The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  He shook his head again, studied me the way his bartender studied me, the way Dolly and the others had looked me over earlier in the day. Part of it was simple: they were checking to see how much I looked liked Elvis. That was the first thing, always. But not the last. Sometimes people looked at me and Dude and Ward, back and forth, and it was like they were thinking, well, that’s how he began and that’s how he grew up and that’s how he wound up, there they are, cheek to jowl, the beginning, the middle, and the end. That got to people. It got to me whenever the three of us were near each other, onstage or in back or in a car together. I don’t know how to say it. But it was like seeing a whole lifetime of clothes in one pile, everything you wore or were ever going to wear, from the diapers at the beginning to whatever you wear when you die. Diapers again, I guess.

  Dolly came over to me and said we were going now, lots of other places to see. The man I’d been talking to shook my hand again, said his name was Billy Bowers and he was the unofficial owner of the place. The bartender was his Filipina wife and the place was in her name and I could walk across the street anytime. I told him to drop in on us sometime. He nodded politely and told me not to hold my breath.

  We moved fast after that, Dolly and Whitney and Priscilla and Luz and Esther and a girl they called Lucy Number Three, on account of there’d been two girls named Lucy before her that did real well, married guys and left town, so Lucy was a lucky name. We went to a country-western place called the Corral and a hard-rock place called Hot Wax and a heavy metal place called California Jams and a bunch of others I forget the names of. They got me dancing after a while. I danced with all the girls but Whitney, who said she didn’t know how. There were places that specialized in female boxing and massage and mud wrestling and body painting. The farther we got from town, the places got more basic. The last stop was just a cement floor and a tin roof over a pool table, with wooden bleachers on the side and a bar in back and some little rooms behind the bar, where girls and guys could go for “short time.” There were always girls around and some of them came to life when they saw me—customer coming!—but Dolly cut that right off. “You can look,” she said, “but you can’t touch.” I danced some more and the girls talked and a pile of food showed up, barbecued fish and piles of rice and a soup called sinigang. It amazed me how these women could put it away. They were always up for food, I learned. Later on, when we went for picnics in jeepneys, hell, we wouldn’t be out of the damn parking lot and the sandwiches would be gone.

  Going home, that first night, around two in the morning, I heard them whispering, consulting, maybe even arguing a little. My name was in it. “Baby Elvis,” “cherry boy.” My guess was that one of the others—it could’ve been Lucy Number Three—was saying, well, we’ve had a nice time on our night out, we showed the kid around but that doesn’t mean one—or two—of us couldn’t do business between now and sunrise. That’s what it sounded like to me, anyway. It got lively in back of the jeepney, lots of back and forth whispering and giggling. The mood changed. Until then I’d been one of the boys, or one of the girls, or something, but now it felt like this-little-piggy-went-to-market. Then Dolly spoke a couple of sentences and everybody got quiet. Something had been decided. Maybe Dolly was saying, back off, he’s mine. Maybe she was pulling rank because she was a little older than the rest, and a good talker. Maybe she was the one who would break me in. I hoped not because I liked Dolly for a friend. I’d do what she wanted me to do, I guessed—be nice to people, and all—but I’d have preferred not to. But it wasn’t up to me.

  Dolly gave directions to the guy who was driving. These jeepneys were funny things, stretched-out jeeps, silvery, splashed with paintings and symbols, with names and sayings, with horses and saints. The driver was up front, in control, hands on the wheel, the horn, the tape player, like captain of the Starship Enterprise. We were all squeezed in back. I was wondering where I was going and who with and it was like back in high school, who gets dropped off at the end of the evening, where and in what order, together or alone.

  Well, the first was me. The jeepney pulled in front of this apartment they’d rented for Dude and me. It had a bedroom—which Dude took—a living room where I would sleep on a couch, and a kitchen for the beer.

  “Good night, Baby Elvis,” Dolly said. It was the first thing anybody had said to me for a couple miles. “We see you tomorrow.”

  It was awkward, getting out of a jeepney, especially if you were packed way in front, right in back of the driver. I started working my way toward the back.

