Cat in a Flamingo Fedora Read online

  Her several-years-old Storm looked like a million-dollar baby in the motel's shabby parking area. She hated to leave it alone without an alarm system, a thought that had never occurred to her before.

  Her high heels speared food-stamp chits and greasy burger wrappers as she minced over the litter to the designated room. Above her, like some shabby Madonna thrusting up from the prow of the motel-office roof, loomed the huge plaster statue of the Blue Mermaid herself.

  Where brass numerals had once indicated the proper room, all that remained was the dirt-etched outline of a one and a six. Temple didn't quite know where to place her white-knuckled knock, so she lifted a foot and rapped with her shoe toe.

  The door exploded inward before she could lower her foot, so there she was, introduced to Domingo like one of his blasted flamingos, standing on one foot. At least she wasn't attired in pink feathers, or plastic.

  "Isn't it marvelous?!" he demanded in a voice that could have been announcing the Second Coming, or his first one. "Fabulous! Don't just stand there gawking. Turn around and look. The Miss America of Las Vegas. Right behind you."

  Temple turned. (What else could she do when Domingo seized her elbow and spun her around?)

  All she saw were the cluttered, low buildings of downtown.

  "Magnificent!"

  She followed Domingo's dark, adoring eyes upward to the plaster figure. "Very Art Moderne

  . .. ," she began.

  "No! You are wrong. Art Now. I will cover the roof with flamingos, make this into a temple of fecundity and fantasy."

  "Uh, it probably already is." She hadn't wanted to think about it, but some of the items she had carefully stepped around and over included used condoms, and needles.

  "Yes, you see it!" Domingo's eyes narrowed as they returned to her face. "Who are you?"

  "Temple Barr. Your liaison with the Convention and Visitors Authority, what passes for a Chamber of Commerce in this town. I have an appointment with you for eleven a.m."

  He smiled suddenly, at her. "And is it eleven a.m., pretty lady?"

  Temple cast a nervous glance at her watch. Somehow she did not want to take her eyes off Domingo. "Seven to eleven."

  "Then you were on time. Domingo does not wear a watch."

  He swept his arms wide, nearly knocking Temple off her feet, to display white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and hairy forearms bare of watch, bracelet or any accoutrement.

  Bully for Domingo, she wanted to say, but overpowering personalities turned her into a clockwork Shirley Temple, all manners and no guts.

  "Then how do you keep appointments?" she asked.

  "I do not, but appointments, like you, come to me, and they keep me on time. Don't worry, we won't stay here." He had caught her eyes wandering over the less-appetizing details of the Blue Mermaid.

  "I did want you to see what I'm looking for. The ambience, quint essentially American. That is where my million flamingos will blossom. All over this city. They will give it color, wit, warmth, excitement."

  Temple wanted to point out that Las Vegas already had plenty of all that, but Miss Shirley fluffed her butt-length circle of crinolines, curtsied and kept a demure, dimpled silence.

  "Look!"

  Apparently Domingo spoke only in imperatives.

  "My car comes. We will lunch someplace else."

  The car (of course) was a fifties flamingo-pink Cadillac convertible, with a flamingo hood ornament, driven by an Asian man. In the backseat, riding alone, sat the dark woman from the photographs, wearing black.

  Domingo opened the huge front door and Temple skipped over the fallen private-dancer flyers into the perfectly preserved white-leather interior. Settling in the backseat with Verina was like being one of two dice in a coffin. They would have to shout to speak from their distant sides of the wide bench seat.

  Domingo took the front passenger seat, pulling a flamingo fedora from the glove compartment, along with a pair of flamingo-bearing sunglasses.

  Temple had to smile. A man who was not afraid to look ridiculous was hard to come by. Max came to mind.

  "One last look at our figurehead--will she not look splendid with a nest of flamingos in her hair?--and then we go have lunch."

  Temple turned to her seatmate, still feeling very Shirley. "I'm Temple Barr, the PR woman.

  We haven't met, but I've read so much about you--"

  "Then we don't need to meet now," the woman snapped. "The driver is called Martin."

  Just like the artist is called Domingo? Temple wondered. Is that what artists really did: call things by names of their own choosing? She wondered what Domingo would call her.

