by P. F. Kluge
“No way,” I said. “Not her.”
“Anyway …” Ward walked over to the hotel window and swept open the curtains. Taipei was spread out below, a hive of lights, like all the other hives we’d been to by now, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong. “Anyway, she’s out there someplace.”
“Maybe just Manila,” I guessed. But I doubted it. Christina wasn’t going to take small steps. “Best not to tell Chester.”
“I agree.” We decided we’d say we got through and the good Father opened up a little and told us Christina decided to go back to the provinces for a while, visit relatives, breathe clean air, think things over. The Chestnut would buy that, we decided. He was easy to lie to.
“She’ll be all right, I bet,” Ward said, still looking out at the city. “If they get together again, it’ll be because she finds him.” He closed the curtain. “That’s one couple I have hope for.”
Ward left it at that but I knew what he wasn’t saying. He hadn’t gotten through to Malou and he hadn’t had any mail either. There were all sorts of reasons why that could happen but I believed in trying simple explanations first and the simplest was he hadn’t gotten mail from Malou because Malou hadn’t written. That woman was a bad case of frostbite. I thought so from the start, seeing her next to the jukebox, using it like a reading lamp, not listening to the music, just keeping track of bar drinks and bar fines and VIP lounge rentals, wearing an I-don’t-care expression. It didn’t surprise me, no mail from Malou. Or that the only one Ward heard from was clueless little Whitney, who asked if he could send her some paperback books.
Chester Lane
We never watched more television than when we went out to see the world. It’s not supposed to be that way and when you think about it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s like sitting around Disney World reading a Mickey Mouse comic book when the real thing is right in front of you. Or something like that.
Still, we worked late and we slept late and the day was already half-dead when we got up. Who felt like rushing off to visit a Korean temple? I liked the foreign-language MTV shows. Ward was a female volleyball connoisseur. “I love the way those Cubans spike it.” Dude favored the exercise shows. The one from Hawaii had some women working out on a grassy lawn in front of a beach. Those were tanned, muscular women. But his favorite was from India, where this perky dark-skinned girl jumped around in pistachio and black exercise tights, like a flavor of the month, announcing—in a British accent—how splendid everything felt. Dude loved her a lot. He wondered what the bar fine might run, on someone like that. So, this particular afternoon, we were cruising around the channels, Dude looking for his aerobic Indian girlfriend.
“Stop!” Ward shouted out. “Go back. I think I saw Olongapo.”
We dropped back three channels, cooking, kung fu, business news, and there was an airplane view of the base, with the ship-repair facility right in the center, and I heard the announcer saying that Subic Bay was America’s largest military base and that, when combined with Clark Field, it represented the biggest payroll in the Philippines, pumping $370 million into the local economy, directly and indirectly employing half a million Filipinos.
“It’s a documentary is all,” Dude said.
“No, it’s not,” Ward snapped back. “It’s an obituary.”
More footage from the base. The bay, beaches, golf courses, housing areas, and hospitals. And the announcer: “This transplanted America had its other side, a neon wilderness of bars and massage parlors that gave Olongapo a reputation as a sin city … and the most famous liberty port in Asia.”
“That’s us!” I shouted.
Now we were looking at Magsaysay Street at night, home sweet home, bumper-to-bumper traffic, crowded sidewalk, miniskirted girls in doorways, security guards.
“Where’s Graceland?” Dude asked.
“It’s probably file footage,” Ward said.
“I thought I saw Lucy Number Three,” I said.
“This isn’t a home movie,” Dude told me. They brought on some Filipino guy who said the bases were imperialist, militarist strongholds that had no place in a sovereign nation.
“Here it comes,” Ward said.
First they showed a shot of Clark Field, before and after Mount Pinatubo blew up. “The abandonment of Clark Field focused attention on the Subic Bay base. U.S. and Philippines negotiators had agreed on a ten-year renewal of the Subic lease for more than $250 million per year. Philippines President Corazon Aquino, herself an earlier bases opponent, submitted the bill to the Philippines Senate but gave the treaty only lukewarm support. Today, by a margin of one vote, the treaty was defeated.” Shots of demonstrators. BASES MUST GO. Nuns and students mostly.
