The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “Well,” I said, when no one responded to me. “I’ll be saying good night.”

  I prolonged it a little, aware that something had gone wrong and it was my fault. It was nothing that would cost me, nothing compared to the blunders and insults that happened with customers every night. But this was my mistake and I regretted it.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I added. The table stayed quiet. I walked away. Then I heard a quick sentence in Tagalog and a round of laughter that excluded me.

  “What was that about?” I asked, turning back. “Was that about me?”

  No one answered. They seemed, not frightened exactly, but intimidated. Americans were nice enough people, but you could never tell when they’d pull rank. One minute they were winning, generous, easy. The next minute: a master race. They were like kids walking down a sidewalk, straddling a crack in the basement, crossing a line by chance. Not watching where they walked.

  “Elvira, tell me,” I said. She wasn’t the one who’d spoken. I knew that. It was one of the Scrabble players. But Elvira had laughed.

  “Oh, nothing sir.”

  “That was it? Nothing?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “That was a long sentence, just to say nothing. And a big laugh, that followed nothing. Why don’t you just translate nothing for me?”

  It didn’t take much to bring the colonial out, even in the most easygoing visitor. Heat brought it out, travel and discomfort. Come here. Now. Take this back. Not that way. I told you not to. Sometimes the people brought it out in us. They made us be that way. If things got too friendly, they reminded you that they were from here and you were not. When the dancing was over, the bottles empty, the bills paid, they reminded you. They reminded themselves. And maybe they were doing you a favor.

  “She say—”

  “Who?”

  “Sir, I don’t know,” Elvira protested. It was getting ugly, all on its own. “Sir, I do not see. Please sir. I hear you say, I’m surprise you are knowing this kind word. In English. And then someone say in our language, say to you, I’m surprise you know this word. And we laugh, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay, everybody.” On my way out, I signaled to a bartender stacking cases of empty San Miguels. I ordered ten bar-drinks, margaritas, 300 pesos each, which went a long way in Olongapo. At those prices, I hoped he’d consider using some tequila.

  Olongapo at two o’clock in the morning. It deserved better than it got; it deserved a painter who could capture the crazy play of neon on rain-washed streets, the street kids, down for the night but not out, the last satay peddlers, the flash of jeepneys, the all-night bars and barbershops and restaurants and massage parlors. The smell of butchered forests and polluted oceans, gasoline and perfume, and any kind of sinful possibility.

  I got dropped off at Barrio Barretto, in a zone of mom and pop nightclubs except for one place, The Main Event, that featured foxy boxers—female pugilists—when the fleet was in. The Main Event was one of Dude’s favorite hangouts, when he escorted movie people from Manila. Dude was an explorer and what he discovered at the Main Event impressed him, watching one girl slam another around the ring. It sounded more like a pillow fight, what with twelve-ounce gloves, but some of those women had moves. Dude insisted, some of them could parry, feint, hook off the jab, throw uppercuts in close, go hard to the body. Those were the ones he liked to buy, fresh out of the ring.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he told me. “I still can’t. They’re so pumped up after they fight—if they win, that is. It’s like the bed’s a boxing ring.”

  “Sounds fun,” I said.

  “No, no, don’t do that deprecating thing, Ward. It’s like fighting and fucking are … you know … the same thing.”

  “The Marines have known this for years,” I said. “The only question is, which comes first.”

  “You get one sweaty, passionate armful, that’s all I know,” he said. “So ready—”

  “Willing and able,” I completed. I wished I could give more to Dude sometimes, when he tried to talk to me. We canceled out each other’s thoughtful moments.

  “I’ve got just one question for you, old-timer.” Dude stuck a finger into my stomach, right below the navel. Then he pushed and it sank, readily, down past his knuckle.

  “I can’t feel a thing,” I said.

  “I’ll bet you can’t,” Dude said. “Tell me, Ward. I’m just wondering. How many years since you could stare down and see your cock? What’d the Original call it? Little Elvis?”

