by P. F. Kluge
“You’re not in a classroom anymore,” I answered.
“What does that mean?”
“You shouldn’t ask a question when you already know the answer.”
“But I don’t.”
“Then you should.”
A hilarious night. Tables full of grilled fish and chicken, courtesy of Biggest Elvis. Elvira modeled some clothes the sheik bought for her, strutting up and down the stage, lip-synching “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” Back from Boracay, Dolly did an imitation of Chester attempting to teach Whitney a dance called “the monkey.” I do not understand this kind move …” Dolly’s Whitney protested. “I hate this monkey business.” When they left, the tables were covered with chicken bones and paper plates of yellow rice, empty boxes from the Donut Hole, dripping cartons of Selecta ice cream. Biggest Elvis stayed behind.
“There’s a saying,” Biggest Elvis said to me. “Or maybe it’s a line from a song. I really don’t know. A saying in the form of a question.”
“So …” His elaborate prefaces irritated me. I didn’t like to talk to Biggest Elvis about our business here. I did not like being called on as a friendly expert witness. It reminded me of Commander Andy. All these foreigners who claimed to know us.
“What can they buy as good as they sell?” He recited it as if he were onstage, a fine, wise line. He seemed so pleased with himself, with the poetry of it. I slammed down my book and got up. This was one question too many.
“What can they buy as good as they sell? You should know the answer, my friend. Food!” I started moving from table to table, collecting trash, sweeping the mess into a pile at the center. His mess. His leftovers. Suddenly I hated him for feeding us, for caring, for asking clumsy questions.
Then he was standing next to me, holding a garbage can he’d gotten from behind the bar.
“I’m sorry.” He held out the can. “Push the stuff in here.”
We moved from table to table, as if this were something we did every night, cleaning Graceland, working as a team. He followed me behind the bar, waited while I washed my hands, then washed his own. He would not leave. He was what I needed. But not what I wanted.
“What do you want with me, Biggest Elvis?” I shouted. “Night after night, you sit, you watch. You ask questions. What do you want?”
He did not answer. He just stood there. Was he at a loss for words? Cathouse got your tongue? Or was he afraid of saying the wrong thing?
“You want a girlfriend?” I asked. “You have so many from which to choose. Elvira! Who would not want Elvira? You’d have to be sick, not to want Elvira. Shall I speak to her for you? Some night when the sheik is not in town? Or Whitney? What about Whitney? Sleepy but beautiful. You might be the one who awakens Whitney. Her Prince Charming!”
“Stop this,” he said, holding up his hand. “This is whore talk.”
“This is whore town. Why not Lucy Number Three? No complaints about her from anyone. She loves her work. Or Erlinda. Or Priscilla. What do you want, Biggest Elvis?”
“I’ll tell you,” he started to say, but I wasn’t finished. I wanted to burn my bridges. Jimmy Fiddler wasn’t going to be my matchmaker, one American pushing me toward another. No matter what.
“In the biggest bar in the best liberty port in the Pacific, you’re an American, you have money, anything you want is yours. So many choices, short-time, long-time, young or old, mother or daughter, mother and daughter, two or three at a time. Are you a leg man? Tits, is it? Ass? Or … yes!… mouth. Or maybe you’re a Billy-boy.”
Now he’d heard enough. He stepped toward me. Now it comes, I thought, a slap across the face, just like in the movies. Suddenly I saw it, everything that was supposed to happen. After he slapped me, I would look at him in shock. How dare you! Then I’d tremble and cry and find myself in Biggest Elvis’ arms. He’d wipe my tears away, hold me. We would embrace and kiss, a paperback romance, us standing there on the floor of the empty nightclub, the tall American folding the island girl into his arms. The girls in the VIP lounges would awaken and look down upon us from above, beaming. Stupid stuff.
No. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around, as though I’d been a child walking in the wrong direction. He steered me back to the jukebox, pulled out my chair, made me sit, and then he took a chair himself, sat facing me, his arms folded across the back of the chair.
“You’re the only person I’ve met in years who’s interested me one bit,” he said. I started to answer but he held up his hand. “Just bear with me, Malou. This isn’t rehearsed.”
