The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “God, she’s young, she’s a kid,” Porter said. And he was right. Teresa de Guzman was a nymph, an angel. A woman, surely, but newly so, small and young and irresistible. In Olongapo, she tempted—she invited—defilement. Someone should have spanked her and sent her home.

  I was surprised by Porter’s surprise. Teresa de Guzmans greeted the fleet by the dozens, by the hundreds. They were women only intermittently, as the market demanded. Mostly, they were girls. Expect no courtesans here, no erotic magicians. These were Girl Scout troops turned feral. Confronted with this, Porter seemed chagrined. He invited me to lunch, detailed an escort to accompany Teresa to the front gate.

  “I notice the ankle isn’t bandaged,” he remarked. “Which, one was it, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She’s pretty.” We stood together outside headquarters, watching Teresa and her escort walk away. I prayed that she wasn’t inviting him out just then. At the very last minute, rounding a corner, she looked back at us and waved and—how couldn’t you love her?—she skipped away, hair flying behind her. Porter leaned back and laughed. I almost joined him, then stopped myself. Life in Olongapo had its comical side. But there was pain too. Abandoned mothers and children, a generation of half-American halforphans. Broken promises, unanswered letters. It was better not to be amused. Once you started laughing, you might never stop. Humor was corrosive here. So were tears.

  People noticed when we stepped into the Officers’ Club. Porter might have been making a point about me—the red priest was a regular guy, liberation theologians put on their pants one leg at a time, and everybody likes french fries. I was his trophy radical and he steered me from table to table, making much of our friendship. “I know who you are,” some officers muttered, not looking up from their food. “Heard all about you!” others good-naturedly exclaimed. That was Americans. Inconsistent, unprincipled, clumsy, strong.

  “Sorry,” Porter said when we reached a corner table. “It felt like we were bride and groom, moving from table to table.”

  The Officers’ Club was on the beach, directly across from the headquarters building. From the bar—an air-conditioned alcove with clean carpets and endless peanuts—I could scan the bay. Though a few ships remained, the Seventh Fleet was back at sea. Like a pan of water left on a stove at low heat, the famous bay stretched out, idle and empty.

  “Where have all deflowerers gone, huh, Padre?” Porter asked. He’d read my thoughts. On Saturday night, when the fleet was in, Olongapo was grotesque, appalling, but alive. When they were gone—I had to admit—it felt vacant. That was something you could blame on the Americans. Add that to the long list of charges. A few small fishing boats out toward Grande Island, smoke coming off the Bataan mountains where it surprised me, that they found something left to burn—what was the point of it all?

  “I’ve liked doing business with you, Father,” Porter said. “I don’t care what they say. I can’t tell you the dinner parties that have been ruined for me because I spoke up for you. Believe it or not, there are people here who think that this base is a good thing. Good for world peace, good for the balance of power, good for the balance sheets. Good for the Philippines … as every poll taken in the area emphatically confirms. Your mayor agrees. Your senator, your chamber of commerce. The opposition comes from outside, from university mouth-offs and newspaper columnists who never get out of their chairs, and politicians who scream about nuclear war and national sovereignty when we know it’s all about renegotiating the lease. You don’t hear that kind of talk on the street. The jeepney drivers, the lottery salesgirls, the waitresses. No problem. None, anyway, that can’t be solved. They love us. Or they say they do. And I’ll do them the compliment of believing what they say. Of taking their word for it.”

  “I’ll say this once, my friend,” I interrupted. “This place dishonors you and it dishonors us.”

  “Maybe so. Just don’t put it to a vote. Anyway, we’ve worked some things out. I tell people I like you and that I’ve got a sneaking suspicion—which I won’t ask you to confirm—that you like me. Sometimes I ask myself what it’s going to be like here, years from now.”

