by P. F. Kluge
I was supposed to go first. There we were, whipping around curves in the dark, because trucks went grinding past in low gear, dogs rushing off the road. We zoomed past sari-sari stores and carinderias, caves of light surrounded by potted plants where people sat out all night enjoying the cool, showering and smoking and playing guitars and tinkering with cars. Because all this late-night craziness was taking me back to Malou, because I was racing down a mountain to be with her at dawn, I sang Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful to Me,” every whiskey-throated word of it. A pledge of love to her.
“Hey, I got one,” Chester shouted, launching right into “Blue Suede Shoes.”
“Chester,” I interrupted. “That’s a Presley song and you know it. It’s part of your act.”
“Don’t matter. Because Carl Perkins, Jr., recorded it first!” Chester Lane, master disputant.
“The idea,” Christina explained to her new ward, “is to do a song that Elvis never sang.”
“Oh. Okay.” Chester kept us waiting for a minute. Then he started giggling. “This is ridiculous. I can’t think of any song that isn’t by Elvis.”
“I know what you mean,” I sympathized. “It’s when they say, now don’t think of an elephant, whatever you do, don’t think of an elephant. And of course, what do you think of?”
“I don’t know,” Chester said. “What?”
“Oh, shit,” Dude said. “Christina, he’s yours. You’ve got ’im. Forever. Bring over the adoption papers, I’ll sign ’em. He’s yours. Forever.”
“That’s it!” Chester exclaimed. “I’ve got it.” And from out of nowhere, out of the night air over Luzon, from the web of sound waves coming from ancient jukeboxes on distant planets came “Pledging My Love,” a forty-year-old song by Johnny Ace. The word “forever” reminded him. “Forever my darling …” It won’t happen often but whenever I hear that song again, I’ll be back in that vegetable-loaded jeepney, winding down the mountain, racing out onto moonlit plains—“promise me, darling, your love in return”—the perfect cone of Mount Arayat lifting out of rice fields near Clark Field, the road narrowed by drifts of volcanic ash from Mount Pinatubo—“for this flame in my heart dear”—Chester singing to Christina, feeling his way through the song, as though he were coming up with the words on his own—“will forever burn.” He stressed the “forever,” for our benefit.
“Wow,” Dude said after a while. “Really dodged a bullet on that one, little brother. Sang the hell out of it too.”
“Your turn.”
Dude didn’t hesitate. “This is for no one in particular.” He was the only one of us who wasn’t in love, I realized. And, in an instant, the just-dead Roy Orbison was with us, somewhere south of Angeles City, closing in on Bataan Peninsula, that gorgeous, sad voice, echoing in me, reaching for those last high notes in “Crying.”
We drove in contented silence after that and all I can say is that I loved the feeling in that jeepney, that relaxed intimacy the three Elvises could never find in a bar or around a table. Lately, it seemed we were together only onstage. Professionals. But I believed we were more deeply tied. Three in one and one in three. I dreaded the thought of going onstage alone. I prayed it would never come to that. I couldn’t picture Biggest Elvis without them.
“How’s it going?” Dude asked Christina. “You’re not tired or anything?”
“No sir.”
“No need to call me sir,” he said. “I’m not in the Navy.”
“I’m fine, then … Dude,” she said. She laughed when she said it.
“Road’s straight,” Dude said. “Not much traffic. How far are we from home?”
“An hour, only.”
“Good. Then it’s your turn to sing.”
“I cannot sing!”
“Bullshit. I haven’t met anybody in this whole country who can’t sing.”
“There’s Dolly,” I said.
“… Or didn’t think they could sing.”
“All right, then,” Christina said. “But it’s an old song. It goes back to the war, I think, soon after the war. Promise you’ll help, if you know the words.”
She started in a thin scared voice that got bigger when we came in to help her and so my last memory of that trip is how we headed downhill into Olongapo, around curves, past Dolly’s house, black sky thinning into gray, three professional Elvises and a convent-raised schoolteaching jeepney driver, singing “You Are My Sunshine.”
