by P. F. Kluge
It was unusual, though, for a customer to keep the VIP windows closed. More often, the lounges were celebrity seats, first-row balcony, high-rollers, drinking, waving down to their buddies who were sitting on the main floor. Tonight was one of the rare ones: one of the VIP lounges stayed closed, all night long. Person or persons unknown. Our show was solid but we found our eyes wandering to that dark-glassed booth and we all felt something ominous, especially at the end of the show, during “American Trilogy.” Usually, if there was something sexual going on up there, it ended when our show ended, sometimes earlier, and, as we stood onstage, taking bows, the glass would slide open and the VIP customers would join in the cheering. And if the girl up there had a sense of humor—Elvira, say, or Lucy Number Three—we’d stand there and applaud them, one performer saluting another. Consummations, high and low. Tonight, the dark glass stayed shut. That hadn’t happened before. Suddenly it felt as though the three of us were in a police lineup.
“What’s going on up there?” I asked Dude.
“Spooked me,” Chester added.
“How should I know?” Dude protested. He was the most disturbed. He’d made a point of knowing Baby Ronquillo.
“Well,” said Chester, “she’s your …” He didn’t know how to finish. Friend? Sponsor? Manager? He groped and turned to me for the right word.
“Are you two screwing?” I asked.
“No!” Dude answered. “We’re business partners. Look, if you want I’ll go see.” He started to walk out of the dressing room.
“Don’t go, Dude,” I said, touching him on the shoulder.
“You don’t want me to?”
“No,” I said, keeping my hand on him, not to restrain him so much as to brace myself against what I was feeling. “Something’s coming.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, we don’t have to go running after it. It’ll come.”
Thirty minutes later, it came. It came walking into the now empty Graceland, where the three Elvises and the regulars were gathering, waiting for food. As Graceland’s fortunes improved, the so-called midnight snack had turned into a late-night buffet. No more paper plates and cartons, plastic bags of soup. We now had tablecloths, serving trays, plates, and cutlery. And, though some of the girls couldn’t resist joking about something that was neither completely soft nor convincingly hard, everyone knew the meaning of al dente. We were laughing together when the future came at us, walking with a limp. Jimmy Fiddler, a.k.a. Daga, the Rat, working his way among empty tables, singing, dancing a little as he got closer, if a lame man can dance. He stopped right in front of Malou. She looked down at her figures, ignoring him. He reached into his pants to adjust his genitals, humming “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things.”
“There’s ladies here,” Chester said.
“Oh really,” Jimmy answered. He glanced at one Graceland woman after another. He saved Malou for last. “Where?”
“Was there something you wanted?” I asked.
“A couple new knees, if you could arrange that, Biggest Elvis,” he said. “A white Christmas. The love of a good woman. That’s for starters. Meanwhile, Baby Ronquillo wants to see you three.”
“When?”
“Now. Upstairs.”
When I saw Baby Ronquillo sitting in the VIP lounge, I thought of advertisements you see for airlines, an important-looking woman waiting in a frequent fliers club for the first-class passengers to be called. She had that sober-suited, adult-mature-sophisticated-professional-woman look. The leather valise, a Federal Express envelope and a pile of faxes in front of her, a designer date book, a Cross pen, and yet … it didn’t quite work and maybe it wasn’t intended to. Something about Baby Ronquillo contradicted her appearance. The way, for instance, that she looked at me, appraising, measuring, weighing, the way the girls of Graceland did. Rejecting: she did that too, in my case. But I sensed that, in the right mood, with the right man, Baby Ronquillo could shed it all. She was still from Olongapo. She wore the garments of affluence the way maids and mailmen wear uniforms at the start of X-rated movies, costumes they would lose on command, except that Baby Ronquillo had gone from actor to director. She was the one who called “Action” and “Cut.”
“I know it’s late,” she said as soon as we came in. She glanced at her watch the way politicians do when they signal that there won’t be much time for questions after they’ve finished speaking. “I’ll be brief. I just returned from Guam, where I visited Colonel Parker, at his request.”
