Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

“We never even dreamed about taking recreational drugs back then. Cigarettes and whiskey and rock 'n' roll music, they were the wicked ways teenagers wanted to get into. If we took anything, it was the officially sanctioned uppers that Elvis started with, his mother's amphetamine diet pills. My mother had some too, and I `borrowed" em."

“And it was all so innocent."

“Yup. Magic pills from Dr. Family Physician.”

Temple gazed toward the stage. The fifties seemed so quaint, like they really were lived in black-and-white. On stage, a band was assembling. Drummer, a real piano man, guitarist, backup singers, they all dressed in some amalgam of fifties–sixties clothes.

Electra leaned over to whisper in Temple's ear, even though no one sat near them. The rows of empty seats were sprinkled with guests of the performers who took pains to sit as far away as possible from each other. Maybe they thought they might give away the trade secrets of their Elvis, like Mike's lip trick with liquid latex.

“Most of these guys started singing along to karaoke machines, or used their own tapes. Performing with a live band is a major step up for them. They're beginning to understand what Elvis was up against for the hundreds of performances he gave from nineteen seventy to seventy-seven.”

Temple absorbed the information. She didn't sing a note, didn't ever want to do more than hum along to "The Star-Spangled Banner" or "Happy Birthday to You," all a loyal American or decent friend should be expected to do. Molina, though, the humming homicide lieutenant, she could stand up on the Blue Dahlia stage and belt out a melody to whatever riffs the backup bandwas ruffling. Took nerve. And if the nerve wasn't there anymore, maybe it took pills.

Then a bouncing baby Elvis was bursting into stage center, his fringe jiggling and the gemstones winking like a drunken fleet of sailors on shore leave. That's what Elvis's white jumpsuits reminded Temple of, not comic-book superhero uniforms like the books said, but little boy's sailor suits, wide-legged, jaunty, innocent, only Elvis's had been embroidered with glitter. Suddenly the teddy bears that lined his bedrooms made sense.

She watched the heavyset guy who resembled every repairman who'd ever been sent to her apartment to fix something, down to the swag of heavy belt at his hips, tool-belt-as-gunslinger-holster substitute.

Elvis was not only blue suede shoes, he was blue-collar superhero. The guy who went from high school into the navy or the army. The average Joe, not Joe College. And his garish onstage taste celebrated the common person's idea of glamour, half Hollywood, half gas-station fire sale.

The music, though, that was timeless, classless. The words were nonsense, the beat was liberating. Gotta dance. Elvi came and went, a lot of them the chunky sailor-suited model so endearingly kiddish despite so many being on the other side of forty. The sleeker ones did Comeback Elvis in black leather biker suits that shone like silk-velvet tafetta in the spotlights. Velvet Elvis made a spectacular entrance in her midnight jumpsuit. Temple knew that the costume would light up like a gasoline-slick rainbow under the actual performance's special light gels, but even underlit the look was dynamite.

Oddly enough, the sole female Elvis impersonator was also the only contestant to evoke Elvis the sleek young sex symbol. Electra, not knowing Velvet's gender, grabbed Temple's forearm and hung on as Velvet Elvis strutted, purred, and stomped through "Tiger Man."

“That's it!" Electra cheered Velvet Elvis on, under her breath. "That's it!”

That's it, all right, Temple thought, a good part of the young singer's appeal, only then the phenomenon hadn't been noticed and named. The Androgynous Elvis. Clairol on his hair, eyebrows, and sideburns, mascara on his lashes.

The fifties were more decadent than they knew.

Temple found herself getting a kick out of the proceedings. Some of the impersonators were so nervous they shook (so had Elvis) but they had brought an innocent, sincere, raw energy to their acts that overcame the sophisticated theater-goer's expectations.

She leaned back in her seat, scrunched down on her tailbone, and let her right tennis shoe noiselessly tap the carpeted floor.

Beside her, Electra sat transfixed, her features lit by the reflected stage lights so she glowed like a, well, a thirty-six-year-old, anyway.

Elvis was gone, but his fans lived on, and they would never see him again. Only imitations.

Temple scoured her memory_. for some performer whose absence from a stage or the planet would deprive her. All she could come up with was the Mystifying Max, and that wasn't a fair comparison. Maybe she just wasn't born to be a fan. . . .

The onstage musicians must have been tiring of backing up such an endless parade of Elvises, who were beginning to blend one into the other. Even what they excelled at seemed lost in the sheer repetition.