The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “I think you’re tired of American kids showing up to marry bar girls. I think you’re skeptical about love affairs that happen between tricks. I think it angers you when the American leaves with a local girl and it sickens you when they leave the girl behind, and the baby, so what we have here is a no-win situation. Stop me if I’m wrong. …”

  He waited for me to object. If I did, it would only be to ask who this man was, really, and why he had come to me. I nodded for him to proceed.

  “So you’re jaded, Father. I understand that. But that young Elvis out there is something special. He’s the best of all of us. He’s talented and he works hard. He makes friends everywhere he goes. He’s a sweet kid. Give him half a chance, you’ll see that. That’s what I want you to know.”

  I had a dozen ways to delay or disrupt these marriage plans. I could bring our parents in from the province or send Christina out to them. I could suggest a waiting period, a year or more. Or I could put young Elvis through a daunting course of religious instruction, see how our young troubadour fancied St. Thomas Aquinas, Teilhard de Chardin, Cardinal Newman. That, suddenly, appealed. A dialogue—a double dialogue—with Elvis.

  “All right,” I said. “Half a chance.” And then, because I could not resist, “Who are you really?” And I will never forget the way he answered me, the nonchalance, the effrontery, the … humor.

  “I’m your dream, Father. Or your nightmare.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Another priest in the same neighborhood.”

  The next week, Wednesday night, via the back door, I entered Graceland for the first time as Biggest Elvis’ guest. The comparison Ward Wiggins had made between us was blasphemous. Also intriguing. If Christ were to return to any town in the Philippines, surely it would be Olongapo. I’d always said so, that our Savior would be drawn to the worst place, just as I had been. And now … Biggest Elvis … told me that Elvis Presley would choose the same town. For the same reason.

  I sat in one of the VIP lounges, where a shy beautiful girl I once knew as Juana—now called Whitney—brought me beer, courtesy of Biggest Elvis. After that, on other Wednesdays, she often sat with me, even when her presence would surely be welcomed by any customers down below. Whitney was diffident, disinterested. Also, completely unembarrassed by the presence of a priest. That first time, we watched the whole performance, the acrobatic gyrations of my would-be brother-in-law and convert, the mean glowering of his brother, the middle Elvis, and finally—what shall I call it, that opening drum roll, that clap of creation at the dawn of time, that crack of doom?—the advent of Biggest Elvis. How shall I describe the melancholy underlying his songs of youth, “Loving You,” “True Love,” “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”? Or how the experience of life in a fallen world informed “That’s How Your Heartaches Begin”? How he knit his songs together with comments and asides, at one moment cautionary—“there but for the grace of God go I”—at others, mocking. Or how he cast literary quotations out at waitresses and sailors—“Fly not yet, ’tis just the hour” and, near closing, “Had I but world enough and time” and—before singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight”—“they flee from me that sometime did me seek” and—at closing—“ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Sometimes he glanced, though he couldn’t see me through the dark glass. “’Tis better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” In this particular hell, his quotations were unrecognized. He was their source, their author, the wisdom of Biggest Elvis, lord of Graceland, the ultimate G-spot, where the evening ended with “American Trilogy,” a wrestling match of drops and falls, kicks and chops, sweat and pain, a parable of birth, death, resurrection.

  “See what I mean, Father?” he asked, that first night. “We’re in the same business!” Still in costume, wiping himself with a towel, he had rushed up to the VIP lounge while the girls of Graceland sounded last call down below.

  “It’s quite a show,” I granted.

  “Show?”

  “What else?”

  “All right. All I’m saying is that we both work for men who died that people don’t want to get rid of. They inspire shrines and relics and miracles and visions and talk of second comings. And holy music. And rituals, Father, rituals that are routine to us, our bread and butter, but they mean a lot to people’s lives, while they’re waiting.”

  “Preposterous. …”

  “Then talk me out of it. Tell me I’m just a singer in a rough bar in a badassed town. That’s what He was!”

  “It’s an impressive show,” I said. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  “It’s more than that and you know it. You saw what was happening down there. You felt it. There’s something else. Something more. I don’t know what.”

  “Neither,” I said, “do I.”

  I asked the lovebirds to wait a year and, to my surprise, they acceded. Chester’s religious instruction proceeded, all too easily. “Whatever it takes, Father.” Chester already believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, his sharp-tongued brother remarked, so he wouldn’t have any difficulty with the doctrines of the Church of Rome. My hope was that time or accident would end this engagement. Granted, the young American’s respect for Christina was remarkable, his behavior impeccable. Still, it could not be. Meanwhile, though, I had a new friend.

