by P. F. Kluge
“Not exactly, sir. I mean if we stink, I guess, it doesn’t matter where we stink. And if we’re good … It’s just that …”
“What? It was your idea, this whole Presley act.”
“Yes sir,” I said. “Only I guessed we’d end up playing in lot of local clubs. Or a room at one of the hotels on Tumon Bay. Up to Saipan once in a while, sure. I saw us playing in places we know. Playing for friends. But this … you’ve got us going to a whole different country.”
“That’s it, huh?”
“Yes sir.”
“But that’s not all of it, is it?”
“Sir?”
“If I were sending you to, say … France … or England … or Japan … that would be a whole different country too. … It’s about the Philippines, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir.” I took my time about answering. Uncle Pete didn’t mind. My answers were slow in coming, he said, but they were worth waiting for. At the University of Guam, they were still waiting for some of my answers. Multiple-choice tests were murder. I always pictured situations in which two out of three answers might be true, sometimes three out of three. That took some thinking, some looking into things. But they only wanted one answer.
“Sir?” I said when I was ready. “We’ve got plenty Filipinos on this island, don’t we? More coming all the time, they say. They do all the shit jobs, the ones the locals won’t take. They work cheap. They get treated bad sometimes. Still they keep arriving and they’re always hustling and a lot of folks don’t like them because … they’ll do anything, you know. It’s like they don’t have a home at all, like their home was a ship that sank someplace and Guam is their life raft … I don’t know … I haven’t had any problems … but they’re so … so … all over the place.”
“Like cockroaches?” asked Uncle Pete. I knew he remembered what we said, down at the Tiger’s Cage, that night the Filipina was singing Streisand and no one cared. It was harsh all right, but that’s the way it was, no point denying it.
“Yes sir. Me and Albert, we’ll go where you send us. But we can’t work up too much enthusiasm about going to the place those people come from. Sorry, sir.”
I was sorry, really, because Uncle Pete had always been there for us, especially when Dude got busted with marijuana and some pills, but that didn’t stop Dude from going ballistic when Uncle Pete said where he was sending us. The Philippines was a dump, Dude said, and everybody knew it. If we went, he said, we better sew our wallets into our pockets and dip our cocks in creosote.
“The thing of it is …” Uncle Pete began lots of sentences like that. He’d say “The thing of it is” and you knew something important was coming. “The thing of it is, an island like this, you get too comfortable. You settle in. You know every mile of road. You know the boondocks. Every beach, every curve of coast. No matter how much you screw up, there’s always friends around to get you home and home isn’t far. If you’re a local boy, you’ve got protection. And, oh hell, Chester, you could play music for your friends, you could marry and make babies and watch me grow old—grow older, that is—and that’s not so bad. …”
He stopped and it felt like he was picturing it and it wasn’t so bad, him sitting out like this, with us around him, all the family he had. Then whatever he was picturing, and liking, he erased.
“But you come to a certain point … and you realize you’ve never been anywhere … you’ve been so happy staying put that you don’t know where you could have gone … or what you could have been. That’s the disease of islands.”
“But you’ve done okay, Uncle Pete.”
“I didn’t come here straight from West Virginia, son. There were lots of places in between. Lots of places.”
We always wondered about Uncle Pete’s life. We were vague about what he did now, his business out in the garage. Uncle Pete said that being powerful meant that nobody knew your name and that being rich wasn’t about the car you drove but the calls you made, and the people who called you. He kept his name out of the newspapers. When people asked at school, we told them Uncle Pete was a retired U.S. Navy officer and a private investor. Dude laughed at that. “Dim bulb,” he said, “how many retired military you know got money to invest? Retired military private investors. That’s a thin book joke. Retired military wait at the mailbox for their monthly checks. They buy their pot roast at the commissary and they line up to die at the VA hospital.” Now that we were talking, I asked Pete about the places he’d been, after West Virginia and before Guam, because whatever he told me would be big news, something that I could bring to Dude. Dude figured Uncle Pete was Mafia or CIA and that maybe the Witness Protection Program had sent him to Guam.
