by P. F. Kluge
“Huh?” said Chester. “Oh …” He laughed a little to please me, then worried he shouldn’t have laughed because Ward’s feelings might be hurt, though he didn’t look to be in any particular pain right now. At least the Filipino took away the dish before Elvis licked it clean.
“Another Island Sundae, sir?”
“I’ll wait awhile, thanks.’
“Check on him twenty minutes from now,” I suggested, and went upstairs to vomit again and put on my leather. The things we do for love, right? My brother Chester didn’t have many ideas but when he did, it was a lulu.
That first time onstage is like the first time you get laid. Mainly, you want to get through it okay, complete the performance. And later, when you think about it, it’s hard to sort it out, what worked and what didn’t, when you should have slowed it down some, or speeded up, the was-it-good-for-you and do-you-want-to-do-it-again. You just want to get through it and the truth is I don’t remember much.
The showroom was full, I noticed, and they were all Japanese tourists, not counting the Filipino waiters. I saw some of the same people I’d seen around the swimming pool. Maybe a sunburn is a kind of status symbol in Japan, it shows you’ve been away, you walk around Tokyo with the skin peeling off your nose. Anyway, they were out there, drinking in groups, smoking in groups, and—I could picture it—getting ready to walk out in groups. They were a young crowd, low-budget, just like Guam. No time for a slow tan, I guessed: just go out and microwave yourself. Some could hardly move in their chairs. A few of the girls looked sharp, though. Small but sharp. You heard these stories about Japanese tourist women, how they kicked up their heels away from home.
So it began. Our careers as Elvis. The backup guys were playing “Don’t Be Cruel” and offstage, Ward was reading about how it was 1956 and Eisenhower is president and Marciano is champ and Ed Sullivan is on TV. … all for this audience of Japanese! Then, he said, a poor man’s son was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—in a manger, probably—and a few years later, having moved to Memphis, he picks up a guitar and so forth. It sounded like a Christmas pageant and I’m worried they’ll walk out on us. Then, oh my God, my kid brother was onstage singing “Blue Suede Shoes” and the whole room lifted off the ground and it was going to be okay. We were going for a ride tonight. We were driving. The Professor had it right, I guess. When Chester Lane came onstage they moved in their chairs. When I was onstage, they were moving in bed. I could feel their eyes, peeling that black leather right off me. Nice Chester, giggle and cuddle, jitterbug and neck, Mama won’t mind, and then, when I was up there—“I want you, I need you, I love you”—I could feel them sliding off their chairs, reaching for their room keys, those nasty girls from Nippon. Before I know it, I was standing next to Chester, waiting to join the Professor for the closing tableau and I put my arm around the kid. In front of us, Ward boomed “Suspicious Minds,” he poached “Loving You” and made it sound like a loser’s last chance, then karate chopped his way through “Burning Love.”
“Is it just me,” I asked Chester, “or is he singing ‘Burning Love’ for the sunburn victims?”
“He’s singing to everybody,” Chester whispered. He had this serious side, solemn almost. He was the kind of kid who gets one of those you-already-have-won letters from the magazine subscription company and looks for Ed McMahon to come up the driveway. On Guam.
“We could cut a deal with Coppertone,” I said. Chester shushed me and we walked onstage for “American Trilogy” and I swear the audience gasped, seeing us standing there together, it was like one plus one plus one adds up to eternity. Ward was crooning “Dixie” and now I saw what he was aiming for with this act of ours. Chester took them to Memphis, to truck stops, radio stations, roadhouses. I brought them to Hollywood and Hawaii, movie sets and beach resorts. Ward took them to Las Vegas and died and went to heaven. No encores after that.
“Okay!” I said to him as soon as we were offstage. “You were right!”
He just nodded. He was flushed and out of breath and sweating harder than anybody I ever saw. “Could I borrow your towel?”
“It’s just like you told us,” Chester said. “We’re larger than life.”
“Larger,” Wiggins said. Then he caught my eyes. What he said next was for me, no mistaking it, and later he said the same thing to Jimmy Fiddler when he drove us in from the Manila airport. “Longer too. You’ll see.”