  Evidently this artist believed in going from the ridiculous to the sublime: the pink Cadillac pulled into the entrance to the Mirage, its high, coppery glass curve of rooms sparkling like a Hoover Dam of fool's gold.

  The party of three, Domingo and the two women, threaded through the tropical entryway teeming with trees and flowers, until Domingo stopped.

  "I love this!" Again the shirt sleeved arms cast net wide and drew in a small school of tourist attention. "Embalmed palms. Yes!" he announced to the dazed onlookers. "These trees are real, and not real. Mummified. Preserved. Quite dead, but looking eminently alive. Like you! Boo!"

  He laughed as they scattered like little red hens fleeing a falling sky. He was the Sky, with his eye that took in everything, his flailing arms that took in so much and shut out so many.

  "Is he always like this?" Temple couldn't help asking Verina.

  "Genius is always like this. Domingo . . . sometimes he is other ways." Her tone was knowing, almost bitter.

  Temple was not sure she was equipped to deal with genius, not with her cotton-pique pale yellow pantsuit and her black-and-yellow Charles Jourdan pumps and black-patent tote bag. Not with Shirley Temple taking over inside and twirling a little curl in the middle of her forehead. The trouble with Shirley was that she was always, unlike genius, predictable. Always good. Never horrid. Temple had a feeling that only someone with a capacity for being horrid could stand being around genius for very long.

  Domingo led the expedition, describing the process of preserving palm trees in a loud, museum-guide voice. Actually, it wasn't a museum-guide voice. Such guides always spoke in hushed, inaudible tones that made one nudge one's neighbors to get closer and hear. Domingo's tone was that of a carnival barker whose overriding emotion was contempt for what he hawked and those who bought it.

  "Fade-proof, fire-retardant," Domingo announced. "Fiberglass beneath. Preserved leaves, preserved bark. Pasted and glued and wired back together like a bionic tree. No water, no bugs, no growth. Wouldn't people be superior if so reconstructed? What do you say, Verina?"

  She said nothing, merely walked behind the artist like an Arab wife in chador, her long dark hair hiding the expression on her face.

  "And you!" he barked. "What do you think?"

  Temple jumped at the sudden shout. Then she guessed that she was "you!"

  "I prefer my people--and trees--organically grown, even if they are a bit messy to take care of."

  Domingo laughed, swinging his flamingo sunglasses from one forefinger, and walked on.

  They passed the hotel fish tanks and lobby, the casino and restaurant, making for the elevators.

  In silence the trio rocketed up in the elevator to the top of the copper tower. Not far down the hotel hallway, Verina unlocked a door and stepped aside to let Domingo enter the quietly luxurious penthouse suite first. Here was no sunken black marble Jacuzzi off the living room, no mirrors and naked statues, that passed for luxe at some of the older Vegas hotels.

  Domingo held up his bare wrist and grinned mischievously at Temple. "You look so much better without your sunglasses on. Room service is sending up lunch at twelve-thirty." He squinted at his wrist, laughed and disappeared through the sliding glass doors to the patio.

  Temple checked her own, very visible watch. Eleven-forty-five. That meant forty-five uncomfortable minutes
wondering what Domingo would do next and what on earth she could say to the chicly hostile woman beside her.

  Verina solved both problems.

  "He wants to be alone. People . . . tire him. You'll want to see the plans."

  Temple couldn't argue with any of that, so she followed Verina into an adjoining room. Once a bedroom, its usual furniture had been pushed to the walls, with the bed replaced by a pair of banquet tables bare of tablecloths.

  Instead they were covered with stand-up cardboard cutouts of miniature flamingos, dozens and dozens of them. Several Las Vegas landmarks were also represented. The Luxor's pyramid rose like a shark fin from the foaming sea of flamingos. Leo the MGM Lion was surrounded by the creatures. The Camelot's fairy-tale towers sported flamingo guards; even its wizard now wore a flamingo-pink robe.

  Something sparkling caught Temple's eyes: Dorothy's ruby-red slippers redone in flamingo-pink sequins.

