The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll get the car.” Off he went, seriously gimping, and when he came back it turned out his name was Jimmy Fiddler and he worked for Baby Ronquillo, who owned the nightclub we were headed for.

  In a minute, he was fighting through the worst traffic I’ve ever seen. Calling it gridlock would be a compliment. You had four lanes, two one way, two the other, but bit by bit people got pissed off, moved out into the oncoming lane and didn’t duck back in on account nobody would let them, so then there were three lanes going one way and then four until the team on the other side organized and mounted a counterattack, pushing through, only now it wasn’t four lanes anymore, it’s like six, because space between cars, back to front or side to side, was wasted space. This wasn’t a traffic jam, that would be like calling a lump of coal a dead plant. This was hell and we were all going to die here in the poisoned air because everything on the road was burning coffee grounds and the visibility went as far as the side of the road, where I saw a line of stores, more like stalls, places with pots of food on tables, stacks of retread tires, wicker furniture, signs advertising BED SPACER TO RENT and GO-GO DANCER WANTED and GOATS FOR SALE. And there were people along the road, kids and dogs just watching us not moving, like they were fishermen on a riverbank, casting a line out into traffic, pulling in an aerial or a rusted muffler. Would you believe there were kids out on the highway, thin kids in shorts and T-shirts, selling cigarettes one at a time, selling chewing gum, newspapers, handkerchiefs, flowers? Some of them wore headbands like Arabs and had cloth over their mouths. There were beggars too, a kid leading a blind man, a woman hefting a baby up into car windows, like merchandise she was trying to unload, something that fell off the back of a delivery truck. She pointed to her mouth and stomach, the kid’s mouth and stomach too. They saw we were Americans and soon they were all over us. “Hey, Joe, very hungry. Hey, Joe, give me peso.” We’d moved maybe five yards in the last five minutes. Then we edged out into an intersection, turning left, turning right, and following the coast. Ahead of us, half smothered in haze, was a city or what used to be one. I saw high-rise buildings with cranes on top only you couldn’t tell if the buildings were going up or coming down. On the beach side, on low swampy land that stuck out into the bay, there was a bunch of shacks that were worse than anything I’d ever seen, acres of shacks, laundry, mud, and babies. Those folks were squatters, Jimmy said. Then, all of a sudden, there were these lawns and palms and big buildings, hotels and convention halls and theaters that Imelda Marcos built, Jimmy said, but the place felt down and mean, like nobody’s plans had come true and everybody was pissed off. The walk along the ocean might have been nice, once upon a time, but there were people in rags, camped under the trees and running after tourists and stepping out into the traffic at stoplights to beg. The palm trees looked like they’d been planted there for punishment and the grass was raggedy and you just knew that if you walked through it you’d have shit on your shoes and not dog shit either.

  “Look, Dude!” the Chestnut exclaimed. Count on him to see the sunny side of things. “Look at all those ships!” Damn if he wasn’t right. Manila Bay was still something, all full of ships, dozens of them anchored in the harbor, and out behind the ships you could see some mountains come tumbling down to meet the sea.

  “Makes you wonder where they’re going and what they’re carrying,” the Chestnut said. “Makes you want to take one. Any one.”

  I have to tell you I loved my little brother, when he talked that way. “When we leave here, Dude,” he said, “can we leave by ship?”

  The way I was feeling, I’d have paddled out to one of those ships right then. The country was a dump, let’s face it, the country was for losers like our driver. What ever happened here since World War II that mattered? I’d been wondering about that, ever since Uncle Pete set this up. When was the last time anybody said, hey, let’s all go to a Filipino restaurant? What’s your favorite Filipino movie? You went to most countries and there was one certain something you had to see, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall, the Grand Canyon. So what’s your destination here? You want to go shopping? What for? I asked Ward Wiggins, the professor, if he could name a single Filipino writer and he came up empty. Embarrassed but empty. Quick, anybody, name a Filipino who isn’t a Filipino politician. See what I mean?