“Holy shit,” Dude said.
“How did Washington react to the treaty defeat?” the anchorman asked the on-the-spot reporter. “With surprising mildness,” the lady said. “Certainly, the Pentagon would have preferred to retain the base. But with the Soviet threat receding—and with the level of rhetoric on the rise in Manila—along with the price tag—planners here decided that it might be time to go. They could live without the base.” Now the anchor was back. “The shut-down of America’s biggest naval base is already under way. It should take about a year. That’s our report.”
We sat in front of the TV while they showed the Subic footage again under closing credits and played this sad old song from World War II, “Now Is the Hour.” We saw the harbor full of ships, the sailors crossing over the bridge into town, a whole jeepney full of guys waving and hoisting beers as they headed out to the cheap dives along the coast. Then the show was over and some ads came on and we still sat there.
“What are we waiting for?” Dude asked. “Instant replay?”
“I still think I saw Lucy Number Three,” I said.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Ward said. “Not for us.”
“You mean,” says Dude, “accustomed as we are to playing half-empty houses, we should feel real at home in an abandoned military base. That what you’re getting at, coach?”
“It can work. …”
“Of course it can. Why just confine ourselves to Olongapo, though? There must be bigger, better ghost towns for us to haunt. What’s the scene in Cam Ranh Bay? Maybe they could use us in Chernobyl.” Dude shook his head, smiled, stopped himself. Time was, Dude would go right after Ward, get in his face when he talked about the three Elvises and how time flowed in circles, not straight lines, about creation and re-creation, about what those words meant and how they were linked. Dude would shake his head or make a sawing motion, like he was holding a violin. Now he smiled in a sad kind of way, like Ward needed to be let down gently.
“It can work,” Ward said. “That’s all I’m saying. I hate to see the Navy go. I liked it fine, when the fleet was in. But I think we can hold on.” He thought about it some more, picturing something we both couldn’t see. “They come to us from all over. They come to Graceland. It happened once. We weren’t a sideshow. We were a destination attraction. Am I right?”
“Maybe so,” Dude said.
“We’ve got to get back to Graceland. That’s all.”
“We’ve got to look after Biggest Elvis,” Dude said to me that night. We were backstage in Seoul, right before showtime, and, as Dude spoke, he gestured over to where Ward was sitting in a corner, sitting on a stool, in kind of a daze. He was in costume, Biggest Elvis threads, but he looked more like a wrestler waiting to go into the ring, ready to get pinned. Jukebox music drifted in from outside, cigarette smoke, and the noise of the hard crowd that was waiting for us.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“You haven’t noticed? He’s doing more and more sad songs. No more ‘American Trilogy.’ At the rate he’s going, he’ll be a blues singer.”
Dude was right. No one who was seeing our show for the first time would notice. If they’d never seen him raise the roof in Olongapo, “rolling the stone from the mouth of the cave,” they wouldn’t miss what we
were missing, that big triumphant I’m-here-forever, I’m-not-leaving, I’ll-never-die. What’s more, they were prepared to accept that, at the end of his life, Elvis might be kind of down. But it bothered us, even if it meant the true facts of Elvis’ life were taking over. But here he was, singing “That’s How Your Heartaches Begin.” Every night. Loser music.
“Listen,” Dude said. “If this Elvis thing is over, like I think it is …”
He stopped and shook his head, nodded at Biggest Elvis, who sat on a dressing room stool holding a bunch of cheap scarves that were part of the act. Ward used to wipe sweat off his face and throw those scarves at the girls in the audience at Graceland. Lucy Number Three had the biggest collection. It was like throwing the bride’s garter at a wedding. The Graceland girl who caught the scarf was said to be a cinch for double bar fines that night. Now it was more like crying towels.
“When this ends, we’ve got other things to do. I’ve got deals waiting. You’re halfway married. We’ll be all right. We’re young. We’ve got Uncle Pete. It’s all in front of us. But him … what’s he going to do? Where will he go? It’s like we do what we do … and he is what he is. We can change what we do. But he can’t change what he is.”
