The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  Well, a week after Dude told me about his career in movies, a letter came from Chester. The penmanship was beautiful and not a spelling error in the whole thing. After one sentence, I knew Chester had found himself someone or someone had gotten to Chester. It was hello from the pearl of the Pacific, the beautiful islands of the Philippines, and he really loved it down there, more than he could put into words, which was why this was not so much a letter as an invitation. Did I remember what I had told him, about how if you were nice to people, they’d be nice to you? Well, he’d found that to be true. It hurt him to remember the way he’d sat around and laughed at Filipinos, at their accents and their manners and their attitudes, like they were household appliances, not people. He loved the place, the country, the people, and—yes—one person in particular that he wanted me to meet. Love, your son, Chester.

  That letter walloped me. I figured he’d sow wild oats down there and the worst that could happen was a dose of clap or some girl said she was having his baby, nothing that couldn’t be fixed. But he was nicer than I’d told him to be. He went and fell in love. In Olongapo, of all places!

  Now, about Elvis number three. I hadn’t heard a word from Ward Wiggins. But he appeared in photographs that Baby sent me, performance shots. I studied those photos closely. Ward Wiggins wasn’t family but I still wondered about him. He hadn’t just changed careers, he’d changed his life, almost like a suicide, throwing his life away. And there he was, down on his knees, clutching himself like he’d been shot in the gut, ready to fall facedown on the floor. Hard to describe the expression on his face. Sometimes, in the newspapers, you see a photo of somebody, usually in Africa or Asia, and the face is all twisted by emotion, so you know they’re feeling something extreme, only you can’t tell what, joy or pain. You just can’t tell, until you read the caption. They look the same. That was the look I saw on Ward’s face, like he’d traveled right to—or past—the edge of something enormous.

  Then, on a Sunday morning, I had the paper in front of me, the Pacific Daily News, and I was checking for people I knew, the headlines, the obituaries, the weddings, the police blotter. And—damn—there they were right on page one.

  SACRED OR PROFANE?

  Elvis “Trinity” Draws Crowds,

  Controversy at Subic Bay Base

  There was a picture of the three of them, onstage, in costume. The caption identified them as three Guam-based entertainers, Chester Lane and brother Albert, both of Agana Heights, and Ward Wiggins, recent professor of English, University of Guam. Then the article began by describing Olongapo, the base, the anything-goes reputation that made it the liveliest town in the Philippines, a town that had seen everything. Or thought it had. Till three American Elvis Presley types came to town and opened up and nobody gave them a chance of making it, not in this cutthroat city of a thousand nightclubs. Coal to Newcastle: in the Philippines, they export entertainers, they don’t import them. But the Elvises had taken over the town, selling out every night. They had a following of faithful who came to see the show again and again, enlisted men and officers and even officers’ wives. “Sophisticated Manilenos” made the pilgrimage to Graceland by bus, limousine, helicopter, and—the latest thing—yacht. Foreign tourists had joined the parade, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean, in particular. But the local folks liked Elvis too, and not just the fan club of “winsome hostesses” who provided “various services” in and around Graceland but also street people, jeepney drivers, students. Every night, even though the place was sold out, they converged on Graceland hoping to glimpse “an Elvis they are unwilling or unable to distinguish from the late original.” That was a little snotty I thought, and so was the description of Graceland: “part coliseum, part funeral parlor, part brothel.” That sounded like high-octane mix to me, all right. Still, despite the wise-guy attitude, the writer liked the show. “An undeniable, even eerie power … séance, revival meeting, road-house jam and grand opera … an uncanny and oddly persuasive blend of naive melodrama and drop-dead musical talent.”

  Not everybody in Olongapo was cheering. Rival club owners complained, some of them anyway. And some Filipino teachers. “America’s final imperial gesture,” said one. “Cultural rape.” “One more American too many.” And this from a women’s group: “Prostitution with music is still prostitution. Rape, serenaded, remains rape.” And then a local priest weighed in. “Appalling.… Beyond the point of sacrilege … popular songs turned into psalms, song cues into homilies, nightclub into shrine, bar girls into acolytes and Elvis Presley into a rhinestone messiah.” He called their club “Disgraceland.”

