Cat In A Jeweled Jumpsuit

They are listening for the first sounds of the low-profile backup musicians creeping into place one by one. Picking up and adjusting their instruments even though no one is supposed to notice them, these Rumplestiltskins of the gold about to be woven by the main attraction.

Elvis to the hundreth power.

Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief.

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

Poor man, rich man, beggared by a thief.

Doctored and lawyered, and left to grief.

Victim, hit man, bridegroom, bride.

Singer, survivor, sweetheart, suicide.

Temple finished installing the fountain of illusion veiling over the high, illusory helmet of hair beneath it. Steel within smoke.

She looked as much like Priscilla as Quincey had, as any woman would who erected the same cage of artifice around herself.

Poor Priscilla, who could only free Elvis once she had freed herself from the gilded cage he had made her; only when he was dead, and none of it mattered but the trademarks.

Temple’s fingertips trembled as she adjusted the veiling. This was a foolhardy thing to do. She had even deceived her stalwart defenders, but they had their own stage roles to play, and she feared their presence would intimidate the killer. Besides, she had Bucek’s professionals looking out for her, promise.

The hair pick so essential to an evenly balanced beehive was clenched in her hand: six inches of pointed metal. Not much of a weapon, but easily concealed.

Bucek was out there.

And the Fontana boys.

And maybe even Agent Mulder, this being a natural X-Files case, but Temple didn’t believe in that last notion as much as she believed in Elvis.

Because he, the original dead man, had driven every incident that had haunted this hotel opening, and had even impinged on the grounds of the Crystal Phoenix.

He meant something different to every person who thought he or she knew him, or loved him, or betrayed him. Sometimes a legend is so large he cannot be counted out.

This Priscilla outfit was made for entangling. Temple stood, arranged the folds, and floated to the door like a gorgeous ghost.

She was so totally retro. In the spirit, so to speak. Ready to meet a ghost on a parapet.

Ready to exact revenge. Extract justice.

Hopefully, the villain of the piece would cooperate. A knock sounded on her door.

She unjammed the chair, swept it aside, threw open the door.

“Quincey! Hey, kid, I’m glad you escaped the JD types to come back to do your part.”

“Forget it, Crawf,” Temple said, sneering delicately. “I didn’t want to waste the neck tattoo for nothing.”

She swept past him, heading for the stairs to the stage. “You gonna help me galumph up these stairs in this too-dead outfit? You owe me for this one. I hope you break a leg,” she added nastily.

Nothing like family solidarity, right, Elvis? The heavy hair, the cataracts of veiling, dulled the sounds pounding off the stage. The show was underway.

As Crawford trumpeted the impersonators’ names between acts, Elvis after Elvis attacked the ebony wood with his feet and voice and soul.

Temple watched from the wings, impressed, but not moved. All were mostly good. None shook the world.

Then Velvet Elvis came on, her holographic black jumpsuit crawling with phosphorescent constellations as the special lighting gels kicked in. Her voice was high, but clear, her angular moves impeccable.

The crowd roared as she finished her three-minute set and eeled off, tensile as a guitar string tuned to high E.

All the performers nodded to Temple waiting alone in the wings as they exited. She was the prize. The High Princess who would award the Sacred Belt.

It lay near her in an open box long enough to hold roses: a five-inch-wide length of inscribed metal that would look heavy even around Mr. T’s 24-karat neck.

Temple felt cultural confusion. In a way the artifact was the Sword in the Stone. In a way it was the National Wrestling Federation trophy belt. It was Platinum Records and Latinum bars, a cross-cultural mélange of trophies both fictional and factual.

It meant nothing and everything, just as Elvis had. It meant life and death, just as Elvis had.

She was Priscilla, she was Guinevere. Both had feet of clay while they wielded belts of gold.

She was mortal, she was eternal.

The sword was in the lake, the sword was buried in a bejeweled back.

She was a symbol, she was a solver of symbols. She was nuts to be here.

Then the nine Fontana boys bounced onstage, each to a twanging guitar chord, each in a pose that reflected his version of Elvis.

“Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” wailed the first.

“You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” whined the second.

“Running Scared,” howled the third.

“Farther Along,” crooned the fourth.

“Find Out What’s Happening,” urged the fifth. “Any Day Now,” moaned the sixth.

“Love Me Tender,” whispered the seventh.

“Crying in the Chapel,” blazed the eighth.

“Amen,” intoned the ninth.

They got a standing ovation.

Temple was among the clappers who blistered the heels of their hands.

Then someone else was gyrating on stage. Kenny! Looking much larger than himself, larger than life.

“Do You Know Who I Am?” he wailed with savage passion, hips swiveling like a stopped-up pepper shaker on a humid, Gulf-coast restaurant table.

Temple jumped up and down in the wings. “Go, Kenny, go!” An exiting Elvis glowered at her. She wasn’t supposed to show favoritism.

Temple settled down to look around. No one much noticed her. She really wouldn’t come into play until she awarded the winner’s belt.

If the killer was an Elvis freak, and if “Priscilla” was his next target, it didn’t make sense to kill her until all the shouting was over.

“Hey!” Oversized paused by her. They had to whisper, which helped disguise her voice.

“You guys did good,” she told him.

“Thanks. You okay, Miss Quincey?”

“Fine.”

“You want some us to hang out by you?”

“Naw. What’s to worry? I’m packing a really mean hair spray.”

Oversized laughed. “You always did. Well, if you’re okay—”

“Go on. Wait for the rankings. I’m sure you guys got at least an eight.”

“It’s like the Olympics, right? Ten’s the winner.” “But eight’s not to sneeze at. Go on.”

“You’re sure in good spirits, Miss Quincy. I can’t see why Miss Temple wanted us to leave you to your own devices, seeing as how your own devices involve some pretty strange stuff.”

“I’m fine.” She pushed Oversized away, quite a feat given his bulk, and her lack of it. “Quincey” couldn’t take too close examination.

She watched him join his brothers in passing behind the black velvet back curtain to the stage’s other side, where Crawford held forth as emcee and they could watch him. It only Crawf were the target most likely … ! She felt terrible about deceiving them, but the show must go on.

The King of Kings’ show wouldn’t go on.

Temple lost her sense of time and place as she thought about Lyle. She had really liked him in the few minutes they had talked, and would probably never know what he had done to merit witness protection, or death. Maybe nothing but blow the whistle. Why would a man risk his life for recognition as someone he could never be? If the King of Kings had lived and won, a protected witness really couldn’t afford that much attention. Nor could the “real” Elvis, if Lyle had been what Crawford thought he was.

Being Elvis seemed to be an unhappy vocation all around. What was the attraction? Did they all hope to do Elvis better than Elvis had? No, it was something else. They all wanted to save Elvis.

Turn back the clock, step on their blue suede shoes. If they could change something in the Elvis legend, they could change Elvis himself. Save him. Even Priscilla was still engaged in that very mission, through Elvis Presley Enterprises. Redeem the past by preserving it in plastic for the present and future King.

Beam me up, mama.

The stage was sprouting new Elvi like legendary dragon’s teeth sowed soldiers.

But the routine—Crawford’ s slightly lugubrious emceeing, sudden entrance, hard-chord intro, quick and dirty rendering, fast exit—was becoming routine. Repetitive drudgery, as it had been for Elvis, in the end.

