Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

My ears pick up a tinny, fragile sound. Am I hearing the circular shimmy of an old record spinning on an antique gramophone?

My shivs begin to twitch in an intoxicating rhythm. My pads begin to tap dance down the stairs.

Have you seen some of those Disney cartoons from the thirties, where every character from Goofy to Mickey Mouse steps to a syncopating beat? It is like I am back in one of my À la Cat commercials, with the Fontana brothers in their zoot-suited sartorial rainbow backing me up. Me, the hep black cat leading the jazz-baby, swing-time parade.

I am looking around, and my trusty night vision is broadcasting in black-and-white.

Hi-de ho .

Thirties nightclub and film black entertainer Cab Calloway is swinging out in his pale zoot suit and pancake hat, singing “Minnie the Moocher”.

That was caught on film. This is Vegas, baby. where the ghosts go to jive. I spot Josephine Baker, the black Venus of Paris, as long and loose and lovely as an exiled black American performer on the Continent has ever been. She has the liquid moves of the Black Ninja Brigade in Ma Barker’s clowder.

Here she is again, in a magic basement, conjuring thoughts of Count Basie, bein’ told by the Strip hotels black folks cannot come into Miss Josephine’s Vegas show. So she sits on the stage doin’ nothing. Hi-de-ho. Us black cats rush the aisles when we are finally let in. Then she cuts loose.

So do I. I spin Louise into a ragtime do-si-do. And the faster we spin, the more we see of the phantom basement and its ghostly cavalcade amid cries of “Go, voodoo daddy”!

I am watching the film clips from a black-and-white forties’ film, Hellzapoppin featuring black performers doing a heckuva lotta jazztime, swingtime, and lindy hopping. These folks are as fluid in motion as my kind is. They are doing back flips, under twists, every spine-bending, mind-bending move we black cats can make.

All the dancers are dressed in old-fashioned service roles uniforms of that era, frilly white maids’ aprons and caps over black uniforms, and as white-capped and white-clad cooks and nurses, white-coated waiters and train conductors, or jumpsuit-capped service uniforms all wearin’ black-and-white spectator shoes and bobby sox. Everybody, every hep cat who has got rhythm is mopping up the floor with more moves than even a movie camera can record. It is past the birth of jazz and swing, it is an infectious sound and beat and joy of breakin’ out of an uptight time.

I am doin’ a rear-leg risin’ solo, swinging Louise around by her fast-tappin’ tail and the whole place is jumpin’ with jive.

The quick-timing feet in their bobby sox and shoes retreat to the edges, the lines of storage units padlocked shut, to leave Louise and me doing our spotlight solo.

I am five again, doin’ jive again, serenading the ladies from the backyard fence with Hi-de-ho. I make a classic cool daddy-o with a cat-chain down to my ankles. I am the cat’s pajamas with a harem of crazy little mamas.

“The lyrics are politically incorrect, Daddy-o, but I did not know you could cut a rug,” Louise says, turning a tight circle on her tippy toes. “You are the RKO-radio Daddy-o.”

I know this is a dream, or a hallucination, but it seems all the pent-up, long-gone pizzazz in Vegas’s secret past has survived in this old building and its basement.

And then everything unwinds to slow motion, and the movie folk dances slow until they are almost at a standstill, like a photographic still.

And in the still, still of the night, I hear the “Memphis Cat” Himself, wailing out “Heartbreak Hotel” like he did it his first time in Vegas at the New Frontier Hotel.

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.