by P. F. Kluge
“So this deer that becomes venison gets digested. It’s attacked and broken down by all kinds of enzymes and acids. And this, music lovers, brings us to act three, end of show, last act, curtains, and I guess you could say it contains the deer and the venison, that it reincarnates them, but from where I sit it looks—and it smells—like a pile of shit. From which I—”
“Wipe ass and walk away!” Chester shouted, beaming. It was Albert’s favorite line. He used it to end anything that bored him, a meeting, a meal, a movie, an affair. It was his philosophy of life.
“Nothing personal, old-timer,” Albert said. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, the kind of sympathetic pat a baseball manager gives a pitcher he’s taking out of the game. “We’re doing fine right now and I appreciate what you’ve put together here. But listen—earth to Ward Wiggins!—this is an Elvis show. It’s not the College of Cardinals. Chester is not a priest and I’m not a cardinal and you aren’t the pope. Okay?”
“I hear you,” I said.
“I’m putting this in the nicest possible way but, with all due respect, I don’t want to grow up to be you.”
When Albert’s act was done, the stage darkened, only for a moment but the moment was crucial. It separated me from them, it put them in the past, it said here is what it came to, this is how it ended. We racked the sound system up a few notches, turned the lights up just a little so it looked like dawn and—wham!—we heard the rumbling of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which most of these guys knew as the “Theme from 2001,” only they’d never heard it this loud before. I waited a few seconds while the music swelled. I looked around the room, which was a movie theater once, so you had a floor full of tables and a bar on either side and a balcony up top, with what they called VIP suites that had BarcaLoungers, couches, and dark-tinted glass.
On any night, even when the fleet was in, more than half the people in front of me were women I knew. Some of them came and went, of course; one married a serviceman and disappeared, another went off to Brunei or Kuwait or Guam, another visited relatives in the provinces and didn’t come back. Still, they were a constant audience, the best women—and the biggest bar fines, 500 pesos just to take them out of here—in town. They were heartbreakingly beautiful, in that high-cheekboned, long-haired elegant Latin Catholic way. They were lean and sleek and refined and—surprisingly—romantic. They came out every night in search of magic. They believed in the lyrics of the popular songs. And this was the saddest part, this was what separated them from the women in all the other ports: they were ready to fall in love with their customers.
I waited offstage, listening to the music. I was always pumped up for this: a boxer entering the ring, a bullfighter facing a charge, a batter standing at the plate, two out, two strikes, bottom of the ninth, which, considering the state of Elvis’ health at this stage of his career, wasn’t such a bad comparison. What I felt, standing there, was that there was something sacrificial about me, something that said, okay, I’m going to perform for you. And die for you. I didn’t know whether the Navy guys got this, right away, but I saw recognition in some of the girls who were raised on saints and martyrs and messiahs, raised in a land of relics and icons, a death-loving and theatrical land, where crucifixions were enacted every year, thorns around heads and nails through flesh. They believed in me. I could see it in their eyes, some nights. If they believed in the thousand-to-one chance that some Navy kid they tried to get to buy a margarita might turn out to be a potential husband, then why not believe in me as well, the second coming of Elvis, their personal savior?
When Richard Strauss boomed loudest, I stepped out onstage and let everybody get a look at me. A moment of recognition, you might say: here is my body, bloated for you. The Elvis of this period was into martial arts and he incorporated some of that into his act, kicks and chops and stances. I did some of that when Zarathustra ended. Then I took the mike and addressed the audience. I sounded jaded but country, the voice of a man who was almost finished, almost but not quite, maybe one performance left in him. This performance, here, tonight. I walked to the edge of the stage, singing the hell out of “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
“You remember me?” I asked, when my first song was done. “You remember me when I was king?”
A light probed in back of me and there stood Albert. Albert hated this part, said he felt like a hood ornament on a car, but the moment worked. Half lit, it was as if he were already receding from me, falling into time, into the past.
