The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  The morning after I got drunk on Mabini Street, I got a call that someone was there waiting for me, Jimmy Fiddler down in the lobby. He opened the car door for me, put on a tape of Johnny Cash serenading criminals, and when the concert ended, we’d covered a mile, tops. No side roads in Manila shortcuts, backstreets. It was like playing musical chairs in a parking lot. We spent twenty minutes at one intersection, locked in, so I decided I’d take in the whole screwed-up scene, the cinder-block buildings, the soot-covered wood, the rusty roofs, the balconies hung with laundry, the oil-covered, cracked-up sidewalk, yet you had to give it to these people, they stayed busy. They sold stuff, they blew horns, they laughed and pissed and littered and, in spite of everything, they smiled like so many kids—orphans, really—born into a bad world, praying and singing and smiling on through, even though the hour was late and the odds were long. That’s what the Chestnut had fallen in love with, I guessed, one of those convent schoolkids you saw squeezing in and out of jeepneys, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs. You couldn’t help believing that they deserved better. He was making a mistake, no doubt about it. Marrying someone isn’t like collecting Halloween treats for the UN, one for me and one for them, this was Chester’s life we’re talking about. Yet I could understand what he was doing. I’ve got a little sympathy too. And brains. But, if it was up to me, when our helicopter lifted off the roof of the embassy, Miss Olongapo wouldn’t be sitting next to us.

  There were billboards all around the intersection, advertising Filipino films, eight or nine of them. In the States they’d have posters, posters blown up for still photographs. Here they had these crude paintings that turn movies into comic strips—which is exactly what they were—heavy-handed, gaudy-colored, glaringly lit. I sat through some of these things in Olongapo. They sold tickets to everyone who came, forget the number of seats, and they kept coming all through the movie, they talked when they wanted and laughed at all the wrong spots and when you saw what was up there, you couldn’t blame them. There were two kinds of movies. One kind was a love story. You had one man and two women on the poster. The man looked like an over-the-hill dance instructor, mustached and overweight. One of the women was hot and sexy, the other saintly and weeping and the plot of the movie was, everybody fucked. The other movie, there was a Rambo-looking guy—sometimes called “Kumander”—and a military bad guy and a guerrilla beauty and the plot was, everybody died. Sometimes they combined the two kinds and they screwed and then they died: massacre movies, these were called. So I sat in traffic, studying billboards and, right there, above traffic, three times the size of life, sneering down from the corner of a billboard, was the same guy who was sitting behind the driver’s wheel, Jimmy Fiddler, a.k.a. “Daga.” The Rat. His name was on the list of actors, four or five down from the top, below some stars nobody outside the Philippines ever heard of or ever would.

  “Hey, that’s you up there,” I said.

  “You noticed, huh?”

  “Was it hard?” How hard could it possibly be, I thought, if this guy did it? And how good could it possibly be, if he was sitting here in traffic, driving me around?

  “Wasn’t nothing to it,” Jimmy said. “I’m a natural.”

  “You die in this one?” I asked, nodding toward the billboard.

  “Shit … are you kidding? You think I kill the good-looking guy and kiss the girl at the end of the movie?” He turned and faced me, letting me see just how ugly he was. At first I thought they called him the Rat because he looked like one: chinless face, nasty teeth. Now—when I saw that pitted skin, noticed those red eyes, I thought he looked like something that a rat had eaten. “Me getting up close and personal with Gretchen Barreto, do you think that’s something anyone would pay to see?’

  “I guess not,” I allowed.

  “Of course I die. It’s the order you die in that’s important. First to kill, last to die, that’s me.”

  “But you never get the girl,” I said.

  “Hey, stud-muffin,” he answered. “It’s only a movie.” Now he turned off the main highway. We passed through a gate where some blue-uniformed pistoleros saluted Ratso or maybe what they saluted was the sticker on his windshield. And suddenly—I mean, like presto—we weren’t in the Philippines anymore. It was that rich neighborhood I was looking for. Now I’d found it. And I was through the gate.