“Don’t start quizzing me, son,” Uncle Pete said. “You have to leave, that’s all.”
“Because you don’t want us to be big fish in a small pond? Is that it?”
“Small, shallow pond,” Uncle Pete replied. “No room to swim. No room to drown.”
If you’re nice to people, people will be nice to you. That’s the last thing Uncle Pete whispered to me at the airport, the day we flew off to Manila. He whispered something else to Dude and, as soon as we passed into the boarding area, we traded.
“That’s lovely,” Dude said. “‘Be nice to people and they’ll be nice to you.’”
“What’d he tell you?”
“To watch out for you,” he said. “In case being nice to people doesn’t work, I guess.”
Being nice worked fine, though, from that first day until now. I knew it would work out from the minute we came down the hill that led into Olongapo, every street jammed with life, chock-full of it, people sitting, hammering, drinking, crawling, smoking, hawking, shitting, flirting, napping. It was all you could do to take it in, all that life. I didn’t know the world could get so full. The whole place got me excited. And then, right away, we walked into the club, which wasn’t called Graceland yet, it was still Genghis Khan’s Tent, and once we were inside there were maybe two dozen girls sitting around, late afternoon, no customers, nothing happening. The place wasn’t open yet, really. Mrs. Ronquillo had the girls who were going to be hostesses cleaning up the place, vacuuming and dusting and all, and that’s what they’d just stopped doing when the three of us came walking in. So the first time I saw the girls of Graceland they weren’t dolled up and dressed fancy, they were wearing cut-off jeans and T-shirts that said DAIRY QUEEN and BAN ANIMAL TESTING. They wore hair curlers and kerchiefs. It was a good thing I saw them that way, with mops and buckets and Ajax and Windex. It showed me that they weren’t just … I hate the word … whores. They were this bunch of girls, scrubbing and wiping, making a party of it like they tried to make a party out of almost everything, no matter how bad it was.
I’ll never forget that minute, them looking at us, sizing and measuring the way women do, and us, the three Elvises, looking back at them, like we’d returned to earth and they were what we saw. For Dude it was simple, looking over that crew. Wow, I got my work cut out for me. Who’s first? Later he changed—he became a monk almost, and after that he changed again. But he came to Olongapo angry and the minute we walked through the door, I knew Dude was going for a fuckathon. The girls knew it too, the girls could tell.
Ward was different, of course. He walked around the edges of the room, he stepped up onstage and stared out at a house that hadn’t been filled for a long time. The windows in the VIP lounges were smudged and dirty, one was missing so you could see underwear and stockings hanging inside. The whole place was cruddy but—swear to God—Ward acted like he’d just bought his dream house. He was like a minister and this was a church he’d been sent to preach at, his own church. He motioned me toward him. He put his hands on my shoulders, looking me hard in the eyes. “This will work,” he said. You ask me, that’s when Biggest Elvis was born.
While Ward was sniffing around onstage, Dude went backstage to check out our dressing room, which, it turns out, had empty cases of San Miguel bottles wall to wall. So I was alone, stan
ding near the girls, feeling a couple dozen pairs of super-experienced eyes on me and it made me nervous as prom night, no kidding, so I walked over to the jukebox, reaching into my pocket for change but I didn’t have any Filipino money yet. One of the girls—Malou, it turned out—got up and reached into the back of the machine, saying something in Tagalog, all of which I missed except two words of English. “Cherry boy.”