  “Business as usual?” I suggested. I felt that way sometimes, that it would never end. I felt that way when my cheeseburger arrived, a wonderful thing, impossible to duplicate outside the base. Is it the beef, American not Australian, or the texture of the cheese, the grease on the grill, or the Stars and Stripes flying overhead? Business as usual. Activist priest, portfolio of problems, a broken ankle, a trashed apartment, cases settled out of court. Cheeseburgers, later.

  “No, Padre. No more business as usual.” This was important enough for him to put down his cheeseburger and wipe the catsup off his lips. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. You didn’t hear it from me and never mind where I heard it. But your good thing—your bad thing—is coming to an end.”

  I waited for him to resume. This could be everything or nothing. We specialized in crying wolf, in claiming victory, in paper triumphs and false alarms. Marcos had used the bases against the Americans: as long as he remained in power, Clark and Subic were safe. Aquino had equivocated. The bases had to go eventually, she said. Meanwhile, however, the lease might be renegotiated. Three years at $481 million per year—one third of what we’d originally asked—was enough for us to permit our sovereignty to be violated until 1991. Meanwhile, negotiations continued. We were still selling ourselves.

  “It’s just not worth it,” Porter said, “that’s what they’re saying. Putting up with your bullshit and paying more to listen to it. It’s not official yet. Your politicians might change their mind. It wouldn’t be the first time. But we think they’ll vote the next treaty down and we’re not too upset about it. We’re walking away. It’ll be a year, eighteen months, before the great moment arrives. But it’s starting now.”

  He might be wrong. That was my first thought. No American knew what violations of language and logic Filipino politicians perpetrated every day, how they posed and postured, how they changed positions, switched sides, betrayed their allies, their constituents, themselves. He might be wrong, I thought. Then I realized that I wasn’t thinking he might be wrong. I was hoping; anyway, half-hoping.

  “I wanted you to know,” Porter said. “I wanted to be the one to tell you. That way I could ask you something and get you to answer before you have much time to think about it. …”

  He gestured around the dining room. I saw tables full of Americans, most of them at coffee and dessert. Ice cream or pie. Ice cream and pie. Beyond them, the beach, the baseball fields, the ship repair facility, machine shops, offices and barracks, airstrips, golf course. Would the aborigines move into the housing? Would the rain forest prevail? Would the meek inherit the base?

  “Tell me … tell me what you think. …”

  I couldn’t say.

  “You’re going to miss us,” he said.

  “I admit it,” I said, recovering a little. “I’ll miss you. That doesn’t make me want to keep you. And it shouldn’t make you stay.”

  Teresa de Guzman, cultural dancer, waited for me at the front gate and sat happily in my car, riffling through my collection of cassettes as we drove back to Subic City. I thought I might ask what she would do with 5,000 pesos. But when I thought of the things that 5,000 pesos could buy I realized it wouldn’t make any difference, it wouldn’t change her life in any important way: three or four bags of rice, a Sony Walkman, a crib for someone’s baby. Her family would nibble away at it. Or she’d spend it all at once and I would notice the Technicolor flicker of another television set along the road.

  “Sus, Maria,” Teresa shouted when she saw Tina Turner among my tapes.

  “Research,” I responded.

  “Research,” she repeated.

  That’s what we’d been doing in Olongapo, I thought. The whole community was a laboratory. We incubated diseases and we indulged dreams. We made love, we made money, we made babies, we made—as they say—beautiful music
together. It was hard for me to believe that the Americans were going. End of research, of study abroad. Study a broad.

  “Sus, Maria,” Teresa repeated, when I pulled the car into the courtyard outside my quarters. She rushed off, crossing herself. On the step of my front porch, as though waiting to make a confession, Elvis Presley sat. Not one of him, but two. One was younger than the other but they were linked. They came from different decades, the fifties and the seventies, so they were both out of the past. Part of history. Like America itself, I hoped. News of the Elvis Presley show had not escaped me. Another in a line of grotesques. The hits just kept on coming. I drove past the so-called Graceland whenever I had business at the base as often as two or three times a week, when the fleet was in. I could recite the name of all the clubs, on a street where the names changed all the time. When I saw the cardboard Presley figures outside of what had been Genghis Khan’s Tent, I guessed that the entertainers were ex-servicemen, staying on. I never dreamed that the three Elvises had come halfway around the world, a trinity of pilgrims on what the eldest had the eventual effrontery to call a mission from God. All that came later. It started with two Americans on my front porch.