Temple heard the numbers work their way to the inevitable countdown.

Sixty-seven. Eighty-three. Ninety-four. She yawned. Gosh, she hadn’t seen Electra’s new boyfriend, Today Elvis, perform yet. A shock of white hair would be anice change from all the black. Funny guy. Israel what? Feinberg. Not a likely Elvis impersonator name. Unless … wasn’t Israel an anagram for Is real? Could it be? Where was he? The watch she wore under Priscilla’s long, dainty Cinderella-gown sleeves read almost midnight. A rat-a-tat of bass guitar chords preceded a rebel yell. An Early Elvis in black leather came sliding across the dark stage floor on bended knees, a guitar cocked at his leading hip like an ax.

“(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” was the song, and a madman incarnate delivered it straight from Beelzebub’s mail room.

Temple straightened up, blinked, and only then noticed a pale satin rope looping down from the heights above her misty headdress.

Every eye in the place fixed on the magnetic Elvis on stage. Tutti Frutti Elvis from rehearsals, Temple realized belatedly. Why did he change his number … ? Her hand lifted to bat at the encroaching stage line. Wait! There were no white ropes backstage, only black—The dangling bridal rope was looping around her neck.

She twisted her head away, but the pouf of veiling over her exaggerated hairdo made it hard to see. Holy Hound Dog! Someone was trying to strangle her! Bucek had been right.

Her arms flailed so sharply Minnie’s shoulder seams ripped like pressed wood in a table saw.

Beads rained past her veiling, bleached poppy seeds falling to the stage floor, but Temple couldn’t hear their brittle landing. Everything was pulsing to the song’s driving beat; the stage floor was heaving, her throat was tightening and her eyes were losing focus in a pale, many-layered haze.

The corner of her eye caught a compact black form launching at her head, launching beyond her head.

Something was screaming, screeching. Not her, her voice was silenced.

The white satin snake at her neck loosened and fell away just as the onstage Elvis charged into her vision like a rocket.

He grabbed her elbow.

His grip forced her to duck and run forward. By center stage she had been dragged to her knees beside him, skidding on yards of beaded organza.

They were sliding together like suicidal skiers toward the stage’s far corner rim, a satin garrote trailing over Temple’s left shoulder like an aviator’s scarf, like the scarf that had caught in Isadora Duncan’s car wheels and killed her. What a way to go! Elvis and Priscilla skidded to a dead stop at the very brink of the stage, cheek to cheek, right where a phalanx of photographers in the pit were posed to snap their picture.

Temple coughed discreetly. “Nice timing,” she complimented her unknown savior. One of Bucek’s ersatz Memphis Mafia men? She never would have credited the FBI man with such flair.

“Rotten planning,” he muttered through her smile and his into her almost-kissed lips.

The voice was as unmistakable as Elvis’s. “Max!?” “May I call you Cilla?”

“Oh … fudge.”

Chapter 57

Won’t You Wear My Ring

(Entered Billboard’s list at number seven, the highest opening position of any Elvis single; advance orders exceeded one million)

Frank Bucek offered Temple a huge Styrofoam cup of coffee.

“I’ll never get to sleep tonight if I drink this.” “Maybe that’s not a bad idea. No dreams. I heard Elvis had a lot of nightmares.”

She was back in Quincey’s dressing room with what was left of Minnie’s instant wedding gown.

Bucek tossed an ivory satin rope in a plastic bag on the dressing table top. “You had a close call.”

“More like a close curtain call.”

He shook his head.

People still clustered in the hall, but they were alone for the moment.

“I’m a little fuzzy on what happened,” Temple admitted.

“We’re still a lot fuzzy on what happened. The Fontana Elvi tell me you told them to guard that Buchanan guy? Why? For God’s sake, why?”

“I was afraid no one would try anything with that much Elvis-power around. Those guys can be pretty pervasive.”

“Yeah, like garlic. You’re lucky that monkey escaped.”

“Monkey? I thought … wasn’t it a cat that jumped up when I was being attacked?”

She was thinking of Midnight Louie, of course, her knight in shining fur.

“Chimpan-zee.” Bucek had the nondescript, chiseled features of an astronaut or a military man or a monk. Hearing him intone the name of the beast that had saved her was too funny for words, but Temple didn’t have the energy to laugh. “Named ‘Chatter.’ Ring a bell?”

“Elvis had a pet chimp named Scatter. He trained it to play all sorts of vulgar tricks. And it came to a bad end, didn’t it? It got hooked on straight scotch and bourbon and turned violent. Everybody lost interest and it was caged at. Graceland until it died of cirrhosis of the liver. What’s gonna happen to this one?”

“Hey, he fingered a hitman for the Mob. We’ll have to put him in protective custody. Probably here at the hotel Animal Elvis exhibition. In a big chimp suite. Lots of interaction with the clientele. He should be fine.”

“You have a sense of humor,” she accused.

“Don’t tell Matt. It would destroy him.”

“And you too, probably. So … somehow the chimp, who belonged to the hit man, got out. So he happened to find his master right when the guy was homing in for the kill. Then the killer was an Elvis addict, right?”

“Right.” Bucek still looked amused, like Temple was a trained chimp he was watching. “You’re so smart, how come you didn’t finger the killer before he laid a finger on you?”

“With so darn many Elvis impersonators here? I’m not totally stupid. I had a leading candidate, but he nevercame near me all night and I didn’t figure he could kill me long distance.”

“Then you got a little distracted.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“That next-to-last Elvis really got to you, didn’t he?” “He was good.”

“He was great. Distracted you from the fact that you were a potential victim. Maybe even made the killer so jealous he decided to interrupt the act with murder. Almost was the death of you, that Elvis. You remember him?”

Temple tried to look vague and helpless. It was hard. “Yeah, but … it all mashes together.”

“He got you out of harm’s way, though, in the end. Amazing how he swept you into that photo opportunity at the last moment. The Sun photographer says he’s got a shot that looks just like Elvis and Priscilla at their wedding. Yep. That ninety-ninth Elvis made a big impression on the judges. They were going to give him the top award.”

“Going to?”

“Couldn’t find him after all the excitement.” “Really?”

“Couldn’t find him entered in the competition.” “Really.”

“The rumor is, Elvis saved you.”

“Elvis? That guy was much too young—”

“Not Elvis Now. Elvis Then.”

“Oh, Mr. Bucek. The FBI doesn’t believe in ghosts, does it?”

“Only on TV, Miss Barr. Only on TV.”

“So who won?”

Bucek looked down at the coiled satin snake in the bag.

“Maybe I should ask, ‘Who lost?’ ” Temple said. “Sometimes you can have it both ways.”

She caught her breath. A fitting end for an assassin: triumph and capture at one and the same moment.

“The judges didn’t know, of course,” he said. She nodded.

“And you weren’t available to award the belt, so they just had Crawford Buchanan hand it to the winner.”

“I see.” Temple couldn’t keep her lip from curling in an Elvis sneer. Crawford’s moment in the limelight must have been bitter, having to crown a King who’d slain the man he believed was the real King.

“Hard to hold a belt like that with handcuffs on, but some you win and some you lose.”

“You have a true gift for cliché.”

“Thank you. Care to guess the identity of the winner and loser?”

Temple took a deep breath. “Is it … Kenny?”

Bucek nodded, impressed. “What did you figure out first: who won the competition, or who worked for the Mob?”