  “I guessed you’d want a peek at Manila before heading to Olongapo,” Jimmy said. “How long you staying?”

  “As long as they like us,” the Chestnut said. “That’s if they like us.”

  “You guys do Elvis, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You don’t do nothing else? Beatles? Rolling Stones? Hank Williams? Only Elvis?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Sounds like a couple weeks to me. We got lots of imitators. We got the Philippines Patsy Cline and the Philippines Willie Nelson at the O.K. Corral. We got the Philippines Prince and Jackie Wilson at the House of Soul. Plus there’s always a James Brown and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis around. They do okay. For a while.”

  “And … what then?” I asked.

  “What do you think? Something else comes along. People got short attention spans around here. They get tired of the same old act. It’s like one of them cheap watches, look just like a Rolex, keep time for a while. Then it stops. Don’t nobody repair them. Throw them out and buy a new one. I give you boys a couple weeks. A month, tops.”

  “We’ll be staying longer than that,” Ward Wiggins said. It gave me a queer feeling because a couple of weeks sounded fine to me, it sounded generous. But Ward sounded real sure of himself. I was afraid he might be right. It was all that crazy, the whole Elvis act. “You’ll see,” he said.

  I promised Uncle Pete I’d give Professor Ward Wiggins the benefit of the doubt, which I had surely done, on Guam, while we were putting our act together, arranging material, buying wardrobe, hiring some backup men—Filipinos—who could harmonize and play instruments behind us, keyboards, drums, flute, guitar. Anybody would have had to wonder what a college professor was doing at two in the morning, singing Elvis in the lowest bar on Guam. That was a warning in itself. There were others.

  I’ll be the first to grant that Ward had the voice, the body, the flair. He was a hard act to follow so it’s a good thing he came last. Fair enough. He had his third of the act, my brother had his third, I had mine. Only then he started in with this business about how we ought to mix up the material, so maybe he’d end up singing an early song like “That’s How Your Heartaches Begin” and Chester might try a later song like “The Wonder of You.” And, he said, since I was the middle Elvis, I had the unique advantage of traveling through time in either direction, past or future, all the way from “Love Me Tender” to “Suspicious Minds.”

  “Don’t you get it?” he said. I had asked why he was confusing all this stuff. “I’m the senior Elvis. I can’t go forward. I’ve got no future.”

  You can say that again, I thought. What happens to an Elvis impersonator who grows old, anyway? Do you pretend that you look like what Elvis would have looked like if he’d lived? Or do you go into something else? Orson Welles?

  “And Chester, he’s got no past. He’s the young Elvis, with the whole world still in front of him.”

  “So? So what? Why mix it all up? You mix up the songs, you mix up the audience.”

  “This is about tradition and the individual talent!” he said. It was like he was lecturing back at the University of Guam but they dumped his butt and now he was our problem. “This is about time and change. When we take a song out of the time it appeared, when we take the text out of context, we interrogate it! Damn straight, Dude! That’s what we’re doing, we’re interrogating these … confluences … of wax and sound … words and music … time and place …”

  “Well, shit,” I said. Then, all of a sudden, he laughed and I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing at himself or me.

  “Listen, Dude, it’s no big thing. A couple song
s now and then. Wild cards, okay? New wine in old bottles, old wine in new, that’s all.”

  The benefit of the doubt meant lots of doubt and not much benefit. If he’d just do his act and leave us alone we’d be okay, I thought, but he kept mixing things up. Synergy. Juxtaposition. Horseshit.

  “I think you’ve got the surface Elvis,” he said to me another time. We were back on Guam and we had our backup musicians with us for the first time and I was wearing my black leather pants and jackets, I just knew I’d kicked ass. And here he came, out of shape and out of work, telling me I got the surface down.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. Hell, I’d leave it like that, if he would. The surface was a fine place to be. The surface was where you lived, that’s what I thought. You went deep, maybe you drowned.

