by P. F. Kluge
Put it this way: suppose every day, somebody threw a party for you, so that you couldn’t step through a door without a bunch of people yelling “Surprise!” That, roughly, was how my brother Chester got through life, ambushed by everybody’s love for him. Was I jealous? Damn straight! Who wouldn’t be? But I was more worried than jealous. You had to fear the worst for a guy like the Chestnut. It got to the point I’d walk around thinking, okay God, if somebody has to lose a girlfriend or have an accident, grow a tumor in his brain, and it’s between me and my kid brother, if it’s between Conrad Birdie and Billy Budd, let it be me Lord because I can hack it and Chester can’t.
And the Philippines! Bringing Chester to the Philippines, all these women, it was like asking a puppy to play in traffic. He was bound to get hit. I deserved some of the blame. I got distracted after I arrived, I got carried away on the sexual side of things. I was like a baseball player who doesn’t want to get out of the batting cage. I had that stroke, man, getting good wood on the ball, knocking them out of the park. Home runs, baby. I figured Chester, in his own small way, was up to the same thing. Who wouldn’t be, except ex-Professor Ward Wiggins? But I never dreamed my kid brother would fall in love here in Olongapo. That’s plain crazy. That’s like going to the stockyards, the damned meat packing plant, and saying, could I please adopt this here little lamb as a pet?
“What’s up, Dude?” he had asked when I finally caught up with him after the show. It was hard for Chester to act innocent. He either was or he wasn’t and in this case he wasn’t.
“You know what, Chestnut,” I said. “And don’t pretend you haven’t been ducking me.”
“I just don’t want to argue with you, Dude,” he said, and I could see he was getting ready to feel all choked up and torn.
“Who’s arguing?” I said. “I just want to be in the loop.”
“Then you’ll argue,” he said.
“Try me,” I said. And then, when he sat there, tongue-tied, I decided to help him. “So,” I said, “I guess you think you’re in love.”
“I know I am,” he said right back.
“I see,” I said. And I waited a couple beats, almost as if that settled things for good. “How do you know you’re in love, Chestnut?”
“You know,” he said, looking straight at me but—it seemed—he was talking down, as if he were reporting on a trip to some country I’d never visited.
“How do you know?” I asked. “Enlighten me, little brother. Is it like in the movies, you walk around and you hear music all the time?”
“Honest, Dude, I don’t think you’d understand. You’re lots smarter than me and more experienced too. Maybe that’s why you wouldn’t get it.”
“I see,” I snapped back. “If I’d had less experience and less brains … if only I were a little dumber and younger, maybe I could figure it out.”
“Come on, Dude,” he pleaded. “Don’t do this.”
“Well, do I get to meet my future sister-in-law?”
“In a while …” he said. “Sure …”
“In a while.” Suddenly the Chestnut was an expert on timing. “How the hell well do you know this woman? You even met her family?”
“Yes …”
“Visited her home?”
“Yes.”
“You got any kind of idea where you want to spend your life? Where your home is? Your work? Because this Elvis thing won’t last forever.”
“We have plans, Dude,” he said. “We talk all the time.”
“This girl from the boondocks—”
“Her name’s Christina.”
“Well, what do you talk about with her? Her favorite color? Your favorite color?”
“Come off it, Dude.”
“What could you possibly …” I didn’t even bother finishing: have in common. I sensed that, across all the gaps, passport and sex and race and everything, they were two of a kind, two clueless people, two of the kind who never quite figure it out. Love makes you stupid, I guess, but you come out of it. Unless you weren’t so bright to start with. Then it’s like a nap turning into a coma.
“You do anything besides talk?” I asked. And as soon as it was out, I saw my kid brother’s face turn into a kind of a fist. So I asked again, whether they did anything but talk, and he still didn’t answer and so I kept going because I was falling fast, I knew, but I hadn’t hit bottom yet.
“You given her a tryout, Chester?”
Now his eyes filled with tears but he was crying for me and how cruel I was, or pathetic. So I got a little crueler and more pathetic.