Albert and Chester exchanged looks, saying nothing. Dude had noticed there was no special greeting for him when we walked in. She’d nodded us all onto the couch, a low couch, great for fellatio, I imagined, but bad for meetings. Our knees were in our faces. Jimmy Fiddler looked down, way down on us, from the doorway.
“He sends you his love, of course,” Baby continued. “He has followed your progress. I’ve reported to him all along. He’s very happy for you. And I don’t mind adding that, in light of the checks I’ve been remitting, he’s happy for himself. He congratulates the three of you.”
“How is he?” Chester asked.
“He told me I’d be asked that,” Baby said. “He told me you’d probably be the one who asked.”
Dude flinched at that a little, hearing Uncle Pete had forecast that Chester would be the one to inquire about his health. “Yeah,” Dude added. “We’ve been wondering.”
“What he told me to say is this: none of your damned business.”
The brothers smiled and nudged each other. Chester flashed me a thumbs-up.
“He wishes he could travel here to see you but that cannot be. ‘My boys are the ones who do my traveling for me,’ he said.” Now she paused and awarded each of us a smile. “Colonel Parker’s wish is that you travel even more, that you take your show to other places, and that you extend the success you’ve enjoyed here in Olongapo.”
“Hold it,” Chester said. “He wants us to leave Graceland?”
“Yes,” she said. “For a while.”
“How long?”
“Four months only. I have your bookings for the first three months. The fourth month is still being negotiated. You’ll travel with your Olongapo band and crew. My office will be in constant touch. Everywhere you go, someone will meet you.”
She handed us our tickets and a typed itinerary. I scanned the names. Hotels and resorts in Brunei, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Colombo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei, Okinawa. Arrivals and departures, local contacts, the next four months of our lives. And nothing I could do about it, no appeal possible. It’s not that the act couldn’t travel. We could go wherever they sent us and put on a show. It was that the act shouldn’t travel. That’s what I wanted to say. But Colonel Parker had kept his distance and Baby Ronquillo wouldn’t understand. You had to be a certain kind of smart, to understand Elvis, or a certain kind of stupid.
“It’s a great chance for you to establish yourselves,” Baby said. “We’re happy for you.”
When she looked at the three Elvises, though, she didn’t see much cheer. We sat quietly, trading glances, trying to figure out what it meant. Chester was thinking about Christina, I was wondering about Malou, Dude didn’t know where his movie career had gone. That was when I started speaking. I’d meant to stay calm and logical but in a minute it was as though someone else were speaking in my voice, the way you hear yourself in dreams sometimes, saying unbelievable things, awful things, so that it’s a relief to wake up and know that no one heard but you.
“You don’t get it,” I said.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Wiggins?”
“Don’t Mr. Wiggins me.”
“But isn’t that—”
“You know who I am. Biggest Elvis! That’s Baby Elvis and that’s Dude Elvis. And we’re not an act that you can just put on the road when you feel like it. We’re not an act at all. We’re for real. We’re the real thing.”
“The real thing? You don’t mean to—”
“That’s exactly what I mean. There’s something in us that’s special. You don’t know. You don’t know how it all got started. Dance, music, religion, drama, poetry, it all came out of the same place once, around the same campfire, out of the same cave, and it was all one thing and it was magic. And that’s what we’ve got. That’s what came together here. Here, in the last place you’d expect, which is also the perfect place, the only place. And you … you traipse in here and you say you want us to play in a hotel someplace!”
Chester was looking at me, startled, Dude had his head in his hands. Jimmy Fiddler was enjoying watching me come apart and Baby Ronquillo smiled, the way a nurse smiles when she pulls out a syringe.
“I know what you think,” I said. “This is show business and that’s entertainment and here’s another gig. But we’re more than that. You sat through our show. Couldn’t you feel it? How could you not feel it? We took a leaky, moldy, money-losing, piss-poor whore bar and we turned it into Graceland!”
