Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

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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.