Little Elvises Read online

  “The most pathetic of DiGaudio’s little Elvises. Really pretty, I mean fruit-salad pretty, but he couldn’t do anything. Tone deaf. He stood on the stage like his feet were nailed to the floor. But really, really pretty.”

  “I don’t remember him in the paper you wrote.” I was taking a chance here, because I hadn’t actually read all of it.

  “I didn’t talk about him much. He was so awful that he kind of stood alone. He wasn’t an imitation anything, really. He was an original void.”

  “But pretty.”

  “Yum yum yum.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. I’ll check it out.”

  “You can look at Giorgio on YouTube, too,” she said. “Although you might want to turn the volume way, way down.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s under ‘Giorgio.’ ”

  “Try ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ That was the name of his first hit. ‘Lucky Star,’ I mean. Little irony there, huh? If there was ever a lucky star, it was Giorgio. If it hadn’t been for Elvis, he’d have been delivering mail. Not that it did him much good in the long run, poor kid. Anyway, search for ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ Otherwise you’re going to spend the whole evening looking at Giorgio Armani.”

  “Is your mom around?”

  A pause I’d have probably missed if I weren’t her father. “Um, out with Bill.”

  “Remember what I told you,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t laugh at Bill’s nose.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Bill’s nose.”

  “Just, whatever happens, next time you see Bill’s nose, don’t laugh at it.”

  “Daddy,” she said. “You’re terrible.” She made a kiss noise and hung up.

  It was okay that I was terrible. She only called me Daddy when she liked me.

  I’ve had more opportunity than most people to do things I’d regret later, and I’ve taken advantage of a great many of those opportunities. But there was nothing I regretted more than not being able to live in the same house as my daughter.

  I’d wanted to stay in Donder, but it was taken.

  “Donder” is a convincing name for a reindeer. “Blitzen” sounds to me like the name of some Danish Nazi collaborator, someone who committed high treason in deep snow. But Donder was occupied, so I was stuck with either Blitzen or Dydie. I chose Blitzen because it was on the second floor, which I prefer, and it had a connecting door with Prancer, which was unoccupied, so I could rent them both but leave the light off in one of them, giving me a second room to duck into in an emergency, a configuration I insist on. This little escape hatch that has probably saved me from a couple of broken legs, broken legs being a standard method of getting someone’s attention in the world of low-IQ crime. And as much as I didn’t like the name “Blitzen,” there was no way I was going to stay in Prancer. It would affect the way I thought about myself.

  Blitzen was a small, airless rectangle with dusty tinsel fringing the tops of the doors, cut-outs of snowflakes dangling from the ceiling, and fluffs of cotton glued to the top of the medicine cabinet. A pyramid of glass Christmas-tree ornaments had been glued together, and then the whole assemblage had been glued to a red-and-green platter, which in turn had been glued to the top of the dresser. Marge ’n Ed went through a lot of glue. The carpet had been a snowy white fifteen or twenty years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it. The first time I saw it, it struck me as a perfect picture of a guilty conscience at 3 A.M.: you’re floating along in a sort of pasteurized colorlessness, and wham, here comes a black spot that has you bolt upright and sweating in the dark.

  I have a nodding acquaintance with guilty consciences.

  When Andy Warhol predicted that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was probably thinking about something like YouTube. What a concept: hundreds of thousands of deservedly anonymous people made shaky, blurry videotapes of their pets and their feet and each other lip-synching to horrible music, and somebody bought it for a trillion dollars. But then all this idea-free content developed a kind of mass that attracted a million or so clips that actually had some interest value, especially to those of us who occasionally like to lift a corner of the social fabric and peer beneath it.

  Vincent DiGaudio Interview popped onto my screen in the oddly saturated color, heavy toward the carrot end of the spectrum, that identifies TV film from the seventies. Since I was going to meet DiGaudio in about forty minutes, I took a good look at him. In 1975, he’d been a beefy, ethnic-looking guy with a couple of chins and a third on the way, and a plump little mouth that he kept pursing as though he had Tourette’s Syndrome and was fighting an outbreak of profanity. His eyes were the most interesting things in his face. They were long, with heavy, almost immobile lids that sloped down toward the outer corners at about a thirty-degree angle, the angle of a roof. His gaze bounced nervously between the interviewer and the camera lens.