“Which I own,” Baby Ronquillo said.
“No, you don’t. You own an old movie theater. A dump. A blow-job emporium. A nothing. We made Graceland.”
“Could we put this to music?” Jimmy Fiddler asked.
“It’s hard for you to grasp, I guess. In a country where everybody’s portable and everything’s for sale and the national hobby is immigration law, well, maybe you think it’s odd or funny or crazy that someone would come here and do what we did and that we’d want nothing more than to stay and keep on keeping on. You don’t get it, do you? Either of you.”
“Calm down, man,” Jimmy Fiddler said. “You’ll be back.”
“You said four months,” Dude said to Baby. “What about our … you know … project?”
“You come back with a script and we’ll proceed. The Colonel is interested.”
“I see,” Dude said. He was the most easily mollified, even though the travel didn’t appeal. “Four months is a damn long time.”
“Then we will be coming back to Graceland,” Chester said. “That is so, ma’am, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” she said, meeting his stare and smiling right at him. That’s when I felt the dread surge into me. The way she spoke to Chester was the way you speak to a kid when you’re moving to a new town and you promise him that his friends from the old neighborhood will be friends for life, no matter what. She wasn’t lying, exactly. She was just waiting for Chester to outgrow the question.
“What about the girls?” Chester asked. “What’ll they do for four months?”
“I’ll take care of them, I promise. I was one of them myself once. Don’t worry about the girls of Graceland. They will be here to welcome you when you return.” Now Baby started assembling herself, getting ready to go. “Do not worry about our Filipinas.”
The last line about not worrying about the girls of Graceland was aimed right at me. I got the message, too. She was telling me that I was another American who pretended to care, an outsider who thought of himself as an insider, someone who could afford the luxury of worry before he departed. Well, I could worry or not, I could worry all I wanted, and it wouldn’t change a thing. The girls would have to take care of themselves. I could pretend otherwise. But after I was gone, they were on their own.
“Ward! Look at the schedule!” Chester cried out. “We’re leaving the day after tomorrow.” I couldn’t believe it but Chester was right. We weren’t just going. We were gone.
“You work fast,” I said to Baby Ronquillo. She gave me a curt nod. I didn’t interest Baby. She changed men the way she changed clothes and when she looked at me she saw yard sale. She saw out-of-shape, out-of-fashion. “I’ll see you two tomorrow,” I told the Lane brothers. “I’d like a word with Mrs. Ronquillo. Alone.”
Chester and Dude nodded and walked out. Dude cast a glance at Baby on the way out. He got nothing back, that I could see. He was an employee, leaving the boss’s office. Meanwhile, Jimmy Fiddler lingered in the doorway.
“I said alone.” I gestured at Jimmy. He stared back at me, unimpressed.
“Jimmy has my confidence,” Baby said.
“But not mine.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Jimmy.” Jimmy turned to leave. That turn was what I wanted to see.
“He can stay,” I said. “It won’t take long. The first thing I want to say is I don’t believe what you said. This grand-tour business. We’re being boosted out of here. I think there’s more than you’re telling me.”
“It doesn’t matter so much what you think.”
“What if I refused to go? What if I stayed?”
“Stay here? In Olongapo? In the Philippines? What about your visa, Professor Wiggins? Your papers? No, I don’t think you’d prosper here. What do you think, Jimmy?”
“It would be a struggle, Professor Wiggins,” Jimmy said, mock sympathetically. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Truly.”
“And the boys need you so,” Baby added. “Why do you see this in a negative way? This is an opportunity! A gift!”
“All right,” I said. “But there’s one thing I have to have. Listen carefully. There’s someone on your staff, a woman.”
“Yes.” Now she was interested. The whiff of sex enlivened her.
“Malou Ordonez.”
“My bookkeeper. She’s very good.”
“We’ve grown close.”
“Really? That surprises me. She seems … a tomboy?” She gave me an appraising look. Picturing me and Malou together. “She’s very good with numbers, Malou.”
