Unknown - Douglas_Carole_Nelson_Cat_in_a_Jeweled_Jumpsuit_Bo

All right! Matt shook her bony hand in turn.

“My digs are right next door. I’m the only Elvisette here. There were a couple other girls, but they chickened out.”

The dressing room was a mirror-image of Quincey’s setup. Everybody pulled a lightweight chair from under the slab of dressing table that lined the walls, and sat.

“What are you interested in?” Shana asked.

“We’re interested in costumes. Jumpsuits,” Temple began in a crab-sidling manner. No sense telling her too much.

“I’m a radio talk-show host,” Matt said, giving his name, rank, and station call letters. “Someone’s been calling me, acting and sounding like Elvis. I’m trying to figure out if it’s a gimmick to promote the hotel and the Elvis competition, or if I’m dealing with a really sick person.”

“If you are, it sure could be Elvis,” Shana said ruefully.

Temple stared at Matt. He had blown his own cover, told this interrogatee everything, but he didn’t seemed worried about that at all.

Maybe Shana Stewart was a goddess, or at least a witch.

“How did you become interested in impersonating Elvis?” Temple put in, since frankness was obviously the order of the day, and she was frankly curious.

“Lily Tomlin. You ever see her do Tommy Velour, the quintessential lounge singer? Fabulous! Shows you what a woman can do when she cuts free of gender stereotypes. I’m a model.” As if Temple, ace amateur detective, hadn’t figured that one out! “I’d like to be an actress, but no one takes me seriously. I’m hoping for some coverage from this, maybe a career boost.”

“It’s quite a stretch,” Matt said. “You’d be hard to picture as a man.”

He sounded nauseatingly admiring to Temple. What had happened to all his ex-priest’s issues, like whether he could relate well with women after all those celibate years? That last line sounded like, well, a line.

Shana stretched back against the dressing table as if emulating Matt’s figure of speech. “That’s the point. If I looked butch to begin with it wouldn’t be as impressive an impersonation. And Elvis was a very pretty man, you know? That’s why he toughened up his image with blackhair and black leather. Didn’t want anyone to see the mama’s boy under the swagger. A shrink could have a field day with Oedipus complexes and repressed homosexuality with Elvis, but I think the guy was straight, that way at least.”

Temple thought it was time to assert her presence as expert interrogator. “I understand you have a very original costume and act.”

“Oh, the boys have been talking about me, have they?” Shana smiled conspiratorily. “That’s what you want: preperformance buzz. I let ‘em see just enough to get agitated about what I might be doing.”

“You’re a velvet painting come to life?” Matt asked.

Shana suddenly stood, which was quite a production at her height. She went to close her dressing room door. Temple was glad she was here as chaperone. Poor Matt wasn’t used to dealing with upfront females like this.

Shana turned, holding the door shut with her body. “You seem like a couple of decent people. I’ll show you my outfit if you keep mum about it. Oh, you can mention it and roll your eyes in front of the other Elvises, but that’s all.”

“We have become very good at rolling our eyes in front of the other Elvises,” Temple said demurely.

Shana’s raucous laughter bounced off the facing mirrors. “I bet you have!”

She went to a niche with a rod running across at shoulder height, but no costumes hung there, just a blue satin boxer’s robe and a big sweater. A long portable locked case, like sports equipment or a big musical instrument is carried in, leaned against the niche’s far wall.

Shana rotated the dial of a padlock, then cracked it open. The interior was lined in black felt, but something else black took up the space.

Temple and Matt came over to see better.

It was a black velvet jumpsuit. Heavenly bodies—constellations, planets, nebulae—decorated the flared bellbottom pants, the wide sleeve-bottoms and the front.

A dazzling asteroid belt six inches wide hung at the hips. Rather than being gemstones or studs, the celestial landmarks were laid out in something Temple, the glitz freak, had never seen before: aurora borealis rhinestones, only in chalky neon colors of lime green, hot pink, turquoise, and yellow.

“I’ve got special gels for the stage lights, kind of like black-light gels.”

“Oh,” Temple blurted, “like the strippers use.”

“Right on.” Shana eyed Temple with new respect, as if she had grown a half foot in her estimation. “It casts this white-purple glow and then this thing comes alive like a landing strip in Oz. Unbelievable.”

Matt nodded. “So they know you’re ‘Velvet Elvis,’ but they don’t know yet just how spectacular you are.”

“Right. Not until dress rehearsal. The thing is, the jumpsuit is everybody’s secret weapon. Some of the veterans don’t care, but the rest of us keep our outfits under wraps until we have to show them off.”

“So any number of you could have a costume no one’s ever seen before?” Temple speculated. That might explain why no one had claimed the mutilated jumpsuit.

Shana nodded.

“And that’s why us asking about jumpsuits might get the cold shoulder.”

Shana nodded again.

“Isn’t it hard,” Temple asked, “being the only woman?”

Shana shook her head. “No. And, after all, I’ve got a pal in Priscilla, right?”

“You and Quincey get along?”

“She’s an okay kid. Notice I did not say ‘good.’ That girl’s got a lot to prove and no one to show her the right way to go about it. But we get along. I haven’t shown her my Elvis suit, though.”

“Why did you show us?” Temple asked.

Shana shut and locked the case and resumed her chair by the mirror before she answered.

“Doing an impersonation is different from any other acting job on earth. You’re not digging into a character through the lines the playwright gave him; you’re digging into a real person through the life he lived, and in this case, died. It’s a commitment. It’s an education. If you’re any kind of actor, it’s a transformation. Even if you’re a bad actor, and there are a bunch of those here, you get caught up in the challenge, and maybe the privilege. You are an interpreter, and you want to be the best damn one you can be. So, you’ve got a vested interest, in the end.”

She leveled a glance at Matt, and Temple noticed that her eyes were a clear, strong, undrugged Elvis blue. Contact lenses, again? Ever the cynic.

“Whoever you’re talking to,” Shana went on, looking hard at Matt, “even if he thinks he’s a fraud, is in trouble. Elvis-sized trouble. King-sized trouble. I’m riding on his image. So I owe it to Elvis to help.”

Chapter 21

Ya-kitty-yak

(Elvis never recorded “Yakety-yak,” but it was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote other songs Elvis did record)

I guess I never paid attention when those Tarzan movies came on.

I find jungle life fairly boring, not to mention hard on the ears: all those exotic birds and monkeys shrieking in the trees, the stampeding elephants trumpeting like they have just been drafted into a mariachi band, natives jumping up and down chanting, drums beating to beat the mariachi band … not my scene.

Still, now I wish I had picked up a tip or two on relating to the most intelligent life form outside of Homo sapiens himself (and that is not saying much). See, these things chitter. They chatter. They screech. It is very hard to decode their ravings. Oh, they have those big brown eyes that everyone finds so expressive. So do dogs, and you know how many of their lightbulbs are on permanent dim. They also are blessed with those blasted opposablethumbs that have become the sine qua non of civilization. (This means that you are nobody without them.) But most of the time those flexible digits are only good for curling around the bars of a cage, and I do not see how that makes the species so intelligent. You will not find my pinkies curling around the bars of any cage. They will instead be kneading in fascinating rhythm into whatever soft surface is available: a mother’s milkwagon, a pillow, or whatever human epidermis is most unprotected by distracting layers of clothing.