Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

17

The Midnight Louie Boogie

Now that the lovebirds are hundreds of miles out of my way, I can thoroughly investigate the midnight incident of slot machine madness without fear of my Miss Temple showing up.

Luckily, as night falls and maybe even knocks itself out, I find Miss Midnight Louise at the nearby police substation where Ma Barker’s clowder is based.

“Why are you sticking so close?” I ask.

“I fear,” she says, “we need to investigate the underground gambling hell from which those antiquated slot machines were imported and exported in a matter of only hours last night.”

“Maybe you have hit on it, Louise. We witnessed some sort of traffic in antique gaming machines.”

“Whatever was going on is crazy,” she concludes.

I cannot disagree, so we trot the few blocks to the old building and slip through the broken slat in the padlocked rear basement doors that allowed the slot machines in and out hours ago. It is hard to imagine the stomp of work boots up from the dark regions below on these deteriorated stairs, but is maybe why they are in such bad shape. The slot-machine parties have been held here before.

The night is ours, in its customary still, dark condition. This is when we creatures of darkness—bats, cats, rats, owls and opossums—come forth to explore. Or hunt.

I must admit that my long domestic routine with Miss Temple Barr has made me a bit weary in the middle of the night. Since both of her suitors had night jobs, we all had to stay on the same page, as they say, and retire in the wee hours.

I let Miss Midnight Louise lead on our path down into the lower depths, now that the slot machines have been returned to the obscurity they had so long ago earned.

We slink down the shambling stairs at the building’s rear, step by step, stealthy pad by stealthy pad. We are a moving whisper in the night. Unseen and unthought of.

Such lesser lights as Punch and Katt and the moneyman Leon Nemo would never linger here, with dawn only an hour away.

Yet the very ebb of night is prime time for our kind. Louise pauses to let me lead now. Earlier, I explored the slot-machine-spewing basement briefly, and noted that many locked storage rooms line the space. I had assumed the most recent residents, antique mall purveyors, each had possessed a basement storage facility. I had not realized that vintage Las Vegas slot machines would be a major collectable.

Three steps down, Louise puts her chin on my shoulder and curls her shivs into my manly flank. Such an affectionate pose is highly unlikely from her. I detect a subtle shiver of anxiety. “Louie. I sense something is not right.”

She almost always calls me some scathing derivation of “Pop” or “Dad”.

“What?” I ask.

“I do not think we are alone down here.”

“Of course we are not alone. There are random rats and mice eating away at any of the storage room contents that are edible. Or not.”

“Hmm,” says Louise, “perhaps we could eat away at the rats and mice.”

She cannot fool me. She is totally addicted to the Asian sushi offerings of Chef Song at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. I am the Great Black Hunter, who once subsisted and feasted on the chef’s prized koi pond residents. Now I am planet friendly. I dine on kibble and people food, which is getting more politically correct by the month. Soon I will be surviving on moth and marigold.

Still, my whiskers tremble to a waft of insubstantial air, the mere murmur of other times and other faces. Karma is not the only feline phenomenon who can channel past hauntings.

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.