“You’d take a car for a spin …”
“She’s no car,” he protested. “And she hasn’t been used.”
“If you say so,” I answered back. Out of nowhere, I pictured somebody crawling under the dashboard, ass in the air, setting this woman’s mileage back to zero. “Still … all the more reason. … Just try it. … Everybody does it. They expect you to. If you don’t they’ll laugh at you. And you don’t want that, do you, Chester? More people laughing at you?”
In Manila, I stayed in a hotel a few blocks in from Roxas Boulevard, slept through lunch, slept after lunch, and, at sunset, I walked along the seawall, checking out the ships that my brother had gotten so excited about. I passed the U.S. Embassy, through the park they call Luneta, the children’s playground at the edge of the park, kids running from sandbox to slide to seesaw, this endless supply of Filipino kids, nannies and parents looking after them. Then I sat in the lobby of the Manila Hotel, sat there for hours, enjoying marble that was so smooth and cool it made you want to roll across the floor and walls and ceiling that were dignified dark wood, with a luster like leather. I watched people come and go, people with schedules and serious business out in the world, plane tickets and reservations out across the dateline, expensive-looking people with places to go. Not all of them, of course. A couple dozen Taiwanese tourists could turn the place into Disneyland and there were always a couple of lounging Filipinos, carrying cordless phones the way cowboys pack six-shooters. Still, it wasn’t Olongapo. It felt good, being out of there, being in a place where no one knew me, where I could be anyone. I liked checking out women—some of those perfect haughty beauties who worked the reception desk and probably didn’t live off bar fines. I wondered what it would be like, sitting down and talking to a woman who didn’t reach for my zipper after she’d used up her ten words of conversational English. I wondered if I still had it in me to fall for a woman or make a woman fall for me, someone with a little class and refinement, someone like one of those reception-desk girls, manicured and multilingual and computer literate. Olongapo had contaminated me. It leaked out of my pores, dripped off my tongue. It threw a scent that nothing could cover, no change of wardrobe could disguise. Elvis used to be my act. Now Elvis was me and everything else was a performance.
Later I ate alone at a German restaurant on Del Pilar Street, watching a months-old soccer tape. I walked past money changers and barbecue stalls, barbershops and VD doctors and hostess bars. I passed labor recruiters’ offices. Wanted: a go-go dancer, a construction worker, carpenter, pipefitter, attractive hostess, driver, able seaman, nurse, for Kuwait, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Saipan, Malaysia. Everywhere but here. And everyone but me. No call for Presley imitators so far as I could see. And no way out for one. Here I was, an Olongapo star, an Elvis clone, aching to escape but no idea of how to do it. Every idea I had sounded ridiculous, like a porn star wanting to make a serious film. You can’t get there from here. I looked around whatever bar I was in, another room jammed with Filipinas climbing poles and studying themselves in mirrors.
Way past midnight and already drunk, I turned into a nightclub on Mabini Street. I sat at a bar and watched midgets. The doorman was a midget. A midget was playing guitar onstage, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” all that hick whining stuff, so far from home. The first ten minutes was between me and my beer. After that, I looked around. This was the Hobbit House: all midget staff, the emcee, t
he waitresses, barmen, the comfort room attendants. And I’d arrived on the best of nights. It was as though they’d been waiting for me to come through the door. Because the emcee was announcing a contest. For dwarfs. Who sang. Elvis Presley.
Now I ordered shots with my beers and watched them do their thing, which was our thing, only more so. Smaller—obviously—but more exaggerated. Shrinking magnified them, the way a bacteria stuck between a glass slide looks bigger under a microscope. It was like watching my life, all stretched out in front of me, smaller and smaller all the time. Chester’s Elvis was more childlike, my Elvis was more macho, like the anger had gotten compressed. Ward’s Elvis launched into “In the Ghetto,” the voice of an opera singer out of the body of a fire hydrant. They’d copied what we copied. That about clinched it, I thought. They were kids playing a kid’s game and so were we. We weren’t actors, we were imposters, dressing up in someone else’s clothes, and songs, and life. Ward Wiggins could say whatever the hell he wanted. He could call himself Elvis the way a hooker would call herself Whitney or Dolly or Madonna. But at the end of the day we were all cheap tricks.