  Vincent DiGaudio had a liar’s eyes.

  As the clip began, the camera was on the interviewer, a famished woman with a tangerine-colored face, blond hair bobbed so brutally it looked like it had been cut with a broken bottle, and so much gold hanging around her neck she wouldn’t have floated in the Great Salt Lake. “… define your talent?” she was saying when the editor cut in.

  “I don’t know if it was a talent,” DiGaudio said, and then smiled in a way that suggested that it was, indeed, a talent, and he was a deeply modest man. “I seen a vacuum, that’s all. I always think that’s the main thing, seeing in between the stuff that’s already there, like it’s a dotted line, and figuring out what could fill in the blanks, you know?” He held his hands up, about two feet apart, presumably indicating a blank. “So you had Elvis and the other one, uh, Jerry Lee Lewis, and then you had Little Richard, and they were all like on one end, you know? Too raw, too downtown for nice kids. And then you had over on the other end, you had Pat Boone, and he was like Mr. Good Tooth, you know, like in a kids’ dental hygiene movie, there’s always this tooth that’s so white you gotta squint at it. So he was way over there. And in the middle, I seen a lot of room for kids who were handsome like Elvis but not so, you know, so …”

  “Talented?” the interviewer asked.

  “That’s funny,” DiGaudio said solemnly. “Not so dangerous. Good-looking kids, but kids the girls could take home to meet Mom. Kids who look like they went to church.”

  “Elvis went to church,” the interviewer said.

  DiGaudio’s smile this time made the interviewer sit back a couple of inches. “My kids went to a white church. Probably Catholic, since they were all Italian, but, you know, might have been some Episcopalians in there. And they didn’t sing about a man on a fuzzy tree or all that shorthand about getting—can I say getting laid?”

  “You just did.”

  “Yeah, well that. My kids sang about first kisses and lucky stars, and if they sang about a sweater it was a sweater with a high school letter on it, not a sweater stretched over a big pair of—of—inappropriate body parts.” He sat back and let his right knee jiggle up and down, body language that suggested he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. “It’s all in the book,” he said. “My book. Remember my book?”

  “Of course.” The interviewer held it up for the camera. “The Philly Miracle,” she said.

  “And the rest of it?” Di Gaudio demanded.

  “Sorry. The Philly Miracle: How Vincent DiGaudio Reinvented Rock and Roll.”

  “Bet your ass,” DiGaudio said. “Whoops.”

  “So your—your discoveries—were sort of Elvis with mayo?”

  “We’re not getting along much, are we? My kids weren’t animals. I mean lookit what Elvis was doing on the stage. All that stuff with his, you know, his—getting the little girls all crazy.”

  The interviewer shook her head. “They screamed for your boys, too.”

  He made
her wait a second while he stared at her. “And? I mean, what’s your point? Girls been screaming and fainting at singers since forever. But you knew if a girl fainted around one of my kids he wouldn’t take advantage of it. He’d just keep singing, or maybe get first aid or something.”

  She rapped her knuckles on the book’s cover. “There were a lot of them, weren’t there?”

  DiGaudio’s face darkened. “Lot of what?”

  “Your kids, your singers. Some people called it the production line.”

  “Yeah, well, some people can bite me. People who talk like that, they don’t know, they don’t know kids. These were crushes, not love affairs. The girls weren’t going to marry my guys, they were going to buy magazines with their pictures on the front and write the guys’ names all over everything, and fifteen minutes later they were going to get a crush on the next one. So there had to be a next one. Like junior high, but with better looking boys. Girl that age, she’s a crush machine, or at least they were back then. These days, who knows? Not much innocence around now, but that’s what my kids were. They were innocence. They were, like, dreams. They were never gonna knock the girls up, or marry them and drink too much and kick them around, or turn out to be as gay as a lamb chop, or anything like guys do in real life. They were dreams, you know? They came out, they looked great, they sang for two and a half minutes, and then they went away.”

