by P. F. Kluge
“You mean … the manager of the real Elvis Presley?”
“No, darling. That was Colonel Tom Parker. This is Colonel Peter Parker. He lives on Guam and he’s got a lot of money that he keeps quiet about.”
“Now he’s here, Malou,” Doy said. “You see?”
“Is he? I haven’t seen him.”
“No,” Jimmy said. “He’s not here this minute, not as far as we know, but he’s got this Elvis act. The punk, the hunk, the lunk, whatever the hell … and no one believes that’s the end of it. More like a beginning. People are wondering about his plans.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “This … colonel? He is not here, am I right? And he doesn’t know me. And I do not know him. Correct? And you are asking me about his plans?”
“The Lane brothers are his adopted sons, Malou,” Doy said.
“And he confides in them? Then ask them … if you think they know anything.”
“No,” Jimmy Fiddler said. “It’s the older Elvis. The fat fuck. He’s in charge. In charge of the act and the sons. That’s what I call a position of trust. Sending flesh and blood to Olongapo. Skinny-dipping in a sewer. The man must have something in mind. You find out.”
“There may be nothing,” I said, and before I finished, Jimmy Fiddler stepped toward me, grabbed my hair, which I had pinned up. The brooch fell on the sidewalk. My hair fell loose behind my shoulders, the way I had not worn it in years.
“I’ve been wondering how far down it went,” Jimmy Fiddler said. What he saw pleased him. I could tell. “Wear hair like that, it’s all the clothes you need.”
Now he took my glasses also, slipped them off me carefully. My Gloria Steinem glasses, Elvira called them. They made me look scholarly. Now they clattered on the sidewalk. Jimmy Fiddler stepped, left, then right, a one- and a two-dance step, and crushed them.
“Well then, Malou,” he said. “I think you’ll find something out. I really do. All we’re asking is what kind of a fish is Colonel Parker. Is he a shark? Is he a whale? Is he a friendly little dolphin? Understand, love?” You wouldn’t let me down, would you? Break this poor heart of mine twice?”
I did not say anything but I had not stopped thinking. Jimmy Fiddler was a movie character, a cowboy in the tropics. An actor, a bad actor, nothing original about him. And he was weak, the way Americans were, American men. I could master him, in time. I saw this, through my fear.
“You understand?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
Now he stepped back and glanced at Doy Valencia. “Give me a minute, buddy.” He walked out of the carport and into the garden. What now? Then I heard him pissing in the sandbox, a hard, sudden stream, as though a pipe had broken. Doy came over and handed me a handkerchief so I could wipe my eyes.
“I’m sorry about this business,” Doy said. Though he was worthless, I believed him. All things being equal, Doy would be good. But if Jimmy Fiddler made a joke on the way home—a joke about me—Doy would laugh on time. It was not easy, being a man around Americans.
“Why didn’t he talk nicely to me? Why this way?”
“Malou, believe me, he has ideas about you.” That was all he said but Doy wanted to say more. “It’s not a nice place, here. It brings out the worst in all of us.”
“Nice or not nice,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense. Why ask me? I only work at Graceland. Why not ask Baby Ronquillo? She owns the place. She made all the arrangements. Ask her what she knows about Colonel Parker.”
Doy flinched when I mentioned Baby Ronquillo. Knowledge is power, they say. That is why people lie so much. Doy was tempted to lie. Or he could tell the truth for old times’ sake and that would make me a little stronger and him a little weaker. He looked over his shoulder, to make sure the American was still pissing.
“We cannot ask Baby Ronquillo,” he said.
“Why?”
“She is the one who is asking.”
I watched them drive away and then I walked upstairs into Andy’s place. The movers had come and gone already. Gone, the baskets and carvings from the mountain tribes, the seashells and miniature brass cannons from Sulu, the hardwood tables and chairs that gave him such pleasure and remorse, “parking my butt on what used to be the rain forest.” What stayed behind were things that Andy thought that I could use or sell, odds and ends, dishes and sheets, books and CDs, a popcorn maker, a rice cooker, a portable radio. His car.
