I see Elvis in his prime. Nineteen fifty-six. A black-and-white figure from an era photographed in black-and-white.
I see the storage lockers as cells, and Elvis sliding down a fireman’s pole and rocking out like a crazy-limbed Siamese in mating season.
“Look, Louise,” I say. “The King is here.”
“Kitty Kong?” she asks, looking around for the rumored King of Cats. But she cannot see Elvis. Only I can.
This is not the first time I have seen Elvis in Vegas. He and I go back a long way, thanks to my nine lives. He knows I will keep quiet about his ghostly gigs. He knows I pick up and amplify his vibe. And now he is the absentee star of a new Vegas attraction. The Elvis Experience offers Graceland artifacts, theater shows…and the obligatory wedding chapel.
Poor Miss Electra is getting a lot of competition. I hope she will be allowed to keep her soft sculpture tribute to Elvis in her Lovers’ Knot wedding chapel pew. He has the best lap of the lot and likes the company.
The EE is Everything Elvis, but no Elvis tribute performers need apply. It opened April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday, I happen to know, thanks to Ingram—at Westgate Las Vegas. The Westgate was previously the Las Vegas Hilton and earlier the International when Elvis performed there. Many of the current staff knew Elvis, including an eighty-two-year-old cocktail waitress who worked during Elvis’s first show there. I find it amusing that Elvis will be occupying 28,000 square feet of the former Star Trek: The Exhibit attraction. Perhaps Elvis will transport in some night and we can boogie.
Back in the fifties, Elvis bombed with the New Frontier’s audience of Midwestern married couples more into Lawrence Welk than the Memphis Cat. But that is all right, mama, that is all right with me. We hep cats are accustomed to being misunderstood by unenlighted generations before and after us. He came back and owned the town.
All this YouTube nostalgia reminds me of the Moulin Rouge, Vegas’s first hotel-casino with all-black entertainment. All the Strip’s white show-stoppers went there to stage their own integrated late, late show: Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr. After that, the Strip had to integrate because of the competition, so the need was gone and the Moulin Rouge only lasted eight months in nineteen fifty-five.
It occurs to me, as I rock and roll with Louise and all these ghosts of times past, that there might be a very important footnote to the Moulin Rouge saga, something seriously relevant to the memories and cycles of life and death, but personal and institutional in this forgotten venue.
But now that I have listened to “Get Happy” singer Judy Garland tell me to “come on get happy” (although she never did, poor woman) and watched Elvis walk down Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel, I cannot quite recall what that is.
That is a pity. I yawn as the music and motion grows faint and feeble and fades, as do we all. Miss Midnight Louise and I lose our rhythm and find ourselves waking up from conking out on a pile of plastic garbage bags for a bed in the dark, empty basement. We leave to walk through the Vegas dawn to get a little peace and quiet.
18
Family Matters
Suburbia was a new landscape for Matt…not to mention how strange being officially viewed as a prospective son-in-law was. He wondered how an essentially irreligious family of Unitarians would regard a formerly celibate priest as Temple’s future husband. At least, like stage magician Max Kinsella, Matt was slightly famous because of his radio talk show.
As he stood and shook hands with the strapping Barr family men, he saw that Temple’s relatives were less bombastic than his large Polish family clan, but they were bigger people. They seemed like bodyguards as they escorted him and Temple up the exterior stairs and into the house’s main living area that stretched above the garage below. A sliding glass door in the living room overlooked a deck.
The low, eight-foot ceilings made Matt uneasy, like being a sandwich meat everybody was examining for two much fat. He was used to and loved the Circle Ritz’s high, barrel ceilings. His family’s venerable Chicago row houses and two-flats boasted ten-foot ceilings.
Matt relaxed with a tiny sigh when Temple’s beefy dad released her from a bone-squeezing hug, pumped Matt’s hand with an accompanying backslap, and then suggested they all go out on the deck for barbecue and beer. That seemed familiar.
Ah, air as fresh as the great outdoors. The cedar wood deck was expansive enough to hold a picnic table for twelve and overlooked a sea of mowed grass that lilted in gentle swells to a row of untrimmed bushes and trees. Minnesota tamed and Minnesota wild.
“Grew up in Chicago, I hear.” Roger Barr confirmed with a grin. “City boy. This grass here is heaven. Until you have to mow it.”
“Can’t argue,” Matt said, enjoying the breathing room so he could take in…four chunky guys all older than he, all wearing loose khaki shorts and well-filled-out T-shirts celebrating the Vikings, the Timberwolves, the Swarm and the Wild. The St. Paul Saints on Daddy Barr’s chest gave Matt hope. God help me, Matt thought quite sincerely. He did not speak Sports. He was a stranger, yes. And in a strange land, even more so.
Temple was disappearing into each brother’s embrace in turn, but emerging uncrushed. “Gee, guys,” she said, “I’m glad to see you again, too, and your full heads of Hair Club for Men.”
That was a joke. Keith, David, Tom and Hank were in various forms of transition to forty and middle age, which meant more middle and less luxuriant hair topping.
Matt duly shook their hands, which ended with a final slap each time. Good thing his job didn’t rely on using a computer keyboard, like Temple’s. His shoulders would be out for a week if this continued.
“Say, Matt,” said Keith, the apparent eldest. “We don’t generally watch daytime TV, but Mom insisted we eyeball a tape of The Amanda Show, and you are one cool talker, guy.”
By then Temple had arrived at Matt’s side to slip an arm through his.
Bad move, Matt thought. The boys didn’t want to see he had a sponsor.
“It’s a living,” Matt said with a shrug.
Temple opened her mouth to (unfortunately) sing his praises and future talk show prospects, but suddenly all attention turned to the sliding glass doors from the house behind them.
Matt, who’d wondered since he’d briefly met her in the chaos of a major Vegas banquet, what womanly steel had borne and put up with this lusty male throng—saw Temple’s mother in her element at last and stood still in shock and awe.
She was a true “slip of a thing”. Her girlishly slim frame curved like a leaf about to be blown away, yet belied by those ample sixty-something laugh lines. Her short-cropped hair still flashed a glint of fiery red among the iron gray. Now he knew the gene pool Temple and her aunt, Kit Carlson Fontana, had sprung from, the fey side of the northern European spring, not the Viking one. It was insane to think this wiry elf could have carried and borne all these big-headed brothers, although Karen Barr broadcast the calm control of a woman who had managed child-bearing with amazing ease, like everything else in her life.
“Matt Devine.” She paused in the open doorway to the deck, her extended arms holding a tray of muffins. “Put these out on the picnic table, sweetie, and we can all get eating.” She cocked an eye at her sons. “Yes, boys, you can safe-crack the ice chest for the Hamm’s beer now.”
Matt was actually relieved to have some heavy lifting to do—Minnesota muffins weren’t wimpy. They were as big as his fist and darkly dotted with nuts and berries.