  That was plenty news from the Philippines, I thought. They were doing better than expected down there. I put the paper down, sat thinking things over. It wasn’t until I got up, I saw another story near the bottom of the page, trailing the one that I’d been reading. A little box of a story, about Ward Wiggins.

  BURNING LOVE?

  OLANGAPO’S ELVIS

  IS ARSON VICTIM

  Somebody had tried to kill the man. That night I called Baby Ronquillo.

  “Are you alone?” I asked, soon as she picked up the phone.

  “Colonel, my colonel! What if I were not alone?”

  “I’d get down on my knees and pray you didn’t have one of my boys on the mattress.”

  “No, my colonel. Better. I have one of them under contract.”

  “I saw that contract, Baby. Didn’t you hear, they outlawed slavery?”

  “No, they haven’t. Only changed the name.”

  “Tell me, you put any film in the camera when Dude walks in front?”

  “He’s not so terrible,” she said. “Colonel, it’s good to hear your voice. I think about you often.”

  “Listen, Baby. It’s hard for me to travel these days.”

  “Oh?” she said. “Legal problems?”

  “Lethal problems. You’ll see. I want you to come to Guam. And soon as you can.”

  “We’ll make some business?” She perked right up. I loved the way she spoke. Make business, make love. I said yes, we’d make business. And she said she was on her way.

  Part Three

  They are in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and the freezing waters of the Arctic. In the entertainment joints of Japan and the AIDS wards of US hospitals. In the hotels of London and the brothels of Amsterdam. In opulent villas in Rome and oil tankers in the Mediterranean. In factories in Taiwan and casas in Spain. In a car assemply plant in Malaysia and a nuclear plant in Syria. In schools in Africa and newsrooms in Singapore. In apartments in Hong Kong and factories in Seoul. In the nightclubs of Saipan and of Abidjian in the Ivory Coast.

  “The Overseas Contract Worker,”

  Philippines Daily Inquirer,

  January 1, 1995

  I

  Ward Wiggins

  I always believed—and Malou believed it too—that when you’re happy you shouldn’t examine your happiness too closely. It’ll fall apart on you. If you start looking back, into the times before, finding all the mistakes you’ve made, bad luck and off-timing, you see how fragile your happiness is. How rare. Then, if you look ahead, you see all the things that are just waiting to bring you down. So you focus on one day at a time, try not to think about the past that’s waiting to catch up to you. Or the future, waiting to mug your joy.

  Those weeks before Colonel Parker struck were the happiest I’d been in years. And the house-burning was part of it. A lot was made of it at the time. Headlines that screamed: OLONGAPO ELVIS/ARSON VICTIM. Headlines that snickered: BURNING LOVE? It was scary, I admit. We might have died and—even though we lived—it gave me pause, knowing there was someone out there with that much hate. Or maybe love. But in the end it didn’t matter. Because we were happy. Happier. Happiest.

  We’d been at a party down the beach, the baptism of Elvis Presley de Ocampo. I gave them the name, I paid for the roast pig, and we’d sat out late, talking story like they do here. Whatever happened to? Where are they now? I loved the way it felt, th
at you could sit out in a lean-to on the beach and you could travel the world, because these people had connections and histories in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Brunei and Taipei, Guam and Tokyo and San Francisco. Or we talked history, back to Marcos, back to Magsaysay, further back, to the Huk rebellion, the Japanese, back, back, Quezon, Arthur MacArthur, the Spaniards, story after story. It reminded me of a bit I’d used on Father Domingo on how you could stand twenty hundred-year-old men in a row and the man at the back of the line could have seen Christ. Twenty men between the life of Christ and the life of Elvis. Then I’d lean forward and clink beer bottles with him. “That’s progress for you,” I’d say.