“Biggest Elvis …” Now that I thought about it, it seemed a strange thing for a person to be. It wasn’t a trade. You couldn’t say Ward was a professional entertainer, someone who could do different songs and styles. He only did one thing. He did what he was.
“We just have to look out for him,” Dude said. That night, second show, I saw just what he meant. It was one slow, sad song after another. The crowd was getting restless and, I’ve got to say, this was a rough crowd to start with. The servicemen were tougher than the guys at Subic, it seemed to me, and the girls—half Filipinas, half Korean—were always on the hustle, not like Graceland, where they teased and kidded around. You say a bar is a bar and a bar girl is a bar girl, you can say that, but I say there are differences. There are always differences, I think. Anyway, these guys had come out to drink and maybe get laid, not cry in their beer about old girlfriends. Well, Ward was closing his act with “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” If it came after something fun and fast—“Burning Love,” say—it would have knocked them out. But they were knocked out already. So Ward was going into the first part of the song,
Are you lonesome tonight,
Do you miss me tonight,
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
and we knew he was thinking about Malou, who he hadn’t heard a word from. I’ll say this for Ward. Whatever he sang he got into it and took it as far as it could go.
Do the chairs in your parlor
Seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your doorstep
And picture me there?
In the middle of “Are You Lonesome Tonight” there’s a spoken part, which is usually real moving and sexy,
You know someone said that
All the world’s a stage
And each must play a part …
and it goes on from there, so that it comes as a surprise when he says “honey, you lied when you said you loved me.” It doesn’t sound angry but it is. Or isn’t. Because then he says he’d rather put up with those lies than live without this woman he loves. Then he goes back into the song and it’s high-powered. But not tonight, this last night in Korea. The military had had enough of Elvis and too much of Biggest Elvis.
“It was Shakespeare,” somebody shouted.
“What’s that?” Biggest Elvis asked.
“It wasn’t someone who said all the world’s a stage,” the guy fired back. His friends didn’t try to stop him. They were cracking up, laughing and high-fiving. “It was Shakespeare, you asshole!”
“So it was,” Biggest Elvis said. “You know the play?” That stopped the heckler. His buddies looked to see if he knew the answer. He didn’t and he was done for the night.
“As You Like It,” Biggest Elvis said. “Set in the Forest of Arden. The seven ages of man.” Then he walked offstage and went straight over to the table. The guys were hunkered down in a circle, as if saying, hey, we didn’t mean nothing, we’re just out drinking beer.
Now Biggest Elvis signaled to the band, so they played some slow music, harmonizing behind him. “It goes like this,” Biggest Elvis said. And then he recited this whole long thing I’d never heard before, but I’ve looked it up. I’ve even tried to memorize it, but no luck, so far. Anyway, it’s about the different parts of life—a lot like our act, really—and how you wind up, like you started, an old person just like a baby, shitting on itself and crying in the dark. Dude thought Ward had gone over the edge but I thought it was one of Biggest Elvis’ biggest moments, standing in a hostess joint that was a lot less classy than the one we called home, standing there in a sequined jumpsuit, pulling that Shakespeare stuff out of the air and reciting it, beat by beat, while the guys played “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
“There you have it,” he said when he was done. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“Hell no, buddy,” one of the guys said. “It’s all right.”
“Yeah, man,” the heckler said. “You just go do your act. We’re sorry.”
Biggest Elvis got back onstage and finished the song. Everybody applauded. It’s not often you see someone get so close to the edge.
“Ward, that was great,” I said when he came off.
“I think it was pathetic,” he said. And he walked on by, out back.
“I think you’re both right,” Dude said after Ward was gone. “Great. And pathetic. The thing of it is, next time it’ll be a little less great and a little more pathetic.”
“Next time?”
Albert “Dude” Lane
I’m not the kind of guy who kids himself. Or, if I do, it’s not for long. So I’d be the first to grant that what happened to us might have happened anyway, as sure as what goes up must go down. But, about halfway through that so-called tour, I sensed we weren’t just fighting the law of gravity. Someone was helping the law of gravity along.