  “I am Father Domingo Alcala,” I said, walking toward them. Nothing in my priestly vows compelled me to be more civil to Americans. Or to pretend that their visit to my parish made my day.

  “I’m Ward Wiggins,” the older of them said. “And this is Chester Lane.”

  “You’re the men who sing at the place called Graceland?”

  “Yes sir,” the younger replied. “My brother, Albert, he’s part of the act too, sir. Sir, your name was given to us by …” The younger Elvis blushed and hesitated.

  “By the girl he’s planning to marry,” the older Elvis completed.

  “Ah, I see,” I said. When a military man decided to marry a Filipina, he and she were obliged to go for counseling at the base. The Americans knew that most of these marriages were doomed: that a courtship in a Philippines liberty port was poor preparation for a life in Bakersfield or Fayetteville. So there were lectures and interviews and papers that took time to process. They could slow things down but they could never stop them. And they could never more than dent the Olongapo credo that divorce in San Diego was more valuable than a marriage in the Philippines.

  Sometimes—more rarely—the Filipino family put things to the test, sending the betrothed to the hardest possible taskmaster. That would be me. Some of our people had integrity. Others had been through marriage counseling enough times to give the course themselves. Those were the girls I secretly cheered for. The cynics, the opportunists. Cases of true love were more disturbing. Disasters in the making. As I talked to them I wondered which was the greater catastrophe: when the Navy man met the woman’s family, a busload of Pinoys looking for a ticket to California, or when she encountered his in-laws, stepping into a living room of polite Americans, watching football on television, waiting to carve a turkey.

  “Does the lady work with you at Graceland?” I asked.

  “No sir,” the younger Elvis replied.

  “At what bar does she work?”

  “What makes you think …” The younger Elvis looked to the older for help.

  “The lady doesn’t work in any bar at all, Father Alcala,” the older Elvis declared. “She’s not a dancer. Not a hostess. Not a prostitute.”

  “I haven’t touched her,” the younger Elvis asserted.

  “I see,” I said. His protest surprised me. It sounded quaint. “What is the lady’s name?”

  “Christina Alcala,” the lad replied. “She said you’ve known her awhile.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did she tell you she was my sister?” I couldn’t wait for his reply. I turned away, covering my face with my hands, moving them up and down, feeling my hair and the skin of my forehead, the lips across my teeth, always the skeleton waiting, just below the surface, biding its time. At lunch I’d learned that the Americans were leaving forever. On the same day, by the middle of the afternoon, I was informed that my sister wished to marry one. And, doubtless, leave herself.

  “I get the feeling we’ve surprised him,” the older Elvis said to the younger, “in not such a nice way.”

  “Shh …” said the younger. “Priests have families too, you know. How would you feel?”

  “Maybe we should leave and come back another time.”

  “No,” I said. “You can stay.”

  “She’s not pregnant,” the younger emphasized. “She hasn’t been touched. Like I said.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said. Temporary consolation. Oh God, in another year they’d have all been gone! “Do you mind my asking … how you met?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen is what the man is saying,” the older Presley told the younger. My predicament interested him. “It’s not what he had in mind.”

  “Well sir,” the younger said. “It’s not much of a story. I was at a picnic out at White Rock with some friends of mine from work—”

  “Graceland girls?”

  “Yes sir, and there was lots of other picnics too—and this other group, they all teach at a school here, it turns out, a school out this way—”

  “I know. You passed it on the way in. Sacred Heart. My sister teaches kindergarten through third grade. I’m the principal, it happens. I also teach … whatever needs teaching.”