  I tried staying as late as I could but even then we were among the first to leave the party. It’s frustrating but it came with being Biggest Elvis. It would be a different party after I’d gone, just like after a priest pushed back from the dinner table and said he had to brush up on the Sunday sermon. That was another line I could use on Father Domingo, another item in the comparisons I kept making between us, our competition for Olongapo’s tarnished soul. I couldn’t resist throwing lines his way, lines that were only half-ironic, as if we were practicing the same trade, working in the same shop, in business together. He was Hertz, I was Avis, he was Coke, I was Pepsi. I’d think about it sometimes and say, now Ward, you’ve got to stop saying things like that. Lay off the irony: it doesn’t travel well. The trouble with irony is you can never tell how far it goes or where it leads. To more irony, I guess. To the fact that down deep, I believed we were in the same business. And, what’s more, that I was winning. And he was losing. He knew it, too.

  I should have backed off, but something in him invited challenge. We were locked into it. We liked and needed each other and we couldn’t stay away. I can still see the play of expression across his face, the sighs, winces, head shakes, the glances upward, as if he were asking God, what did he do to deserve Biggest Elvis, Dude Elvis, Baby Elvis, right here on his doorstep? Wasn’t it punishment enough to be born Filipino, to be a priest in a liberty port, to be assigned to a particular parish celebrated, across the world, for its blow jobs? Did he have to face a fat, bejeweled, hairy-chested American, an Elvis Presley incarnation—not imitation, Father, I said incarnation—who aped the church’s rites, liturgy, sacred music, and who offered himself—and his two early selves—as a new Trinity? Who died and resurrected himself four nights a week in front of packed houses, beer on premises, women to eat in or take out? The whole grotesque situation had gotten as bad as it could get, he thought, and then—hot damn, Father—it got worse. The bright, winning Christina, his cherished sister, fell under the spell of the infant Elvis, who—worse yet—turned out to be a youth whom he could not resist liking, no more than he could quite avoid friendship with the dangerous and subversive Biggest Elvis.

  Before, his life had been difficult. Now it was torture. In the morning, within the walls of his church compound, he’d breakfast to the sound of Baby Elvis, conducting pro bono music classes in the elementary grades, whole classrooms harmonizing “Love Me Tender.” Driving to Olongapo, he passed the part of Barrio Barretto that was becoming known as Elvisville. He could see Elvis scarecrows in the fields, he’d be caught in traffic behind jeepneys named Jailhouse Rock and Kid Galahad. And, in town, he confronted Graceland itself, all pink and white, tour buses pulling into parking lots, sidewalks clogged with out-of-town, even out-of-country visitors whom I insisted—only half-ironically—on calling pilgrims.

  It was too much. Yes, he liked me. He liked the talk. He liked the music, the visits to Graceland, the Sundays at my house. His emotions had been cruelly mixed and it must have been hard, I later decided, for him to order the burning of my house. With me in it, though I no longer slept alone.

  Malou and I saw the flames from half a mile away. No other house was near us. We knew that was our place burning and that it was too late to do anything.

  “That’s us,” Malou said, We didn’t hurry at all. If anything we walked more slowly. More thoughtfully.

  “I know,” I said. Strange, but I was enjoying the moment. We were walking hand in hand along the beach and that was the first time Malou had walked that way with me. We’d spent nights together, we’d traveled, back and forth, to Graceland. We went to Manila, Baguio, Agoo, Mindoro, tentative little forays, bit by bit expanding the world we shared. But she withheld a lot of herself: the family I never met, the childhood undiscussed, the old lovers unmentioned. Those were her rules. The curtain came down whenever I asked. So it was me, remembering books I’d read and lectures I’d given, and Malou listening. So there we were, strolling along the shoreline, leaving footprints in wet sand while our house was burning. I knew that something was coming. You couldn’t be Biggest Elvis without paying a price. The world gets back at you, I believed. But—that moment—it didn’t bother me.

  We thought it was a case of theft or vandalism. That was before we found that the back and front doors had been wedged shut, in someone’s hope that we’d be sleeping inside. When we saw that, I couldn’t help thinking of Father Domingo Alcala. I couldn’t avoid it. He topped my list. He was the list. In no time at all, I convicted him. And in the next moment, I forgave him. Biggest Elvis forgave. And felt sorry for the pain I’d caused him. That my friend Alcala was the instrument of my undoing, that bothered me. Someone else should have come along. An anti-American. A thief. A rival bar owner. Or—as the newspapers later suggested—a music lover. Not him. Not a friend.