He looked down at the floor, ran his hand through his hair. “Why do I want to know you? Because you’re smart. Because you read. And while I’m punching gut and sweating bullets, you’re here, doing your books or reading something. The kind of woman who always brings something along to read because she might get bored, the book is like a warning to the world she’s in, that if the people she’s with aren’t up to expectations, in a minute she’s out of here. …”
He picked up tonight’s book, turned it over. Love Medicine. Elvira had laughed when she saw it, as if the hero would be French Tickler or Spanish Fly.
“There you are, with those glasses and black slacks and the same white T-shirt with nothing on it, every night, extra large, with room for you to hide in.”
I made a T for time-out with my fingers. “Actually, not the same shirt, all the time. I have many like it.”
“I say to myself, she’s smart. You make a mistake, she’ll nail you. And she’s moody, she’d got all kinds of moods. You run into one of those moods—not if, but when—and you’ve got a problem. And she’s alone. Funny wiring for a place like this. Or anywhere. Now here’s where I start sounding like a kid. I say to myself, I think Malou is neat. I’d like to get to know her. I wonder if that’s even possible. I wonder …” He laughed, shaking his head. “You’re right, I guess. Who wouldn’t want Elvira?”
“I do, sometimes.” I could hardly hear myself but I said it. And he heard, he nodded. He wasn’t shocked.
“Who wouldn’t want Elvira? Or—dream the impossible dream—Whitney. Fine and willowy Whitney. She smiles at me, ever since we talked. We’re friends now. That’s something.”
“She said she wanted a serious man,” I recalled.
“I guess I don’t always say the wrong thing. Or ask the wrong question. Only now and then. And only to you.” He almost reached out for my hand. He started, caught himself, withdrew. I saw it all. “Could we be friends? All right. You’re a woman, I’m a man. Which generally leads to fucking, not friendship. You’re from here and I’m from there. So it’s money and passports. And a lot of questions I can’t answer. Still …”
“I don’t know what you want,” I say. Olongapo is bottom-line. How much, how long, top or bottom, here or there. A certain act, a certain price. That’s the deal. A price for what you want.
“Talk. Spend time. Do things together. Get to know each other. …”
Talk to each other. In Olongapo you talk while you wait to get hard again. Spend time. Time is money here. Spend time in VIP lounge, hotel, apartment, beach. Do things together. What kind of things do you want me to do? Once you think Olongapo, everything becomes clear and specific. What he says is vague. Get to know each other. We do that all the time here. Some do it several times a night.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I do not think it is possible. What you say …”
He nodded, almost too readily, as if he’d heard what he expected to hear. “Well then …”
He walked away. Biggest Elvis sleeps alone again, I thought. Malou, also. An offer of friendship, rejected. A thousand other Americans reached into their pockets for money and then they opened their pants. Biggest Elvis was different. But he was still American and I’d had one American too many.
“Biggest Elvis!” I called out after him. In the movie I would run to him. We would walk out together, onto Magsaysay Street, neon reflections gleaming on the shower-wet street. And then the movie
ended, the picture blurred, the part of it that I could imagine. I could not imagine us together, not here or anywhere. Still, he turned when I called out to him.
“What’s the harm in it,” I say, “if we talk sometimes?”
The next night, Biggest Elvis tried for a seven-letter word every time. He accomplished this twice in the first game, once in the second. He lost both. He shook his head and left, thanking me. I told him “You’re welcome” and watched him walk away. Just a friendly game, which I won. Twice. Elvira would have told me to let him win, at least once, and afterward, to stretch my body in front of him, to stretch back and yawn luxuriously. She begged me to discard my T-shirts. I sat alone, wondering about Biggest Elvis. What was his story? His personal history? No one came to anyone clean, beyond a certain age. We had records. Was it better to share the past or ignore it? I closed my eyes and rested my head in my hand and I heard him walking toward me, coming back for me. What now?
