The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “That’s just Christina,” Dolly said, like she was apologizing for the girl’s bad manners.

  “Dolly,” I said, swallowing hard. “I’d like to meet her.” Something happened that next minute that’s hard for me to describe. Dolly had kept the other girls away from me. I was cherry boy, Baby Elvis, a kind of mascot, everybody’s buddy. But maybe, all along, she’d been saving herself for me, or me for her. When I asked about Christina, that chance was gone. We weren’t going to be a couple. She adjusted fast, in a damn twinkling, but it was there for just a second, a little worry and a little pity, about what was and wasn’t in the cards.

  I didn’t expect her to go rushing down the beach to bring Christina the good news. But somehow the word must have gotten passed and I’d be surprised if Dolly and Christina were the only ones who knew. Women have a way of finding this stuff out: there weren’t any clueless women around here, except Whitney. Anyway, the party broke up and I was carrying a whole load of pots and pans out toward the side of the road, where we were going to snag a jeepney. Stuff was shifting and sliding on me and I was struggling not to drop anything, so I didn’t see her coming. She just stepped in front of me, like she’d come to collect a bill I was walking out on.

  “Dolly says you want to meet me,” she said in a let’s-get-this-over-with tone of voice. I fumbled around and finally put my dirty trays and dishes on the ground.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Chester Lane.”

  “I know who you are.” No sign of a smile on her face, in a country where everybody smiles, whether they mean it or not.

  “They call me Baby Elvis.”

  She nodded. “I know that too.” Now I felt that everybody on the beach was listening, hell, that the traffic out on the road was slowing for a look, the way you do when you pass an accident. “You wanted to meet me.”

  “I sure did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because …” I forgot why, I almost said. “I liked the way you played volleyball.”

  “We lost. Fifteen to six.”

  “You scored the six.” That earned a shrug. “I could tell you didn’t like it. You took it seriously and the others didn’t.”

  “That happens.”

  “Well, I thought you were fine.” I was feeling a little better now. Not great, but off the critical list. Her eyes never left me, though. She used them like weapons, I swear. First they found you, radar-locked onto target, then they started burning in. “I play at this club here in town—Graceland, it’s called—and I was wondering if you’d like to maybe come by and be my guest there and watch the show is all. No obligations … ‘No salesman will call.’…”

  “Impossible,” she answered. She didn’t say why but I figured it out real quick. I could’ve kicked myself. Graceland was where I worked and I had lots of friends there that I wasn’t ashamed of. But asking her there was like taking a prom date to a massage parlor.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I only thought … I’d like to get to know you. Sorry.” I reached down to the plates and trays, swiping away the flies that were circling around in holding patterns, waiting for a place to land.

  “You don’t even know my last name,” she said. That’s true, I thought. And I didn’t suppose I’d be needing it. I’d as soon stick my tongue in an electronic socket as give her a call. “Christina Alcala,” she said. “Good afternoon.” And she walked back down the beach.

  Not fewer than a dozen Graceland girls had been watching me from maybe thirty feet away. Of those, half had passed right by us while we were talking, moving real slow. So the atmosphere on the ride back to Olongapo was real sad, everybody knowing I’d just gotten slaughtered. I just sat there, staring out the back of the jeepney, watching the Philippines slide by, all the bars and food stalls and funky beach resorts. Then Whitney of all people tapped me on my knee and broke the silence.

  “Baby Elvis,” she said. “You are not so good talking to the girl. … Next time—”

  “There ain’t gonna be a next time, Whitney.”

  “Next time, maybe you sing.”

  There was a next time, though, thanks to Dolly. Not that I saw it coming. It was just as well. Sometimes it’s good not knowing. Sometimes it’s the only way to go. If Dolly had told me I was due for a rematch with Christina Alcala, I’d’ve been sweat-soaked, fumble-fingered, and tongue-tied. This way, I was only hungry.