  “Don’t go getting touchy on me, Dude,” he said. He pulled me aside and motioned I should sit down on a couple of beer crates. He was in costume too, one of his rhinestone Liberace suits and it made me uncomfortable sitting across from him decked out like this, like it was … I don’t know … Miller Time for clowns. “What did you do before this?”

  “In music?”

  “No. Drama. You were a drama major, weren’t you?”

  “I did Bye, Bye, Birdie. I was Billy Bigelow in Carousel and El Gallo in The Fantasticks and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.”

  “All the singing heroes, huh? My wife and I went to see that Carousel. You were good. Almost too good. I just about had to throw a bucket of water on her after you came onstage.

  Yeah, I thought, and from what I hear about your marriage, the bucket of water missed. Then he asked if I’d ever done any nonmusical drama and I told him Orpheus Descending and Picnic and Look Back in Anger. And then I figured it was my turn. I was entitled to a question of my own.

  “What did you ever do, Ward, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Besides impersonating a professor? Is that what you’re getting at?”

  I shrugged. Some students loved him. Others hated him. It’s usually that way, I guessed. Everybody was somebody’s asshole.

  “Don’t discount the professor role, Dude. That was drama, fifty minutes Monday-Wednesday-Friday, eighty minutes Tuesday-Thursday, three hours on seminar nights. That, by the way, is when I started doing Elvis. After seminar.”

  “You change personalities in a phone booth someplace?”

  “I never acted in my life, Dude, and I’ve never sung for money, if that’s what you want to hear. As a matter of fact, I’m not singing for money now.”

  Then what the hell for? I wondered. I held off on saying it. I sat back and got another portion of bullshit.

  “I want you to think of this as more than an act. More than an impersonation. It’s an incarnation.” He stopped and checked my eyes, to see if I got it, like it was a deep point. What I got was a feeling that he’d be serving up poisoned Kool-Aid before much longer. We were talking weirdness. I just listened.

  “You’ve got the music down, Dude. But think … dramatically. The music they can get on cassettes. You can be as good as those cassettes, but you can’t be better. What you can do is take this Elvis … deeper. Give them more than they ever got from the Original. More than they’ll ever get.”

  “Him being dead, you mean?” Nothing like a brown-nosing question to move a lecture along.

  “Yes! They want … they come to see … to get close. And, the way art refines life, selects and arranges and lies … we do that too. All I’m asking, Dude, is this. When you’re up there I want you to feel what’s gone before you. Chester … the young Elvis … what it was like for him … to be him … to be … and to have been …”

  The tenses were kicking up on Professor Wiggins, no doubt about it. It was hard to keep track of time out in the Twilight Zone, I guessed.

  “And then, Dude, if you can do it without gagging, I want you to look ahead. At what’s coming. I want you to look at me.”

  My nod of agreement wasn’t enough for him. I was studying my boots and I felt him reach out a hand, touching my chin, raising up my head, to be sure I was looking at him.

  “There. Take a good look. That’s what’s coming. I’m the third act and there is no fourth. Time plus you equals me. Put that in your act.”

  After two months on Guam, we were ready to perform for real. We were tense, edgy, wanting whatever was going to happen, good or bad, to happen soon. That’s when Uncle Pete announced he was going to try us out on the road, which is an expression that doesn’t mean much on Guam. I was hoping for Hawaii. Maybe not Waikiki, up against Don Ho, not right away, but maybe someplace nice on Maui or the Big Island. But Uncle Pete decided to send us to Saipan. A disappointment but not, all things considered, a bad choice.