Now, Andy seemed far away and the house confirmed it. My vanished American. No help for me now. Cassettes and dishes, hair dryer and toaster, crumbs for mice. Base housing once again. In a few weeks someone else would move in. The houses accepted us, our photos and furniture, books and souvenirs. They went along with the program. They waited for the next customer. New occupants. Children, to play in the sandbox Jimmy Fiddler pissed on.
I threw what I wanted into some shopping bags and carried them out to the car. I could not sleep here anymore. One last time, I walked through Commander Andy’s house, closing windows, turning off lights, saying goodbye. The house was empty, the house won again. I drove slowly out the main gate and across the river. I felt that a part of my life was ending. Commander Andy time. My first American. Good-bye, Commander. Now I was a citizen of Olongapo again.
An hour before dawn, I drove down Magsaysay Street. I saw drivers asleep in jeepneys, guards in doorways. Dogs crossing from side to side, foraging pizza crusts, scabs of Navy vomit. People going out early or coming home late. The edge of a new day in Olongapo. Foxy boxing. Mud wrestling. Country and western. College-girl fashion show. Graceland. On the sidewalk, cardboard cutouts of our three Elvises, young, middle, and biggest.
Part Two
I, I, I’d like you folks to know that I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies and I was the hero of the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.
Elvis Presley,
quoted in Elvis
by Albert Goldman
I
Father Domingo Alcala
At the curve of Subic Bay, at the foot of the Zambales mountains, at the end of the road from Olongapo, my parish reposed, a few dozen buildings, only two of them more than one story, shops that were sheds, stores that were stalls, people who lived off what they took from a tired land and pulled from a polluted bay. The days were blindingly hot, nights humid and still, and what I waited for, every day, was late afternoon, when the sun relented, the heat subsided, winds stirred, and all my disappointments receded. It was possible, in this time of rich golden sunlight and playful breeze, to forgive, to bless, and to hope. I could try to tell myself that this was a place among many similar places. But it was all a lie. This was a place like no other. This was the most evil place on earth. Or the saddest. Or—if it was possible—both. No escaping it, even as I walked among my people, as I greeted parishioners, patted heads, chatted amiably outside garages, lifted lids off pots in carinderias, sat in doorways with old women. This was Babylon. This was Sodom and Gomorrah.
After a few years in Subic City, I could feel the Americans coming. I could sense the Seventh Fleet’s movement toward my village, could count the long days at sea that separated the carriers and cruisers, destroyers and submarines from their last sight of land, Perth or Pusan or Diego Garcia, the dwindling distances, the miles and hours that kept them from my village, from the night that I would go to sleep, feeling the wind blowing off an empty bay, and awaken to find that the fleet was in. I could feel it in my legs, in the palms of my hands, I could feel them coming. I had my ritual, when the fleet was in, my private ceremony. I mounted the steps of one of the town’s two-story buildings. The sound of the jukebox grew louder as I climbed the steps. “Macho, macho man!” The main floor was empty, just one girl in a chair at the bar, a pile of hair curlers in front of her. She jumped up, mistaking me for an early customer. Then, seeing her mistake, she backed away, ashamed or disappointed. Down below, in the darkness slowly falling, my parish transformed itself from ramshackle barrio to sin city. Farme
rs lived off the land, fishermen off the sea, yes, yes, but their daughters lived off the fleet and—see how the evil compounded!—fathers, mothers, brothers lived off the daughters who lived off the fleet, off the fleet and what followed it, tourists with special tastes, a United Nations of furtive catamites and sodomites, pederasts and pedophiles. My people prepared themselves. Smiling acolytes lit charcoal fires for satay sticks, older brothers emptied truckloads of San Miguel beer into refrigerators. While the sky turned orange and purple, swirls of neon pink and lime celebrated Marilyn’s, Blow Hole, Ace of Hearts. And, like candles in roadside shrines, jukeboxes came to life, the Eagles promising “One of These Nights,” the Three Degrees wondering “When Will I See You Again?” The joy of arrival, the melancholy of departure, everything was ready. If you were a priest in Subic City, you knew all the tunes. You knew venereal diseases. You knew chlamydia. You knew T-shirt slogans. EXCUSE ME: YOU OBVIOUSLY MISTAKE ME FOR SOMEONE WHO GIVES A SHIT.
