Temple nodded. “I won’t use anything harmful, that you don’t mean to say.”
“It was like one big mass orgasm, is what it was like. Only spiritual. An emotional release like you’ve never had before.”
“You obviously saw him perform live.”
Lyle nodded. “In the seventies, of course. I came late to the banquet.” He paused. “I even saw him in the last couple years, when he was just pitiful. He was like a puppet on those drugs. It made grown men who knew him cry. The fans cried, but they never stopped loving him. Unconditional love, isn’t that what you call it? It was like he couldn’t do anything to make them not love him, and sometimes I think that’s what he was trying to do, putting himself onstage when he was too drugged to stand up, or to remember lyrics or anything. He was trying to make them give up on him, so he wouldn’t have to bear the burden anymore. If they would just stop loving him … but they couldn’t, any more than he could stop hating himself at the end. He was ready to leave. That I know. He was ready. Everybody around him knew it. He died standing up, with his boots on, not in that bathroom at Graceland. That was just the actual fact. The real death was earlier. We were all watching a dead man walking for a long time.”
“What did you do then?”
“Do?” Lyle shook his head as if to shake off a nightmare, Temple thought.
She glimpsed the tiniest flash of white roots at his left temple. His face was lightly lined and tanned, the way Elvis liked to look after a trip to Hawaii. Temple was miserable at guessing ages. Because she felt she looked so ridiculously young, she tended to underestimate other people’s ages too. She would put Lyle Purvis in his forties. In fact, Elvis’s hair had gone white by forty-two. It was weird to picture a snowy-haired Elvis.
While Temple was dallying on top of old Smokey, all covered with snow, Lyle had come out of his own fog reliving Elvis’s last performances.
“What do you mean ‘do’?”
“Do for a living back then?”
“I don’t even remember. I was just a kid.”
“What’s your day job now?”
He laughed, uneasily. “It’s pretty unglamourous.” When she waited in silence, he added, “I work for a messenger service.”
“Around town here?”
“Right. Have car, will travel.”
“None of the Elvis impersonators have performance-type jobs that I can tell. Unless they’re the ones who make a living at it.”
“There are a few of those,” he agreed.
“Why not you? Everybody talks like you’re the best.” “Because I don’t want it to be that serious, all right? I want it to be something I can do if I feel like. I don’t want to end up like Elvis, having to go through the motions to make enough money to get everybody off my back, and then get so depressed I blow the money myself and have to dig myself in deeper to keep the whole cycle going.”
“It’s hard making a living as an entertainer,” she agreed. “What brought you out of hiding for this show?” “Hiding? Who says I was hiding?”
“I didn’t mean hiding, exactly. Just that the other Elvises see you as some kind of mysterious figure that comes and goes without notice.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about me.”
“You certainly wowed them by showing up on the stage.”
“Okay. Maybe I like theatrical entrances. Elvis did too, and that’s who we’re supposed to be impersonating. These offbeat Elvises oughta be drummed off the stage. The idea is to honor the man and his music, not come up with the funkiest interpretation. Cheese Whiz Elvis. Where’s the respect?”
“Didn’t Elvis mock himself and even his audience sometimes?”
“Yes, he did.” KOK sat forward and fixed Temple with a stern look. “And he was wrong. It was a gesture of surrender to his own vulnerabilities. In the end, his self-esteem was so low he looked on his audience’s love for him with contempt. Instead of seeing them as forgiving friends, he saw them as fools and dupes he couldn’t force to turn against him.”
“You’re saying he wanted to be martyred.”
“He wanted to end what had become too hard to keep up. He didn’t see any honorable way to desert the field. So he performed himself to death.”
“What about the Colonel’s role in driving Elvis into mediocre movies and debilitating tours?”
“Oh, Colonel Parker. The villain of the piece. Everybody was responsible but Elvis Presley. Did you ever notice how the least likely suspect in a murder case always turns out to be the killer?”
“Who’s the least likely suspect in the Elvis saga?”
Lyle’s tiny shrug made the gold threads on his gi shimmer and shimmy. His lower lip curled up before he gave a half smile that lifted the left side of his upper lip, just like Elvis’s.
“How about the victim himself?”
Chapter 42
Elvis and Evil
(Elvis recorded the song, “Adam and Evil,” for the 1966 film, Spinout)
“What a weirdo guy,” Temple reported to Electra, after Full-spectrum Elvis had escorted her through the throngs waiting to bedevil Lyle, aka the KOK.
They all made proper farewells—bows, kisses, caressing scarf moves—and left, leaving Electra in an even greater girlish tizzy.
“How can you say that about the Elvis of the nineties?” she demanded of Temple when they were alone.
“What’s the Elvis of the next decade going to be: the King of Zeroes?”
“I thought you had seen a bit of the magic that made Elvis the biggest star of the twentieth century. I thought you were becoming converted.”
“Converted to a particular impersonator being good, yes; to Elvis, no. Besides, this Lyle guy said something so bizarre at the end of our interview. He implied that another Elvis impersonator killed the Elvis in the pool.’ “Professional jealousy?”
“How could that be? The dead Elvis isn’t even missed. If it had been Lyle Purvis himself, okay. But a nonentity Elvis isn’t worth killing. Besides, Lyle sounded about as clear as Elvis was during one of his spiritual meanderings. It was like he was describing some mystical sort of murder, as if Elvis somehow had killed himself.”
Electra’s sweet-sixteen sixties face—today Temple had glimpsed the madcap teenager inside the not-sodignified matron’s exterior—grew radiant with inspiration.
“Temple! Elvis could kill an Elvis … but only if the real one is out there somewhere.”
“ ‘Out there’ like ‘the truth’ on the X-Files? Over the edge and into Paranoid Country? I’m sorry, Electra. I will never buy that ‘Elvis lives’ scenario.”
“Oh, you little hard-headed cynic! That notion doesn’t have to be taken literally.”
“What other way is there to take it?”
“If you need to ask, I don’t need to tell you.”
“Huh? Oh, that this too, too solid delusion would melt, dissolve into a dew—”
“When you’re done spouting, could we meet somebody else?”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go in to meet KOK Elvis. It would have blown my cover.”
“Well, I can meet one pseudo-celebrity without blowing your cover.” Electra took Temple’s arm firmly. “Now. Show me Miss Priscilla.”
Quincey was in and receiving visitors in her dressing room. “Hi,” she tossed over her shoulder and around her flowing hair at Temple. “I heard a whole lot of stomping going on upstairs. Did somebody off Elvis onstage?”