“Many Americans love it here. They come here and they never want to leave. Sometimes, if they go stateside, they come back.” That was what they said in Olongapo. I can’t remember where I heard it first. Maybe it was from Jimmy, or from one of the Filipinos we hired for backup after we arrived. No, wait, maybe it was the woman who ran Graceland, the day we checked out the place, Malou, the brainy-looking one who didn’t put out. Anyway, you heard it all the time. And it was true. Americans loved it, all right. And the dumber they were, the more they loved it. The place was paradise, if you’re a certain kind of American, if the most important things in your life were steak and pussy. You got the steak, lots of it, top-grade, choice, served the way you like it, at 1950s prices, inside the base. And you got the other stuff, young or old as you want it, served the way you like it, on the other side of the fence. At 1950s prices.
Some people could be happy forever with a setup like that. I admit I was in hog heaven for a while. The Professor took us aside when we arrived and gave us this talk about the birds and the bees. No matter what else we did, he said, we shouldn’t mix business with pleasure, shouldn’t do business with the girls who worked at Graceland, even though they’d be wanting to do business with us. He was appealing to our professionalism and our pride, he said. And that night, as a matter of professionalism and pride, I started working my way through the girls.
It was easy. There’s a rule I heard about out at Subic City one night, the rule of the haircut. Some old chief petty officer announced it to me like he was serving up the law of gravity. The wisdom of the East. The rule of the haircut: everywhere you go, far and wide, high and low, the price of a woman is about the price of a haircut. “The high end might be a wash and blow-dry at a hairstylist, a couple hundred bucks maybe,” this old redneck said. “That could last all afternoon. The low end is a five-buck trim near the bus terminal, in and out in twenty minutes.”
I went wild, the way anybody would, with all these fine cheap women around, two or three a night, one or two at a time, kiss me good night and wake me up in the morning, the pitter-patter of little feet. Elvis needs you, darling. Newcomers fresh from the provinces, foxy boxers right out of the ring, ex-convent girls and Arabs’ mistresses, the snooty-looking Spanish senorita types and the dark and funky Malays. It tickled me, sometimes, to look around Graceland and count the ones I’d had. First, a minority, a loyal opposition, then a quorum, a majority. And if it weren’t for Malou—I’m still not sure what she does for fun—or her highness Elvira and a couple of others, I’d have had them all. Matter of professionalism, Professor. Matter of pride.
It’s hard to say what happened next. Kind of embarrassing. The bottom line is that, after a month of take-a-number-please, fall-in-line fornication, I’d had enough. The girls of Graceland were still fine-looking, don’t get me wrong, and I was still waking up wanting it, every morning. But a couple things got to me. At Graceland, I’d see them working the tables, hustling drinks and fines, slipping into the VIP lounges, out into cribs or cars, coming back and going out again, turning two or three tricks a night, and I’d look at the guys they were going with and it bothered me, it even hurt some, picturing what they were up to. Or I’d see some cheerful Dolly or Priscilla out back washing some guy’s come out of her hair. And humming a tune. I’d thought they were lining up for me. Then I saw I was wrong. I was lining up for them. And it wasn’t just about sloppy seconds. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be last in line. I also didn’t want to be first. I didn’t want to be in line at all, in any line including all those bodies I’d seen in gym class, red-blooded
American boys, waiting to unload on them. Fucking unfair, I thought. And sad, besides. I’d be onstage singing “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” and across the room I’d spot someone I’d been to bed with, sitting next to some bench-press crewcut kid, his hand on her butt, hardassing her about springing for a margarita and she’d flash me this look which said—which begged—rescue me. I saw that look so often. Pretty soon, it seemed, I saw it everywhere I looked. Or, if I passed them out back, they’d sing a little bit of a song, not exactly aiming at me, just putting it in the air, “Are You Lonesome Tonight” or “True Love.” They’d say they didn’t mean anything by it, if I asked, they were only singing a song, what’s the difference, but I knew better and it bothered me, having songs I sang come back at me that way, like lies. It bothered me, too, admitting that the Professor was right, to have him teach me a lesson about professionalism and pride, him living on the beach, all by himself, loving nobody, no kind of role model at all. Anyway, I cut down—and out—on the fine women of Graceland. I’m embarrassed to say it, like all of a sudden I wasn’t a man. Failure in the sack, that’s what it sounds like. But it wasn’t like that. The problem was someplace else, in my head or maybe my heart. I don’t know. I just didn’t want to be part of the party that was going on there. Me of all people, the sexiest Elvis, bailing out.