“Out scouting the competition?” someone asked. I turned slowly on my bar stool and looked into sunglasses, scarred skin, and the mouth of a muskrat. “I like these guys more than your act,” Jimmy Fiddler said. “These guys have a sense of humor about themselves. They know they’re ridiculous.”
I signaled for my check and wished I were out of there already but checks take forever to arrive in the Philippines. They don’t trust the help to add, I guess, so there’s always a Chinese-looking woman behind a teller’s booth, keeping tabs.
“Your drinks are taken care of,” Jimmy said. “There’s someone wants to meet you.”
“No thanks,” I said. My guess was that Jimmy wanted to bring me over to meet all the baby Presleys. They’d pull me onstage for a song, maybe hang on my arms, sit on my shoulders, scoot between my legs, like Santa and his little helpers. That would tickle him no end.
“Baby Ronquillo wants to meet you,” Jimmy said. “Does that register with you?”
“The person who owns Graceland?”
“Shit, you don’t know the half of it. Graceland’s nothing. A toy. She owns a five-star hotel in Palawan and a logging concession in Mindanao and a golf course on Cebu. Then there’s the movie studio. …”
That got my attention, though Jimmy wasn’t done yet. “A French restaurant in Makati. Condos in Alabang. A placement service for overseas workers. She ships them out by the planeload. Shipshape, the company’s called.”
While Jimmy talked I looked over at a woman dressed in a black suit, tailored-looking, that had threads of silver and gold woven into the sleeves. Good legs, I noticed, hair in a bun, still black. While I was looking at her she was looking at me, so there were two of us who were making an inventory. The famous Baby Ronquillo. From bar girl to boardroom. At Graceland, they said her big break came back in the Marcos days, when there’d been some international meeting in Manila—was it the World Bank?—and the local talent had been trotted out to welcome visitors, $3,000 a pop. Baby stayed attached to her banker and when she left him, months later, she was off her knees forever. Or so they said at Graceland, where they told it as if it were a Cinderella story. Now the living legend was staring at me from across the room, wanting for us to meet. I wondered why. I asked myself, why not? And then I got scared. I realized I was in deep. I was up against quality. And I was drunk. This was one deal I couldn’t screw up. I turned back to Jimmy.
“Tell me about the movie studio.”
IV
Malon Ordonez
Biggest Elvis walked away and we laughed at him. Then the drinks came, the bar drinks that he ordered for us, blue margaritas which tasted like melted candy and we earned half the cost of the drink, which matched the daily minimum wage in a country where the minimum was negotiable because we could always go a little lower. The Americans knew it, even the first-time sailors, the R & R boys, when they bargained for bodies, how much for a short time, how much for all night, for one hole, two holes, three holes. So it was cheers, Biggest Elvis, though we poured your drinks into the toilet, here’s looking at you, Biggest Elvis.
“Malou, you spoke fresh to him,” Elvira said. “And he makes me put what you say into English.”
“You could have told him I said anything. ‘What a handsome man!’ ‘I love the way you walk.’ ‘The bigger, the better, the biggest, the best!’”
“I could not think so fast,” she said. This was so. Elvira, we said, had a limousine body. A beautiful woman, built the way that Americans liked, and Arabs, and Japanese. She had the body, the fall of hair, that Spanish nose, those breasts—her “moneymakers,” the other girls called them. Men took her on trips to Singapore and Hong Kong and she returned with whole wardrobes of clothing. “If they undress me, they can dress me too.” Not only nightclub clothes, Olongapo things, but hats and shoes, sweaters and leather jackets and furs that she would never wear here. Souvenirs, she called them. But she always came back to Olongapo. Elvira the beautiful, the bountiful, the forgiving and forgetting. She didn’t come to the club every night. She never went with men for short times. She sat, she flirted, and when the moment came, she quoted an absurd price, four or five times higher than the other girls. Still, when the fleet was in, Elvira met them. In Olongapo, we all waited for the fleet.
