Unknown - Douglas_Carole_Nelson_Cat_in_a_Jeweled_Jumpsuit_Bo

This makes me sorry to see my little doll and Mr. Matt Devine wasting their time going around and talking to various of these impersonator dudes when it would be much wiser to cultivate a unique source. Talk to one Elvis impersonator, and you have talked to them all, is my point.

So my target is not this plentitude of dudes, but the lone little doll among them, and I am not referring to Miss Temple. Once she has led my friends to the Elvis concession and turned them loose, the subject fades out into the hall, where I am waiting.

A classic line in crime detection is French: cherchez la femme.

In plain English, this means tail the frail.

So I pitter-patter after Miss Priscilla, aka Quincey.

Frankly, I do not expect much to come of this. I expect to end up back at her dressing room, where she will resume obsessing about the state of her resemblance to a woman who at least is still alive, even though this particular semblance of her evokes the Bride of Dracula.

I can understand the King’s fixation on the color black, however.

No wonder he dyed his wimpy golden locks to the color of soot. I am glad that my rival for the cat food spokespurrson role, Maurice, has not thought to turn his yellow coat black like mine. Elvis, I heard Miss Electra holding forth, dyed his hair because even from the first he wanted a film career and he felt dark-haired dudes had a stronger screen presence. Dudes like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, or James Dean. Well, James Dean was a little wishy-washy in the hair color department, but Tony Curtis was another favorite of Elvis, and he was black as Midnight Louie.

Another thing Elvis was into was black leather. I come by mine naturally: nose, footpads and eyeliner, only I do not have to apply mascara like some Adrian Actor dude.

So I cannot fault the guy for changing himself around to look like me. Maybe not me personally, but my kind of cat. We are considered tough hombres, let me tell you, and the ladies really go for that macho look.

Why he wanted his Miss Priscilla to also look black tothe max, I do not know. I myself prefer a bit of variety in my private life. But everyone is entitled to his little quirks, and Elvis, a born collector of everything from cars and ‘cycles to girls and horses, was dealt a full hand of little quirks too.

So there I am, only a few steps behind these cute chunky old shoes, and I almost run into Miss Priss’s pale hose when she stops at a door that is not hers.

It is all I can do to keep my whiskers from tickling her calves. I do not manage to keep from gawking up her Aline skirt to check out a garter. Nobody wears garters anymore but snakes. Sure enough, Miss Quincey has been accurate enough to Miss Priscilla’s era to be wearing a garter belt. I am impressed by her acting verisimilitude.

She does not notice me, though, not even my vulgar surveillance.

She opens this door, darts in, and turns to close it so fast she leaves me standing in the hall extracting my whiskers from the doorjamb. I have just received a most unexpected and unattractive crimp in my facial hair.

Now I am really curious! Just what is so secret behind that door? I retreat to a nearby trash container, hunker behind its cola-streaked side, and wait.

When Miss Priscilla comes out, I will be ready to dash in, or my name is not Mr. Lucky.

Actually, my name is not Mr. Lucky, but there are times when it should be.

Chapter 18

King Creole

(The title song from a 1958 film)

“And I thought that Mike and Jerry were a twin act,” Matt said, staring at the next-door dressing room chockfull of burning hunks of Elvis.

“I guess their dressing room was unusually deserted,” Temple said. “Say, wasn’t Elvis a twin?”

“Not exactly. He was a surviving twin. His brother was delivered dead about a half hour before he was born. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered if anyone here did a twin act.”

“I suppose it’s possible.” Matt didn’t add that the ever-expanding boundaries of bad taste could encompass almost anything nowadays. “His twin was named Jesse Garon.”

“And Elvis was Elvis Aaron?”

“A lot of people in the South used rhyming names for twins, if not first names, then middle names.” Matt studied the mirror-magnified mob of Elvises. “Psychologists say that twinship bonds are formed in the womb. Surviving twins like Elvis never seem to recover from the loss of that exact double. They say twins touch in the fetal stage, even kiss.”

“Ooh. Creepy.”

“And suicide rates for surviving twins are much higher than normal.”

“So maybe not just drug abuse killed Elvis?”

“No one was willing to go on record that drugs did it. Heart failure was the ostensible reason, the diagnosis for all sudden deaths. It was also used for his mother, but later sources say her death at age forty-six was caused by cirrhosis of the liver.”

“Mother drank?”

“Discreetly, but most of his male relatives weren’t in the least discreet. Overdrinking and early death were family traits. Elvis was down on alcohol, forbid having it around, though he tried it out a few times in later years. His instincts were right about booze; his family obviously had a genetic predisposition for the disease, but no one then realized that that kind of thing is genetic, and that drugs are the same bad ticket to ride. Elvis was pretty astute, but he had an odd habit of deferring to people too much. He could have been predisposed to depression, partly because of the loss of his twin, which made him likelier to take drugs.”

Temple studied the industrious rows of Elvis clones. “Do you think any of these guys abuse drugs?” “That’d be taking imitation too far.”

“I’d think so, but you never know. Let’s check ‘em out.”

“This isn’t a grocery store,” he commented.

Insouciant, she grinned back at him while wading into the narrow, gym-bag cluttered passage between big guys in bulky suits spraying their hair and fluffing their sideburns with hair dryers.

“Media coming through,” Temple caroled, making them a head-turning attraction. “No cameras yet, don’t panic. Preliminary interviews while you primp.”

Matt remained bemused by the sheer wholesale scale of Elvis imitation as an avocation, and perhaps an art form, for all he knew. He was reserving judgment until he saw some of the acts.

Was any of these men his soft-spoken midnight caller? Some shouted back and forth, exchanging tips and valued accessories such as safety pins. Most were grimly confronting their other selves in the mirrors, touching up pale roots with dye-wands, struggling to balance unevenly glued-on sideburns.

A few wives or girlfriends acted as dressers. Everybody seemed to be frowning in concentration, or shouting for an essential something that was inexplicably missing. It reminded Matt of the fevered concentration in dressing rooms before the grade-school Christmas pageant.

“Anybody missing a jumpsuit?” Temple added her voice to the hubbub. It carried like a trumpet when she wanted it to, and she did now.

That shut them all up., Faces snapped from the mirrors to focus on her red hair. And to focus on Matt standing behind her, suddenly wishing he weren’t. He still wasn’t used to being in the spotlight.

“Seriously, folks.” Now that she had their attention, Temple pressed her advantage. “Who would mutilate an expensive costume like that? Any ideas? And whose suit was it?”

“You media,” one Elvis finally said, his voice nothing like the real Elvis’s. “Always looking for the bad news.”

Temple shrugged. “Maybe it was a publicity stunt.”

That got them going. A half dozen voices chimed in. No legitimate Elvis, was the consensus, would deface the King’s image in any form. And anyway, the impersonators all knew how much money went into the Suit. They’d have to be “lower than Red West” to trash one.