Christina’s first stop was the Lane brothers’ apartment. That was awkward. The two kids ought to have time together alone. I suggested to Dude we stretch our legs a minute and he took my cue. We walked around the corner from where the jeepney was parked.
“I feel like hammered goat shit on a flat rock,” Dude said, stretching and groaning. “But I’m sorry to see it end. In a way.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Not that I’d want to do it again,” he quickly added. “I see a way out … a way out that’s up … I’ll take it,” he said. “Nothing personal. You know that.”
“I know,” I said. The trip felt over. We walked back to the corner, in time to see Chester standing on the driver’s side of the jeepney, leaning inside to kiss Christina. On the lips only, I was sure, and with his eyes closed.
“Damn,” Dude whispered. “How often do you see that on the streets of Olongapo? They do short-time around here. They don’t do young love much.”
“They might be all right,” I said. “They might make it.”
“In this country, maybe,” he said, frowning. “But isn’t that like failing in the rest of the world?”
His eyes met mine. He wasn’t talking about Chester. He was talking about me, about all the Americans who came here, hanging out and staying on, the beer guts, the wrinkled faces, the shit-eating smirks. The getting laid.
“I’ll take you home now,” Christina called out, “if you’re ready.”
We’d thought we’d be back in Olongapo in time to eat breakfast. Whitney was in the kitchen alone when I stepped into Elvira’s apartment. She was at the table, the image of a student pulling an all-nighter. She didn’t hear me come in, she was that far into what she was reading, and she jumped when she saw me standing in the doorway.
“Biggest Elvis!” she said. “You scare me!”
“All the time?”
“I’m reading this book all night and I cannot sleep.” She held up a copy of The Shining. “Is this true story?”
“Made-up story. Not true,” I assured her. “But there is truth in it. Maybe.” I’d just given Whitney the benefit of an entire course I’d taught. And Whitney was appropriately perplexed.
“I’m still scared,” she said. She gestured toward a closed door off the living room. “Malou, she is sleeping in there.”
“I brought back some strawberries.” I put two bags on the table, stained where the berries at the bottom had soaked into the paper.
“I’ll wash and put sugar,” Whitney said. “You go see Malou. And put sugar.”
I knelt down beside her, kissed her on the forehead. Just the way I’d pictured myself doing it. She scowled, as though I’d interrupted something deep, opened her eyes reluctantly.
“Oh,” she said. “You came back.”
“Close your eyes.”
“They were closed,” she complained, “until you—”
“And open your mouth.”
She obeyed, though with the same enthusiasm you’d give a dentist. I put the strawberry in her mouth. She swallowed and went back to sleep.
Chester was in love, I was in love. Not Dude. Like the Elvis he performed, he was a reslless character, not a kid anymore, not a living legend either. He occupied that uneasy middle ground which, come to think of it, most of life is like. He despised the things he did—the way Elvis himself despised those stupid movies—and he wanted things he couldn’t put a name to. His ambition was huge and vague. He wanted to be somebody, he just didn’t know who.
Dude called himself a Presley imit
ator, disregarding my request never to use that word. Imitator, mime, clone, act, shtick, gimmick, trick, he went out of his way to derogate who we were and what we did. And where we were. We were the biggest fakes on a street of fakes, surrounded by Filipino Tom Joneses and Patsy Clines and Kenny Rogerses. So he screwed his way through half the Graceland staff and when he got done screwing he felt worse than before. Then he started running to Manila on weekends. He came back red-eyed and hungover. It was only a matter of time, I guessed, before he’d leave. But Baby Ronquillo started giving him bit parts in movies—parts that were so bad he entertained us, reprising his roles, late at night around the jukebox. He passed around the scripts, assigned lines for some of the girls to play. I can still see him, playing opposite Dolly, each holding a script.
“Get away from me,” Dolly says. “You frighten me.”
“This is just the beginning,” Dude sneers. “I’ll teach you the meaning of fear.”