  “And they did go away. Most of them vanished without a trace. Are you still in touch with any of them?”

  It didn’t seem like a rough question, but DiGaudio’s eyes bounced all over the room. He filled his cheeks with air and blew it out in an exasperated puff. “That ain’t true. Some of them, they’re still working. Frankie does lounges in Vegas. Eddie and Fabio, they tour all over the place with a pickup band, call themselves Faces of the Fifties or something like that. They’re around, some of them.”

  “And Bobby? Bobby Angel?”

  “Nobody knows what happened to Bobby. Somebody must of told you that, even if you didn’t bother to read the book. Bobby disappeared.”

  “Do you ever think about Giorgio?”

  The fat little mouth pulled in until it was as round as a carnation. “Giorgio,” he finally said. He sounded like he wanted to spit. “Giorgio was different. He didn’t like it, you know? Even when he was a big star. Didn’t think he belonged up there.”

  “A lot of people agreed with him.”

  DiGaudio leaned forward. “What is this, the Cheap Shot Hour? Even somebody like you, after what happened to that poor kid, even someone like you ought to think a couple times before piling on. Who are you, anyway? Some local talent on a TV station in some two-gas-station market. I mean, look at this set, looks like a bunch of second graders colored it—”

  “This is obviously a touchy topic for—”

  “You know, I came on this show to talk about a book, to tell a story about music and Philadelphia, about when your audience was young, about a different kind of time, and what do I get? Miss Snide of 1927, with your bleeping jack-o’-lantern makeup and that lawn-mower hair—”

  “So, if I can get an answer, what are your thoughts about Giorgio?”

  DiGaudio reached out and covered the camera lens with his hand. There were a couple of heavily bleeped remarks, and then the screen went to black.

  “My, my,” I said. “Touchy guy.” I glanced at my watch. DiGaudio lived in Studio City, way south of Ventura Boulevard, in the richest, whitest part of the Valley. I had another thirty-five minutes, and the trip would only take fifteen. I typed in Giorgio Lucky Star.

  And found myself looking at fifties black-and-white, the fuzzy kinescope that’s all we have of so much early television, just a movie camera aimed at a TV screen, the crude archival footage that the cameraman’s union insisted on. Without that clause in their contract, almost all the live television of the fifties would be radiating out into space, the laugh tracks of the long-dead provoking slack-jawed amazement among aliens sixty light years away, but completely lost here on earth.

  Even viewed through pixels the size of thumbtacks, Giorgio was a beautiful kid. And Rina was right: he couldn’t do anything. He stood there as though he’d been told he’d be shot if he moved, and mouthed his way through two minutes of pre-recorded early sixties crap-rock. Since the face was everything and he wasn’t doing anything with the rest of himself anyway, the cameras pretty much stayed in closeups, just fading from one shot to another. No matter where they put the camera, he looked good. He had the same classical beauty as Presley. Like Presley, if you’d covered his face in white greasepaint and taken a still closeup, you’d have had a classical statue, a cousin of Michelangelo’s David.

  But unlike the sculpted David, who stares into his future with the calm certainty of someone who knows that God is holding his team’s pom-poms on the sidelines, Giorgio had the look you see in a crooked politician who’s just been asked the one question he’d been promised he wouldn’t be asked, in the athlete who’s been told he has to take the drug test he knows he’s going to fail.

  Giorgio was terrified.

  The house looked like a box designed to hold four eggs, a pyramid, and part of Niagara Falls. Hung irregularly with windows the way some people put up pictures, it was an exercise in geometrical schizophrenia, squares connected to rectangles and triangles and parallelograms and irregular trapezoids and other useless shapes, plunked down on a view lot. Maybe nine thousand square feet, one story high, meandering drunkenly over half an acre. It was a burglar’s nightmare. Just finding your way back out would be a challenge.