The jukebox was a museum. We’re talking rock and roll heaven, musical grooveyard, memory lane. Half the song titles weren’t even printed, they were handwritten. I leaned down to read the songs: Del Shannon, Loretta Lynn, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Roy Hamilton, and Fats Domino. And then this girl, Dolly, came up behind and leaned hard against me and linked her hands around in front of me, except one finger was making these little circles around my belly button. I knew it was a joke and she knew it was a joke and everybody knew it was a joke but my body wasn’t in on the joke, it didn’t have any sense of humor at all, it was getting seriously excited and those circles around my belly button kept getting wider, like someone dropped a stone in a pond, those circles were rippling out, taking in more territory. She was turning me on and she knew it. So, like it was pulling the eject button on a shot-up airplane, I reached for the jukebox, pushed the first song my fingers could find, and it was an early Miracles song, “Mickey’s Monkey,” and as soon as the first notes rang out, cherry boy was in charge.
Dolly was good. She copied every move I made, the way I hunkered down, the way I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet, the way I stretched out my arms and threw my shoulders, she caught on but she didn’t catch up because when it comes to dancing, I’ve got a million moves. So, by the time we finished, all the girls were breaking up, seeing Dolly get more than she bargained for from the cherry boy. She stood there, smiling and surprised and out of breath. I said what I’d been raised to say. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. And she gave me this look—I wouldn’t know what to call it. Surprised? Flattered? “You’re welcome,” she said.
That moment got us started off right at the place that was later known as Graceland. Because we weren’t johns and they weren’t hostesses, no one was the boss and we were in it together. I wanted the whole Elvis thing to work, for their sake as much as ours. They were depending on us and I didn’t want to stink out the place, that’s all. Dolly and me were pals. She adopted me, she protected me. Some of the others maybe wanted to take a shot, for money or just to say they’d done me, but Dolly headed them off.
Graceland was like no nightclub I’d ever seen. It was one huge room, with a main floor that came down in three levels, from back to front, down towards the stage. Not a window in the place—it had been a movie theater once—except where what used to be the balcony had been divided into private lounges, like the places you see around the top of basketball arenas, where the big shots sit and drink and watch the replays on TV. There were three bars, one on the right as you came in, one in back under the balcony, and another out front where the lobby used to be. On the left, there was a jukebox and a table. That was Malou’s place, where the girls checked out with customers on their way upstairs or to hotels. Our dressing room was a joke—on us, Dude said—out in back of the stage, next to the storeroom and the toilets. Through the years, folks had tried to decorate, with flags and pennants, calendars and snapshots, Christmas lights that never came down. But—Dude said—these were like drawings on the walls of a cave. Empty, even half-full, the place was death. It needed a packed house.
Our second day in Olongapo, they were cleaning while we were rehearsing. It was funny, it was as though we were performing for an audience of maids, and there was Dolly again, up on a ladder, scrubbing the smoked glass outside one of the VIP lounges that ran around the second floor. Now, Dude and me tended to take it easy during rehearsals, just going through the motions, because Dude’s mostly an actor and I’m mostly a dancer and we need a full house to fire us up. But Ward never held back. He was more like a priest and you don’t half-pray. He sang “Suspicious Minds” all out, so that the opening
We’re caught in a trap
We can’t get out
Because I love you too much, baby
caught everybody’s attention. I doubt they’d ever heard that big a voice before. And then, halfway through, Ward went into the slow part, real husky and low, down on his knees …
just don’t let a good thing die
when, honey, you know
I’ll never lie to you …
and then, taking the backup part
oh, oh, yeah, yeah …
and that little slow moment in the middle was when he captured them. There was silence when he finished, like a ghost had gone walking by. Maybe the girls had been wondering if we could hack it and maybe Ward was the one they wondered about the most. Me and my brother had the looks. What you saw was what you got and no complaints. But looking at Ward out of costume, you saw a dumpy guy nobody was going to want to undress with their eyes. But then he’d sung. There are thousands of guys who think they can do Elvis. They look like him—that’s the easy part—but they die as soon as they open their mouths. Ward was the real thing. Goose bumps. Silence. Awe. And then, from the back of the club, the voice of someone who couldn’t sing at all, Dolly, up on a stepladder, wiping smoke and spider webs off the glass,
I’m caught in a trap
I can’t get out …
and then all of the girls took up the song, just that one verse about being caught in a trap, which maybe they were. But—caught in a trap—they were singing about it.
