Matt didn’t know much about performers, but this guy’s very sobriety suggested he could uncoil as hard and fast as a rattlesnake onstage.
A dark horse in the glittery Elvis sweepstakes, but who knows? Temple was trolling for more obvious prey than potential winners.
“So,” she said more loudly into the lingering silence the distant Elvis’s comment had caused, “does anybody here have it in for the Priscilla clone?”
“Us?” A yip of indignation from an Elvis in the opposite corner. “We don’t have to like the real one, but this girl’s part of the grand finale. She hands out the authentic imitation gold belt from when Elvis broke the Las Vegas attendance record at the Hotel International in nineteen sixty-nine to whoever wins the competition. No way we’re gonna short-circuit a moment of glory for one of us.”
“Only one of you can win,” Matt pointed out. “Maybe the other ninety-nine wouldn’t mind a sour ending note.”
“Nah. We’re not like that. We compete, sure, but we know you’re up one time and down another.”
“You mean there are no leading candidates for the grand prize?” Temple asked.
Silence and shrugs infected the room. A wife, or girlfriend, paused in teasing a pompadour, then one finally spoke.
“Oh, there are guys who’ve won before, and might again. El Vez always has a good act, and other guys are tops too. But we’ve been at dozens of these competitions, and there’s always some upset, or some new guy winning out of the blue. You can’t count on winning, no matter who you are, and you sure can’t do anything about it except to do your best when it’s your time onstage.
“But surely,” Temple persisted, Matt feeling almost embarrassed by her dogged pursuit of a point of view so strongly denied, “some one contender is particularly strong, someone who won last time, or whatever.”
Again, the silence, during which blue eyes courtesy of Bausch and Lomb consulted each other. The fragile wooden ice-cream chairs creaked under the shifting posteriors of nervous Elvi.
“There’s KOK, of course,” said a fellow so diminutive only his voice could be heard.
“KOK?” Temple was perplexed, and Matt had never seen the initials in all the Elvis books he had skimmed, including those on impersonators.
A huge Elvis stood, and it wasn’t hard to look huge in those white, flared-bottom jumpsuits.
“KOK,” he repeated. “The King of Kings. Guy named … what? David something.”
How appropriate, Matt thought.
“No, no, no. His name was Ken-something. Peebles maybe,” another Elvis suggested.
“No, Perkins.”
“Purvis. Ken or Kyle—something Purvis,” the Elvis in the corner contributed again, warily.
“Perkins,” the second Elvis said firmly. “Man, he was something. Didn’t think he was Elvis, mind you. But he played the part like a reincarnation of Elvis. Eerie, that guy was. In fact, that’s what some of us nicknamed him. Eerie Elvis. That’s with two Es at the beginning, not like in Erie, Pennsylvania.”
Another ladyfriend stopped combing and teasing. “Yeah, I remember that guy. Looked a lot like Elvis before his final downslide. You know, pretty damn good, really, considering all the pharmaceuticals he was downing. That guy was so particular about every detail, more like a fan than an actor.”
“Yeah. There was something … ritual about him. Hadto have the music played just right. Real nervous before he went on—”
“Just like Elvis was.”
“Hell, we’re all nervous!”
“Anyway, he was something. I never seen anybody so into Elvis. Like it was his … career, or something.”
“Grim, yeah. Offstage anyway. Like his life depended on it.”
“But he’s not registered for this competition,” a cheeky chipmunk Elvis put in optimistically.
This Eerie Elvis guy was sounding, even to Matt, like the ghostly gunfighter riding into town at the last moment and blowing everyone else away: Lee Van Cleef at his most smoothly sinister. Part hero, part villain. Not much different from Elvis, really.
“Maybe it was charisma,” a hairdressing wife said dreamily. “Elvis had it by the bushel. Some people have that air about them.”
The guys were quick to dismiss the mystical approach, just as Elvis’s Memphis Mafia had loathed his explorations of Eastern mysticism with L.A. hairdresser Larry Geller.
“Nah, this Kyle-whoever was just damn good at being Elvis.”
“But he’s not registered for the competition,” Chipmunk Elvis repeated.
“No. He dropped out of sight a couple of years ago. Fast.”
Elvises nodded in mirrored multiples.
“Like something had caught up with him,” Distant Elvis said slowly.
“Maybe the Memphis Mafia,” one joked.
“Yeah, John,” Chipmunk Elvis goaded Distant Elvis with an air of long practice. “The Memphis Mafia is on the loose and taking out bad actors. We better watch out.”
“What do you think of those guys?” Matt asked. More shrugs. “The Memphis Mafia? They were okay.
Too many relatives riding on Elvis, though. And the Mafia boys, they added a lot of pressure to his life for all they took care of things for him.”
“Squabbling like jealous two-year-olds,” a significant other added, shaking her sheenless strawberry-blond fright wig. “Boys will be boys, and Elvis’s entourage sure proved it. From that standpoint, I don’t blame Priscilla one little bit for trying to get the guy to settle down into a normal domestic life.”
“Tame the King? No way!”
Matt could see that these adult men weren’t much different from the employee-pals who became known as the Memphis Mafia. They were lost boys too, trying to preserve a Never-Never Land of adolescence that was a far cry from what it should have been. They needed their Peter Pan, even if it took fistfuls of amphetamines to keep him flying. No matter that he’d crashed and burned and died alone in a Graceland bathroom over twenty years ago, he still wasn’t allowed to stop.
The King is dead, long live the Kings.
Temple must have felt some of the frustration he did when confronting the self-destructive lifestyle and indestructible legend of Elvis Aaron Presley. “Thanks,” she said, ending the mass interview. “You were very helpful. Good luck to you all during the competition.”
“Hey! Are we gonna be on … whatever show?”
“We’ll be back,” Temple promised with a jaunty, noncommittal wave.
So they all turned back to the mirrors and the job of becoming the best damn Elvis they could be.
Temple was quiet until they were opposite Quincey’s dressing room again, and had no chance of being overheard.
“KOK. This Kyle Purvis guy sounds like one hell of an impersonator.” Temple eyed Matt soberly, then wiggled her eyebrows for comic relief.
“It’s hard to tell how good these guys would be onstage. The one who talked about Priscilla’s reasons forleaving Elvis, he struck me as having the natural equipment, maybe the temperament for the role.”
“Seemed kind of low-key for the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll.”
“Okay. Let me have it,” Matt said with resignation. “You think he is Elvis.”
“I think somebody wants somebody to think Elvis is walking these halls. It could be this Kyle Purvis.”
“Kyle Purvis. King of Kings,” Matt scoffed. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”
Chapter 19
You Ain’t a Hound Dog
(Sales of the Elvis version of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” exceeded six million copies in 1956 alone)
Every time I turn around in this Kingdome joint, I hear someone say that they owe it to Elvis.
I have never heard of a dead dude before with so many IOUs still out.