Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

34

Midnight Magic

Things have changed, changed utterly.

Along the Las Vegas Strip. Among my favorite people and places.

Yet some things will never change.

My Miss Temple—(forget Missus, an ugly word, totally not French, and Madam has connotations. In my book, ladies are always Miss, but I will grudgingly use Mrs. on occasion)—is a known vintage clothing lover.

I have long realized the addiction went beyond suits and shoes to such finds as the snazzy chrome nineteen-twenties toaster that holds any snail mail she still gets. Sadly, she buys cat carriers new; at least until I get my paws and claws to work on them.

The biggest objects of her vintage obsession are the cluster of modest motel-casinos in the nineteen-forties that grew into the dazzling skyline of higher and higher hotel-casinos…whose grandeur faded one by one as they became “gut jobs” and fell to make way for ever grander and higher replacements.

I find myself musing on how the Strip itself mirrors more than half the twentieth century and a bit of the twenty-first. And how change and rebirth is impossible without death, whether it is the death of the body or an idea or a vision.

That is why I retreat nowadays (when ripping and pounding at the Circle Ritz make even the zebra-print carrier no retreat), to the abandoned Neon Nightmare building to meditate, as my breed is wont. It seems a perfect metaphor for Vegas dreams and melodramas.

Las Vegas has so much flash and cash floating around in its neon stew that when a venue is slowly dying, it is an instantly detectable Black Hole amid the wheeling, glitzy galaxies of the Strip and even the night sky so often overpowered by the wattage below.

It had been that way for the Dunes and the Aladdin in the eighties as “new ownerships” appeared on the desert sands in the east horizon and quickly sank into the mountains in the west. Including The Sands itself. Such names, from the Stardust to the long-lasting Riviera, only recently imploded with pomp and ceremony.

We hip cats about Vegas mourn these losses, every one a prime Dumpster-diving location in its heyday, as well as the epitome of class and creativity for its time.

The implosion of the Grand Old Dames of the Strip kicked into high gear during the nineties, destruction becoming a massive stage show itself. First, the impeccably placed charges. The filmed countdown. The wide media coverage of a once-fabled building holding memories of once-fabled entertainment acts collapsing in seconds into itself, into nothing, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. And all death throes available on YouTube now. Watch them and weep for the bygone glamour.

Only the dead neon remains, stocked in the Neon Graveyard museum, a past art fondly remembered, but too passé to revive on a large scale. I and my compadres often stroll there, and I nap under the giant Silver Slipper shoe in honor of Miss Temple. Passed down from generation to generation of my lineage have been the sumptuous seafood entrees at, say, the Dunes amid Art Deco grandeur. All gone, gone utterly, along with plenteous inexpensive buffets. Now tourists desiring seafood at a hotel buffet must have the tops of their hands stamped like at a cheap nightclub to be scanned to give them entry if they have paid for that option.

Yet desert flowers can lay dormant and then bloom spectacularly, even if only once in a blue-suede moon. And the media always loves a spectacular failure. And resurrection.

Like Elvis, who was the quintessential Vegas entertainer, larger than life, flawed and beloved for it, immortal for his sad mortality.

That is why Graceland in Memphis has created its first permanent outpost at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino.

I find that news very exciting. Fact is, Elvis and I share a certain simpatico spirit. I have seen his ghost out and about in Las Vegas and am expecting even more encounters now that so many of his beloved objects have landed here.

Some may pooh-pooh my “Elvis sightings”. True, a lot of nut jobs have claimed that honor. But none of them can also claim a historically established heritage of nine lives. That is how I believe I can see Elvis. I can slip in and out of my past and present lives if I am in the right meditative mood. It is nothing like the psychic powers Miss Electra’s overbearing companion, Karma, claims.

These are dude-to-dude moments when our psyches intersect. They did not call Elvis “the Memphis Cat” for nothing. In fact, he and I cleared up the cold case about who killed Jumpin’ Jack Robinson at the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo to get the land it sat on, which still has a valuable, but lost, gambling license. He went there in person as a young first-time Vegas act and I went there in spirit, diving deep into my hep cat catalog of lives.

So I listen when Miss Temple is muttering to me while sopping up Internet trivia on Elvis’s latest incarnation at a big off-Strip venue.

“Wow, Louie,” she says, staring too long at the screen. “Elvis has finally, really never ‘left the building’.”

That is the announcement made after his concerts, when fans were hopping and shouting for encores, but the concert was over. “Elvis has left the building.”

“Elvis is back almost where he began here,” she says. “The attraction building is the real deal, not some ersatz pretender. Before it was the LVH-Las Vegas, then the Las Vegas Hilton. It was originally the International Hotel, where Elvis performed more than six hundred sold-out shows between his 1968 ‘comeback’ and 1976 death.”

I press nearer. Elvis’s comeback had only lasted a short cat’s life. Eight years. How old am I? It is none of your business, I would trumpet to anyone crass enough to ask.

“Hmm.” Miss Temple is sliding onto her spine on the chair. “When Priscilla Presley opened ‘Graceland Presents ELVIS: The Exhibition-The Show-The Experience’ last year on April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday, Miss Temple and I know, but so few follow the Bard these days), she looked as gorgeous and young as only a seventy-year-old Hollywood celebrity can. Imagine going from child bride-in-waiting to ex-wife to savvy businesswoman and mother guarding the major legacy of Graceland.”

That is very hard for me to imagine, especially the child bride-in-waiting part. I do not wait well.

I see the screen morph into Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding photo.

Miss Temple frowns. “Not an inspiring wedding gown, Louie. One of those sixties waistless long sheaths. She does have a small train, though. Oh, well. Back to business.”

Miss Temple is devouring the new attraction’s details because she might use them in related press releases.

She often talks to herself by pretending to talk to me, and, face it, I am a world-class listener because I have chosen not to talk back. She has no idea that I, too, have a deep, abiding interest in my buddy, the King.

“The redone old International showroom opened on the 59th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s first, ill-attended Las Vegas performance at the Venus Room of the New Frontier Hotel. Now the renamed ‘Elvis Presley Theater’, it has been restored to ‘vintage perfection’. I gotta see that vintage perfection, Louie. Think Matt would go with me?”

I would, but I do not need a ticket to sneak into any show in town.

“And,” she exclaims, “Some PR genius even dug up, excuse the expression, an aged cocktail waitress who had worked at the International then and remembered Elvis.”

Miss Temple laughed uproariously at the computer when she read that.

“What a PR coup,” she said. “Imagine a Vegas hotel keeping a cocktail waitress employed into her eighties. I suppose Elvis was her claim to continuing employment. Good for her!”

One forgot how young Elvis had been when he had died. Forty-two. When his life spirit has intersected occasionally with one of my lost early lives, he is in his mid-thirties prime, like the black leather he wore in his comeback TV show, sleek and dangerously sexy. Also like me when Miss Midnight Louise is not around to rain on my parade.

And like Miss Temple, I love every facet and era and trace of the 24/7 carnival fantasy show Vegas always has been and always will be. And I know Miss Temple and I both will always mourn a classic attraction gone dark.