  She turned to Verina. "You're not going to change Dorothy's shoes in the MGM Grand vignette?"

  "He is. We're negotiating with the management. He also wants to decorate the artificial lawn surrounding the Oz figures with the artistically placed lawn-ornament flamingos."

  "They will go for this?"

  "The huge corporations that own such major attractions are noticeably lacking a sense of--"

  "Humor," Temple finished, nodding sympathetically.

  Verina looked daggers at her, daggers dripping flamingo-pink blood, no less. Maybe she had pinkeye.

  "I was going to say, a sense of artistic license, of the absurd and the profound, which, as Domingo says in his lectures, often occupy the same sacred ground."

  "Domingo lectures, formally?"

  "Domingo speaks to prestigious groups: think tanks, university presidents, gove rnmental bodies. He believes that art should be public, that it should have scope and thrust, that it should inform every corner of our culture, pathetic as it is."

  Temple nodded. That's what Shirley would have done.

  "I'll just study this architectural model, then, until lunchtime," she said. "That should give me a better grasp of the project's scale and purpose."

  "Oh, I doubt that. You can't be expected to grasp the artistic aspects of the installation. All we ask is that you inform us of the personalities involved at each of the project manifestations. I really don't think that we need you, but Domingo insisted on someone local to run interference." She lowered her sunglasses for the first time to let Temple see her ice-blue eyes. "I hope you're good at it."

  Then she left, shutting the door so silently that not even the turning knob clicked audibly as it slid into place.

  Temple sighed and wandered toward the floor-to-ceiling windows covered with vertical blinds. Through the thin fence of the edgewise slats, Las Vegas was laid out far below like a body on a dissecting table. From this height she could see the straight spine of the Strip, the vertebrae of cross streets.

  On second thought, the city was more of a Gulliver stretched upon the sand while millions of Lilliputians thronged like parasites over its roads and sidewalks and identifying marks. Here she stood on the mole of the Mirage, there lay the bruise of Bally's and there the curving vein of the monorail running to the MGM Grand. Arteries, veins, bruises and also birthmarks, such as the vast construction site for New York-New York.

  How could you satirize a parody? How could you vulgarize Vegas? How could an overpopulation of plastic flamingos make any more monumental an adult fairyland founded on one keystone hotel, the first and only Flamingo to set foot in Las Vegas? Bugsy Siegel's bouncing-baby hotel-casino, the font of all this, which would soon bring forty million people a year to a wasteland turned Wonderland.

  Maybe this time, Temple thought, Domingo had bitten off more than he could chew. Maybe this time he had picked the one national monument mad enough, and mean enough, to bite back.

  ****************

  Temple was summoned into the main room when the room-service lunch arrived. Domingo ate hurriedly; it was a necessary task rather than a pleasure. The women followed his lead, Temple picking at her vegetable pasta and soon calling it quits, Verina doing likewise with a fruit plate.

  Domingo looked significantly at Verina, who left in a rustle of discarded napkin and exiting robe. Domingo rose as well, abandoning the table, and leaving Temple only one role: to follow him to the window-wall looking down on a dusty, daylit Las Vegas.

  "I have a dream," Domingo said.

  The bright daylight from the high, hotel windows turned him into a silhouette, a speaking silhouette with arms thrust wide. Temple couldn't tell if Domingo were a frustrated actor, or a frustrated Christ-figure.

  "You've seen it. Now I'll tell you about it." He strode to the bedroom that housed the model, and Temple followed. Verina awaited them like a dark bronze statue. Once there, Domingo prowled around the huge display table, waving his arms, telling his dream.

  Temple didn't need long to understand it. If Los Angeles were known as the City of the Angels, Domingo would make Las Vegas notorious as the City of the Flamingos, at least for a brief, shining moment. An ambition to make Las Vegas more notorious than it was and is struck Temple as oddly touching.

  Why flamingos, she asked.

  "Excellent question. No one has thought to question me before. I am too famous, too successful, too outrageous. Yet there is method to my madness."

  He proceeded to identify his method. "The first truly visionary hotel-casino was founded on the Strip in nineteen forty-six by Bugsy Siegel. It was called the Fabulous Flamingo."