  The door was yanked open by a grim-looking, artificially black-haired, defiantly elderly woman as tall as I was, with a protruding chin-mole on the left side of a protruding chin, NFL shoulders, and severely muscled calves beneath her black skirt. The calves looked like they’d evolved to hold the planet still while she walked. Her hair was drawn back into a tight bun and further restrained by a hairnet. The overall effect was the apple-bearing witch in Snow White on steroids. She banged the door against the wall, glared at me, grunted as though the worst suspicions of a long lifetime had just been confirmed, turned her broad back, and started to hike down the hall. I followed, and she said, without looking back, “Close it.”

  I shut the door while she waited for me, tapping a booted foot, and then I followed her for what seemed like ten minutes across a pale wood floor that zigzagged through rooms of all shapes, any one of which would have done fine as a living room, until we reached a semicircular space with an enormous window, a single molded pane of curved glass that stretched the length of the rounded wall to reveal the lights of the Valley glittering expensively below. Beneath the glass was a curved sofa in white leather, exactly the same length as the window. And dead center on the sofa, behind a curving coffee table in bleached wood, was Vincent L. DiGaudio.

  Grandma Atlas ushered me into the room, announced, “Your mistake’s arrived,” and stepped aside with the air of someone who’s completed an unpleasant task.

  DiGaudio was a lot wider now than he’d been when he did the YouTube interview in 1975. Like a lot of guys who’ve run to fat, he’d been told that dressing in black from head to toe would make him look like Fred Astaire. His hair was dyed the same black as the woman’s, a dead black that ate light without reflecting any. He’d also grown a little soul patch. It clung uncertainly to his lower lip, like a misplaced comma.

  “You don’t look like much,” DiGaudio said without getting up.

  “You get what you pay for.”

  He replayed the sentence, half-moving his lips. “I ain’t paying you nothing.”

  “We’ll discuss that later. Could you ask Frau Blücher here to get me something to drink? A Diet Coke or something.”

  “That stuff will take the chrome off a bumper.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a 1957 Chevy.”

  “What I mean, we don’t got it. We got fruit juices and natural sodas, got a bunch of kinds of bottled water.”

/>   “Whatever’s easy,” I said.

  “What’s easy,” the woman said, “is you stay thirsty.”

  “Your mom?” I asked DiGaudio. “Or a rental for the evening?”

  “Hey, buster,” the woman said.

  “Buster?” I said. “You allow her to call your guests buster?”

  “This is Popsie,” DiGaudio said. “Popsie can call you whatever she wants.”

  “You’re the one who has to live with her. Water, out of the tap, would be fine.”

  Popsie said, “Psssshhhhhhh,” with a disgusted shake of the head and barged out of the room, towing a vast amount of negative energy behind her. I half expected to see all the metal objects in the room drag themselves in her wake.

  “You don’t want to fuck with Popsie,” DiGaudio said after the door closed behind her. “She used to wrestle. WWF, no less.”

  “What’d she call herself?”

  “Hilda, the Queen of the Gestapo.”

  “And this qualified her for what job description?”

  He shifted his bulk, tried to cross his left leg over his right, and failed. He brought the leg up again, grabbed the calf with both hands, and forced it into place. “What do you care?”

  “Just making conversation. Why’d she call me your mistake?”

  “Popsie’s got strong opinions. Figures anybody Paulie sends will be a fuckup. She thinks I should just sit around waiting for the cops to come and get me.”

  “Before you tell me why they might come and get you, let’s do a fact check. This isn’t free.”

  He brought up a heavily ringed hand. Primed by Marge, I checked for a pinky ring, and found one. The man was a cad. “Scuse me?” DiGaudio said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, okay? Paulie’s got one of your nuts in a vise—”

  “Paulie?”

  He opened his mouth a couple of times but nothing came out. He wasn’t used to being interrupted. “My nephew,” he finally said. “Paulie.”

  “Jesus. Vinnie, Paulie. Popsie. Where are Vito and Sonny? Why not just hang some neon in the window, MOBS R US.”