“Kenny was good tonight, though not as good as . whoever. But I’d already suspected him. Because of the jumpsuit.”

“What jumpsuit? The place was crawling with jumpsuits.”

“The first jumpsuit. The first victim in all this. The one that was trashed in Quincey’s dressing room and turned up buried later in the Medication Garden.”

“More legerdemain. Tricks to fool the eye.”

“Not really. Because I finally realized that if Lyle the protected witness could be an Elvis fanatic, maybe his executioner could be one too. To catch a thief, et cetera. Like you said about the leaf and the forest and Father Brown. It had to be all about Elvis. So I decided that the killer must have loved Elvis as much as the victim. And I still remember how genuinely sad Kenny was about the violated jumpsuit. Then, when it disappeared and turned up buried—in the Medication Garden, next to all those enshrined Elvis jumpsuits—I realized why.” “Why?”?”

Temple sipped the coffee, though she’d probably regret it in a couple of hours. “It was buried in reverence, not in guilt and concealment. The killer was sorry he’d offed the jumpsuit. Do you see? The hitman could destroy a living, breathing target, but it almost killed him to ruin any Elvis artifact, no matter how effective the ruse was.”

“Interesting theory. You want to test it on the source?”

“Kenny’s still here?” She thought about it. “I suppose he didn’t know it was really me he was going to off so spectacularly on stage.

“No, he didn’t, but it wouldn’t have really made any difference. Lucky that his lonely chimp got out and that Elvis impersonator decided to sweep you into the end of his act, or it would have been the end of yours. That backstage was an piece of chaos, a perfect murder scene.”

Temple lifted the long, slightly worn skirt of Priscilla’s second wedding dress. Kenny had murdered two people, and who knows how many before that. Did she really want to see him? Did she really want him to see her? Then she glimpsed herself in the mirror. Odd how wearing a costume can make you forget that you look utterly unlike yourself.

“Sure, I’ll see him, since he can’t really see me.”

Bucek took her elbow to assist up from the chair. Temple wasn’t sure whether he assumed she was shaky from her recent veil’s-breadth escape or he thought that the trailing gown was hard to walk in, which it was.

Faces in the hall—mostly Elvis faces—peered curiously at Temple as she passed. For the moment, Priscilla had stolen the spotlight from her ex-spouse.

Two grim men in black guarded a closed steel door.

Temple recognized the fruity smell of the storage room that must have housed the chimpanzee, but now the large cage was occupied with a human being.

Kenny paced in his glittering jumpsuit like a big cat in one of those awful confined cages zoos used to have before most of them became humane and provided animals with open spaces reminiscent of their natural environments.

She had always seen him as muscular, but it wasn’t until he performed that she had seen how strong he was.

He looked up as she and Bucek entered, and stopped dead.

One leg, his left, twitched.

Two other men sat on folding chairs near the cage.

Under the flat, unfriendly illumination of overhead flourescent lamps, the entire scene had a surreal feeling.

Temple would have liked to have seen her gothic Priscilla figure entering this stark environment like an avenging ghost.

Kenny didn’t look scared, just uptight.

A third folding chair, empty, stood near the cage. On it lay a massive, gold-plated belt studded with Austrian crystals, very like the vermeil belt Elvis was given to honor his 1969 appearance that broke all existing Las Vegas attendance records. Elvis had his gold-oversterling-silver belt inlaid with sapphires, diamonds, and rubies later.

It must have weighed the world.

Curious because she’d never held this less valuable but no less massive belt, Temple bent to pick up the trophy she’d lost the chance to award because the man in the cage was trying to throttle her.

“Don’t touch it!” he said.

Temple paused, startled by his vehemence.

“You don’t deserve anything Elvis earned,” he went on in the same low, loathing tone. “Or anything anyone else earned by honoring Elvis.”

She turned and went closer, even though the men on the chairs stirred uneasily. The metal chair feet screeched on the concrete floor.

The only thing that kept this bitter man from calling her “bitch” was the presence of the men in black. For the first time she understood the roots of Elvis’sparanoia. He’d gotten death threats for years; so had Priscilla; so had Lisa Marie.

“How could you persecute a sixteen-year-old girl who had nothing to do with Elvis or Priscilla, who was just playing a part in a stage show?”

She didn’t bother revealing that she wasn’t Quincey, or that he had seen her earlier in her ordinary form. It didn’t matter who she was to Kenny. If you were masquerading as Priscilla, you deserved anything you got. Killing Quincey or killing Temple would have been no sweat to him.

“You nailed Elvis when you were just fourteen,” he accused back, “and he was away from home with his mama just dead and gone. Snared him like a Mississippi Delta catfish in a net. Like Dee Stanley snagged Vernon. Elvis was never free after he met you. The Colonel and your father made him marry you finally in sixty-seven, and that was the beginning of the end. You broke his heart when you left him.”

Obviously, Kenny had imprinted on the image of Priscilla the way a racing greyhound is trained to imprint on the helpless cats and rabbits used as bait to get it running.

“You loved Elvis,” Temple said. “You really hated to see that Elvis jumpsuit destroyed. Yet you must have commissioned it, brought it here, and it wasn’t even a design that Elvis had worn. It was totally invented.”

“Well, you don’t want the estate to get its trademarks in a wad, and it owns just about everything Elvis. So some of us make up our own designs. That was a great one. I never planned to trash it, but I needed distractions, and … it had to go.”

“Why the horse motif?” Temple wondered.

“Why not?”

Bucek suddenly spoke. “Wish we’d known about that earlier. If you knew Kenny’s background, it would make sense.”

Temple turned, puzzled.

“I don’t know whether your big ego or your small brain is more trouble to you, Kenny.” Bucek joined Temple at the chickenwire barrier and shook his head. “Now that you mention it, Kenny left a clue the size of horse hockey.”

“You mean burying the suit?”

“That, but what was on the suit is more telling.” Bucek kept his eyes on Kenny, but he spoke to Temple. “Kenny has a nickname in the Mob. Most of them do. His is ‘Kenny the Horse.’ Comes from starting out as a mule for heroin deliveries, before he moved up to hit man. No matter how much he was into impersonating Elvis, he couldn’t help letting some braggadocio about his Mob connections creep in. Now he gets to take his victim’s place, and we get to hide him and protect him and call him our very own, until we can make a good case on the whole organization.”

Kenny listened, never taking his eyes off of Temple/ Priscilla.

“What happens to my suit?” he wanted to know. “Who gets custody of the suit?”

“What about the chimp?” Temple wondered indignantly. “Don’t you care what happens to him?”

“That stupid animal! Blew my cover. He was good for a few laughs, but nobody better step on my jumpsuits.”

“Don’t worry,” Bucek said. “That jumpsuit will be on display like the rest of them, as Exhibit A in court someday. You’ll be reunited before a federal judge, but I doubt anyone will sentence a jumpsuit to the prison term you’ll get.”

Kenny shrugged at this dire prediction of the future. “Jailhouse Rock. One of E’s best films. He did real well in prison stripes.”

Bucek shook his head and took Temple’s elbow again, escorting her to the door.

“That man has an unreal sense of values,” she commented.“That’s what makes hit men tick.”

“So … how does this case get settled? Publicly?”