  “What’s this placed called?” I asked.

  “Forbes Park,” Jimmy said, turning one syllable into two: For-bis. In Forbes Park the street curbed smoothly under arching shade trees, branches meeting overhead, making a green tunnel for us to pass through. The house sat behind walls and gates but I could still sneak a peak at Beverly Hills mansions with fussy lawns and gardens that looked like pictures out of children’s books. Lifestyles of the rich and famous.

  Then, right then, I started to worry. A flash of alarm, flop sweats, like me onstage and not knowing my lines. I was on my way to visit Baby Ronquillo and all I knew was that she owned the club I worked at and lots of other businesses besides. A movie studio. I was hoping there might be something for me in them, that she might put me in cheap flicks that would get me started. And—what else?—she had an employment agency that sent locals overseas. That was all I knew. Shit, I was flying blind. How did she get where she was? Who did she belong to, if she belonged to anybody? And who belonged to her? And what did she want with me? It wasn’t fair. Her court, her rules, her crowd, her game.

  We turned into a white crushed coral driveway lined by tall, straight palm trees with little mops up top, barbered and polite. The house was yellow stucco with a red-tile roof, Riviera-looking, if you could say that something reminded you of a place you’d never been. Right then I was beginning to feel I’d never been anywhere. Born in West Virginia, raised in Guam, working in Olongapo. Shit!

  I got out of the car, stopped and stretched, trying to relax myself or at least appear relaxed, in case anyone was watching. I liked the way the flowers grew around the second-floor veranda, purple bougainvillea against the sand-colored stucco. Out on the lawn, a Filipino was edging the grass with what looked like nail clippers. Another one was watering the grass, slapping at it with the water that came out of a hose. In this country, it was cheaper to hire a man than buy a sprinkler.

  A maid opened the front door and gestured me inside. I could hear people laughing in back of the house. On my left I spotted a dining room with a long, shining table. On my right a staircase went up to the second floor, the kind of staircase you make a grand entrance on, all polished marble, watching your step so you don’t go down on your ass. The marble was orange and white, like a Creamsickle.

  I stepped outside the house into a field of sunlight and the first thing I saw was a color I’d almost forgotten, that light, clear swimming pool blue, like a whole pool of aftershave lotion, Mennen skin bracer maybe, a color that didn’t exist in Olongapo, that kind of blue, not in the water and not in the sky. A big lawn surrounded the swimming pool, several terraces on different levels, each terrace bordered with flowers and ferns and hedges, all of them leading up to a wall that ran around the property, with shards of glass, clear glass and beer-bottle brown, politely embedded in the top. There were some trees that you don’t plant and you don’t grow, you just move in under them and stay.

  I looked around plenty. I had time. There were two dozen people. None of them was Baby Ronquillo and none of them paid any attention to me. They’d seen me all right, I sensed, and they’d decided not to bother with me. Fair enough. I walked over to the bar, got a club soda, and just stood there, taking it all in.

  Three fashion-model types were perched at the edge of the pool, lean and haughty, with expensive don’t-even-think-about-it looks on their faces. Precious and delicate, not like our Graceland girls. A couple others sat at the table teasing with some guys in white linen slacks and silk shirts, no threat to anybody. Billy-boys.

  I wondered if Baby Ronquillo was going to show up at all. Two more groups of people arrived after I did, more o
f the same, fitting right into giggles and gossip that didn’t include me. I was standing there alone, me, myself, and I. They talked about me—I picked the words “Elvis” and “Olongapo” out of the chatter—but no one came over to say hello. That was strange. Somebody arrived at a party, he didn’t stand alone for long, not in this country. Filipinos were friendly people, I’d found, maybe too friendly, but they didn’t just leave you hanging, feeling as out-of-it as I was. Someone always came over. This bunch was different.