I could feel the approaching Americans and the town could feel them too. Lassitude and randomness yielded to calm, confident purpose, inaction to strenuous effort, ordinary humanity to something that was more and less. Even now the Americans passed through the gates, they crossed the river, onto Magsaysay Street, into the liberty port. They decided to save Magsaysay Street for later. Graceland’s first show was ten P.M. Meanwhile, they commandeered jeepneys and, beer by beer, advanced toward my parish.
Let me make clear that I did not hate the Americans. I enjoyed my missions inside the American base. I envied their youth and good cheer. I loved the jukebox music that accompanied my life, music for every occasion first meetings, flirtation, consummation—Donna Summer, that would be—and departure. Sometimes it seemed that the songs didn’t underscore emotions but that they replaced them, so that what it came to was a loss of feeling, atrophy and numbness rolling in, men and women reduced to jukeboxes, and it was all a matter of feeding coins into slots and pushing the right buttons, again and again, night after night. “You’ve got to give it to the Filipinos,” I heard a sailor say one night. “They just keep coming.” A double entendre, a dirty joke, all right, a table full of snickers. A profound truth, nonetheless. Jan and Dean were right. “Two girls for every boy.”
Now the women came out. They were always here, wives, mothers, and daughters, but now they clustered around jukeboxes, they loitered in doorways. At one moment, a single girl stood outside Blow Hole, brushing her hair. Then another, then three. The moment arrived. Contact. The sound of horns beeping, horns that sounded like wolf whistles, tapes playing. The first arrivals disappeared into nightclubs. The second wave, the third milled around on the street. How like an invasion! No wonder we used the same words for love and war, foreplay and softening up, first contact, hit the beach, slow dance, fast dance, touching and embracing, penetration, planting the flag on foreign soil. Jeepney after jeepney of hard muscular bodies, institutional haircuts, high school faces. Love and war, mongrel and hybrid, a beast with two backs.
Now I retreated. Render unto Caesar. Render along the beach, in cubicles and cribs at the rear of nightclubs, under tables in the game of smiles. On your knees, on your back, render. The game began. I left my people behind, where I could not help them, where the very sight of me would contribute to their pain or—conceivably—spoil their pleasure. I retired to my quarters, a modest bungalow, half-residence, half-office, behind my church. Sitting in darkness on this night of a thousand couplings, snatches of music drifted my way, that pounding disco, those forlorn love songs, vulgar and hypocritical and yet each of them, in its own moment, persuasive.
The Americans had to go, the sooner the better, no matter how much they paid to stay, no matter how much their leaving cost. Sail away, sail away. Loving them, hating them: never mind. Maybe there would be a nation here someday. Maybe not. My people would have to sort it out among themselves. I knew the arguments on both sides. Safeguarding democracy, projecting the free world’s presence, Russians in Cam Ranh Bay, only ninety minutes away. Forty thousand Filipinos on the payroll at Clark and Subic. Ripple effect. Indirect employment. Hospitals and schools, golf balls and shell casings, all the things that Americans gave, that my people took. And, against this, the talk of sovereignty and pride, exploitation and debasement, my arguments, but just as much a litany—a list of songs on a jukebox—as the others. I had heard them all, all through the Marcos years. Now the yellow-dressed housewife played the jukebox. Cory Aquino. The bases must go. One song. Or we could raise the rent and shorten the lease. Another tune. Stay a while longer, a little while, and pay a little more. One song melting into another, the jukebox gone haywire. Subic and the fleet and the shattered nights. “Perpetual peace is a dream and not a very happy dream at that.” Von Clausewitz, K-4 on the jukebox. The hour before dawn is darkest. Notes from the journal of a country priest. “Liquor in the Front, Poker in the Rear.” Music adrift in night air. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Too long, indeed. Meanwhile, I had the case of Teresa de Guzman to contend with and, though I did not know it, the meeting with Elvis Presley.
“Padre Paternity?” I asked.
“Oh, come on, Father,” the lieutenant said. “You know how people are about nicknames. Does it surprise you that Americans pick up the habit? Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Domingo.”
“Domingo who?” I asked again.