“For now, everything, of course, will be denied, lost, brushed under the rug. There was no one here but Memphis Mafia hotel security. One Elvis impersonator cracked and was … institutionalized. A mysterious Elvis impersonator tried to steal the show. Life goes on, murders go unsolved, local police hate the outside agency’s guts. We try to keep Kenny alive to testify and bring down the bigwigs behind it all. Are you happy, Miss Barr?”

“I’m happy to be alive,” she said when they stood out in the hall again. The onlookers had thinned, bored by the lack of action. “And so, I imagine, is Elvis.”

“Right.” Bucek escorted her back to Quincey’s dressing room so she could change back into herself. “By the way, there’s one member of the press we haven’t been able to muzzle. Luckily, no one would believe him in a million years. I’m sorry.”

He left the room, shouldered through the remaining spectators, and vanished.

The Fontana brothers made a daisy chain in front of the door, but a slight, agile figure dashed through, under their arms.

“T. B., are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Tell me about it.” He came close, crouched beside her chair.

“About what?”

“About Him! The Elvis who disappeared. I was wrong. Thank God I was wrong.” Crawford trembled on the brink of tears. “Lyle wasn’t Him. He didn’t die. He came, and saved, and went again. Tell me about him, please.”

“Well,” said Temple. “The first thing I noticed was how blue his eyes were, and how they … glowed. Like electricity. In fact, everything about him … glowed.”

Crawford nodded, at peace. Not even taking notes.

Temple drew in another hit of caffeine from the big cup on the dressing table, even though the contents were stone cold, just like Elvis. She was riding on the high of survival and the joy of imagination. Elvis had saved her, yes, he had. In one form, or another.

Viva Las Vegas.

One-twelve A.M.

Matt was gliding away from the radio station on the Hesketh Vampire. Leticia was annoyed that the results of the Elvis competition at the Kingdome hadn’t been available in time to announce at the end of the Midnight Hour.

He was relieved it was all over. Elvis had not called since Lyle Purvis had died, whatever one event had to do with the other. Only three women had been waiting for Matt after the show. Maybe his fans were all over at the Kingdome, cheering the ersatz Elvi on.

Even the Vampire seemed subdued tonight, its motor running smooth and relatively silent for a change. Leticia was busy preparing “Elvis tapes” for sale, but Dwight had raised the issue of the estate objecting to merchandising any unauthorized shred of Elvis.

Matt could see their point.

Matt could almost see Elvis, a distant, lonely figure riding a predestined track, a human being lost in the meteoric dazzle of his own contrail.

Could you ever reach deep into another human being and know him? Could you ever reach deep into yourself and know him? Matt glanced in his right side mirror.

Moon at twelve o’clock high.

Moon, or falling star? He was tired.

He might be tired of himself.

And then he saw that cyclops of dogging light, just like the other night, that phantom in the mirror, that mo-torcyclist’s nightmare, that buzz at the farthest range of his hearing.

The part of himself he could never escape, because it had somehow become Other.

Matt pushed the Vampire, pressed it into higher speed. It grew throaty, as if growling protest, then it leaped forward.

Still. A light in the mirror.

A pursuer.

A Hound of Heaven.

Or Hell.

Well.

He knew how to ride this thing at last.

He wasn’t afraid to tilt almost horizontal.

He didn’t fear the noise and the speed.

Speed King.

He wasn’t going to get caught.

Not here.

Like this.

By … whom? An anonymous splinter of himself. The eternal judge. The Wild Card Incarnate. Elvis on the half shell? No.

Sometimes you move and it’s zen. The hand, the eye, the soul in mindless syncopation. Maybe it’s rock. Maybe it’s roll. Maybe it’s delusion.

Matt was in that state. The machine moved with him. He moved the machine. The needle said they did ninety. The moon and the asphalt said they were waltzing in three-four time.

But finally the whirr and the scream behind them caught up. The light in the mirror was a star gone nova. Some hounds you can’t outrun.

Matt slowed, breathed, pulled over.

In the mirror, the single light focused, stopped, hung there like a spotlight.

The sound of silence was deafening after the rush.

He waited, balancing the weight of the Vampire on the balls of his boots.

Leather creaked in the dry desert air.

Black leather.

A motorcycle policeman advanced in Matt’s left side mirror.

A mythic figure, really. Boots, pants, jacket creaking. Hips expanded with a holster of accessories: gun, gloves, baton, walkie-talkie, whatever.

Paper in a notepad shifted like dry bones. “Whoa, son. You were goin’ pretty fast.”

“Sorry. My shift is over. I’m anxious to get home.” “Home’s not worth rushin’ to so fast. Let’s see here. Ninety miles an hour.”

“Guess I didn’t look. I’m sorry.”

“What this thing do?”

“The bike?”

“Never seen one like it.” Boots creaking at each step around the Hesketh.

“It’s English.”

“English bike? Usually they’re those real light bicycles. This is a heavy machine.”

“Custom.”

“Custom. I like custom. Got to give you a ticket, though.”

“I understand, officer. I’m a little nervous. Been working late a lot. And, I thought, someone was following me—”

“Someone following you. That’s a nasty feeling.” “Yeah. You get it sometimes?”

“All the time, son. All the time. Comes with the territory.” He walked around the Vampire again. “Nice bike. So what’ll it do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know?”

“Never took it up to maximum. It’s … well, against the law.”

“Against the law. We don’t wanta be against the law.“The cop leaned close, peered at the dash. “What does it say it’ll do?”

“Uh, the speedometer goes to one-twenty.”

“You tried it?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should.”

“I can’t. It’s against the law.”

“Against the law. See this?”

“It’s a badge.”

“Yes, sir. Now that’s not against the law.”

“I guess not.”

“So I’m not going to give you a ticket tonight, son, on one condition.”

“Yes?”

“That you take this thing to the maximum.”

“But—”

“Now, go on. I don’t want to have to get mean, but if I can catch your taillight, you’re not doing as I say.” “No, sir. I mean, yes, sir.”

“Go on, then. I want to see you flying.”

Matt went.

Into the desert on empty roads, timeless flight. The moon couldn’t keep up.

The motorcycle policeman couldn’t keep up.

Finally, finally, the voices in his head couldn’t keep up.

He got a ticket anyway. A ticket to ride.

Temple turned the key in her door, then tiptoed into her own place like a thief. It felt so great to have the weight of Priscilla, actual and metaphorical, off her.

“Meroww,” said Midnight Louie, writhing against her ankles and stalking over to his bowl to stand and stare resentfully.

She had thought … who knew what she had thought tonight?

“We had some monkey business at the Kingdome tonight, Louie. Good thing you weren’t there.” “Merrrr0000w!” said Louie. He almost sounded like he was scolding her.

“I know I’ve been gone a lot lately,” she said meekly. “Got caught up in Elvis fever. This whole town did. But it’s all over now. Here, have some ocean flounder on your Free-to-Be-Feline.”

Louie dug in and Temple tiptoed away before he could scold her further, to the bedroom.

“Meow,” said Midnight Max, who was reclining on the comforter, sans Elvis accoutrements.

The stereo was softly playing something Elvis, though.

“You would have won if you’d stuck around,” Temple said.

“Couldn’t afford to.”

She sat at the foot of the bed. “Okay. How? Why? When?”