“But …but … where do you come from?”
“From hell.”
“Go back to hell, then!”
“I’ll take you with me, woman!”
I see Elvira playing a seduction scene with Dude. This was typecasting. Elvira comes over to where Dude sits at a table. She leans against him from behind.
“What do you want?” Dude asks. Sullen. Arrogant.
“I want some …,” Elvira stretches luxuriously upward, then bends down, her cleavage hovering around Dude’s ears, “exercises.”
“What kind of exercise would that be, lady?”
“Something hard. …” Elvira says. And it goes on from there, the Graceland Studio of Dramatic Art.
“Biggest Elvis,” Whitney asked me, after watching a few cameos from Dude’s new career. “These movies Dude is acting in …?”
“Yes.”
“They are not good, are they?”
“Well, what do you think, Whitney?” Sometimes it seemed Whitney was coming out of a lifelong trance. Sleeping Beauty, wide-eyed with wonder. I knew her story. I knew more about her than I did about Malou. Born in the Divisoria, the clogged, noisy Manila market district. Her father finished a contract in Bahrain, landed in Manila, took her shopping, raped her. The mother sided with him and Whitney was gone. She’d made her way to Olongapo, thinking that waitresses actually served food, that hostesses were polite, well-dressed women who showed customers to tables.
“I’m thinking people do not talk this way,” she said. “Also, I do not care about these people.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. And watched her nod and walk away, teacher’s pet.
There were scripts all over Baby Ronquillo’s house and Dude brought them to Graceland by the armful. They landed next to the jukebox and now I saw the girls at Graceland reading through them. Partly, they were looking for funny bits they could do after closing time. They liked that. More than that, they sensed that this was Dude’s way of apologizing for his first weeks, when he’d marched them in and out of his apartment, marking notches on his gun. They put that behind them and turned to looking for—Dolly said—“something which might be good for Dude.” They didn’t find much. The market for American heroes was way down. The stuff they read was awful. If Dude wanted to make a mark, he’d have to write the role himself. Everybody agreed about that. Baby Ronquillo, the girls of Graceland, Dude himself. And that was when he came to me for help.
“It’s not that I don’t have ideas,” he said. This was offstage, watching Albert do a version of “Old Shep” that had customers sobbing on hostesses’ shoulders. “But the good ideas that I have won’t work here. And the ideas that I have for here … aren’t any good. Which is why I was hoping we could talk.”
“Sure.”
“It’s against your interests, Ward. I want to be up front with you. The minute I hit, I’m gone.”
“So what have you come up with?” He was holding some papers, I noticed.
‘This is rough,” he apologized. “Okay. I liked the idea of going with this Elvis thing. Baby liked it too. It’s right here for us. She owns the damn club. And it brings in an American audience. And …”
He stopped, looked down, looked up. “I’m not kidding myself. That’s something you can’t afford to do around Baby Ronquillo. If it’s my idea and I’m in it, she figures she can get to Uncle Pete for financing. She wants that real bad.”
“Still—there’s no getting around it—you need a story.”
“Yeah. Pain in the ass, but there you have it.” He shook his head, sorted through his papers. “Okay. Number one is Elvis—that’s me—is working in a place like this. He gets captured by drug dealers and held for ransom.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. Basically.”
“That’s all?”
“For now. So? What do you think?”
“Let me hear number two.”
“Well, number two is he gets captured by communist guerrillas and held for ransom.”
“Is there a number three?”
“He finds out that the guerrillas are really drug peddlers. It’s a kind of combination.”
Dude had a short list of villains and heroes: kidnappings, carnappings, hijacking planes, hijacking drugs. He knew the stuff was bad. When he went onstage after our first discussion, he was angry at me and at himself. It took guts for him to throw out his own ideas, night after night. I admired the way he kept working at it, like a prisoner filing appeals, hoping to write his way out of confinement. He read newspapers, hunting for stories. He talked to Graceland women, not only about godawful scripts he brought them. He asked about their lives, where they came from, how the towns they came from were run. He wanted to know about the crimes that they didn’t make movies about, illegal logging, land-grabbing, rigged elections.