Once I turned off Graceland women, Olongapo got old for me, small, dirty. And I couldn’t see a way out. Chester was loving it. And the show, the Elvis act, kept packing them in. The fleet sailed away but the act sailed on, guys from the base taking up the slack, repeat customers and—this surprised me—people driving over from Manila. We had valet parking all of a sudden and a gift shop that sold Elvis souvenirs, books and records and pictures, not just pictures of Elvis either, but pictures of us. That was weird, I thought, and I told Ward I thought it was weird, imitation Elvis getting tangled up with the Original, and we had another Twilight Zone dialogue.
“I don’t like it either,” he said, nodding his head, then shaking it with regret. “It’s the commercialization I don’t like. I hear it was the owner’s idea. Baby Ronquillo. Do you happen to know … is Baby a man or a woman?”
“A woman,” I said. “Though we could always get a second opinion.” I was already acquainted with the legend of Baby Ronquillo. She’d climbed the ladder right out of here. Then she bought the ladder, just for old times’ sake, and, now and then, climbed back down to look at where it all began for her.
“Well, it’s her place. But I don’t like it. I think it’s … tacky. Just to make a buck.”
“Hey, Ward?” I asked. “Earth to Ward?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got news for you. This place is a business. It is commercial. We sell beer and whiskey for money. The girls sell their bodies, for money, and we get the bar fines. Coming and going, we make money.”
Ward let me finish but he had this way of shaking his head, no, no, no, right when you were talking, as though he were saying you started out wrong and the more you spoke, the wronger you got. Annoying habit.
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” he said when I finished. “It’s a business, sure. But there’s more than that going on here, Dude.”
“What might that be?”
“If you have to ask …”
“Thanks a lot, then. I guess I dodged a bullet. Remind me not to ask.”
I didn’t have to ask, though. I knew. It was happening all around us. Graceland was changing, taking on airs. They dressed up the outside of the building to look like a southern mansion, with columns and a porch, and then they ran neon all around the edges of the building, so that at night the outlines of it were traced in pink. Vanilla ice cream with a raspberry swirl. They took down the sign that said GRACELAND. They’d put it up, just for us, right after we arrived. Before that, Graceland was Genghis Khan’s Tent, Da Place, Burning Inferno, the Chicken Factory, a jinx location, too plush for the local market. At first, Graceland was just another name and the smart money said that in a month or so they’d be taking the sign down. The smart money was right, but for the wrong reasons. We didn’t need the label, any more than the Taj Mahal needed a sign out front. People found their way to us. They weren’t customers, they were pilgrims.
“No end in sight,” I said to the Professor one night. We usually talked at the start of the show, while Chester was onstage. I could hear him singing “My Wish Came True.” “I thought the novelty would wear off.”
“We’re not a novelty act,” he answered. “Tiny Tim was a novelty act. Sha Na Na. The Village People. There’s lots of novelty acts. Fifteen minutes of fame, like the man said. Not us, Dude. We’re stayers.”
Calm and confident as can be, he delivered all this, and I had this sickening feeling I was trapped in Olongapo, stuck in a black leather suit, singing Elvis tunes and when I died they’d drive me to the graveyard in a damn jeepney. I’d been thinking weeks, okay, months. He was talking till death us do part. When it came to the PI—the Philippine Islands, that is—I had a bad case of been there, seen it, done it. But Ward was only settling in.
“Business is only getting better,” he continued. “You see that for yourself. It’s not just the fleet and it’s not only the naval base. We’ve got Filipinos driving over from Manila, we’ve got vans and buses in the parking lot, you notice? We’re getting press too. Manila papers, airline magazines, Stars and Stripes. Have you seen this?”
He handed me a book in Japanese or Chinese, I couldn’t tell which. I should start from the back, he said. I should turn it over.