Max smiled. “I got back in town and couldn’t reach you at home, so I finally appealed to Electra for news. She informed me you’d become Elvis’s greatest fan and told me all about the dirty tricks going on at the Kingdome. I figured you couldn’t resist the greatest mystery of the twentieth century, so I slipped over there to sniff around—apparently Midnight Louie had similar notions, because I kept seeing him around—”

“I didn’t.”

“He’s like me: hard to spot unless he wants you to.” “Hmmmph,” Temple said.

“Anyway, I decided that being in the thick of things was the best way to give you backup.”

“Did you have to pull me into that too-too hokey knee-slide?”

“The audience loved it.”

“The audience loved you. I didn’t know you could do that.”

Max shrugged. “Neither did I. So who tried to kill you, and why?”

“A Mob hit man with an Elvis fetish. Priscilla’s death was just the icing on the cake. The real target was a man in the federal witness protection program.”

“Elvis hitting Elvis. Has a sordid sort of harmony, doesn’t it? Are you angry that I turned up?”

“Not at all, Max. I’m just really sorry that I couldn’t give you that belt.”

“I bet you are!”

He leaned forward to reach for her. “Isn’t it time Elvis and Priscilla had a reconciliation?”

“Way overdue,” she agreed.

In the kitchen, Midnight Louie howled his objections.

Chapter 58

Mystery Train

(Recorded at Sun Records in 1955 and cowritten by Sun founder Sam Phillips)

Matt approached WCOO the next night like a surly transient. He kept his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, hoping no preshow fans would accost him for autographs. They’d started showing up before as well as after his hourly midnight stint now. A. E. After Elvis.

He -just wanted to creep into the radio station unnoticed, and get on with whatever the night would hold in store. It certainly wouldn’t be Elvis anymore. He hoped. He had served his time in Elvis’s particular variety of limbo and needed to get on with his own life, as dull as it was.

His blood chilled when he saw people clustered near the station entrance. They all seemed focused on something. Maybe he was just jumpy after last night’s post-show encounter, but he couldn’t help thinking of the body Molina had found outside the Blue Dahlia.

Was it his turn to find a corpse on his own turf? His next thought was even wilder. Had his caller ended the silence with a sudden plunge into depression and suicide on Matt’s very doorstep? His footsteps made them turn one by one. The staccato conversation of an agitated group trailed off word by word.

“He’s here!”

Faces focused on him, full of strange excitement. Even Keith who worked the switchboard was out on the parking lot asphalt, looking dazed.

Matt stared past the strangers’ faces to what had occupied their attention.

A parked car, that’s all.

Keith had bought a new car, and Matt’s fans were admiring it. Good, let them bug some guy their own age.

“Nice wheels, Keith,” he said in passing, seeing little more than a sleek silver fender. Silver. Keith had openly lusted after the Vampire. “Sorry, I’ve got to get on the job,” he told the girls who were gravitating toward him like mercury finding ground zero.

Matt waved in passing, smiling at the sincere flattery of imitation, and went into the station.

Ambrosia herself (Leticia in full radio diva persona) was sitting on the deserted receptionist’s desk like a chocolate Buddha wearing the face of Shiva, gorgeous goddess of destruction.

“You’re pretty mellow, man. Considering.” “Considering what?”

She hoisted a dangling plastic tag. “Considering your new car.”

“My new car.”

“That’s what the tag says. Glad to see an employee doing so well. Won’t have to give you a raise for a while.”

“My new car.”

“Sure glad you’re not so repetitious on the air, honey.

You better hurry if you’re gonna look at it, or before Keith kidnaps it.”

Matt took the tag from her hands. It was attached to a set of car keys, all right. And his name was printed on a paper sandwiched between two slices of clear plastic.

Matt exploded out the door, not pausing to ease it shut for once. The crowd of eight women parted like a curtain.

There it sat, illuminated by the nearest parking lot light until it shone like a hologram: an aluminum-silver puddle of metal in the shape of the redesigned Volkswagen beetle.

“Let’s see the inside,” Keith urged.

Matt tried the key, surprised when it opened the passenger door.

Keith, tall and thin as a soda straw, jackknifed into the seat. “Wow. Cool. Look at this stuff.”

“What stuff?” Matt asked.

Keith was caressing the upholstery like it was Sharon Stone. “I think it’s suede.” He leaned close to the driver’s seat, sniffed and squinted. “Blue suede.”

Matt forced his mouth to stay shut and walked around to the car’s sloping front, looking for a dealer name on the license plate holder.

There was none.

There was a license plate, though, It read: 281 ROCK Elvis had just given away his last—or maybe just latest—car.

Chapter 59

Tryin’ to Get to You

(Recorded at Sun Records in 1955, probably with Elvis on the piano)

“I do not see what you need me for,” Midnight Louise complained.

Since we are standing in the bright sunlight near Chef Song’s fish pond, it is especially fitting that she is in her usual carping mood.

“I told you. As a witness. I do not lay the dead to rest every day. Especially a corpse as famous as this.” “I do not like dark, enclosed places.”

“Neither do I.”

“So that is why you invited me along. You are scared stiff.”

“What is to worry about a bit of ectoplasm? I have already glimpsed Elvis in the non-flesh before, at the Halloween séance last fall. Or … it could have been a dear departed Elvis impersonator. It is so hard to tell the real thing from the sham these days.”

“You ought to know about that. I suppose you had something to do with that brouhaha at the Kingdome. Your roommate was in the newspaper looking like a bride of Dracula, cheek to cheek with an Elvis impersonator. She was identified, but he was called ‘a mystery man’ since he disappeared after his act, even though he was the leading contender to win. This is sort of a Cinderella story with dudes. Maybe he left a lone blue suede shoe on the Kingdome steps.

“This incident and the Mr. Midnight tapes have got the Elvis-sighting machine cranked up to maximum. And your friends and associates are up to their sideburns in it. You know what I would do if we did indeed spot some form of Elvis down in the mine attraction? I would do something more pungent than step on his blue suede shoes. I am not impressed by these dudes that cat around and get away with it. Clear? Are you sure you still want me along?”

“Of course, dear Louise.” I refrain from telling her of my key but hidden role in nailing the Elvis killer by loosing the chimp to find his master, in mid-murder, as it happened. “If we do see something, you will make an excellent supporting witness because you are so skeptical.”

“Okay, pops. Let us shove off, then.”

Unfortunately she is right. The only way to get down in the mine attraction is to take the rickety crate that functions as an elevator.

We wait until the workmen are on a lunch break, all above ground and munching on enough tuna fish to feed a cat colony. Then we dart from islands of shade and finally into the elevator.

Unfortunately, it is firmly anchored in the “up” position, so we must shimmy down the ropes, which are big and rough.

I make a four-point landing from five feet above the floor of the tunnel.

Faint work lights diminish into the dark distance. Iswear I can hear the drip of subterranean water, even though this is desert.

Miss Louise has knocked a yellow hard hat off its rack on the way down; this is not the kit’s usual clumsiness, but part of a plan, I discover.

“If we are going ghost-busting,” she says, “I want to throw some light on any apparition with the nerve to take us in.”

“How do we get it down the tunnel?”

“We take turns pushing. All right by you?”

I privately think this a dim idea; a ghost is supposed to glow in the dark. Who needs light? But together we play kick-the-hard-hat and soon we are down where, I figure, the workmen spotted what they thought was Elvis before.

“Will there not be hologram figures in this exhibit?” Miss Louise asks.