That night, Dolly asked did I want to go out and see the town. A bunch of girls were going, she said, like that would make me feel comfortable and I guess it did. Dolly had more mileage in the tip of her tongue than I had in my whole body and that scared me because if I wasn’t exactly a cherry boy, I hadn’t fallen far from the tree. It was like, one on one, Dolly outnumbered me, but with a bunch of the other girls along, I was okay. It got to be a joke that night. They called themselves my bodyguards. They didn’t ask Dude or Ward, only me.
Soul City was across the street, a black and bluesy kind of place where the brothers seemed surprised to see me. The burden of proof was on the white boy, to prove he wasn’t an asshole. This was where they went to get away from Navy bullshit and white bullshit. The jukebox was all rhythm and blues. Hall and Oates wouldn’t have lasted a minute. So I got some sorry stares from the customers and—this surprised me—from their girlfriends too. The girls were Filipinas, just like Dolly and the others I came with, but there was something about them that was different, as though, after all that music, dancing, and the rest of it, some soul had rubbed off on them. You could see it in the way they danced and the way they laughed, the way they flipped their hair, Tina Turner-style, and the way they looked at me, like I was last year’s movies. Dolly put on some music and I guess they wanted me to dance, show what the white boy from across the street could do. It didn’t feel right, putting on an act, here’s the blue-eyed soul brother. I sat down at the empty end of the bar, nursing a San Miguel and minding my own business.
Even the room made me nervous, no windows at all, no view, just yellow and black striped walls. Ward said white places, bars and taverns, had windows all around, exits and entrances from all sides, so you could wave people in off the street or see who was pulling into the parking lot. But black places were like caves with one entrance and when the door opened everybody got to check out the visitor while the visitor was helpless, adjusting to the dark. Ward had a lot of theories like that.
“Hey, kid …” This guy was two stools down from me, a light-skinned black man and no kid. If he was military, he was career military, maybe retired. I relaxed a little, knowing he’d been dealing with whites a while. “Could I just ask you a question?”
“Yes sir.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m with them, sir,” I said, nodding over to where Dolly and the rest were gabbing with the other hostesses.
/> “I know that,” he said. “I saw you come in. What I mean is what are you doing in the PI?”
“I’m working across the street, sir,” I said, “with them.”
He laughed and took a swallow of beer and gave me this look I used to get in high school which I call the back-to-drawing-board look.
“I know what they do,” he said. “I don’t know what you do. Unless what you do is what they do.”
“No sir, I don’t do that.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I’m an entertainer, sir. I sing and dance.” I looked at him closely. He seemed like a nice man. Be nice to people and they’ll be nice to you. “I sing and I dance a lot better than I talk.”
He took that kindly, signaled the bartender she should bring me another beer. She studied me closely when she delivered it and I guess she thought she was staring at the Original or someone close enough to the Original to be worth staring at. That’s part of being Elvis, Ward said. Giving people a good look at you, close up.
“I’m part of an Elvis act,” I said.
“Moving in right across the street? You’re shitting me!”
“No sir.”
“I thought I’d left that shitkicker behind. Elvis Presley! You do him?” “Yes sir. I’m the young Elvis. From when he was starting out. There’s two more. The Elvis who was a movie star. That’s my older brother.”
“Unbelievable. And … let me guess. You got some fat crooner for the third and final act?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, sir. That’s Ward Wiggins. He’s the brains of the operation.”
“Just how much brains does it take?” he wondered. He was nice but he acted as though someone had pulled a practical joke on him. “Right in my neighborhood. How long you staying?”
“It’s kind of open-ended. There’s a difference of opinion. My brother thinks it’ll go a couple months. But Ward thinks longer. Much longer. Maybe permanent.”