Baby Ronquillo had told us that the tour was put together fast, so there might be some loose ends along the way. But in Korea, that hotel we stayed in was second-rate and the bar we played in was a dump. I wondered if that wasn’t the plan. Then we flew from Seoul to Narita. There were a couple of flights a day, Narita to Guam, and it would have been easy to give us a break to visit home and look in on Uncle Pete, but our flight was for Saipan and from Saipan we were supposed to rush off straight down to Palau because a new hotel was opening there, a very big deal, and we were supposed to open the new hotel. So all we had was an hour in the transit lounge at Guam and when we tried calling home, nobody picked up. There we sat at three in the morning, elbow to elbow with hundreds of Japanese tourists. I looked hard at Chester and he looked at me. We were a taxi ride from home. We could have walked away from the whole thing, straight out the door. ‘Thanks a lot, Uncle Pete, we been there, seen it, done it, and now we’re prepared to get serious about our lives.” But there sat Biggest Elvis, all heavy and sad and heartbroken and I guessed we’d be staying with him awhile longer. I also guessed it wouldn’t be long. Something was happening to Biggest Elvis. It was about his weight or maybe about the way he carried his weight. He was never svelte. He packed the weight that the role required. He used to joke about it. Sitting down to eat, he’d say he was “going into wardrobe.” An extra portion of ribs, another pile of rice, a double scoop of ice cream was “putting on some makeup.” He carried it pretty well at the start. It was happy fat. But now he was sagging, just sagging all over, up and down, inside and out, looking more and more like those last sad pictures of the Original, all bloat and jowl, like this was someone he had an appointment to catch up with. In for a penny, in for a pound.
South from Guam, we stopped at Yap, where there were shot-up Japanese fighters on the airstrip and they sold betelnut at the airport store and some of the guys on the ground crew had red mouths that matched their loincloth
s, teeth and wardrobe all coordinated. We always talked about how our act moved through time, but that was the time of Elvis’ life. Now it felt like we were reeling backward, way back, out of control, and that if we turned on a radio we’d hear Glenn Miller playing and getting interrupted by an announcement that Pearl Harbor had just been bombed. Sometimes, in spite of what Ward said about the importance of the past, how it enriched and renewed—a rap I’d heard about a hundred times—it still seemed like an awful lot of luggage we were carrying around. People think it’s easy being an oldies-but-goodies act, dressing up in someone’s clothes, stepping into their shoes and songs. But sometimes I didn’t want to be part of what was over with, even though Ward said that nothing was ever over. I wanted to be new and young and clueless. I wanted to pretend the whole world began on my birthday.
Palau was something else from the air, this whole mess of green islands in a huge lagoon, so many leftovers from the Garden of Eden, with causeways that connected the islands, and fishing boats outside the reef and metal roofs winking up into the sun, to tell you that there were people around. Not many people either, and none of them were to meet us at the airport. That hadn’t happened before. We waited around while the crowd thinned out and the plane we came in took off and then we got a taxi to take us to a brand-new hotel that was supposed to be waiting for us to christen it with song. Only they weren’t expecting us at the hotel. When we told the desk clerk that we were the Elvis Presley trio, she went blank.
“Elvis Presley is dead,” she informed us, as if that settled things. Then she asked, did we have reservations? Ward said no. We always let him handle the messy details. Before this, he’d have had a response when the woman said that Elvis was dead. He’d look astonished. “I hadn’t heard. Are you sure?” Or he’d look sad. “Why didn’t they tell me?” Or indignant. “I’d be the first to know!” Or he’d lean forward and whisper to her. “But I came back.” This time, though, he stayed quiet. Did we desire an ocean view room—she pointed through the lobby toward where some Filipinos were stuffing palm trees into the ground near the swimming pool—or would we prefer the garden view? That was out near the road and the parking lot. And all Ward did was shrug and walk away, dumping his butt into a chair, leaning backward, looking up at the overhead fan.