It was a tourist guide, I guess, that had pictures of Manila Bay and Corregidor, of beaches and rice terraces and … of us. There we are, two glossy pages to ourselves and a photo of three of us onstage at the end of the act, Chester with his legs spread and back tilted, guitar up at the roof, and me with this fight-me-or-fuck-me look, and Jumbo the Elephant wiping his jowls with one hand, pointing his finger heavenward with the other, as if thanking God for our material. I thought I’d signed up for a music act, not a cult.
“I’ll tell you something,” the Professor said, and warning lights flashed on in my head. He sounded as though he were saying something that had just occurred to him, struggling to get it out, so I should be patient, listen carefully, not interrupt. But I was feeling like a character in a script he wrote, a script I was trapped in, the same script night after night. Hell, movie actors got to change roles, travel to different locations. Even in a sitcom or soap, at least the story moved along, things changed, people left town or died.
“He’d have come here.”
“Excuse me?”
“He never played overseas. They say Colonel Parker—his, not ours—had immigration problems. I don’t know. The whole world was there for him. But he played Hollywood and Vegas and a hundred pissant towns. You know where he was headed, when he died? The first concert they canceled? Two nights in Portland, Maine. The night after that, Utica, New York.”
“So?” Portland and Utica were sounding pretty good to me.
“This is his kind of town. The navy base, the clubs, the beach, the neon strip, the audiences we get … the air we breathe … the air … the funk, the sex, the rot, the bloom …”
If you asked me to pinpoint, down to the second, the moment I thought Wiggins wobbled out of orbit, this was it. You could get into Elvis, I guessed. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand the people who did. But okay. You could be serious about the work you do. It was good to care about your work. But Ward was turning into Elvis’ ambassador to planet earth, appointed for life. So, caught in a trap. I knew if we put this to a vote, right now, I’d lose, two to one. Chester would vote against me and Ward knew it. Out onstage, Chester was singing “Any Way You Want Me.” After that, “Teddy Bear.” Then it would be time for me to turn my trick in the House of Elvis.
“I know him better than you do,” Ward said. He couldn’t let go. “It’s his kind of town.”
“He’s my brother,�
�� I reminded him.
“I’m not talking about your brother, Dude. I’m talking Elvis.”
The Chestnut was coming offstage. I heard them wanting more but we didn’t do encores. Elvis returned to earth on his terms, not ours. That’s why he picked Olongapo. His kind of town. Our kind of town. All according to Ward. Sometimes he made it sound like the Original’s life was just the start, an opening act, a rough draft. That the Elvis masterpiece was yet to come. Sometimes it scared me, hearing him talk. Other times, it pissed me off.
“I’ve got news for you, Professor,” I said. “This was never supposed to be forever. You can stay all you want. But at the right time, we’re gone.”
“Who’s we?” he asked.
“That’s me and my brother,” I snapped back. I was inside my leather, already sweating, feeling surly.
“I don’t think so,” the Professor said. “Your brother’s stay here could outlast either of ours.”
“Is that so?” That knowing manner irritated me. But the truth was, I hadn’t seen so much of Chester since we arrived in Olongapo, especially after I started poking the Graceland cuties. He’d been hard to find, rushing in and out of the apartment, like there was always someone waiting for him. “Out with it,” I said.
“You should hear it from him,” the Professor said. “Brother to brother.”
“Just …” It was time for my show. “Don’t play with me, Ward.”
“All right. I guess you didn’t notice. While you were jumping the help here, your brother was falling in love. He’s proposed, I hear.”
The lights went dark just then and I stepped onstage. “Return to Sender.”
The night Ward dropped that bomb on me, I left Olongapo for Manila. We worked Wednesday through Saturday night. Sunday through Tuesday was a slow time for me. Chester was always taking off someplace, out to provinces with some of the girls. He invited me along but I knew better. Piling into a jeepney with some off-duty hookers wasn’t my idea of fun, or riding in an interisland boat with no schedule and no lifeboats. Besides, I’d seen that look of disappointment when they knocked on the door and I answered, two or three girls with some food for Chester. It didn’t matter if I’d had every one of them, every which way, it wasn’t me they cared to see. But Chester was fair game. I thought about him that night, on the bus, passing through villages and rice fields on the way to Manila.