“I had everything I wanted and more than I needed and I made some mistakes …” I took a step toward him, extended a hand, then realized the futility of it, that we could never touch, “… that I would make again.” And I nodded good-bye to him.
“You remember when you first saw me?” I ask. Better not wait for an answer. These guys weren’t born then. I quickly turn to where the spotlight found Chester, way at the back of the stage, posing with his legs spread, his back arched away from the audience, his guitar pointing toward the ceiling.
“That was the me,” I said. “The me that used to be.” Darkness swallowed Chester. And, like that, I launched into the most disputed part of our act, a quick medley of early Elvis hits, “Jailhouse Rock,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” snatches of some of the same songs that Chester and Albert had performed moments before. God, did we have arguments about this! Chester said it didn’t seem right, repeating ourselves that way. He called it poaching. But I was determined to win this one and what carried the day was the risk or—as Albert saw it—the likelihood of my humiliation.
“You want to wear my leather?” Albert jeered. “See if you can squeeze that gut inside my motorcycle jacket?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
‘They want to see me try. They want to see me lean backward and hold up the guitar like Chester does, with his head damn near touching the floor, only in my case—I admit it—it’s my gut climbing toward the rafters. They want to see me try to be young again and mostly fail. They want to measure the change.”
“For the worse, man. Look at yourself.”
“Okay. For the worse.”
“All right,” Albert said. “Go crap on yourself.”
It was hard, getting him to see that just as Elvis changed, so did the songs. They traveled with him, but what he brought to them, and what he found, was always different. Chester sang “Love Me Tender” and it was like a virgin’s plea for gentleness. Albert tried it, it was whips and boots and people handcuffed to bedposts. I sang it, Sinatra-sad, with all the melancholy of time and loss. We interrogated our material—that was what I’d say, if they pressed me. We asked questions of the songs and they asked questions back at us, hard questions of their own, like what were we doing here and what ever happened to us and how did things get to be that way.
I put all of that in my opening medley, age and weight and even a stroke of clumsiness, as if it had been years since I tried these steps. It was sad to see me even try. I saw glimmers of sympathy in some of the girls’ eyes, a trace of embarrassment in the Navy guys: fat sumbitch looks like he might croak right in front of us. Leonard Warren, Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter, Enrico Caruso, I made a list of performers stricken onstage. The Flying Wallendas. Did they count too? And—come to think of it—Jesus Christ. Didn’t he die onstage? Meanwhile, though, they were hearing Elvis. I haven’t told you about my voice. Chester and Albert were good singers but their voices were not their main instrument. Chester was a dancer, Albert an actor. Albert didn’t have to worry about growing up to be me: he could never take my part. The later Elvis was a stylish, booming singer, elegant and operatic, closer to Mario Lanza than to his earlier rockabilly self. I had his kind of voice. It was born in a shower, developed in high school musicals, perfected in summer stock. Then I abandoned it, but it never deserted me.
After the medley, it was time for the big songs, a mountain range of crescendos and heavy breathing, of boomers like “The Won
der of You,” “Burning Love,” “It’s Now or Never.” I turned “Suspicious Minds” into an aria. I shifted down to “Loving You,” up to “A Fool Such As I,” down—to the pits, in my opinion—with “In the Ghetto,” which I skipped if I saw more than three black faces in the crowd. Then there was no escaping the trio of songs that had been Elvis’ patented curtain-closer in his Las Vegas years. “American Trilogy,” they called it, and a cunning piece it was. “Dixie” and “All My Sorrows” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I sang it like I believed it, and by the time I finished, I did. I believed. And so did the people in front of me.
That was when the magic happened. And this was when the story I’m telling you really began, when I sang “All My Sorrows.” For just a moment, I would cut out the posing, the kicks and karate chops, and come way down low and quiet, looking out at the audience, where I’d pick a face, some sailor with his arms around a couple of bar girls, a line of San Miguels in front of him. That’s the guy I aimed at, him or one of the girls he was with.