  “Well sir, whatever you teach, it isn’t volleyball. They couldn’t play volleyball at all. They were giggling and silly and getting all tangled up in the net and losing track of the score and forgetting to rotate out and I’m telling you, Father, you can’t just sit and watch that kind of half-assed … oh …”

  “Finish your story.” Part of me was getting to like this awkward, ingenuous youth. Part of me liked all of them, until I saw the outcome of their presence here, all the things they did and everything they left behind, meaning no harm. You realized that the harm they did had nothing to do with anything they intended, good or bad. I liked them. They weren’t stormtroopers or foreign legionnaires. They were boys, meaning no harm. But so was Lieutenant Calley.

  “I got up and organized things. Someone had to. Then we had a game, Graceland against your school. Good girls against nasty girls, they called it.”

  “So who won?” the older Elvis asked. I’d been wondering the same thing, Graceland versus Sacred Heart.

  “Graceland, sir. And that’s about all there is to it, sir. That’s the story of how we met.”

  “I see. You were at different parties at the same beach …”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And after a while, the two parties became one party.” I noticed the older Elvis smiling, sympathizing with my predicament, the snail’s pace of my interrogation. I felt he’d dealt with the younger Elvis himself and enjoyed seeing someone else attempt to reach him.

  “Well sir, we shared food and we sang. Some of the people sort of know each other. Dolly—she’s some kind of cousin—”

  “So … you played volleyball together and now you want to marry my sister.”

  “No sir.”

  “No?”

  “I wasn’t in the game. It was all-girls, both sides. I coached and later I refereed. And someone had to keep score for them.”

  “Chester?” The elder Elvis intervened. “What Father Alcala is getting at … is that you must be missing a few steps. First you play volleyball and next you want to marry her. If that’s all it took, then everybody who played volleyball that day would be getting married. … See?”

  “No sir,” the young man insisted. “See, I was the only guy.”

  “Then why,” I said, “of all the women who were there, did you select. …” The word select destroyed me. After I said it, I could not go on. The language of pimps, salesmen, waiters, floorwalkers, and streetwalkers. Select. And now my sister had been selected. Finally, I finished the sentence. Select was the verb. My sister the object. “My sister?”


  “Are these conventional questions?” the elder Elvis asked. “I’m just wondering.”

  “No,” I admitted. “They are not.” I promised to consult with Christina and to set a date for another meeting. Recovering a little, I conveyed the seriousness of the marriage bond at all times, and special considerations in this case, issues of family and culture. And faith. I wondered if young Elvis—Chester—was Catholic. He was not, of course. That, I realized, was to my advantage.

  “But I’m willing to learn,” he said. As if the Church of St. Peter were a new instrument for him to play. Then he arose, with the utmost good cheer. “Whatever it takes, Father.” He offered his hand. “You’re not looking so good, sir.”

  “It will pass.”

  “That’s okay. It’s not every day you run into a brother-in-law. See you soon!”

  “Wait outside a minute,” the older Elvis told the younger. Chester Lane nodded, waved, stepped outside. I was left facing an older version of my brother-in-law-to-be. It was as though a dreadful film had been fast-forwarded to the closing sequences, so I could picture Christina attending to the wishes of someone like this lout, heavy-faced, fat, sideburned.

  “I don’t want to prolong what’s been a difficult afternoon, Father,” he said. “I can tell you’re not pleased. But this isn’t what you think.”

  “And what do you think I think?” I replied. I wanted the Americans gone. All of them. Now. Forever. But there was an intriguing familiarity about him, a presumption of equality that I couldn’t leave unchallenged. One of the hazards of my calling—of ministering to the poor, the victims, the humble—was that, day in day out, I was smarter than the people I worked with. Not better, certainly, not even wiser. But surely smarter. And when I caught a glimmer of smartness—a knowing smile, a furrowed eyebrow, an ironic tilt of the head—from someone, I responded. I noticed how he studied my bookshelves. I wondered if I had not found another member of that most secret society, scarcer than aborigines, more furtive than pedophiles: a reader.