  Our show had kept getting bigger and bigger, folks coming from far and wide, especially after this American TV show did a segment on us called “Elvis on the Beach.” Beached Elvis, Dude called it, looking over at Ward. “Beached whale.” There was an edge in Dude’s voice and if you looked at things through his eyes, there was something to resent. The fame that came to us came mostly to Ward. More and more, me and Dude felt like opening acts, preliminaries for Biggest Elvis. We knocked audiences on their asses, no mistaking it, but, hard as we worked—and you should’ve seen the pure, nasty competitiveness Dude started pumping into “Jailhouse Rock”—the emotions in the room raised up a notch when Biggest Elvis walked onstage. I asked Ward what that extra something was. It wasn’t musical, he said, it was spiritual. I asked him what did that mean. “You’re the ones who lived,” he said. “I’m the one who died.”

  Some nights, the show was so draining, I didn’t want to hang around the jukebox and eat the food that Biggest Elvis was always ordering. So when Dolly asked would I like to go home, she had something special cooking—some goat meat, she said—I said fine. Let’s just get out of here. In a minute I could slip into some slacks and a T-shirt and step out onto the street. People spotted me and Dude but they didn’t come at us the way they swarmed Biggest Elvis. Dude said he liked it better that way. He was an actor, he said, and part of being professional was the ability to move in and out of a role, not like some people, some head cases we knew. So it was a good thing, he said, that we could walk down a street and not get mobbed. It meant we were professional. I wasn’t sure he liked being a professional so much.

  Dolly lived way up the winding road that leads in and out of Olongapo, right behind a row of stores that sold surplus equipment that jumped the fence from the base, uniforms and mess kits, office equipment, first-aid kits, tools, boots, you name it. We walked up a steep flight of steps to where a couple houses held on to the edge of the hill, just barely. Dolly’s house was solid, square cement blocks, the roof was shiny new, and, coming nearer, I heard the hum of an air conditioner, spotted the glow of a color television: from a distance it looked like a lit-up aquarium, fish swimming inside. Dolly’s two kids were watching the TV and Christina was watching them. She was Dolly’s baby-sitter, also her cousin.

  “Hello again,” she said when we walked in, like oh, what a pleasant surprise. Before I could answer, one of the kids was tugging at my hand, a boy who asked was I Elvis and I said sometimes, it depended. It felt like I was answering Christina. Dolly and Christina exchanged some words in Tagalog. It never bothered me, not being able to understand what they said. I think people need a way of pulling back, sometimes, of drawing a circle around themselves, even if I wasn’t inside the circle. Good news, bad news, they get to you sooner or later, anyway. Then Dolly dragged her kids to the back of the house and I was left alone with the Texas Chainsaw Volleyball Player.

  “I was rude to you,” she said. “Dolly says I was. And I agree.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I think I deserved it. I just saw you and I said, that’s someone I’d like to meet. It’s not like I knew what I was doing or anything.”

  “True, true, true,” Dolly said as she passed through and headed into the kitchen. “Oh so true.”

  “Well,” I said. “Everybody seems to be agreed on that one thing. Chester Lane doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Now I faced Christina. “You know what you’re doing, all of the time?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A little.” A little was a lot. We wound up talking for hours. Mostly, she talked and I listened. Christina had this very exact way of speaking, a
s though she composed a whole sentence, looked it over for mistakes, before saying it out loud. Other times, she’d just stop and wait for the right word to come. “Going to the dictionary,” we called it later. People like me and Dude just ran our mouths, saying whatever was in us, funny and foul as it might be. Christina wanted everything to come out perfect. So she took me back to that picnic on the beach.

  She’d noticed me, she admitted, so slow and soft you’d have thought it was a sin, just putting her eyes on me. She’d seen how the women liked me, not the way a seller treats a buyer but they honestly liked having me around. She’d never seen an American treated quite that way, the way I was teased and watched over. She also liked the way I ran errands, organized games, made a point of talking to everybody. But she didn’t want to talk to me.

  “He wants to meet you,” Dolly had told her.

  “What for?”

  “So he can know you.”

  “What for, know me?” She was angry at first, she said, angrier than anyone could realize. “These Americans think that every woman here is like the women on Magsaysay Street, waiting to be found by them.”