  “Oh, it’s been years. But some other people look in from time to time.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Dude said. “I don’t believe you, Ward.”

  An alley led off the highway, right past the Show Me Bar and Nightclub, which showed me one barmaid, head down on the bar and, farther in, the glow of a television set, like a fire in back of a cave. Past the Show Me, a hard-packed path went through some garden plots, corn, beans, eggplant, down toward the beach. The feeling changed as soon as you left the main road. Along the highway, you had air-conditioning, cold beer, hot music. They danced the latest dance, they wore the latest threads, they talked that MTV talk. Out back, you were in another country, where people lived in square wooden houses with tin roofs, or in open-sided thatch-roofed huts. Wood smoke curled my way, and I could smell caged pigs and tethered goats. Some mornings, I’d come across schoolkids dressed in uniforms, whole columns of boys and girls, and women carrying plastic tubs of laundry to where a stream emptied into Subic Bay. That was during the day. But the real magic happened at night. I’m talking about a certain moonlit night, the same night I talked to the jukebox girls for the first time, the ones I’d noticed crossing themselves when I sang “All My Sorrows.” I walked home and an old-timer came toward me, came out of the fields, gesturing for me to wait awhile. Up close, I saw he had one good eye. The other was just a socket. He was a skinny, shrunken fellow wearing baggy khaki shorts and an old T-shirt that said DAIRY QUEEN. Out in the fields, he might be mistaken for a scarecrow. He moved toward me and I saw that he had a rooster in his arms, a fighting cock, cradling it like a mother holds a child in a nativity scene. He held the rooster toward me and there was plenty of moonlight to show me those shining feathers, some red, some brown, and the glint of killer eyes. The old man held the animal out for me to touch it, saying nothing, just humming what sounded like a lullaby. I reached out, hesitated. He nodded again. I just brushed the animal behind the neck. The feathers felt smooth and oiled. The scarecrow nodded his head, thanking me. “That’s all,” I said. “That’s it?” He backed away and crossed the flooded field. Communion complete.

  You could laugh about it all you want. But this Elvis business wasn’t just an act. If I were doing a low-rent lounge act in Henderson, Nevada, it might be different but in this part of the world, spirits hovered and sometimes I could feel them in me. I saw it in the audiences at Graceland and in moonlit fields at Barrio Barretto and I sensed forces, fates, larger somethings that I couldn’t see. For the record, I’m agnostic. I put Christ a couple rungs higher than Elvis and I put Elvis somewhere above Santa Claus, all of them on a ladder that leads right into space. But still, something started happening when Elvis came to Olongapo. Every night I felt it, that sense of something impending, something that was headed my way and I didn’t have to do anything but wait for it. Sit and wait, the way bar girls waited for lovers, the way the port looked for ships. Something coming.

  Built by some Manila bigshot as a weekend retreat, the place where I lived sat right on the beach. I liked it the first time I saw it, a one-room building, concrete and wood, with a porch along the front, looking out at the bay. In back there stood a water catchment, an old concrete cistern that caught rain off the roof and released it onto a concrete slab below. I liked my shower, when I came home. The beach wasn’t much, rough brown sand that the tide covered with Pampers and Clorox bottles and broken rubber shower sandals, as though returning unwanted gifts. A little farther i
nland, clumps of grass and vines and morning glory ran above the water line.

  On the porch, three in the morning, Biggest Elvis hunkered down into a chair that protested at the two-hundred-forty-pound hunka-hunka-love dumped into it. The steps complained also, the very floor I walked across. I inconvenienced the world I lived in and some nights, when it rained, or mornings, when the sun heated the tin roof, snapping and creaking as it changed temperature, it sounded like the roof was complaining about me too. Oh, I was something, really something. I needed Dude Lane with me, to keep me honest.