  Saipan was half an hour’s flight from Guam, part of the same chain of islands, the Marianas, only Saipan is a U.S. commonwealth and Guam is a U.S. territory that calls itself a commonwealth. Anyway, it was far enough away so that all of my brother’s adoring pals and my druggy unsavory friends wouldn’t come trailing after us, to boo and cheer. But if it wasn’t home territory it wasn’t foreign ground either. Uncle Pete did a lot of business in the commonwealth and took us up there for vacations, when we were little. I’d always liked Saipan. It was quieter than Guam, greener and less crowded. On one side of the island there was this long, sandy beach, shaded by soft-needled ironwood trees. That’s where we passed the hot part of the day, moving from picnic to picnic, folks offering us plates of chicken and fish and ribs wherever we went, local folks relaxing, good people, I thought. This was along the invasion beach and, in the shallow lukewarm lagoon and out on the reef, there were tanks and landing craft that were rusting away right where they’d gotten hit. We’d go out there, looking for bodies and stuff, and sometimes, right at the edge of the reef, where the ocean turned serious, we’d scare ourselves, chucking pebbles that would sink to the bottom of the world. I didn’t mind trying out our act on Saipan. But as soon as we landed, I started feeling sick. Not the Chestnut. He was Mr. Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Not the Professor, not that I could see: he’d sniffed failure a time or two before. The man in the middle, the middle Elvis, was the one who worried.

  Saipan was changing, getting to be Guam all over again, a murderer’s row of high-rise hotels along the beach. The laid-back place that I remembered, maybe it was still there, but you’d have to look a lot harder to find it. What I saw was Japanese tourists and Filipino worker slaves, just like Guam. When we turned into this Las Vegas–style hotel, when I saw a showroom big enough for the Republican convention, I started to sweat. Elvis pictures were all over the place—someone had gone out and papered the town—and that made me feel worse, like they were wanted posters. I got sick as soon as we arrived. Then I went outside. They had one of these irregular pools, shaped like a kidney or a liver, jungle-looking, with dozens of Japanese tourists around the edge, smoking cigarettes and burning the skin off their backs. I hated the idea of trying to entertain them, of my songs going into those ears, like water down a drain. Clueless sunstroke victims, duty-free dipshits, slide-rule club on vacation: our first audience. Karaoke kids. I found a chair in the shade and told the Filipino to bring me a club soda. The whole setup felt no-win. The club soda felt like it was going down the up staircase. I turned the chair around so it faced the beach. Trying to get a grip. Funny, they make a big deal about putting hotels on the beach and then they forget it, it’s just where the sun sets.

  “Some hotel!” Chester came up from behind me, just bubbling over.

  “There’s a refrigerator in our room all filled with stuff. And did you see that fruit basket! They got grapes!”

  “Great, Chestnut. My big thrill was snapping the paper band around the toilet seat before I vomited.”

  “You going to be all right, Dude?”

  “Yeah, sure. Never better. I’m jet-lagged is all.”

  “Dude, it’s a twenty-five-minute flight.”

  “Shut up, Chestnut.”

  “You know what I
thought of when I saw you sitting out here across the swimming pool? It was just like one of those Elvis movies, Blue Hawaii maybe, or Paradise Hawaiian Style.”

  He was smiling down at me, certain he was cheering me up. I’d never watched a whole Elvis film but I pictured lots of women in out-of-date bathing suits and stupid fight scenes and songs coming in out of left field. Old, stale movies. Was that my world now?

  That afternoon, after sound checks and rehearsals, we sat together at a table in the empty showroom. Professor Wiggins had polished off a plate of egg rolls and now he contemplated ice cream that my brother said wasn’t bad at all. I couldn’t eat. Chester had picked up a postcard that was on a table near the front door. You know the kind: it shows the place with all the tables set, flowers on every table, ready for Japanese money to come walking in.

  “How come,” Chester wondered, “these postcards always show the place when it’s empty?”

  “What?” Now I was in negotiations with my stomach: I’d settle for a cease-fire. But my stomach said, vomit now or vomit later, it’s up to you. How long can a stomach hold on to food anyway, before it has to go down? Or come up?

  “They always show what the place looks like with no customers. It looks empty.”

  “You’re deep, Chester,” I said.

  “I mean it. You go to a restaurant, it’s not to look at restaurant furniture. I want stains on the tablecloth, people facing desserts they can’t resist.”

  “You leave Ward out of this,” I said. The eldest Elvis was reconnoitering something called an Island Sundae: pineapples, maraschino cherries, sliced bananas, and kiwis. God, if I ate and vomited that against the wall I could be an art major.