike was getting pugnacious, twirling his nerdish glasses by one earpiece. He’d be a good on-air interview, Matt was horrified to find himself thinking. Was Temple right? Was he being corrupted by his new media role?
“Yeah. They said all that at the beginning, and it was better than what they said at the end, that he was a drugged-out, used-up fat fool who threw his life away. It’s just kinda funny that in between all that bad press the guy reinvented pop music in this country—in the world! He put it all together and brought it on home: rhythm and blues, gospel, country, pop. Man, the Beatles, that Dylan guy, they all were big cheeses after Elvis, and they all said they owed him a lot.”
“Yeah,” Jerry added. “Elvis grew up poor, but those church folk in the South, they knew how to sing. He heard it at church, he heard it in the bars on Beale Street, on the black radio. No one had put it all together like he did. It was never the same after Elvis. He’s the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
The present tense was not lost on Matt. Elvis lives: an eerie anagram of the performer’s name that even he had noticed. And now it had come true.
“Are there any black Elvises?” Matt asked. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Temple making a startled motion after sitting statue-still and letting him conduct the interview.
He had been thinking of the black churches he had used to drop in on, and the glorious use of music in the liturgy, the most inspired blending of music and worship since the Middle Ages, he would bet.
But Jerry and Mike were bristling.
“We ain’t prejudiced,” Mike said. “It’s just that Elvis mostly isn’t a black thing. They got their Johnny Mathis and the old blues guys and gals. They were great, don’t get me wrong. But Elvis just isn’t a black thing.”
“But,” Matt mentally riffled through his previous night’s reading, “wasn’t Elvis accused later of ripping off the black musicians? And didn’t he dress black in high school? He was hanging around Lansky’s on Beale Street, which outfitted black guys and musicians. He was put down for it then.”
“Yeah, yeah. That stuff was there. That’s why he was a friggin’ genius. But … what can I say? We don’t get many black Elvises. We don’t keep ‘em out. They just don’t show up.”
“What kind of Elvises do you get?”
“We got a Mexican Elvis,” Jerry said. “El Vez. One of the top veterans in the business. We got Oriental Elvises. We even got a broad or two. But we don’t get black Elvises.” He shrugged. “It’s just a cultural thing.”
“Why do Elvis when you can do Ray Charles?”
Matt nodded. Elvis had been a musical, stylistic bridge from black to white, but it still wasn’t necessarily a two-way street, for either race.
“What other specialty Elvises are there?”