“I haven’t got it yet,” he told me one night. “But I’ll get it.”
“I think maybe you will, Dude.”
“Life’s so damn sloppy. It doesn’t come in stories. Sometimes I think if only a voice came out of the sky and said the beginning, the end, if they just gave me that much, I’d have it knocked.”
“That’s half the game. Where to start. Where to stop.”
“Only place you find those signs is in a cemetery.”
“Maybe that’s where your story begins,” I said.
“I got it!” he announced the following night. “It’s that line about the cemetery. We begin at Graceland. The real funeral, the real Graceland, I mean. That long line of limousines. People crying on the sidewalk and selling shit. That’s all under opening credits, maybe. And then—bingo—we see Elvis pulling into a town like this … bars and whores and guys with guns. Ever notice how some of these towns look like movie sets? Like that Mexican town that got shot to pieces in The Wild Bunch? Anyway, the audience doesn’t know … the people in the town don’t know … whether he’s real or not.… And Elvis sets up shop, real small, a couple girls and a mama-san who’s like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke and it goes okay for a while but this is a corrupt town … racketeers and gunmen—”
“You’d better write it down,” I said.
“But I haven’t told you the ending yet.” I knew the ending but I let him tell it. “The end is like the beginning. Another funeral, only this isn’t in Memphis, this is in a Philippines cemetery, like the one outside town, with all those whitewashed above-ground mausoleums. We see another Elvis in another coffin … and … we still don’t know. …”
“I like it, Dude.”
“You shitting me?”
“No,” I said. And I saw him rush back to work, back to the apartment that Chester told me was wallpapered with plot descriptions, character sketches, scraps of dialogue, Dude’s movie, up against the wall. He paced the room at all hours of the night, Chester said, put things up and took them down, crumpled them up, flattened them out again. So, in the end, Dude was happy too, in his way. It hadn’t occurred to him yet that the Elvis he had written, the Elvis he buried in Memphis and resurrected in the Philippines, was Bigge
st Elvis. The man in the coffin was me.
“I saw that guy,” Chester said one night. “What’s his name?” It was Saturday night, between shows, another of our booming, bountiful Olongapo Saturday nights. We’d slipped across to Soul City. Billy Bowers had a room upstairs he called his private club. We liked to sit there and look down on the street. It was enough to make us feel like kings, no lie, because we saw a whole line of buses creeping by, packed with out-of-town customers, and limos and jeepneys and once in a while a horse-drawn calesa, all coming up to Graceland. The sidewalk was jammed, tour leaders holding up flags to keep groups of Japanese and Taiwanese together. They were there for us. So were the Navy and Marines. The street kids and vendors. The beautiful people, in from Manila, the spoiled and expensive women who had doors opened by drivers and then you’d see a leg come stretching out from inside, pointing a four-inch heel at the Olongapo sidewalk, like an astronaut on the surface of the moon, then that tapered leg, soon followed—double your pleasure—by another one just like it. Oh, it was fine, sitting and watching the people come to Graceland.
“Who are you talking about?” Dude asked.
“This driver guy. The one in the Hawaiian shirt.”
“Jimmy Fiddler. Works for Baby. She didn’t tell me she was coming.”
“He just went in.”
“Did you see her?”
“Only the guy.”
A customer who desired the use of a VIP lounge could watch the entire show from behind tinted glass. The idea was to take in the entertainment outside and be entertained yourself, in the lounge, in other ways. Some people really liked it. They liked having sex while we were singing. Their act and ours moved together, their high notes and ours, hurtling toward climax. Maybe it was kinky. I thought so. “Don’t knock if you don’t try,” Elvira reproached me. Her Brunei sheik loved to have her in the VIP lounge. To him it was serenade, ballet, drama, porn-film fantasy, undressing Elvira while Chester sang “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” climaxing during “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”