  “Thanks, everybody,” I said. And I mentioned every one of them by name, Dolly, Whitney, Priscilla, Luz, and Esther, and Lucy Number Three. “I’m grateful for the welcome to town and I’ll do my best not to let you down.” Meanwhile, I was inching my way out. “Thanks again. I had a real nice time and … hey!”

  Maybe Dolly vetoed anybody taking me home that night but somebody said something and they all got in a poke, a tickle, a pinch as I crawled by, defenseless. Whitney just tickled my ear with her finger. The others weren’t so shy. Somebody hefted me right between the legs. It was Lucy Number Three, I think. She touched me good, like she was putting it on a butcher scale to weigh. I rolled and stumbled out the back, shirt hanging out, everything all tangled up, and if I hadn’t gotten laid, I sure looked as though I had. I stood there waiting to see if one—any one—of those girls would follow me out of the jeepney. It wasn’t up to me. It was their move. Then the driver gunned the jeepney and they barreled off down Magsaysay Street, loud music behind them and the muffler roaring, and I could hear them laughing like a bunch of teenagers, shouting “Good night, Baby Elvis” and “We love you so much, Baby Elvis.”

  Dude stuck his head out the bedroom door as soon as I came in. “Where you been, Chestnut?” he asked, walking over to the refrigerator, opening it up, showing me a San Miguel.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I had plenty.”

  “So I see. Who with?”

  “A bunch from work. They took me around, one club after another. It’s some town, Dude. It really cooks.”

  “It’s a shit-pile, Chestnut. One big clip joint. But there’s nothing we can do about it right now. It cost you much, tonight? They got a million tricks here. They water drinks or they dope them. They drink tea and charge for champagne. And you go to sleep with one of them in your room, they’ll have a yard sale while you’re sleeping. And slap you with a paternity suit in the morning.”

  “We had a welcome party,” I said. Something was going wrong here and I didn’t know how to set it right.

  “It cost you much?” he asked again. “Three hundred pesos for a quickie. That’s scale. Don’t let them bullshit you. You especially. They look at you, they know you’re a rookie.”

  “I didn’t pay nothing tonight, Dude. It was a welcome party. It was for me.”

  He drained his beer in a swallow, chugged and belched. “Well, that’s all right, then. You get it for nothing from a hooker, that’s true love.”

  I just sat there on the couch, taking my shoes off. He didn’t get it, not tonight and maybe not tomorrow. But now that I was Elvis one and he was Elvis two, there was some distance between us. We were playing different parts, even when we weren’t onstage.

  “I got a little welcome party of my own going on in there,” he said, tipping his head toward the bedroom. “Not quite over yet. Two thirds over.”

  So I was in bed and I could hear the sound of my brother and someone working it out. To me, it sounded like they were both onstage, waiting for applause when they finished up. Then, not ten minutes later, the door opened and some woman came tipping into the room, which was dark. I was still awake but I tried to be thoughtful, trying to pretend I was sleeping, and she was thoughtful too, tiptoeing across the room so as not to wake me. Then she stopped by the couch and looked down at me and saw my eyes wide open.

  “Baby Elvis,” she said. “Cherry boy.” So I knew it was one of the girls from work.

  “Who’s th
at?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” she said. And left. I could’ve asked Dude the next morning who he’d been with but I didn’t want to know. Or maybe I did. I wondered. But in the end, I liked it better, not knowing.

  Dude always kidded Ward about sleeping alone. He joked about it, about how burning love burned out, how blue suede shoes should be blue suede slippers. The fact is, Dude slept alone too. The women he paid were “tuck me ins” who left as soon as they got finished and “wake me ups” who came over in the morning. I opened the door for them and I hated to see which of my friends he was tagging. Dude went a little crazy when he got to Olongapo.

  I got into the habit of stopping in to talk to Billy Bowers, even between shows, still in costume. I’d just grab this plastic raincoat and pop across the street. It tickled him to see me, Elvis at halftime, dressed in black and pink, sitting at a bar with a bunch of brothers who’d as soon go square dancing as watch what was happening at the place we were calling Graceland. Billy had thought a lot about Olongapo. He said it was like this valley in the old Tarzan comic books, a secret valley where elephants went to die, so they left their tusks all over the valley, a treasure of ivory.