My voice came way down, so that the whole place leaned forward to catch the words of the song—a father whispering to a child, a consolation and a warning, that death comes to all of us. A heartbreaker of a song, a kiss of death buried in a lullaby. That was when they knew this was no clown show, that ominous, lovely moment, tucked in between “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Sometimes I lingered on “All My Sorrows,” I held the moment, repeating the words, and sometimes I almost wanted to go from table to table, passing the word, the black spot, the kiss of death. The girls sensed it, some of them, saw it coming and crossed themselves, hoping what they feared would pass. That little moment is when all of this started.
Then I had one mountain left to climb, one roof to raise, that trying, obnoxious “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It made me earn my pay, but I put everything into it so when I finished my heart was pounding, I was sweating in puddles. I’d stay there, head bowed, arms outthrust. (Albert said it was a good way of pointing the customers toward the exit.) Anyway, His truth went marching on, right into the streets of Olongapo.
It cheapened the act for me to display myself offstage. A car usually waited for me out back. After the second show, I’d pile my shiny boots, loose shirt and tight pants, my capes and scarves and wrestler’s belt into a dressing room corner, put on a pair of chinos and a blue denim work shirt and some scuffed-up loafers. On my way out, I’d grab a beer from the bar and nod good night to a handful of girls who stayed behind, the handful who hadn’t hooked up with the fleet or maybe they’d finished their customers off already. There was always a group of them, I’d noticed, right near the jukebox. Not all of them were hookers either, at least not all the time. It wasn’t that simple. The game wasn’t just money, it was also love. So there they sat, some of the girls who worked fast and some who couldn’t find work and some others who chose not to work, all sitting around talking, reading movie magazines, comparing clothing, like a pajama party. It amazed me how they could be b-girls one minute—“spare parts,” “u-drives,” “little brown fucking machines powered by rice”—and, the next minute, chatty, giggling teenagers. In them, guilt and innocence were tangled together. The first month or so, I passed them by, calling out good night like a man who had someplace to go when work was done. They said good night in return. That was that. And that was temporary. One night I decided to take my time, going home.
“You guys,” I said, pausing in front of them. “Don’t you ever leave?”
“We are waiting for you, Elvis,” one of them said. Priscilla, her name tag said. The names changed. Right then we had a Whitney, a Mariah, a Madonna. Priscilla was one of the sharper girls, fluent in English. She could live off the drinks she sold and be a little choosy about the rest of it.
“You’re all waiting for me to take you home?” I asked. I counted them, one by one, all six of them. “We’ll have to rent a jeepney.”
“Oh, sir, no sir,” Priscilla continued. “You make a selection from among us.”
“Half? Three? Two? One.”
“As you like it, sir,” she said. It was all a joke. They were laughing and some of them had that way of covering their faces when they laughed, hiding their mouths. It was funny, how shyness survived. And here of all places. They were young but they lived in a country that had been dealing with Americans since the century began. We’d been colonizers and administrators, allies and liberators. We were soldiers and schoolteachers, missionaries and investors. At Graceland we were potential customers. Or lovers. They waited to see how we wanted things to be, never quite knowing. So they hedged. Whenever they said something serious, there was a joke in the neighborhood. And every joke could turn serious. Including the joke they were making now, about taking someone home, if I wanted.
“Take two of us, sir,” someone suggested. Like a doctor explaining a prescription. “We are small people and you are … so big!”
“And then you know what happens,” I said, swallowing some of a beer I’d kept for the ride home. “I come out tomorrow after the show and you’re all sitting here but you stop talking all of a sudden. You look, you trade glances, and I know that the word is out on me. What size is Elvis’ gun? How fast did he draw it? How often did he shoot it? Did he hit or miss the target? How many targets were there?”
“But sir!” another girl pressed. I leaned forward to check out her name tag. They all had name tags. It was a step up, I guess, from wearing numbers, like the women in Bangkok, sitting behind one-way glass windows, displaying themselves to customers. “Elvira!” I said. “That’s you?”