“Pardon me, sweetness, I was just out looking for a blow job. I know it’s a little late …” Jimmy Fiddler stood there, his crotch at the level of my face. He smelled of aftershave, a heavy scent. The same Old Spice that Commander Andy used. These Americans.
“I see you’re getting to know Fat Stuff. You fucked him yet?”
The look I gave him took him by surprise. He pretended to be shocked.
“Whoa … sorry, darling. I forgot. You don’t do that kind of thing.” He pulled out a chair and sat down, uninvited. “Thing I can’t figure out, is dykes made or bom? Did you come onto the planet saying, gee I was put here to chew the carpet. I was born a rug muncher? Or is it something that you discover after a real bad date?”
I stayed silent, waiting for him to leave, knowing that—like the other American—he would leave when he decided.
“Enough chitchat,” he announced. “Time’s short. What do you know?” “Nothing.”
“Oh,” he cheerfully replied. “Nothing. Okay. Well, I guess I’ll be on my way then.” Suddenly he spun around and wiped everything off the table, glass, Scrabble board, tiles, all over the floor. “I don’t think you’re even trying. When this person I know asked for me to check out Colonel Parker, I could’ve played it any number of ways. I could’ve made friends with one of the three stooges. But I didn’t. I thought of you, darling. Do you know why?”
“No,” I said. But I knew.
“I like mixing business with pleasure.”
I knew that. He’d thought of me. He wanted me.
“But I’m not having so much fun,” he continued. “Not yet. I don’t even think you’re trying to make this work. I think you just forgot about me. I remembered you. You bet. But you forgot about me. I guess I’m just not … memorable.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t forget.” I disappointed myself. I lacked the courage to defy him. Like so many other Filipinos who talked to Americans, I said one thing and meant another. I told the American what the American wanted to hear.
“You have a plan …
“yes. I have a plan.”
“Where’s the board?” Biggest Elvis asked the next night.
“I gave it to Dolly,” I lied. “She wanted to play at home.” In fact, I’d picked the board and tiles off the floor, tucked it all in back of the jukebox. An A and an H were missing. Underneath the jukebox, I supposed.
“Oh. What are we going to do, then?”
“We could talk,” I say.
“The two of us?”
“It’s what you wanted, no?”
He nodded, sat down, and looked at me. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Take your time,” I said. I tried sounding relaxed and playful. Teasing. Elvira did this so well, Dolly also. Not me.
“I say the wrong thing, you’ll get mad.”
“Trust me,” I said. Jimmy Fiddler, my matchmaker, my coach. How artificial I sounded, as though reciting lines someone else had written. Someone who didn’t know me. I’d noticed how a silence sometimes fell over Olongapo tables, when music stopped and drinks were ordered and it was still too early for bar fines. How little—once we stopped talking business—how little there was to say. “You were a professor, they tell me. Who discovered you? Was it … this … Colonel Parker?”
“You really want to hear this?” he asked. “I was a professor. And a husband. And somebody’s kid once too. You want the whole thing? What’s your pleasure, Malou?”
“As you wish.”