  “Olongapo is like that valley,” he said. “Look around, Baby Elvis. You got a harbor full of ships and a street full of bars like you ain’t had in America in a hundred years. Even the air smells old. And you’ve got all these sidewalk characters, hookers, hoods, newsboys, cripples, out of an old movie, black and white. You’ve got a bar like this and an old bullshitter like me. … You don’t find that anywhere but here, no more. It’s a junkyard, man, it’s a museum, it’s the magic valley. Everything that used to be in America—everything that America used to be—it’s here. It washed up here. My bar included. And your act.”

  Maybe Billy was right. There was no place we could have hit the way we hit in Olongapo. From the start I knew that we were part of something special. And it wasn’t just, hey, you catch this act, here’s a fun place to go. Ward was weird, Dude said, but Ward was right. Elvis was back, the second time around, in triplicate. I wasn’t the only one who knew this. It spread through the girls. It was out on the street. And I could feel it, whenever I sat down with Father Alcala. He was tired and worried, quiet when he should have been talking, and laughing when there was nothing funny around, at least nothing I could see. He said that this outbreak of Elvis was the latest local social disease. He was a man standing in the way of something that he couldn’t stop. Elvis in Olongapo.

  “He is dead, isn’t he?” I asked Ward one night. Dude had been going on about how Ward was losing his grip on reality, that before much longer we’d be needing an exorcist. It was one thing, he said, for some street kid to gawk when we walked by, thinking Elvis was back, but it was something else when we started acting that way ourselves, turning a whore bar into a revival meeting.

  “Elvis Aaron Presley?” said Ward. “Deader than hell.” I’d joined him up in the VIP lounge, watching the house fill. The showroom opened an hour before our first show and the band did fifties music, the sort of stuff that was around when Elvis came on the scene, Ink Spots, Mills Brothers, Bill Haley, Frankie Laine. But no Elvis stuff. “Have you been talking to your brother?”

  “Him. Sure … and Father Domingo too.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s dead. August 16, 1977. In the bathroom at Graceland, on the floor in front of the toilet. At the age of forty-two. While reading a book. Some say the book was Sex and Psychic Energy. Or the Bible. Or something about the Shroud of Turin. His face was purple, his eyes were red, and his body was cold. They autopsied his body, they embalmed him, they put him in a coffin, and they put the coffin in the ground.”

  “Then what?”

  “Father Domingo wants to know whether I think Elvis is back? Tell him he’s still in the ground. He didn’t pop out after three days. That’s his tiger, not mine. Okay?”

  Ward had guessed right. Father Domingo was out for us. I was just trying to learn the ropes about being Catholic. I wished there was a book I could read, like a driver’s manual. I mean, how hard could it possibly be, if sixty million Filipinos were Catholic already? I felt that I could be a good Catholic. But Father Domingo kept me reading, kept throwing me puzzles. And sometimes he teased me about my act. He’d ask me if I felt Elvis inside me, when I performed. Or what was the difference between saying Elvis lives—which was appearing on signs around town—and Jesus lives. And what was the difference, did I think, between music that was holy and music that wasn’t. It seemed we weren’t making any progress at all.

  “I’ll tell you the secret, Chestnut,” Ward said. “Keep this between us. Most people die and that’s it. They leave some memories behind and people crying. It’s pretty much over, though. But sometimes it’s different. If a life’s been big enough—not good or bad, especially, just big—it leaves something behind that other people can be part of, that they don’t want to let go of.”

  “Second coming?” That was another phrase I’d heard from Father Domingo.

  “Second chance.”

  “For the person who died, you mean?”

  “For him.” Ward nodded. “And for us. All of us. To try it out again. Sing those songs. Get it right this time. Okay?”

  “We’re not doing anything bad, then?” I asked. Ward shook his head. “Sometimes it feels that Father Domingo thinks we are.”