“Yup. Of Jersey Joe Jackson, the founding father of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel when it was the Joshua Tree back in the forties. And maybe of some other noteworthy dead people.”

“Sometimes I think all the noteworthy people are dead.” Louise sits down and looks around. “They already have painted glow-in-the-dark paint on some of the walls.”

“The workmen say that is not what they saw. Nor are the holograms installed yet. They saw a figure in a white suit, shining down the dark tunnel.”

“That way?” Midnight Louise stands and begins walking farther down the passage. “Kick on the chapeau light, Daddy, I am going to see Elvis.”

I do as she says. A beam shoots down the tunnel at human ankle-height. I can see Louise’s swaying hindquarters, tail high, sashaying away into the dark.

I do not think Elvis would hurt her, but I also do not think she is aware what strange forces she flouts. I believe she will soon have a rude awakening, which will be very good for her.

So I curl up around the hard hat—the built-in light provides a nice cozy warmth, and yawn. I expect her back in a sudden flurry of haloed hair and hiss and spit. If ever anyone needed to see Elvis, Midnight Louise is it. I yawn. I am getting sleepy, very sleepy.

Then I hear a faint noise far down the passage. I force my drooping eyes open and try to focus.

A white human figure is swaying in the distance, arms working, left leg buckling.

Elvis is pantomiming one of his finest moments on stage, just for me.

I leap up. It will be a shame to tell this spirit to get lost, but this is a Jersey Joe Jackson attraction, and his ghost has dibs on the venue. Call it ectoplasmic copyright. He was here first, and it would be interesting to discover who predeceased who. I am sure that they have debates about haunting rights in the afterworld.

Meanwhile, though it is impressive to see Elvis rockin’ and rollin’, I grow a bit uneasy about not seeing Miss Midnight Louise. No doubt she has swooned, as so many female Elvis fans were prone to do. I guess I should amble down, now that she has learned her lesson, and make sure the ghost doesn’t turn any of her black hairs white. She would look pretty silly spotted like a Holstein.

I step into the yellow light road made by the hard hat and follow in Miss Louise’s invisible footsteps.

The light fades and the darkness gets thicker as I move along.

I hiss for Louise, but get no answer.

Elvis is still bent over, flailling his legs and arms like a madman, playing the meanest air guitar I have ever not heard.

If only I had this on videotape. I could make a boxcar full, just like the Colonel.

Still no sign of Louise. Looks like I will have to ask Elvis to answer for it.

The closer I get, the more the jumpsuit glows, white-hot, with red, green, and blue sparkles. Elvis has his head dropped down so he can see his ghostly fingers hitting his ghostly chords on that air guitar.

Well, no. Elvis does not have his head dropped down. Elvis has no head! This is not your usual National lnkquirer sighting. This Elvis is not rated PG, but R. Too much for my tender offspring.

“Get out of here, you creep,” I shout, worried for the first time. Ghosts with major missing parts are usually more sinister than the all-there sort.

Of course he does not listen to me. I am now only a few feet away. “What have you done with my daughter?” I demand. “Unhand her, you phantom.”

No answer, not even a pause to recognize my presence and demand. Okay, the Michael Jackson gloves are off.

I spring from my position, shivs extended, planning to hit him in the jerking knees.

My first contact with the incorporeal is the sense of a barrier being breeched, a soft, giving barrier that I push through like the fighting feline I am. In a second, I am right through Elvis and on the other side.

Oops. I hope it is not the real Other Side, like I cannot get back into the living world.

Even as I worry, I land like a bag of nuts and bolts on the cold, hard cavem floor.

Elvis has crumpled into a pale puddle, just like the Wicked Witch of the West went south in a dark pool of ickiness in The Wizard of Oz.

But where is Louise? I stand and call her name, turning in a circle. No answer.

And as I turn back the way I came, I see that Elvis is struggling to rise again. I leap upon his heap of congealing, ethereal atoms.

But Elvis is striking back. I feel the sting of wounds from beyond the grave and soon his jumpsuit is becoming a winding cloth. I spin round and round until I am swaddled and trussed like a turkey.

“Cut it out!” a voice orders.

A familiar voice.

Midnight Louise struggles out from the wadded fabric, which is only too, too solid. It is, in fact, not only material, but a cotton material common to work clothes.

“Here is your Elvis. One of the painter’s jumpsuits. He must have been putting on the phosphorescent paint along the tunnel corridor and got it all over his white coveralls. So he left it hanging to dry down here. Everybody was too scared to come down and investigate.”

“Great. I always thought this was a purely natural phenomenon. What would Elvis be doing down a dark hole, anyway? All we have to do is drag this suit down by the elevator, and even the dimmest bulb should be able to figure out what happened, just as we have.”

“We. Right. Start dragging, Dad, and save some strength for the upward climb. I did hear you refer to me as your ‘daughter,’ did I not? When you thought I was missing?”

“I was, ah, calling for wa-ter. Not daughter. I thought you might have fainted.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, at least your roommate will have seen the last of Elvis on all fronts. I would definitely say that Elvis has left the building.”

cannot disagree.

We set off down the long, dark tunnel to the elevator shaft. It reminds me of a birth canal, though I do not often think of things like that.

We are halfway there when my left ear flicks back to catch a distant murmur of “Thank you, thank you verra much.”

I glance at Louise, whose sour puss is pointed dead ahead, ears unperked.

Naw

Tailpiece

How a Cat May Look at the King

If you ask me, Elvis, the world’s most famous draftee, may have been A-1 to the army, but he was 4F in life: literally crushed to death by fame, fans, floozies, and flunkies.

I have detected several similarities between the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and my kind of cat, least of all our propensities to hang out in a streetlight in front of all and sundry and cut loose with sound, motion, and our natural erotic appeal to females of all ages, stages, and wages of sin.

First, we share very humble origins, but extraordinary pizzazz at making ourselves beloved by others. Elvis was never a street person like myself, but we were always loners with a vision of how we could rise far above our kind to become an idol and inspiration to millions. Okay, -thousands and thousands in my case, but I am not done yet.

Natural talent can be such a curse, always in danger of exploitation by others. Like myself, Elvis had touching trust in those who purported to assist him in his meteoric rise to fame and fortune. (Okay, so my rise is more mediocre than meteoric; close enough.) Elvis had his mysterious Svengali, a self-created illegal immigrant who put on a pseudonym and airs, Colonel Tom Parker. The so-called Colonel commandeered the King’s career at an early stage and helped himself to a much bigger share of the take than a reputable manager would.

I have my so-called collaborator, Miss Carole Nelson Douglas, who signs our contracts and handles the purse strings and catnip dispersion. It is assumed I have no interest or aptitude for the distribution of my own wealth. In fact, I am treated something like an ignorant and minor child, who must be “managed” for my own good.

Although our associations with our respective “partners” have been necessary and good for us at the onset of our careers, as time goes by our Svengalis have exercised far too much artistic control of our high-energy brand of performing genius that requires constant challenge lest it become boring servitude. Elvis was indentured to films and concert tours. I have my books and book tours, although my front woman takes over even there.

And then there is our endless attraction to the ladies. We cannot help that. We were born with that, although Elvis helped it along by adopting my hair’s own natural ebony coloration. So there we are: bigger than life, black, and beautiful. Add in our natural athletic ability and urge to take the spotlight, and you have a potent variety of catnip for dolls of all persuasions.