“You’ll return the favor sometime? I don’t mind going first, if you promise you’re next. But if it were just me—out there alone—I don’t need it. It’s not my style. So this is for you, Malou.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He said he’d never liked those books that began with somebody’s birth and ended with somebody’s death, books that went marching from the obvious to the inevitable. He liked stories that moved back and forth, recovering and reconsidering the past, visiting the future, returning to a present that was enriched from both sides and if he hadn’t gotten that to work in a book he’d once written or the career he used to have, he had it now, everything coming together like magic, time and place, the way the Elvis act had come together here in Olongapo. He’d had bad times, false starts, dead-end jobs, and a marriage that ended just before his wife’s death. Just four months ago he had thought of himself as a failure, till he’d opened his mouth in front of a mirror and an Elvis song came out. And was that—I asked again—how he met Colonel Parker? Or had he met the Lane brothers first? He didn’t heed my question. He was telling me more important things, he thought. Now, he felt, he’d found himself. Even as he put himself into another man’s life, his own life was enlarged. He was amending and continuing Presley’s time on earth and it might seem crazy to someone who’d never been there but there was power on the Graceland stage. He stepped right into that power and it trailed him offstage, it followed him home, magic. Colonel Parker must be pleased, I ventured, detesting my own clumsiness, wondering if I weren’t going out of my way to fail, even hurrying my failure along. He stopped a moment, puzzled, as if he’d heard a wrong note. Then he continued. The best thing when you’re happy is not to examine it, he said. He’d have been happy to just have a new life in a new place, where every note and each breeze and every blink of neon elated him. But then he’d seen me sitting at the jukebox, solitary and unmoved—“outside of the magic”—and, though it was pushing his luck, he wanted something more. Happiness was something you shared, he believed, though sadness was better faced alone. He looked at me, distant and skeptical me, and wondered if his happiness could touch me. Or not? That was the chance he was willing to take with me. We could talk about his life some other time. Everybody had a history. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. But that wasn’t what he wanted me to know. That wasn’t the most important thing. No need for me to respond now. If I walked away, he’d understand. Maybe I hated Elvis—both the dead and living—and maybe I found him repulsive. He could understand that.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was overwhelmed. I was touched. I still hadn’t found out what I needed to know. “I don’t know.”
“That’ll teach you to give Dolly the Scrabble board.”
That, perhaps, was when I should have spoken, when I should have been as honest with the American as he had been with me. I should have said I’d lied about the Scrabble board, that I needed to talk to him. I needed information. I was in trouble and I should have told him. But I was Malou and I did not. My mistake. He seemed at ease. He’d trusted me and he didn’t regret it, yet. He stepped behind the bar, reached into the cooler, a San Miguel beer for him, a Coke for me. He beamed as he neared the table, he seemed buoyant, relieved.
“Your manager,” I said. “This Colonel Parker. Does he manage many acts like yours?”
He stopped and stood still. He took a swallow of beer, right out of the bottle, not bothering with the glass. He almost always used a glass.
He looked down at me and I could not meet his eyes.
“Know something, Malou? I counted five times you asked me about Colonel Parker. At the beginning and at the end and three times in the middle. Makes five.”
“I was only wondering.”
“No, not five times, you weren’t only wondering. You were pumping me. You want to tell me what’s going on, Malou?”
I stayed quiet.
“You’re in a jam, you should tell me. I’m done talking. I’m ready to listen.” Still, inept as I’d been, deceitful, I could not bring myself to confess to the American. Knowledge is power. So we lie. Or keep our mouths shut.
“Of course you’d be taking a chance, talking to me. You’d be way out there, wouldn’t you, walking the wire with no net. Hell, Malou, I’ll make it easy for you.” Out of his pocket, a wad of 100-peso notes. Americans repeating themselves on me. They brought out the worst in us. And we returned the favor. Commander Andy to Jimmy Fiddler to Biggest Elvis. Money men, material girls. “I’ll pay you to tell me what’s the matter. How much does it cost for you to trust me? More than a quick pop but less than for all night? Somewhere in there, I guess. …”
Now he reached behind the jukebox, found the Scrabble board I’d hidden, and handed it to me.
“Was this your idea of subtle? Get me to tell my life story and oh, by the way, about the man you work for, you wouldn’t happen to know … know what, Malou? His bank accounts? Investments? Deals? It must be that. It couldn’t be anything personal. No one would go to you for something personal because we all know how far your personal interest extends.” He thrust his hands far apart, like a man crucified, and then he narrowed them slowly. Look at the size of this fish I caught. And kept narrowing. “We know how far.” Now his hands were closer together, narrowing the distance between the finger and thumb of one hand. “About an inch.”
The next few nights, the food came as usual. More than usual, even. Whole barbecued chickens, grilled fish, plates of rice, cartons of ice cream, all courtesy of Biggest Elvis, who did not appear. That didn’t stop any of the girls from eating. But some of them wondered. Christmas was coming to Olongapo and Christmas was a puzzling time, especially for Americans. The Americans thought they knew us. They saw Filipinos running up and down basketball courts, playing their hearts out at a game in which, because of their lack of height, they could never prosper. They always came up short.