“Domingo to court to sue your ass.” Lieutenant Porter leaned back in his chair and laughed. A Navy lawyer in an air-conditioned office on the second floor of headquarters, inside the base, he was a short, pugnacious humorist. He passed out business cards for a Subic City establishment that offered “the finest cocksuckers in the Philippines.” Around his office he exhibited the most obnoxious local handicraft available, carvings of eagles and carabao, velvet paintings of the Kennedys, the gaudiest of sunsets.
My report: a certain Teresa de Guzman, employed as a cultural dancer in a Barrio Barretto club, attempted to escape the unwanted attention of an American Marine attached to the USS Peleliu. She tripped and broke an ankle, which injury had caused her pain, cost her substantial sums for continuing medical care, the final outcome and sum of which could only be estimated and, moreover, her injury deprived her of the opportunity to earn her livelihood and pursue her career, thus impoverishing not only Ms. de Guzman but her entire, and entirely dependent, family. So I said.
Lieutenant Porter savored my presentation. We had done this a dozen times before, he and I. Now it was ending. Where he was going, he would trade in subdivisions and wills, he would incorporate businesses, avoid taxes, plan estates, and miss “da PI.”
“I love it,” he said when I concluded. “What will I do without you? What will you do without me?”
“The best we can,” I said. “A greatly overcrowded occupation.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll ever get to the Allentown-Reading area?” he said. “Farms turning into subdivisions, factories into outlet malls. Pennsylvania Dutch selling pies and pretzels. Taverns where men sit and watch TV all night long and the only woman in the place wears overalls and a flannel shirt.”
“Not like here.”
“Well,” he said, picking up a file. “Before my eyes tear over altogether.” He read the file while I waited. “Tsk, tsk,” he went. Or “Oh, my!” Or “Naughty, naughty.” Then he threw the file on the desk. “Cultural dancer? That’s beautiful. Go-go girl, takeout girl, escort service, maybe. Hooker, u-drive, spare part, I thought I’d heard them all. But cultural dancer? That’s stylish. This woman—”
“Teresa de Guzman.”
“—works out—or out of—a place called Fountain of Youth. A water sports place, pools, saunas, showers, and all the local … cultural … extras. It says here that at the end of her … performance? … she sits in a tub in a T-shirt which I surmise is a wet T-shirt and she invites some members of the audience to help her soap up … some of those hard-to-reach locations. Lance Corporal Reese responds to the inv
itation and, the floor being wet … he stumbles forward. Teresa de Guzman interprets this as an attack. She gets out of the tub, she arises—with a modest shriek, no doubt—and … that wet floor again … down she goes.”
“I have a signed statement, I have witnesses.”
“By the jeepney load. Sure you do. So do I.”
“In light of this disagreement, Lieutenant, I suggest we go to court. The 1965 amendment to the bases agreement provides for adjudication in local courts of offenses charged against American servicemen. I therefore request, on Teresa de Guzman’s behalf, that Corporal Reese be placed on international legal hold—”
“—until the Philippines courts have settled. Tell me, Father, how long does it take to reach a decision, these days?”
“Maybe … a long time,” I responded. “Lawyers, witnesses, translators. A crowded docket, a sadly overloaded system. … I’m afraid the Peleliu will have sailed long before Corporal Reese has a decision.”
“Sailed! Did you say his ship will have sailed? By the time your courts get to a decision, the ship will be decommissioned, melted down, recycled into hubcaps.”
“Then again …”
“We could settle. All right, Father, the moment approaches. How much will it take to make cultural dancer Teresa de Guzman whole again? What’s the market value of an ankle?”
“To a lawyer or a priest, sir, very little. But to a cultural dancer …”
In a moment more, our work was done. It would be a long while before the other parts of Teresa de Guzman’s body matched what her ankle had earned for her. Lieutenant Porter escorted me out of his office and was surprised to see a woman sitting outside in a chair.
“Is this …?”
“Lieutenant Douglas Porter, this is Ms. Teresa de Guzman.” Shifting to Tagalog, I told the woman that she should keep her eyes on the floor, downcast, and her face sad. Then I told her she was 5,000 pesos richer but she must stay serious and not thank the American or it would be harder for all the women who followed her here.