  “I know,” he said. “But he gets Sunday. And all of eternity. All I’m asking for is Saturday night.”

  It was Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, to be exact, plus special appearances that our boss in Manila, Mrs. Baby Ronquillo, arranged at hotels and graduations and once—never again, Dude said—at a cockfighting pit. But that was part of the deal that Uncle Pete had made, she could ship us out on off-nights. So we went by small plane—the Buddy Holly special, Dude said—by ferry, by jeepney, sometimes all three, to places so far out of it they hadn’t heard that Elvis had died and others they hadn’t heard he’d lived. We were traveling backward through time, it seemed, to places that were from before the beginning. We were like light from a far-off star, carrying images of what happened years before. And—funny thing—it was all my idea. My one idea, Dude said. He said it back on Guam, he said it on Saipan, he said it in the Philippines all the time, like when we were at the domestic airport, waiting for a Philippines Airline flight that was five hours late or on a ship where the deck was covered with sleeping passengers and cockroaches owned our first-class cabin and four out of four toilets were clogged. Dude would bitch and I’d nod, not wanting to argue, but God, I was happy, knocking around islands I couldn’t pronounce the names of, and waiting to go onstage while they cleaned the blood and feathers out of the cockpit. And I was always happy coming back to Olongapo, because there’s no place like home and Olongapo was ours. We owned the place. Also, Christina was there.

  Dolly was the one who brought us together. Dolly was my bodyguard, my matchmaker, my chaperone, which is funny parts for a bar hostess to play but what I’ve learned here is that people aren’t just one thing. A hooker isn’t just a hooker. And a singer—an Elvis, say—can be more or less than what he seems. That goes for priests, too.

  Take Dolly. She was a hustler, all right. I’d seen her work on a table of hard-core petty officers, wised-up dudes who’d done it all, from Pusan to Bangkok. They came into Graceland tough and shrewd and tighter than a crab’s ass. “Just beers.” They ain’t buying nothing extra, you’d better believe it. They’d pour their own beers, thanks—“hands off, darling”—and drink at their own slow speed and that’s that. “We need anything, we’ll let you know, darling.” Nobody could put anything over on them. Girls came over, introduced themselves, asked if they’d like some company. “You can sit with us, darling, but don’t talk to me about no bar drinks.” That was the part I didn’t like, watching these friends of mine, beautifully dressed, hanging around a table full of rednecks in T-shirts who just ignored them—like the guys were the ones who should play ha
rd to get, not these great women. They’d keep talking among themselves. That wasn’t polite. I could see this frozen look come over the girls’ faces and the life drain out of them, all the spark and smile while these … assholes … were talking about the base bowling league or something. Something died in me, when I saw that.

  That’s when Dolly did her thing. She’d drop by the table and start kidding around, tell a joke, get the party going. Before long, the guys were whispering, what they wanted, what they needed, the girls were whispering back, the drinks were coming, beers and whole trays of margaritas. Everybody was pals and the evening was still young. There was nothing official about it, but Dolly was the team manager. Elvira had the looks but she was kind of snooty. Malou had brains but she wasn’t so good dealing with customers. “You have three strikes on you when you’re dealing with Malou,” Dude said. “You’re an American—that’s one—and you have a dick—that’s two. And you’re here.” So Dolly kept an eye on things. On me.

  The first time I saw Christina was at the White Rock beach in Barrio Barretto, when we all wound up playing volleyball. I didn’t notice her before the game but, once it got started, she stood out. The other girls tended to goof off and clown around. Whenever they did something wrong, they made a joke out of it. Before long, the object wasn’t to score a point but to do something cute and funny. Christina got pissed off, I noticed. The others were falling over each other, rolling in the sand, tangling up in the net, playing like they were at a pajama party, like giggles were points. Christina played harder. She was tall for a Filipina, rangy and lanky and athletic-looking. She dug the ball out of the sand and set it up, only to see somebody slap it into the net and worry about a fingernail. Everybody else forgot the score. When the game ended, she walked off toward the beach, waded out into the water like she never wanted to see any of us again. I hadn’t seen anybody like her before.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Dolly.