“That guy”—I pointed at Jimmy—“has been harassing Malou. It started before I came. It’s continued while I’ve been here. I don’t want it to happen after I leave.”
“Jimmy!” She feigned shock. “Are you in love again?”
“My foolish heart …” Jimmy responded, shaking his head, holding up his hands.
“Jimmy’s forever falling in love with the wrong women,” Baby said, in a boys-will-be-boys tone of voice.
“He’s threatened her, Baby. And it was on your orders. You wanted to know about Colonel Parker. So he leaned on her to find out what she could from me. Which was clumsy and unnecessary and dumb.”
“Well,” she said. She stopped, looked at me. She marked me for an enemy, right then. She’d offered to slap Jimmy’s wrist for me, if I’d been willing to pretend he’d gone after Malou on his own. An Olongapo crush had gotten out of hand: nothing broken that couldn’t be fixed. Plenty more where she came from. But I had specified Baby’s involvement and she didn’t like that. “Well,” she resumed, “that’s all over now. Colonel Parker and I have gotten to know each other again … without assistance.”
“So you have,” I said. “But I want your gofer away from Malou.”
“No problem,” Jimmy said. “No hard feelings. I got this habit of falling for the wrong women, like she says.”
“The wrong women?” I asked.
“The ones I can’t have.”
“She’ll have my number wherever I’m staying, Jimmy. Phone and fax. It’s a small world. You look at Malou, I’ll know.”
“I said no problem. All right? There’s a difference between what’s onstage and what’s not. Don’t get carried away here, Wiggins.”
“Stay away from her,” I said.
“Sure, Mr. Biggest Elvis. Word of honor.”
Graceland was empty when I came downstairs. The girls were gone, the food cleared away, the lights out on the jukebox. Graceland was closed for the night and it would be months before I saw it filled again. That’s what Baby Ronquillo said. It felt longer to me. It felt like forever. I stood there for a while, picturing what it had been like on all our good nights that had been getting better and better all the time. I felt the magic of a full house, when the whole world came to Graceland. I pictured the three of us onstage, the three Elvises. I thought of the Original. Who wouldn’t want to be brought back to life that way? Maybe they weren’t lying. Maybe we’d be back in no time, reopening triumphantly. But it
didn’t feel that way. I’d gone into Elvis, maybe too far, but before this came along my life felt small and second-rate. I wanted a bigger life and this was where I found it. And what happened to me was something I’d passed along to others. I saw the girls of Graceland, Dolly clowning and mimicking our act, Elvira vamping, Whitney reading Stephen King, Lucy Number Three taking a bow in the VIP lounge, Priscilla, the former schoolteacher, advising an officer not to use “hopefully” at the start of sentences. And more. I saw Malou sitting in the corner by the jukebox, the way she looked before we met, distant and puzzling, waiting for something which I hoped was me. Maybe I was right. Maybe.
“Oh, what a beautiful morning,” Jimmy Fiddler sang when he dropped by to take us to Manila.
“I’ve got a favor to ask,” Dude said. “Do you think you could get us all the way to Ninoy Aquino Memorial Airport and not say anything all the way?”
Jimmy nodded and passed us the key to the trunk, where we deposited our bags, our wardrobe: guitars and capes, belts and leather, pink and black suits, the tools of our trade. The backup band followed in a van.
We left Olongapo quietly, on a drizzly gray morning that matched our mood, rain like sweat dripping out of heaven’s armpit. Smoke from garbage fires curled up into the rain. I asked Jimmy to drive down Magsaysay Street. Outside Graceland they were taking the three cutout Elvis figures inside. Baby Ronquillo worked fast. And Jimmy was driving us out. He was right after all. He was a stayer. We were transients. We could pretend, if we wanted, that we were going out as winners, moving on to bigger and better things. You can always do that, make death itself feel like a promotion, as if you were moving on up. But Olongapo was where I had wanted to stop moving.