  Chester was popular. Not like a sailor. Chester was a friend, not a customer. The girls ironed his shirts and combed his hair. They brought him local food, from lechon to locusts. They gave him their pictures, invited him to family parties, baptisms, weddings, funerals and if he screwed them—which I doubted—it was almost certainly for free, as if they were teaching him a new dance step, show me how, show me now. He was learning the language too. Chester approached this country the way a kid rushed down a beach, splashing into the water. I worried about Chester. I worried that time was not on his side. He had turned me into his guardian. Just recently, he’d asked me what it meant to be Catholic.

  His brother, Albert “Dude” Lane, could be a pain. He was selfish, sarcastic, ambitious. The girls saw Chester and everything was for free. They saw Albert and they flipped the meter. But Albert was smart. Every conversation with him was a combat, with winners and losers. Everything he did was part of an overall campaign. He wanted to make it more than anyone I’d ever seen, a score, a killing, a name for himself. He spent half his time in Manila. Three hours away. He weekended in Cebu or Palawan. He didn’t report to me but I could read the names of resorts on the towels he stole, on bath gel, shampoo, and little bars of soap he kept in our dressing room, laundry bags and coat hangers, stationery and shoeshine cloths. That was Albert. Driven by dreams. Or nightmares. The nightmare was what he’d told me: he didn’t want to be Elvis forever, to grow up and be like me.

  It was still dark when the roosters started crowing. Maybe the one I blessed was one of them, the leader of the pack. I sat out on the porch a while yet. Some dogs came trotting down the beach, shadowy figures in gray light. Someplace down the beach, a radio went on loud. They weren’t getting their money’s worth unless it was going full blast. The Eagles sang “One of These Nights” on Armed Forces Radio, followed by Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances.” It was odd how songs found us, moving through the air, bouncing around time zones, orbiting the earth and landing in a place like this, Subic Bay at dawn.

  Bedtime. I left the porch and stepped inside, undressing in the dark. I’d turned on the air conditioner and the overhead fan. It was redundant, like wearing a belt and suspenders, but I liked the whooshing of the cold air overhead. Another treat to myself came next. Over my bed hung a mosquito net, finely woven, my teddy, my tent, my kind of shroud. I rolled beneath, enjoyed the cooling of the room, the stirring of the net. It would be late afternoon before I emerged. Meanwhile, my younger selves made up for me, all through the night. The Lane brothers got their share all right, they evened the score. But Biggest Elvis slept alone, another American waiting for his fate to find him.

  II

  Colonel Peter Parker

  I was one of those World War II veterans who got a taste of the Pacific and never quite made it home. It wasn’t just the Japanese who left stragglers behind, hiding out in caves and taro patches thirty years after the war was over. After the war, I hooked up with the Trust Territory government as a business adviser, based on Guam. Guam made sense. It was midway between the Philippines, where the war had started for me, and Japan, where it ended. Guam was an American place, way out in the Pacific. It was also a good place to turn a buck. Not at first, though. Those early years you needed a government job; back then, the private sector didn’t amount to spit. Scrap metal and copra, that’s all. Everything was small-time, secondhand, and down-home. A store was a place that sold canned corned beef and mackerel and warm beer. A hotel was a Quonset hut with a broken toilet. The airports were World War II fighter strips, the roads were all potholes. It was a tropical version of West Virginia. And the Palauans and the Trukese, the Chamorros and the Carolinians were like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

  I liked it fine out here, back then. But you can’t stop progress. Or you can’t stop the people who say you can’t stop progress. They wanted those concrete air-conditioned houses. Forget the thatch. Forget outrigger canoes and sailing by the stars, when you can blast around in a fiberglass shell with three hundred Evinrude horses behind you. Well, it wasn’t up to me. They decided what they wanted and I helped them get it. I got in on the ground floor. You wanted to do business in paradise, I was your man. I knew about long-term land leases that were really sales, I knew about local proxies. You wanted a garment factory in the boondocks, a hotel on the beach, I was your man. Interested in cable TV systems, time shares, tuna fishing, talk to me. Casino gambling, garment factories, golf courses.

