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boys!
    Sixth Avenue – Avenue of the Americas – east corner of Tribeca; narrow-fronted, blink-and-miss-it restaurant: Cantonese, a little exclusive. Ambience within – warm, like a wood-burning Newfoundland fireplace; anachronistic, like this place should have been five blocks the other side of Broadway, down there in Chinatown between Columbus Park and Chatham Square.
    A dozen or so customers, mostly in pairs: one or two illicit rendezvous – people there when they were believed to be somewhere else, hushed words, repressed emotions, hidden agendas, ankles out-of-sight and touching beneath the table; middle-aged married couple, obvious even as she orders for him ’cause she knows what agrees with him and what doesn’t, possessing that comfortable blanket of familiarity that has soundlessly replaced what they once possessed, the awkward rush of desire and discovery that marked the early years of their confederacy.
    Back in the right-hand corner, a table against the wall. Two men seated, their meal almost finished. Late thirties, early forties perhaps, one of them smart in dark suit, tie, spit-shine shoes, the other less so: a heavy cotton suit that has seen better days, and a face marked and lined and patterned and crossed with a hundred years of living. A worn face; a face with a story, a narrative,a journey around it; a face like a suitcase that has travelled the world; shoulders hunched as he leans forward, listening, hands folded together, fingers interwoven; fair-haired, eyes blue-grey-greenish, like a smudge of unnameable color at the edge of a palette.
    Smart-suit is talking, animated, smiling, cheeks reddened with beer and sake, saying, ‘So it’s . . . I don’t know, ’74, maybe ’75, and he’s down in Vegas for whatever reason. Elvis is down in Vegas—’
    Suitcase-face interrupts. ‘He pretty much lived down there . . . don’t think he sang anywhere else during the last years of his life.’
    Smart-suit nods, waves aside the interjection. The reason that Elvis was in Vegas is irrelevant, a distraction. ‘So he’s down in Vegas . . . down there in Vegas, and he hears about some Elvis impersonation contest—’
    ‘An Elvis impersonation contest.’
    ‘Yes, sure . . . you know the kind of thing? Whole bunch of fat saddos all dressed in this sequinned cabaret shit, big sideburns, three cans of hairspray to fix their hair, right?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘You know the deal, yeah?’
    ‘I know the deal.’
    ‘So, like I was saying, the King . . . he hears about this contest, and just for the hell of it he figures he’s going to enter this thing—’
    ‘Elvis? Like the
real
Elvis Presley . . . he’s going to enter an Elvis impersonator contest?’
    ‘Right,’ Smart-suit says, and he’s starting to laugh, like one of those times when the teller knows the punch-line, and maybe he’s told it a hundred times before, but there’s still something godawful funny about this story and there’s nothing that can be done about it. ‘So he figures he’s going to enter this contest.’
    ‘And he does?’
    Smart-suit nods. ‘He enters it. He comes along all dressed up in the real deal costume, all the sequins and rhinestone, the heavyweight boxing belt, the cape, the whole charabanc, you know? He gets up there, he belts out a classic, gives it his best freakin’ shot just to see what will happen.’
    Suitcase-face is smiling, nodding, like he knows what’s coming, and if you asked him he would’ve sat there ’til Tuesday and never figured it out, but there’s a quiet tension to how the story goes that gives it a certain magic.
    ‘And you never guess what happens?’
    ‘What? What happens?’
    ‘He comes fourth.’ And Smart-suit loses it, and he starts laughing, and Suitcase-face sits there for a moment, and then he starts laughing too, and the pair of them just come apart at the seams, and heads are turning, and those with uptight repressions and guilt complexes, the kind of things you share with