Speaking of nip, we even share the same failing. I too am mighty fond of a legally prescribed medicinal substance, which, if taken too intensely, can change my kittenish, lovable side so appealing to my friends and fans into cruel, predatory moods during which I lash out and bounce off the wall. I cannot help it any more than Elvis; it is a genetic predisposition.

Elvis always wanted to be a helpful authority figure. Early in life, he wanted to be a policeman, which accounts for his later habit of hanging out with the police and collecting badges—even via President Nixon, during one famous Elvis incident when he was pretty well smoked—and major personal armaments such as guns. Despite his own medication dependence, Elvis hated kids using street drugs and wanted to serve as an example to them.

I, of course, help homeless members of my own species through my Adopt-a-Cat tours. And I too am drawn to police work, although I walk the PI side of the legal beat, not being much of a dude for regulations, just like Elvis. Just like Elvis, I am often loaded with concealed side arms, only mine are of the edged variety.

In karate, which he loved for both its defense and mystical side, his fighting name was Tiger, and for a while he carried a cane with a ruby-studded head of a Big Cat.

Then there’s our shared mystical side and penchant for Eastern religion. Elvis was interested in the Autobiography of a Yoga and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and such. I am a follower of Bastet, an ancient and powerful goddess of the Egypt of the pharaohs, where the hot text is The Book of the Dead. We both have been ridiculed for exploring fringe religion, but the impulse is sincere, and that is all that is called for in religion. Unlike Elvis, I do not see any necessity for standing up and preaching, but then I have never had access to the amount of catnip he did. Personally, I prefer to keep the mysteries of Bastet just among us nonhillbilly cats.

Alas, I do not share Elvis’s enthusiasm for motorized vehicles, although I will resort to them when I must.

Nor do I have a raft of former associates eager to leak every detail of my life and times. Miss CND is bad enough with the occasional personal eccentricity she will detail in

my fan publication, Midnight Louie’s Scratching Post-lntelligencer. Did the world really need to know that Midnight Louie Jr. was taken for a girl when he first came to the shelter? This is a sore point with Elvis and me: we are both such gorgeous dudes that some envious types would use it to impugn our virility. This is nonsense! We also have been dogged by paternity suits and death threats.

I, of course, am completely innocent and still kicking. As for Elvis, anything is possible.

Very best fishes,

Carole Nelson Douglas Takes the E Train

Midnight Louie, Esq.

Have an Elvis sighting to report, or merely wish information about Midnight Louie’s newsletter and/or T-shirt? Contact him at Midnight Louie’s Scratching Post-Intelligencer, PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX76163

, by e-mail at cdouglas@catwriter.com, or visit the web page . Thank you. Thank you very much.

L-or me, Elvis was always inevitable.

His past presence hangs over the Las Vegas landscape like a ghost moon, visible day and night, night and day. He first peeked from behind the curtain when Elvis impersonators contributed to the climax of Cat in a Crimson Haze, the fourth Midnight Louie novel.

I was never an Elvis fan. My grade-school best friend and I swore that we’d never join the screaming hordes of teenyboppers making him such a sensation. Our Midwestern upbringing ensured that we’d disdain dangerous icons of sexiness (or sexual excess, or sexual liberation, pick your point of view) such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

Later I realized that Elvis’s musical influence had been truly extraordinary, but I still didn’t care for or about Elvis, though I knew I needed to know more about him to fully portray Midnight Louie’s Las Vegas.

In 1996, while on a Midnight Louie Adopt-a-Cat book tour of the Southeast, I had just enough down time in Memphis to race to Graceland via Gray Line tours. I joined the milling throngs in the souvenir plaza and donned headphones for a self-guided tour, feeling like a fraud among the faithful. The fabled house and grounds surprised me; so ordinary, really. I most vividly remember a painfully thin horse in the pasture behind the grounds; very old or ill, for no tourist attraction would abuse an animal. Was this some frail survivor or descendent of Elvis’s horse-riding kick of ‘66? A last witness to his final spurt of happy (and expensive) enthusiasm before he turned totally inward into a paranoid kingdom of obsessive karate, mysticism, megalomania, prescription drugs, guns, and badges? At the Meditation Garden Elvis loved, filled with flowery floral and written tributes, I was impressed despite myself by the numbed silence of fans who filed past the engraved tombstones set into the ground. Here lay Elvis, his beloved mother, his ineffective father, and his ever-present paternal grandmother. He called her Dodger. As a kid he once threw something at her and she ducked so it missed. No doubt that Elvis inherited his mother, Gladys’s, notorious temper. Even there, though, I remained an unbeliever in the temple of another faith. Not even the sober contemplation of death could make me a pilgrim to Graceland.

In 1994, I was asked to edit a collection of stories about Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn left me as cold as Elvis, but I dutifully delved into the mountains of Marilyn books. I even included my take on M. M., a dramatic monologue about what Marilyn would be doing at age seventy if she had survived: debuting on Broadway. Soon I found myself dusting off my long-shelved performing skills (theater was my college major) to don M. M. “drag.” I not only delivered the monologue buton occasion answered questions and related to crowds in the M. M. persona. Moonlighting as a Marilyn impersonator enlightened me enough to finally confront Elvis impersonators, the Elvis phenomenon, and the even greater mountain of books on them both.

Every writer becomes an actor, getting into characters’ heads, thinking like them, feeling for them. Any writer who deals with historical personalities becomes a kind of psychic channeler. Eerie how much you come to know about that person beyond mere fact. It happened to me with Oscar Wilde. In a short story, I named his favorite painting, my pure invention. A new, exhaustive Wilde biography was published soon after (as they are every couple years). Two of his favorite paintings were pictured, including the one I’d cited. My prescience was no mystery; the painting was of a religious subject with latent homosexual erotic appeal. I knew my time period, my art history, human psychology, Wilde’s writings and biography, and therefore my man.

I never knew Elvis or wanted to. It’s not a pleasant process, investigating stunted lives and early deaths. Like a forensic psychologist, a writer reading about such icons’ hyperbolic lives can’t help wondering what, if anything, would have made a difference to the tragic decline that followed fame. What would have saved Elvis (or Marilyn)? Who killed Elvis (or Marilyn)? I wasn’t intrigued in a literal sense, because I concluded neither death was murder, but by the paradox that success so often breeds self-destruction.

Elvis’ life and death is an object lesson in the perils of peaking early. Before he was eighteen, he experienced two intensely emotional elements in his life that nothing else could ever duplicate: a singular connection to his mother, an extended and symbiotic twinship, and the artistic and erotic euphoria of a performing charisma that drove his audiences to frenzy. His mother died when he was twenty-three. Nine years of movie-making surgically separated him from his live audiences. Fame and fortune forced him into isolation from overwhelming fan adulation and death threats. Nine years of a return to the manic-depressive performer’s emotional seesaw brought him from career rebirth and comeback triumph to a drug-assisted decline and death.