  I tried walking over to one of the tables, four or five people sitting around, picking at cheese and grapes and things, drinking white wine and paying no particular attention. Land this bunch on a desert island, you wouldn’t worry about any monkey business, that’s for sure. Monkey business: Olongapo talk for screwing. Right on the money too, I thought, the way we climb and ride and roll and poke, it was hardly even human. I’d been working in a zoo, no doubt about it, a zoo where every bedroom was a cage and every meeting was a trick and there was nothing monkeys did that money couldn’t buy. And I’d climbed right through the bars of the cage, at first. Now, it shamed me.

  “Elvis?” One of the girls sitting at the table looked up at me, over her shoulder.

  “Yes?” I responded.

  She started to laugh at me, as if the point had been to see if I responded to that name. Her buddies joined her. “The Elvis of Olongapo,” one of the guys said. That kicked up more laughter. They shifted back and forth from English to Tagalog and left me standing. All right, big deal, they knew two languages and I knew one and it might be asking too much for them to accommodate me. But if I only spoke Tagalog, if I were some humble Filipino, holding a free beer, I doubted they’d be any nicer. It would all be English then.

  “Hong Kong … Seoul … San Francisco … New York,” said one of them, the hostess of a show I’d watched on television.

  “No, no,” said a guy everybody called Bong. “Singapore … Honolulu … Los Angeles … New York!”

  “Nonsense,” said this beauty who looked to be one sigh away from anorexia. “Hong Kong … Bangkok … Rome … London … New York!”

  I was in a nest of frequent fliers, arguing about the best route to New York and later, the best hotels in town, the Mark, the Plaza, Helmsley. They called out names the way the girls at Graceland called out numbers—K-3, G-7, W-9—as soon as a customer walked toward the jukebox. And then I realized that if the revolution that never comes ever came, if a bunch of hostess girls and jeepney drivers, lottery salesmen and cigarette vendors grabbed some guns and came over the walls of Baby Ronquillo’s property, if they got their shit together and left patches of T-shirt and skin on the cut glass, if they put us all against the wall, sure, it would suck to be me, but I couldn’t argue with it, just a matter of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  After twenty minutes, I’d had enough. I stepped to the edge of the pool. The water looked good to me and nobody was in it. So all right. If they weren’t paying attention to me, I wasn’t paying attention to them. I took off my shoes and socks and no one cared. My shirt came next, neatly folded, far enough back so it wouldn’t get splashed. I pulled off my jeans, nonchalantly. This wasn’t a striptease. This was Elvis in Hollywood. The film he should have made. He could have been something, it was written all over him, a combination of Marlon Brando and James Dean, the sneer, the loneliness, that cornered, restless feeling, hunter and hunted. He could have been great and Ward told me he knew what he’d missed, making those twenty-nine moneymaking piles of shit. Not one of which you’d pay to see today. Sure, he combined Brando and Dean, in a way. He got fat and he died young.

  My boxer-style underwear went last and I heard some comments behind me. Was it that I’d stripped naked or was it that I wore boxers? This was a bikini-brief crowd, male and female, phosphorescent candy-stripers that left little to the imagination. Minus my boxers, I left nothing. I walked around the edge of the pool right past the three models—“’Scuse me, ma’am,”—and stood at the deep end of the pool. They’d be laughing if they could see this at Graceland, I thought. Olongapo seemed far away from Forbes Park. They’d told me Olongapo wasn’t the Philippines. But what was? Was it this pampered gang of switch-hitting, frequent fliers? Well, check it out. Elvis goes a-skinny-dipping.

  I swam back and forth, several lengths, just showing off—I knew they were watching me—but then I got into it, my breathing and my stroke, my underwater turn, and I kept at it, even if they weren’t watching anymore. Back and forth, back and forth, it was just me, nobody else, and when I finally stopped at the end of the pool it was as though time had passed, the quality of light had changed, shadows had moved across the lawn, and people had left the pool and gone to tables beneath the trees where I sensed a line of snow, a whiff of pot, out there in the shade. Then Jimmy Fiddler came to the edge of the pool, handing me a towel.

  “She’ll see you now,” he said.

  “She’s seen me already,” I answered.

