Yet desert flowers can lay dormant and then bloom spectacularly, even if only once in a blue-suede moon. And the media always loves a spectacular failure. And resurrection.
Like Elvis, who was the quintessential Vegas entertainer, larger than life, flawed and beloved for it, immortal for his sad mortality.
That is why Graceland in Memphis has created its first permanent outpost at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino.
I find that news very exciting. Fact is, Elvis and I share a certain simpatico spirit. I have seen his ghost out and about in Las Vegas and am expecting even more encounters now that so many of his beloved objects have landed here.
Some may pooh-pooh my “Elvis sightings”. True, a lot of nut jobs have claimed that honor. But none of them can also claim a historically established heritage of nine lives. That is how I believe I can see Elvis. I can slip in and out of my past and present lives if I am in the right meditative mood. It is nothing like the psychic powers Miss Electra’s overbearing companion, Karma, claims.
These are dude-to-dude moments when our psyches intersect. They did not call Elvis “the Memphis Cat” for nothing. In fact, he and I cleared up the cold case about who killed Jumpin’ Jack Robinson at the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo to get the land it sat on, which still has a valuable, but lost, gambling license. He went there in person as a young first-time Vegas act and I went there in spirit, diving deep into my hep cat catalog of lives.
So I listen when Miss Temple is muttering to me while sopping up Internet trivia on Elvis’s latest incarnation at a big off-Strip venue.
“Wow, Louie,” she says, staring too long at the screen. “Elvis has finally, really never ‘left the building’.”
That is the announcement made after his concerts, when fans were hopping and shouting for encores, but the concert was over. “Elvis has left the building.”
“Elvis is back almost where he began here,” she says. “The attraction building is the real deal, not some ersatz pretender. Before it was the LVH-Las Vegas, then the Las Vegas Hilton. It was originally the International Hotel, where Elvis performed more than six hundred sold-out shows between his 1968 ‘comeback’ and 1976 death.”
I press nearer. Elvis’s comeback had only lasted a short cat’s life. Eight years. How old am I? It is none of your business, I would trumpet to anyone crass enough to ask.
“Hmm.” Miss Temple is sliding onto her spine on the chair. “When Priscilla Presley opened ‘Graceland Presents ELVIS: The Exhibition-The Show-The Experience’ last year on April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday, Miss Temple and I know, but so few follow the Bard these days), she looked as gorgeous and young as only a seventy-year-old Hollywood celebrity can. Imagine going from child bride-in-waiting to ex-wife to savvy businesswoman and mother guarding the major legacy of Graceland.”
That is very hard for me to imagine, especially the child bride-in-waiting part. I do not wait well.
I see the screen morph into Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding photo.
Miss Temple frowns. “Not an inspiring wedding gown, Louie. One of those sixties waistless long sheaths. She does have a small train, though. Oh, well. Back to business.”
Miss Temple is devouring the new attraction’s details because she might use them in related press releases.
She often talks to herself by pretending to talk to me, and, face it, I am a world-class listener because I have chosen not to talk back. She has no idea that I, too, have a deep, abiding interest in my buddy, the King.
“The redone old International showroom opened on the 59th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s first, ill-attended Las Vegas performance at the Venus Room of the New Frontier Hotel. Now the renamed ‘Elvis Presley Theater’, it has been restored to ‘vintage perfection’. I gotta see that vintage perfection, Louie. Think Matt would go with me?”
I would, but I do not need a ticket to sneak into any show in town.
“And,” she exclaims, “Some PR genius even dug up, excuse the expression, an aged cocktail waitress who had worked at the International then and remembered Elvis.”
Miss Temple laughed uproariously at the computer when she read that.
“What a PR coup,” she said. “Imagine a Vegas hotel keeping a cocktail waitress employed into her eighties. I suppose Elvis was her claim to continuing employment. Good for her!”
One forgot how young Elvis had been when he had died. Forty-two. When his life spirit has intersected occasionally with one of my lost early lives, he is in his mid-thirties prime, like the black leather he wore in his comeback TV show, sleek and dangerously sexy. Also like me when Miss Midnight Louise is not around to rain on my parade.
And like Miss Temple, I love every facet and era and trace of the 24/7 carnival fantasy show Vegas always has been and always will be. And I know Miss Temple and I both will always mourn a classic attraction gone dark.
35
An Attraction Gone Dark
The sun also fades fast in Las Vegas.
As she drove up to the Neon Nightmare, Temple could barely make out the support structure for the galloping neon horse that had given the nightclub its name. Neon Nightmare, the horse being the “mare” part. It had reminded her of Dallas’s famous red neon flying “Pegasus”, restored in both its nineteen-thirties original and a new version commissioned before the first horse had been miraculously found disassembled in a box and restored.
The parking lot lights were dark too, so Temple drove her red Miata with the convertible top down, as if that provided any security, right up to the main entry door.
The building was a black glass-clad pyramid, inside and out, a nightclub owned and also used as a private clubhouse by a cabal of magicians delighting in all the secret mystifying stage scenery, effects and props of their profession.
“Boo.” Max’s face appeared at her lowered driver’s side window.
Temple started. With his black hair and trademark black turtleneck sweater and slacks, she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the building. Magicians before and since before Houdini had used Men in Black against a black curtain onstage to create their illusions.
“Sorry,” Max said when she blinked. “I forgot how spooky this place was.” He opened the door and Temple handed him her tote bag while she locked the car.
“The place is closed,” she said. “How do we get in?”
“No worries. I already ‘cracked’ it. I did perform here as the Phantom Mage for a while.”
Temple took in the faint reflection of them as a couple in the dark door, cast by a distant street light, a dark attraction that had gone darker.
“You almost died here, Max. How can you stand seeing it again?”
“You’re right. Standing is taxing. We should go in and sit down.”
He produced a small but powerful flashlight and tapped the seamless black façade. A wide door clicked ajar. Faint light shone behind it.
“Temple, we have nothing to fear from the things that almost got us. It’s the new ones that might.”