“Yes sir.” A top-of-the-line model, in black billowing slacks and a matching blouse and a halter that covered a more substantial bosom than you usually saw in these latitudes. She was more Italian-looking than Filipino: Claudia Cardinale, Sophia Loren. Plus she had that pouting, downward-turning mouth that says, come on, I dare you. Elvira was one of the bolder girls. Others blushed and giggled as soon as you looked at them. Some—Elvira looked like one of them—had been around, to Singapore and Hong Kong. Others were fresh from the provinces, right out of barefoot villages and barrios. Those were the ones with tribal looks, short, flat-nosed, with high cheekbones, and squat, serviceable bodies. Their conversation didn’t get past “How you like Philippines?” and “How many children you have already?” Endearingly, they always wanted to see family pictures out of the wallets of the men they slept with.
Now Elvira leaned forward, aware of the edge she had on the other girls, who were watching her make her play. She paused, she purred, reached out and placed an elegant, manicured finger on the top of my hand. And then she did this trick. Later, I saw other girls at Graceland do the same thing when they were getting intimate, late at night, close to closing time, which meant closing a deal as much as closing a bar. But this was the first time for me, and Elvira was a piece of work, when she wanted to be. She took my middle finger—yeah, that one—and gently bent it across the palm of my hand so that the tip touched down about an inch away from my wrist. Then—with all the girls watching, ooohing and aahing—she released the finger and stroked it and gave me this come-on look. The span from where the finger touched when it was bent back to where it reached when extended was supposed to be the length of my love machine. A rule of hand which Elvira seemed anxious to verify.
“You like me?” she asked, running her finger up and down my middle digit, tickling and stroking.
“Elvis and Elvira? Gee, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
It turned out they laughed a lot, this late-night crew. They laughed about business, about Japanese and Americans and Filipinos. Compare and contrast: how much they paid, how much they wanted, how quickly they finished. They cursed the customers who masturbated beforehand, so the girl would have to work harder for her money. They all deserved a better break, I thought, and I admired the way they came back, night after night, dressed like princesses.
“Baby Elvis goes out all the time,” a girl named Whitne
y said. “And Dude Elvis … all night. Every night. But Biggest Elvis …”
“Biggest Elvis!” They whooped, they laughed, they high-fived each other, and now I had a name that would stick and Whitney looked around, astonished, no clue what she’d done. Out of the mouths of babes. In the Philippines, nicknames kept on coming, a nation of Babys, Juns, Dings, Dongs, Bings, Bengs, Dodongs and these weren’t schoolkids. They could be senators, ambassadors, judges.
“Biggest Elvis,” I repeated, acknowledging the inevitable. The nickname would stick. “Enough for one night. I want to thank you all for a lovely evening.”
A chorus of complaints arose. Biggest Elvis was getting away, one big tuna slipping out of the net. As I walked away, though, I saw something that stopped me. Three women sat near the jukebox, which cast just enough light for them to see the squares and tiles on a Scrabble board. I hadn’t noticed them till now. They didn’t banter like the others. They kept a distance which wasn’t hostile, they just needed to concentrate. I couldn’t resist looking at the board. Later, I asked myself what I expected to see. Was I looking for a game played by Olongapo rules, with BARFINE leading into BLOWJOB and COCK branching into a triple word score QUICKIE? There was a kind of false wisdom you could fall into when you lived in a place like Olongapo, a kind of wised-upedness, a beery, bullshitty I-saw-it-coming, I-told-you-so. That’s what happened to me now. Because the words on the Scrabble board were things like EXODUS and QUINCE.
“Wow,” I said, pointing to the word DIASPORA. “I didn’t think you knew those words.”
I should have known better. This was a country that valued education. If you wanted hungry students, this was where you came. The trouble was, they stayed hungry after graduation. You had political scientists driving taxis, biologists diapering rich peoples’ babies, history majors sitting in bars, waiting for strangers to walk in. That’s what I wished I’d remembered, while the silence lengthened. No one at the table gave me a look. All I heard was someone shaking the paper bag in which they kept the unplayed letters, that and “You Don’t Send Me Flowers Anymore” starting out in the jukebox.