“Maybe it was a strategy to make Elvis available to more than his big-city fans. Where did you see Elvis?”
“Carlsbad, New Mexico, February fourteenth, nineteen fifty-five. I weighed a hundred-and-eighteen pounds for probably the last time in my life. The waist of that circle skirt I wore would hardly fit my thigh nowadays.
They dis Elvis for getting fat, but who doesn’t?”
“Gods, supermodels, and rock stars aren’t supposed to. And maybe they take all those drugs to make sure they don’t.”
“We never even dreamed about taking recreational drugs back then. Cigarettes and whiskey and rock ‘n’ roll music, they were the wicked ways teenagers wanted to get into. If we took anything, it was the officially sanctioned uppers that Elvis started with, his mother’s amphetamine diet pills. My mother had some too, and I `borrowed” em.”
“And it was all so innocent.”
“Yup. Magic pills from Dr. Family Physician.”
Temple gazed toward the stage. The fifties seemed so quaint, like they really were lived in blackand-white. On stage, a band was assembling. Drummer, a real piano man, guitarist, backup singers, they all dressed in some amalgam of fifties–sixties clothes.
Electra leaned over to whisper in Temple’s ear, even though no one sat near them. The rows of empty seats were sprinkled with guests of the performers who took pains to sit as far away as possible from each other. Maybe they thought they might give away the trade secrets of their Elvis, like Mike’s lip trick with liquid latex.
“Most of these guys started singing along to karaoke machines, or used their own tapes. Performing with a live band is a major step up for them. They’re beginning to understand what Elvis was up against for the hundreds of performances he gave from nineteen seventy to seventy-seven.”
Temple absorbed the information. She didn’t sing a note, didn’t ever want to do more than hum along to “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Happy Birthday to You,” all a loyal American or decent friend should be expected to do. Molina, though, the humming homicide lieutenant, she could stand up on the Blue Dahlia stage and belt out a melody to whatever riffs the backup bandwas ruffling. Took nerve. And if the nerve wasn’t there anymore, maybe it took pills.
Then a bouncing baby Elvis was bursting into stage center, his fringe jiggling and the gemstones winking like a drunken fleet of sailors on shore leave. That’s what Elvis’s white jumpsuits reminded Temple of, not comic-book superhero uniforms like the books said, but little boy’s sailor suits, wide-legged, jaunty, innocent, only Elvis’s had been embroidered with glitter. Suddenly the teddy bears that lined his bedrooms made sense.
She watched the heavyset guy who resembled every repairman who’d ever been sent to her apartment to fix something, down to the swag of heavy belt at his hips, tool-belt-as-gunslinger-holster substitute.
Elvis was not only blue suede shoes, he was bluecollar superhero. The guy who went from high school into the navy or the army. The average Joe, not Joe College. And his garish onstage taste celebrated the common person’s idea of glamour, half Hollywood, half gas-station fire sale.
The music, though, that was timeless, classless. The words were nonsense, the beat was liberating. Gotta dance. Elvi came and went, a lot of them the chunky sailor-suited model so endearingly kiddish despite so many being on the other side of forty. The sleeker ones did Comeback Elvis in black leather biker suits that shone like silk-velvet tafetta in the spotlights. Velvet Elvis made a spectacular entrance in her midnight jumpsuit. Temple knew that the costume would light up like a gasoline-slick rainbow under the actual performance’s special light gels, but even underlit the look was dynamite.
Oddly enough, the sole female Elvis impersonator was also the only contestant to evoke Elvis the sleek young sex symbol. Electra, not knowing Velvet’s gender, grabbed Temple’s forearm and hung on as Velvet Elvis strutted, purred, and stomped through “Tiger Man.”
“That’s it!” Electra cheered Velvet Elvis on, under her breath. “That’s it!”
That’s it, all right, Temple thought, a good part of the young singer’s appeal, only then the phenomenon hadn’t been noticed and named. The Androgynous Elvis. Clairol on his hair, eyebrows, and sideburns, mascara on his lashes.
The fifties were more decadent than they knew.
Temple found herself getting a kick out of the proceedings. Some of the impersonators were so nervous they shook (so had Elvis) but they had brought an innocent, sincere, raw energy to their acts that overcame the sophisticated theater-goer’s expectations.
She leaned back in her seat, scrunched down on her tailbone, and let her right tennis shoe noiselessly tap the carpeted floor.
Beside her, Electra sat transfixed, her features lit by the reflected stage lights so she glowed like a, well, a thirty-six-yearold, anyway.
Elvis was gone, but his fans lived on, and they would never see him again. Only imitations.
Temple scoured her memory. for some performer whose absence from a stage or the planet would deprive her. All she could come up with was the Mystifying Max, and that wasn’t a fair comparison. Maybe she just wasn’t born to be a fan… .
The onstage musicians must have been tiring of backing up such an endless parade of Elvises, who were beginning to blend one into the other. Even what they excelled at seemed lost in the sheer repetition.
You could hear the musicians’ feet shuffling during a lull, and those of the backup girl singers—and they were no more or less than girls in their fluffy outfits and hair.
Then she became aware of a figure, a ghostly figure lost in the dark at the back of the set.
The drums started pounding in deep, bellowing alteration: drum/drum drum/drum drum/drum. “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” the universe-opening theme music from2001: A Space Odyssey that live-concert Elvis had taken for his opening theme.
It was melodramatic, it was egomaniacal and pretentious, it was terrific theater.
The man at the back lifted his arms slowly to the pulsing throbs of the drums, a short cloak he wore spreading like wings. Then he turned and strode forward into the lights, a dead man walking.
He came onward. This was Edwardian Elvis of the early seventies. This was the mature, recharged Elvis who had resumed live performance tours after nine frustrating years of inane movie-making, all engineered to provide the most money and exposure and least star satisfaction by the inimitable, pseudonymous, and bogus Colonel Tom Parker, carny confidence man turned theatrical manager. Some said Parker had mismanaged Elvis to death.
But he wasn’t dead now. He was in complete control.
Temple quite literally sat up and took notice. His steps, timed to the thundering drumbeat, seemed to lift her off her seat.
He came right to the stage’s very brim. If maddened girls weren’t jumping up and down in the orchestra pit, screaming, they should have been.
The band suddenly revved up and the still figure exploded into searing song and mind-bending motion. First came “Jailhouse Rock” as delivered by a pneumatic drill. Then “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Women started screaming in the audience. Temple stared wide-eyed as Electra jumped up on her seat and began clapping her hands. Temple blinked at the spectacle on stage. Images of Elvis in performance were emblazoned on the collective popular memory. The impersonators had the patented poses all down, wide stance, swiveling hips, knees flexed, tippy-toe balance, dipping almost to the stage floor. Elvis fan or not Elvis fan, everyone had images of Elvis branded into their brains.
This guy made it all new, reinvented the moment as if twenty-some years had never passed. Evoked the same primal screams.
Temple felt herself about to surrender to the mass hysteria that welled up around her like a ground fog filled with shrieking horns that happened to be people.