  "Why?" Temple asked.

  "Why what? Why found modern Las Vegas?"

  "Why name a hotel in the middle of an empty desert the 'Flamingo'? Flamingos are long-legged, shallow water-dwelling birds. They belong on African lakes and in South American jungles and maybe in Florida souvenir shops for tourists. So why name a desert hotel after a flamingo?"

  "How do I know?" Domingo was beginning to sound frazzled. "The flamingo is a bright, sinuous bird. Great for graphics. Perhaps a man nicknamed 'Bugsy' wanted to be associated with a more elegant creature than an insect. Why is not important. What is what art is all about.

  What is what I do.

  "I do not explain myself, I present my concept. The world explains it, defames it, photographs it, deplores it and myself. Editorials rant about the waste of good money, about how much water could saturate the desert for the cost of importing these thousands of cheap plastic birds, these lowly, mass-manufactured foreign imports that spear into good soil all over the Americas--South America, Central America, Mexico and the United States. These homely lawn ornaments that will not die! This is not for me to explain."

  "All over the Americas? Canada too? And what about Alaska?"

  "What?!"

  "Do plastic flamingos populate these more-northern turfs, so to speak?"

  "No! The actual flamingo does not breed beyond the snow line, or the timber line or even the sun belt. They are creatures of sunlight, that is the point. They are gaudy, New World storks; they represent fecundity and fashion. They will wrap Las Vegas in their otherworldly reality, in their shoddy, hollow shells, in their bright, impossibly lurid color. They are very spiritual things, these humble lawn ornaments."

  The artist's model was neither particularly spiritual nor humble, but she stood looking on at this performance like an iron Madonna.

  During this exhibition, Temple had come to realize that what Domingo said about himself was more important than what others said about him. His real object was performance art.

  Wheedling civic big wheels into endorsing his wild, wicked schemes was half the fun. He was, at heart, a con artist.

  And he was ideal for the role. In his photographs he looked like an odd combination of hipster, hippie and nineties guru, and no more than thirty-four. In person he was ambiguity personified. His age might be fifty, or even sixty, or a well-worn thirty-four. His brooding dark eyes, hedged by shaggy black hair, suggested an exotic foreign origin-- sou
thern Italy, Greece, Central Europe, perhaps even Turkey. Or Native American.

  His voice had an almost-foreign formality, but no accent, not even of a regional U.S. locale.

  Domingo was a blackboard, a blank slate for the eyes and ears and hearts of his viewers to fill in as they wished, or felt impelled to do so. Con man, genius, gypsy, thief of time and pretension or merely a crazy artist? Who was he? Or, more important, what was he?

  As Temple watched Domingo strut his stuff, seemingly for her alone, she realized that they were collaborating on a work-in-progress that Domingo started all over again with each city, each person, each landscape and landmark he drew into his whacked-out remodeling schemes.

  "Now, Miss Barr!" His domineering voice demanded her full notice.

  "Which place in this city do you wish to see inundated with birds of a feather called flamingo."

  She jerked her attention to the toy Las Vegas on his conjoined tables. That was a work of art in itself, or certainly a high order of craftsmanship.

  "I can't say right off. I've never thought in terms of flamingos before."

  "No! That is why you are considered sane and safe, and I am not. That is also why I am a good deal richer than you, aren't I?"

  "I have no idea of your personal finances."

  The Dark Lady finally spoke. "Domingo is a multimillionaire for weeks at a time . . . before he reinvests in his artworks."

  "Yes! I have reversed the art-world stereotype. I invest in my own art, rather than leaving that important function to others, to kingmakers and hangers-on and frauds."

  Temple had been musing over the small-scale layout of Las Vegas. She felt like a Greek goddess, up at this Olympian height, gazing down on the puny affairs of mankind.

  "Of course the obvious is the existing Flamingo Hilton hotel."

  Temple pointed to the bright horizontal band aping the wraparound neon sign of flamingos imitating fan-dancers on the hotel's entry facade.

  "Obvious, yes." Domingo came to brood over the tiny mock building. "Still, the finest sign of the old school left in Las Vegas. Is any of the original building left standing?"