“Biggest Elvis,” Elvira said. “Is it true he never takes a girl?”
“He leaves here alone. Every night is like tonight.”
“He has someone in his house, maybe.”
“No,” I answered. “The bartender—Remy—his family lives near there. He says Biggest Elvis stays by himself. He sleeps all day.”
“I think …” I knew what she was thinking. I knew how the sight of Biggest Elvis going home alone could grow into a love affair, a marriage, a life together away from here. “I think Biggest Elvis is lonely,” Elvira announced.
“Here,” I said. “Eat something.” I passed over some green mangoes and a plate of salt. To fill her mouth and to stop her dreaming.
“Baby Elvis is very popular,” I suggested. “Everybody loves him.”
“He’s a nice boy,” Elvira said. But she wasn’t interested. Even now, dipping mango in salt, Elvira had elegance, holding the mango between thumb and forefinger, pointing her little finger outward as she put the slice between her lips. Elvira was royalty. Our Marie Antoinette. She loved hotels, air-conditioning, airports, duty-free shopping. She loved meals prepared at her table in five-star places, pepper steak and Caesar salad, cherries jubilee, bananas flambé, Irish coffee. She brought back menus to Graceland, menus from room service at the Oberoi, the Grill at Raffles. She brought baskets of perfume, bubble bath, shoeshine kits and shower caps, stationery. She brought back ballpoint pens with no caps and clothes hangers without hooks. She brought Bibles and city maps and copies of What’s Doing in Perth and This Week in Hong Kong.
“There is the middle Elvis,” I said. “Dude Elvis. Very available.”
“I don’t want him,” Elvira said, cocking her head toward the VIP rooms along the balcony. That was where Dude Elvis took his friends, Manilenos and foreigners, for special parties behind dark glass. One night, we saw Baby Ronquillo there and Dude Elvis joined her, after his act was done. Elvira did not compete with Baby Ronquillo.
“I don’t want that Dude,” Elvira repeated, shaking her head. “But Biggest Elvis …”
No, I thought, this was another Elvira mistake. They had all been mistakes, all her men. At least she had her souvenirs and no babies. Many others had babies and no souvenirs, red-haired freckle-faced babies, babies with wide African noses.
“No, Malou,” she was saying. “I do not think of Biggest Elvis for myself. “I think of him for you.”
It took time for me to answer. My friend Elvira was not a smart woman. But she had instincts. She looked at a man and right away it was yes, no, or maybe. “If I can picture something happening, it can happ
en,” she always said. “If I can see it in my mind, never a problem.” Now she pictured me with Biggest Elvis. “You could have him, Malou,” she said. Not a doubt in her mind. Finished already. Elvis and Malou.
“For what? What do I want that man for? I had one American already. As you know.”
“It’s up to you,” she said. Behind her, just then, was her driver. Where Elvira stayed was only a minute away, an air-con apartment a man from Brunei provided for her. But Elvira did not walk the streets. She stood up, brushed some grains of salt off her lips. She couldn’t help it. Everything she did was sexy. Sometimes I thought I would like to make love with Elvira. That was something I could picture. There was something about Olongapo, the Navy talk, the world they brought and the world we brought to them, those thousands of cocks, that made us look at each other sometimes and think of other ways, the chance of something fond and gentle, soft not hard. So we found ourselves, sometimes, staring and wondering about what love might be.
“Think about him, Malou,” Elvira said. She left, taking three other girls with her, newcomers from Visayas. She had some clothes for them, she said. And a place to stay, if they needed it. The other girls, the ones who slept upstairs in the empty VIP rooms, disappeared up the steps. Then I closed the club for the night, though it was never really shut, never empty. In the PI, no place ever closed. A bartender slept in the back, plus some girls upstairs and a guard who was also a doorman, blue-uniformed and carbine-carrying, sitting in the doorway all night long, dozing between oversized cut-out figures of the three Elvis Presleys. And if the boys from the fleet came back at four in the morning, Graceland would open once again, open anytime, open as wide as necessary, one size fits all.