  There’s something about islands that draws people with money. Carpetbaggers, we call them. When they came, they came to me. I helped unpack their bags. Some things worked out, others didn’t. But it was all business. I took the money I made from them, plus money I’d married and money I’d saved, and I put it in beachfront property in the Northern Marianas, mostly on Saipan. Not the high-priced parcels on the sandy side of the island, right on the lagoon. I bought the rocky places, cliffs and blowholes. I wasn’t the first but I was one of the first to figure that tourists don’t care about beaches, they only think they do. They like to look at them, they like knowing they’re there, standing by. But when it comes to swimming and sunbathing, God never made a beach that could compete with a clear, clean, filtered swimming pool. So after ten years I made money, and for ten years after that the money I made made more money.

  All I can say about the Elvis show is it sounded like a good idea at the time. The Elvis thing wasn’t work, wasn’t even a sideline or a hobby. It was a joke like—I don’t know—the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion. It was something I did for my boys. It began in a nightclub down on Marine Drive, the Tiger’s Cage, the only night I’ve ever been there. Or ever will. It burned down last month, suspicion of arson, surprise, surprise.

  “Uncle Pete, just take a look,” Albert said to me. He was twenty-one at the time, a junior at the University of Guam. “Just come out with us one night. There’s something we want to show you.”

  “Is it your girlfriend?” I asked, fearing the worst. Chester and Albert were my sister Patsy’s kids and they’d been with me for ten years, ever since their mother got herself killed in a highway accident at Welch, West Virginia.

  “No, Uncle Pete,” said Chester. “We have an idea. A family business venture.” I started worrying right then. Ideas weren’t Chester’s strong suit. He brought home C’s from the University of Guam, where he was a freshman. It broke my heart to see how kids from Truk got higher grades in math and Vietnamese ran rings around him in English. And the comments on his papers! Sometimes just a line drawn across the middle of the first page: “I stopped reading here.”

  “We could make money,” Albert said. “And have some fun.” He was the older smarter brother but that didn’t make me feel any better. He wasn’t that much smarter. Dude’s last business venture that I know about involved a $500 overseas telephone bill to a phone sex operation in Skokie, Illinois. After I straightened him out, Chester did the same thing. But he—Chester, the criminal mastermind—tried calling collect. “I only wanted to talk,” he said.

  I loved these boys like they were my own. I loved them from the minute they stepped off that plane from Honolulu at three in the morning, all lost and groggy, milling around in a mob of tourists, looking for me. They were easy to handle when they were boys. But lately the sap was rising and the grades were falling. Albert was squeaking through, in “dramatic arts.” Chester said he was thinking about majoring in oceanography, mainly
because he liked boats. He might as well have said tap-dancing. What they needed was work and the only thing that interested them both was music. I was a Mantovani fan. Ferrante and Teicher. I couldn’t even listen to my boys practice on their guitars. Practice makes perfect they say but as far as I could tell, they were getting worse. But I helped them out. I rented them a warehouse in Tamuning they could practice in, an old Quonset hut next to a Toyota dealership, and a cockpit. Overnight, it became headquarters for the restless youth of Guam. Now the boys wanted me to endorse their next move.

  The Tiger’s Cage was the nastiest place I’d ever been. A cracked linoleum dance floor, a moldy carpet, plywood booths, rusted card tables, plastic tablecloths, nothing, absolutely nothing, you couldn’t buy at a yard sale. No napkins, no glasses, no toilet paper in the john. A local place, for sure. Japanese tourists come to Guam by the hundreds of thousands. It’s Florida for office girls and low-middle management, traveling on tight little packages that involve Japanese airlines, Japanese-owned hotels, tour buses, and duty-free shops. But the Tiger’s Cage was for local layabouts and losers, for slumming military, for Filipinos and Trukese who worked docks and warehouses and construction, on and off the books. This was the underside of Guam, and my boys were welcome there, met with friendly waves and high fives. And then I realized what they wanted out of me, the whole idea. They wanted me to buy the place.