  Dolly shouted something from the kitchen then and it wasn’t about dinner. She was speaking up for the women on Magsaysay Street, I guessed. She was letting go of the hopes she’d had for us but she wasn’t riding off into the sunset, that was for sure. And Christina better watch what she said about the girls of Graceland.

  “You Americans assume that every woman is waiting for you to enter their life,” Christina said. Now, when she spoke, it sounded rehearsed, like something from a classroom that she needed to get out all in one piece. “It comes from the base. It disgraces Americans and Filipinos both. It brings us to the edge of war, all in the name of peace. It protected a dictatorship, in the name of democracy. It poisoned the air and the water. It turns us into a race of servants, procurers, prostitutes. It leaves behind a race of orphans, mixed-race, neglected—”

  “Bullshit!” Dolly cried out from the kitchen, following with a spray of Tagalog. If Dolly’s voice was a gun, those Tagalog words were bullets. And the English words were tracers. They told me where she was firing. Words like payroll and jobs and dollars and nice guys. Christina smiled, kind of asking for my sympathy, but before she could resume, Dolly marched in two of the mixed-race kids her cousin had been complaining about. “This is Marines,” Dolly said, pointing to the boy who’d asked me about Elvis. “And this …,” she hefted a girl, a year or two younger, with eyes that broke your heart, “is Navy.” She made a face at Christina. “My poor, confuse half-caste baby.”

  “Not everyone is as good as you are, Dolly,” Christina answered, kissing the young Marine, the young Navy.

  “Not everyone is as bad as you say,” Dolly responded. She moved the kids across the living room, then closed the bedroom door behind her.

  “Olongapo is a bad place,” Christina continued, but her speech had lost energy. The reciting was over. She returned to the story of the beach and how she’d run over to intercept me, once the party started breaking up. Dolly says you want to meet me. …

  She wanted the Graceland girls who were walking by us to know she was turning me down. It peeved her, being put in such a situation, another girl who’d caught an American’s attention. At least the Graceland girls could hear what she was saying. But beyond them was a beach full of Filipinos who could only guess: another Navy boy facing off with an angry girlfriend, another love affair winding down when the American’s time grew short. That’s what she thought she looked like to the people who were tearing open Pringles cans and dangling babies out at arm’s length so they could pee into the Navy’s rented bay.

  There I’d stood, carrying pots and pans, complimenting her on her volleyball play, ticking her off even more because—she already knew, she could tell from the look on my cherry boy face—I didn’t really deserve the ration of shit she was handing me. I was another well-intentioned American kid. The world was full of them.

  I had asked her to drop by Graceland sometime, catch the act that the town was talking about. On me. Bigger than full-body massage, foxy boxing, mud wrestling, here was the Elvis show. Another Olongapo abomination, the worst of a bad scene. Sure, she granted, there were good Americans here. I might even be one of them. So much the worse. Hadn’t I ever thought about what those girls went through night after night, hitting on customers, hustling drinks, what that felt like? Or what it meant to go off with somebody—anybody—who had the price of admission?

  Now she was on a roll again. If I studied the history of these islands, she said, the real history and not what got served up in schools, I would know that the story was of abuse and betrayal, one foreign power, Spain, replaced by another, the U.S., with Japan in between. Deaths by the thousands. World War II, a colonists’ war, the Philippines caught in the middle, wrecked and ignored. MacArthur rushed off to rebuild Japan, Marshall pumped millions into Europe, Germany included, and the Philippines got no real money, only a phony, strings-attached independence. Business as usual, corruption everywhere. America running military bases to protect democracy, then ignoring democracy to protect the bases. Marcos dancing with Nancy Reagan. Bush toasting Marcos. And Olongapo was at the heart of it all and we were the heart of Olongapo because what happened at Graceland symbolized the whole sick thing: Americans with beers in one hand, money in the other, standing unsteadily while a beautiful nation went down on its knees. And that—she wanted me to know—was why she’d been angry at me. Nothing personal.