Compare how Elvis and Marilyn were alike: Both were self-made bluecollar heroes Both stuttered Both scorned underwear Both had birth certificate misspellings of their middle names (Norma Jeane/Jean; Elvis Aron/Aaron) Both were overmedicated by doctors Both created iconic personas that were perpetuated by impersonators and massive merchandising Both rebelled against the sexual hypocrisy of the fifties Both sought to be taken “seriously” as actors; Marilyn fought for and got better films Both were dominated by soulless money men who stifled their potential and careers

The best book about Elvis is Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography. The Last Train to Memphis relates Elvis’s phenomenal rise up till 1958, when his mother died and the draft interrupted his career, sending him to Germany as an army private. John Lennon later said that Elvis died when he went to Germany. Careless Love is subtitled “The Unmaking of Elvis Presley” and covers the twenty-year period after Elvis returned to the United States until his shocking death at the age of forty-two.

Guralnick’s books cite the few useful parts of the many memoirs that focus on Elvis’s failings and extreme behaviors, and also convey the inborn personal charm and the performance charisma that Elvis cultivated shrewdly before the sheer weight of his popularity (andtherefore power) overcame even his remarkable gifts. The Inner Elvis by Peter Whitmer, Ph.D., explores the pathology of a surviving twin and identifies Elvis as an abused child whose “lethal enmeshment” by a doting and domineering parent, his mother Gladys, doomed him to the fate he found. P. F. Kluge’s novel, Biggest Elvis, about Elvis impersonators in Guam, is moving and insightful. Gilbert B. Rodman’s Elvis After Elvis makes a scholarly case for Elvis single-handedly creating the climate for the sixties’ social revolution: youth culture, the protest movement for civil rights and against Vietnam, the sexual revolution and gay rights, and ultimately, the resurgence of feminism that resulted from all the preceding.

Reading many of the dozens of books about a pop icon like Elvis is like listening to conflicting yet buttressing testimony from an endless parade of witnesses in a legal case. You must strain fact from self-serving faction. You read details about the prescription medication dosages, the autopsy, and the theoretical causes of death; you consider forensic psychology and testimony of interested and disinterested parties. You eventually distill the flood of facts and opinions into a theory of your own.

Here’s mine: both nature and nurture created and destroyed Elvis Presley. His extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins had what is now recognized as a genetic disposition to the disease of alcoholism. His mother was never autopsied, and her death at age forty-six was attributed to liver disease, but it is thought to have been cirrhosis of the liver. She certainly drank in her last years. The headstone Elvis put on her grave reads “She was the Sunshine of our Home,” and during Elvis’s youth she was described as musical and fun-loving, although possessed of a frying-pan-throwing temperament. Photos of Elvis with his parents as his fame grew show a somber, tender symbiosis: Elvis and Gladys always focusing on and touching each other; Vernon a tangential figure on the fringe of this consuming bond. But Gladys’s eyes are ringed with unhealthy black, her expression is dead (or dazed by alcohol). She is not a well or happy woman. Her cherished son’s meteoric rise, her loss of contact and control as he was swept away in a fever of touring and publicity and screaming girl groupies, coincided with her decline and death.

Wisely, Elvis disliked and avoided liquor, except for brief experimental periods, and disdained “recreational” drug use even as he escalated into massive doses of prescribed uppers and downers. He had no more knowledge than anybody then of the addictive dangers of mood-altering medications. He educated himself in the medications’ side effects so he could prescribe for himself with authority. The seeds of his psychological and physical downfall were not only genetic and familial, but rooted so early in his performing career as to make his “unmaking” inevitable, which is where the word “tragic” enters his saga.

Because of lifelong sleeping problems, including nightmares and sleepwalking incidents, he slept with his mother until the age of twelve. He had never slept away from home until he went on the road in his late teens, to perform. This extended maternal closeness drove him into a confused sexuality: women he became truly close to became mothers, and the sexual side of the relationship became nurture and caretaking rather than passionate. Elvis always had “other women,” often actresses or groupies, whom he pursued for shallow sexuality, but were more often needed as bedtime companions rather than lovers.

Through many books, the first reference I found to his using “uppers” was when he was given Dexedrine by other soldiers to stay awake on night guard duty in Germany. He came home with massive jars of the pills for the whole entourage. Although he’d made a few movies by then, Hollywood’s tendency to medicate stars doesn’t seem to be the culprit in his case. Then I found a referenceto Gladys, self-conscious at the media attention Elvis’s stardom drew to her. She took diet pills and Elvis borrowed them at the very brink of his career. Diet pills then were amphetamines, “speed” prescribed readily by family doctors. They depressed the appetite center in the brain, which also interfered with the sleep center. They make you sleepless, but give you energy to burn. Minds on speed will run in creative circles, inventing all sorts of ambitious projects, but the impulse rarely produces anything concrete. When the effect wears off after a few weeks, takers need to increase the dosage to get the same effect.

Performers draw on superhuman amounts of adrenaline to enthrall their audiences, and stay awake hours after performing to come “down.” Speed would have aggravated Elvis’s naturally hyperactive metabolism and performer’s lifestyle. He was soon also taking downers to sleep, the typical Hollywood doctor cocktail. The two medications create a manic/depressive roller coaster. Everything excessive that Elvis became had its roots in his impoverished youth, but was later enacted with the grandiose extravagance of a speed addict. The vampirish hours of a rock star made him into a man who reversed day and night, sleeping at dawn and rising to start the day at dusk. It was convenient for everyone around him, including women, to follow the same schedule, so Elvis enthusiastically converted them to the wonder pills too.

He was an overprotected mama’s boy, a shy and sensitive soul ripe for loneliness, ostracizing, and bullying. He found identity in embracing his differences, in dressing like the black musicians who made Memphis’s Beale Street a musical legend. Like many an outcast teenager, he took on a protective aggressive coloring. He hid his vulnerabilities behind the accoutrements of a fifties “hood,” those black-leather-clad urban bad boys with the greaser hair, sideburns, and attitudes. He even dyed his hair and eyebrows black, covered his blond eyelashes in mascara. He ached to play football, but his overprotective mother forbid him to. The coach hated his long hair and wouldn’t let him play without a buzzcut anyway. Years later, Elvis organized his Memphis Mafia into a football team. He was quarterback, of course.

An only child, he often gave the rare toys, a wagon or toy car, his family could ill afford to other children. As a wealthy and famous adult, he became famous for dispensing Cadillacs and other luxury cars by the dozen to friends and strangers, perhaps 280 in all. His impulses were always generous. Beneficiaries could be girls after only one date, poor workers on his one-time ranch, strangers, members of the Memphis Mafia. Jealousy swirled around Graceland when Elvis was on a buying jag: who would get the gravy? It wouldn’t always be whoever most deserved the extra calories. His donations to charity were less quixotic and his generosity was inbred, not merely a speed-assisted profligacy. He arranged a liver transplant for one of his record producers, for instance.

Of course his music, the synthesis of white hillbilly and black blues music that got him attention, developed during his teen years on “lonely street,” which was broader than Beale Street in Memphis, and included the “race music” on the radio and the gospel music in the church Gladys and Vernon attended.

When the Jaycees named him an outstanding young man of 1971, Elvis Presley reveled in the achievement because it was more than another performing benchmark. It was a testimony to character and personal worth. He was already outstandingly indentured to prescription medications by then, and Priscilla would leave him in a year. It was already the beginning of the end, but a proud moment. As he said in his acceptance speech, he’d fulfilled every dream he’d had as a child worshipping comic book heroes who would doff their impotent ordinariness, don a gaudy jumpsuit, and fly to everyone’s rescue.

That was the problem, he had fulfilled every dream. Only the nightmares were left.