  “Come on, smart-ass,” he said. I followed him across the yard toward the house. We were almost inside when he stopped and turned, standing in my way.

  “I figure you don’t take advice from anybody,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I listen. It depends.”

  “Well, listen to this. Watch yourself upstairs. Whatever you think … it’s probably wrong.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The thing about this country … you’ve got to know when to leave, that’s all.”

  “You haven’t left.”

  “See what I mean? Watch yourself.”

  He led me into the house, carrying my clothes for me, and after I got dressed he pointed me up those marble steps, to where Baby Ronquillo was waiting, in a chair that looked out a bay window, onto the lawn and the pool. She was dressed in a terry-cloth bathrobe, enjoying coffee and a cigarette while someone did her nails. She was that kind of woman. Her house was guarded, her yard was gardened, her pool vacuumed, clothes tailored, body massaged and manicured, and when she moved around town it was in an air-conditioned bubble. The air she breathed was different from what I sucked in and out. She scared me.

  “Well done,” she said. She looked me up and down, the way the Navy checked out Graceland girls. In a minute, I bet, the manicure would be over. I was ready. At least I think I was. Ready or not, here I come. The legend lives. This particular series was going the full seven games, I bet. “You remind me of the Colonel.”

  “How’s that?” I asked. I never saw Uncle Pete go naked. Come to think of it, I never saw him in swimming trunks. But Baby Ronquillo had known him before I did. And maybe she’d know him better.

  “My Gary Cooper,” she said.

  “Your who?”

  “My American. My cowboy. My … how do you say it? … my something else. Are you surprised?”

  “No,” I said. “Actually … it’s nice to hear.”

  “He had none of that American guilt. Do you follow? I don’t think you do.”

  “Uh …”

  “In bed. Between the first time and the second. With others it was ‘What does this mean? Where does it go? You know I love my wife, Baby, I really do!’ But Colonel Parker smoked a cigarette between times. And held me. Just like in the movies.”

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Anyway, there was no need. Baby Ronquillo was looking way past me, smiling, and it was a moment before her attention returned. And then it was to dismiss me.

  “You’ll be hearing from me,” Baby Ronquillo said. “Jimmy will drive you home.”

  And that was how my career in movies began. My bits as a mercenary, a drug peddler, a kidnapped missionary, a multinational businessman. The scripts came to Olongapo on a Thursday. I read them over the weekend, hopped into a hired car after the second show early Sunday morning, and headed to wherever they were filming, Manila, Batangas, Laguna, Zam-bales, Baguio. Baby made films fast—second takes were rare—and she made them all in a bunch. I gave up keeping track. I took what she gav
e me, no questions asked. Later, though, she invited me to read scripts, to jot down ideas, wondered whether she could come up with something that might attract a Stateside audience.

  I’m not stupid, I told myself. At first I figured she wanted me to go to bed with her, especially after what came to be called my “audition” in the swimming pool. But that didn’t happen. I wasn’t a boy toy, not yet. She seemed more interested in what Uncle Pete was up to. His plans, his prospects, his business strategy. I couldn’t help much but she took it good-naturedly enough. She liked having me under contract, it seemed. And she praised some of the ideas I came up with. Elvis Presley showing up in the Philippines: that’s the one she liked the most.

  V

  Chester “Baby Elvis” Lane

  “This Philippines business,” Uncle Pete had said, way back on Guam. “It scares you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  We were sitting out back, late at night, in two lawn chairs at the edge of the property, the edge of a cliff really, because it was a couple hundred feet down to Marine Drive. We couldn’t see the traffic, because the road ran right against the bottom of the cliff, but we could hear it all right, beeps and honks during the rush hour, drunks and drag racing and sirens late at night. We couldn’t see the buildings, either, all the malls and clubs and shopping centers, but we could catch the glow, which made it hard to see the stars. You’ve got to go way offshore to see the stars, way out on a boat, and then you’ve got to turn off the cabin lights and the running lights and that’s when the whole sky comes out.

  “Fear of failure?” he asked.