  Nothing I could say when she finished. I liked the way she spoke to me, the way she put it all together, even though the message wasn’t so good. She met my eyes, now and then, while she was speaking. She wasn’t just delivering lines, the way people do. She was paying attention to the way I took them in. It’s not often someone speaks to you like that. In a country where buildings, jeeps, and probably airplanes were held together with tape, wire, and chewing gum, I’d found a perfectionist. Nothing half-assed about her. I’m gonna get close to you, I said to myself. Any way you want me, that’s how I will be. I noticed she didn’t smile much. I could do something about that. And I still hadn’t heard her laugh out loud, not once. I’d be taking care of that, count on it. And I would sing to her, even if it wasn’t at Graceland.

  It seemed to me she was placing a mighty heavy load on Graceland. I knew what went on there. I’d see the girls making deals and disappearing for a while, upstairs and outside. Sometimes I didn’t like the looks on their faces when they came back in. But I’d seen them laugh and joke too. I’d heard them singing or, in Dolly’s case, trying to sing, even dancing together by the jukebox, after closing, when they shot the shit and ate Ward’s food. I’d seen how they hung around the place, practically lived there, washing clothes and changing diapers up in the VIP lounges, trading dresses. It wasn’t like they had some better place to go. And I’d seen the way they looked after each other and had taken care of me, from the day I walked in until this very minute, and another thing I’d noticed was that if they talked about leaving, or even if they left, they talked about Guam or Hawaii or California. They never spoke about back home. And Graceland gave them a shot at that, not a great shot but the best they had, and until something better came along I was rooting for them. That was how it looked to me. I might be wrong, though, and I decided to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to make her mad at me all over again. So I was happy when Dolly came out and said it was time to eat.

  It was one in the morning but in this country, when there’s food you eat. The presence of food was special, not the appetite. Mostly, Christina and Dolly talked about the two kids, who kept inventing these excuses to come into the kitchen and stare at me, until I volunteered to escort them to bed myself, if they promised to stay put after that. It was a deal, they said. Handshakes and high fives.

  Surprise. Double-decker bunk beds for the kids, covered with toys and teddies. And a third bed that was Dolly’s, not that different. She slept with them, when
she had a choice where she slept. Souvenirs and tourist stuff took the place of Terminators and Robocops. A Statue of Liberty, a map of Singapore, a lacquered coconut crab shell that said GUAM: WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS. There were framed photos: Dolly at the railing of a boat, Dolly at an outdoor grill, turning chicken, Dolly in cut-off shorts, holding a baseball bat. Some photographs were taken in nightclubs, by photographers who went from table to table: Dolly and different men. Always the same Dolly, always a different man. Bummed me out. It’s sad, the way we leave each other.

  “You are Elvis?” asked the Marine. Same question as before.

  “Sometimes,” I said. Same answer.

  “When?”

  “Whenever I want to be.”

  “Sing,” he commanded.

  “You sing,” his sister chimed in. She was darker than Dolly, all right. Afro-Amer-Asian. Anybody ever going to sort this out?

  “In bed, first,” I said. They popped right in. “One song is all you get.”

  “‘Every Time You Go Away’!”

  “‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’!”

  They settled for “Love Me Tender.” I sang it so slow it put them to sleep. Hell, it usually puts me to sleep. There’s no way around it, I had to live with it, though it wasn’t my favorite song. But it worked, as a lullaby. One minute the Marine and the Navy were watching me with big eyes and I wondered how many other men—nice-enough guys—had come home with Dolly before. What kind of parade had it been? All of a sudden—thank God their eyes were closed—I was wiping away tears. Carried away by my own performance. Surest sign of an amateur, Dude would say. Dolly and Christina both noticed it too, when I came out.

  Dolly walked us out to the front of the house, then followed us to where steps led down to the main road. Two in the morning, all’s well, dogs sleeping, babies put to bed, bars mostly closed. You still broke a sweat when you moved but the breeze was there to cool you. You could feel it, as soon as you lifted your arms. Hello, there. Christina was ahead of me, going down the steps, when Dolly called for me to come back up, as if there were something we’d left behind. When I got there, she led me around a corner, leaned against a wall, and held me, putting her hands on my head and pulling me down into a kiss.