  We spent the rest of that night at Elvira’s apartment, the same place everyone else from Graceland went when they had trouble. A half-dozen of the Graceland girls were sitting around the kitchen when we walked in. I went to sleep to the sound of their voices, rising to shrieks, falling into whispers. I was asleep—I was dreaming a dream of graduate school and discovering there was a language requirement I hadn’t fulfilled—when Malou came into the bedroom. It wasn’t much before dawn. I woke to find her kneeling at the edge of the mattress, which sat on the floor.

  “Wake up,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I want to tell you how I feel,” she said. That got my attention. Malou told you things reluctantly, a little here, a little there, bits and pieces that were out of order, sometimes contradictory, as though she hadn’t gotten her story straight yet.

  “Go ahead, Malou.” God, how I loved saying her name! She’d lit a candle in the corner, turned off the air-conditioning, opened the window, so we could catch a breeze.

  “I am scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything. I don’t like depending on you. Or anybody. But I do. I don’t like loving you, I don’t like the idea of it. It feels like a mistake. But still I go with you. I’ve lost control of the situation.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that,” I said.

  “I’m afraid something will happen. And there is nothing I can do.”

  She fell silent. I reached out to her to touch her and felt tears on her face. That shocked me. And her. As soon as I felt them, tried to wipe them away, she turned her head away. “I hate weakness,” she said.

  “Whatever is coming, we’ll handle it.”

  “Easy to say.”

  She got up and walked over to the window and stood there for a while, looking down at the street, and that was when I said to myself that there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Malou at the window, wind ruffling the curtain, someone blowing a needless horn in the street, a rooster crowing, in the hour when night thinned and the lights at last went out in Olongapo. I knew I was in love and I knew I couldn’t tell her. Then I saw her take both edges of her T-shirt, pull it up, to dab at her eyes, and then she pulled it off, over her head, and walked toward me in the half-light.

  “Please,” she said. A new line, from Malou. I glanced toward the door. I’d heard them talking out there, before I went to sleep. In this house, there was always someone awake. And the walls were thin.

  “They might hear us,” I said.

  �
�I don’t care.” She came into my arms and she was trembling, anxious, urgent. Malou was a subtle, able lover, always, but always in control, like an athlete who played just hard enough to win. That night she was out of control, raucous, and, frankly, noisy. She wanted everyone to hear us. And they did.

  “You should burn your house down every night,” Elvira said to me when I stepped out of the bedroom later in the morning.

  A man who works around prostitutes is a pimp. At the start of my time in Graceland, I worried about that. There was no way I could ignore the business of the place. The more I got to know the girls, the worse I felt about it. There wasn’t much consolation, either, in knowing that I wasn’t a customer myself. The money they made, the drinks they sold, the bar fines went into our salaries. I tried to make the best of it: the food I ordered, night after night, was part of it, the loans I made, the doctors’ bills I paid, the money for phone calls, family presents, tickets home. Atonement, I called it. Malou called it reparations. But it got me only so far. Even in my most jovial mood, it sometimes felt like I was starring in some dark, touring version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

  Then some good things started to happen and if they didn’t answer all my doubts, they made them less pressing. The word of Elvis spread. We sold out, night after night. We raised our prices and people kept coming. The girls raised their prices too. Now they were Graceland girls, elite, snooty, choosy. And they dressed the part. Jeans and T-shirts, rubber flip-flops were ancient history, as unthinkable as serving warm beer and glasses full of ice cubes.

  Most hostess bars paid girls out of drinks and fines. No action, no money. They were there on consignment. Unusually, Graceland paid a minimum wage, just for showing up, provided they passed muster with Malou: they looked good and had their health card. They were ahead before they started. They could do pretty well serving and selling drinks. That was an improvement. Then the big change came. I noticed it one especially busy Saturday night, lots of money in the house, foreign tourists and high-rollers from Manila, we’re talking serious money, the kind of night the other bars dreamed of, action, traffic, all the business you wanted, two or three customers a night, two or three girls per customer. And yet, at closing time, most of the regulars were around the jukebox, waiting for my food to arrive.