She looked as cute as a bug in a rug. A jitterbug in a rug.
Next to her towered this tall old guy with snowy, thick hair and one of those elaborately billowing guts atop thin hips and legs that made him an excellent Santa Claus candidate.
He was wearing boots, jeans, and a nylon windbreaker. And Frosty the Snowman sideburns as fluffy as cotton balls.
The two sashayed over to Temple’s booth like Saturday-night square-dancing partners: in tune and dressed to charm.
“Temple,” Electra said, gesturing to her escort, “this is Today Elvis!”
For a bizarre moment Temple thought she was on a TV show, like Today from NBC, or This Is Your Life (but It Shouldn’t Be).
The old guy stuck out a callused hand that took Temple’s and shook. Hard. “Howdy. Nice to meetcha. Call me Israel.”
She blinked again. “I beg your pardon?”
“Or my younger friends call me `Izzy.’ Israel Feinberg. I, ah, am in the show. I do Today Elvis.”
“You do ‘Today Elvis.’ Elvis Today. What else?”
While Temple babbled, Electra slid into her side of the booth first, on the power of her unseen crinolines—mercy, but those fifties skirts had Puff Power! Israel slid in after her.
Aside from the gut, he was a handsome old boy with a self-denigrating charm that could either go country or populous urban.
“So you’re the legendary Temple Barr,” he said, nodding sagely. “Electra here says you’re a mean gal to cross.”
“Um, I don’t know. Nobody bothers to cross me much. So how’d you become Today Elvis?”
He chuckled, a rich, operatic sound. A singer, Temple twanged.
“Born in the USA, the same year as E. Nineteen thirty-five. Heart of the Depression. Up north. Philadelphia. Wouldn’t know a guitar from a sitar. But I sang a little. Did a lot of Neil Simon on the amateur circuit in the sixties. You ever see Come. Blow Your Horn? Ah, it’s old, cold stuff now. I was the playboy son in that. Kept my hair. Liked to sing. Suddenly occurred to me: if Elvis were alive today, he might not look, or sound, too different from me. Can you believe it? Elvis had Jewish blood, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, he thought so. Wore a Star of David and a cross together, to hedge his bets. Put a Star of David on his mother’s headstone. Gotta love a guy like that, and him studying all those Eastern gurus too. Omni-Elvis. I can dig it.”
“So, now you do—?”
“Ordinary Elvis.” His arms spread wide to display his middle-class, middle-aged spread. “Unadorned Elvis. How he might have been had he lived to his father’s age. His hair was already white at forty-two. Maybe hishealth problems made his weight worse, but it’s the burden male flesh is heir to. He was wearing girdles in his last months. The black hair dye wasn’t cosmetic then, it was necessary. Johnny Carson said it: old, fat, and forty. Johnny was blessed with thin genes. Me, I wear jeans, and I’m old, fat, and sixty”—he glanced at Electra—“something. Elvis would be sixty-four today. I figure I’ve aged and saged and sagged enough to do him justice. So, I ‘do’ him.” He leaned over the table to wink at Temple. “Most fun I ever had in my whole life.”
Temple put her hands to her … temples and leaned back in the booth. “Thank you. ‘Fun.’ That’s what everyone forgot. Elvis had fun. Even if it was just an escape—”
“Especially if it was an escape! Let the man have a little fun, young lady! He didn’t have much while he was growing up poor. He didn’t have much after the Colonel got his claws into him. He didn’t have as much fun as his fans got out of him. The fun was short and the shit was deep. I play Elvis as if he had outlived and outloved and outlawed them all.”
“That’s neat,” Temple said.
Across the table from her, Electra beamed.
“That’s right. That’s all right, Mama.” Izzy winked.
Temple felt as if she had entered an Alice-in-Wonderland set.
They dined on fried-banana-peanut-butter sandwiches, with burned bacon on the side. She and Electra had cherry Pepsis and turtle sundaes with pecans, butterscotch, and hot fudge sauce. Yummmm! All she needed was a dormouse and a caterpillar. No Red Queen, though. Skip the Red Queen. Come to think of it, where was Molina? They discussed the buried Jumpsuit.
“Right,” Izzy said, munching on a burger. He had skipped the burned bacon. “It’s Freudian. Symbolic. If there’s any one symbol of Elvis, it’s those damn jumpsuits. We impersonators—pardon, according to the estate, we’re now ‘tribute performers.’ La-di-dah! La-didah-dah. La-di-dah-dah.” He was jiving in the booth, drumming his fingertips on the mint-green Formica tabletop and Temple was thinking Elvis would be sixty-four … when I’m sixty-four. Need me, feed me. Fried bananas and peanut butter. Comfort foods, every last one of them.
“Izzy?”
“Yeah, kid?” Drum, drum, drum-drum-drum. Doowap, doo-wap.
He was like some uncle she had never had, the one you could ask about anything. He was cool for an old dude.
“Izzy? Would Elvis really be exactly like you today?”
“I hope not, honey.” He leaned toward her, his dark eyes set in baggy, wrinkled bezels like elephant knees. “I hope Elvis today would be sleek and toned, flat-bellied, and that his coiffure would be dark and smooth as semi-sweet chocolate. I hope he’d be everything that I’m not. Eternal almost-youth at no more than … urn, fifty-six, a well-preserved, hale and healthy fifty-six. With lots of plastic surgery and hair transplants and maybe Viagra; you think?”
She laughed. “If he isn’t like you, he should be so lucky.”
He inclined his snowy head. Like a king. “Thank you.”
“Izzy. Could Elvis still be around? If he was, what would … could he look like? Really?”
Izzy sighed deeply. “If he didn’t look quite like me? What are you asking?”
“Could he pass as himself? Could he still be out here? Somewhere? What would he really look like?
“You tried one of those police department computer imagining things?”
“No, and I don’t have access. I only have access to speculation. To you, Today Elvis.”
“You’re serious. You think Elvis could be out there. You … have a notion.”
“I have a wild idea.”
Electra, who had sat back to luxuriate in Temple’s learning to appreciate Izzy, stared dreamily at the grille of a fifty-eight Oldsmobile embedded into the soda fountain. “I’m getting the weirdest feeling. Like Elvis is everywhere, just like Mojo Nixon said. Just … open your mind’s eye, and see for yourself.”
Temple’s mind’s eye saw senior citizens, even if they used to rock ‘n’ roll. But who could channel Elvis better?
“Izzy, is there anybody in this competition who could really be Elvis?”
He shook his head. “No contest. I’m probably the closest thing to reality, and I’m a far cry. A far cry. Hey. Young lady. You just reminded an old man how inadequate he is.”
“No. I just reminded you how close you are. No one else?”
“Well … I’ve seen most of the acts rehearsing.” He shook his frosty head. “Naw. Maybe … that guy they call the King of Kings. Maybe him. Maybe. Heck, lil’ darling shiksa. He looks too young, but then you kinda hope Elvis would be Forever Young. He’s got the power. Part of it, anyway.”
“Do you think he could still be out there?”
“Sheesh! Where’d this kid learn to ask questions? No. Elvis is dead. He killed himself after everybody around him let him down, after he let everybody around him down. He’s better off dead. He had too much pain. He had too much … too much. The man makes me cry. That’s why I ‘do’ him. He makes me feel. That’s a luxury at my age.”
Electra took his hand.
“I’da saved him if I could,” Izzy said, “but no one could. And especially not you, kid. Especially not you.”
Temple, chastened, thought. She thought, rebelliously. Elvis was out there somewhere, or all of this wouldn’t be happening.