  Biggest Elvis! In a perfect world, we’d have traveled together, walked dogs, met for breakfast every morning, retired to the same small town. We were that well matched, not the odd couple, but the even. And, as we grew old together, needing less sleep, staying awake longer as though that might reduce the risk of death, as though being awake when death came might permit some last-minute negotiations, we might talk of Subic and the fleet, raise our voices, what was left of them, and sing old, profane songs. We’d been walking through wastelands before we met, deserts of nods and nonsense, rote learning and ritual, excuses and extenuation and, sighting each other, we saw salvation. We shared newspapers and magazines and detective novels. I relaxed around Biggest Elvis. More than that, I confessed my doubts, certain confessions that took me aback, after I had made them, confessions that, in the end, were warnings. He brought out the despair in me, the mockery I kept to myself, the obscene voice I had only heard in dreams, often enough to recognize it as my own.

  “Slow down,” he said to me one night when we were out driving. Between Barrio Barretto and Olongapo, the road climbs and curves and, around a single turn, there is a cemetery on the left, a true city of the dead, a subdivision of mausoleums. Headlights wash over tombstones, plastic flowers, snapshots of the dead. On the right, sprawling for miles, the town, the base, the bay, the mountains of Bataan. “Look at that!” Biggest Elvis exclaimed. “Pull over.”

  There they were, America and the Philippines, rubbing up each other like slow dancers, with a polluted river in between. The base was as trim as a university campus, the town a boiling pot of neon lights, clotted pink and red, like an infected wound.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” I said, “if we will ever have a nation here.” I kept talking, once I’d started, about that little time when the Philippines mattered. Yellow ribbons, People Power, marching nuns, martyred exile, avenging widow. “The Filipino is worth dying for.” “Only a Filipino can stop a tank.” (Provided, I could not resist adding, the tank was driven by another Filipino.) Those had been great days—dislodging an American-backed dictator while the world watched. Then, another great day: that morning that the skies over Olongapo had darked with gray ash from Mount Pinatubo, ash that had clogged sewers, soiled laundry, scratched windshields, and—as if God had heard my pleadings—buried the American base at Clark Field. Great days. But Subic remained and things had not changed. We were still a poor country run by rich people, a nation of servants, at home and abroad.

  “You’re down, tonight, Father,” Biggest Elvis said.

  “You noticed.” I knew I’d gone too far.

  It’s hard for me to say exactly when I realized that Biggest Elvis had to go. The very pleas
ure I took in him persuaded me. He brought out the doubts in me, the weakness, the despair. And the subversive affection for an America which he epitomized. But those were problems I might have lived with. I might even have endured his colleague’s marriage to my sister, although my nights were filled with grotesque imaginings of what our Filipino journalists would make of this. I pictured myself presiding at a ceremony with men dressed in pink and black suits, the bridal couple in a Cadillac, the church wired for sound, my sister decked out like the Original’s Priscilla, a nymph buried under a beehive of hair, gazing upward toward a sideburned, thick-lipped sensualist, winking at me as he kissed her deep and long, right in front of me, as though part of the priestly office was to confirm that a large wad of chewing gum had successfully transited from mouth to mouth.

  That was bad. But there was more and it was worse. On Wednesday nights, watching the three Elvises—the trinity—I saw that Biggest Elvis might be right. He was competition. He was another priest in the neighborhood. It was ritual and passion—payson—it was parable and moral. I saw the pattern of it, the response Biggest Elvis elicited from an audience of whores and sailors. When I compared what happened at Graceland, these waves of emotion, with my strained pieties on Subic City Sundays, the apathy and routine of it all, I despaired. We were mismatched. And we were becoming more so as the show improved, as postulants and mendicants arrived from far and wide, devotees and pilgrims, always more of them and more loving, all the time. “We’re in the same business,” he kept telling me. A joke, I thought. And yet we were. In these islands, we welcomed prophets and messiahs, Baltazar, Papa Isio, the League of Honor, the Colorum, sects, movements, faith healers, now this.

  Biggest Elvis had to go. If fate cast me as his Judas, so be it. The shrine, the relics, the half-holy music, the incarnation and reincarnation, death and return, absolutely fraudulent and utterly convincing, it was happening here and fast, so that its triumph seemed shockingly easy and years from now I might look back and say, of course, I should have known, it was all so perfect, where else but here, who else but him. Him. The god of Graceland.

  II

  Ward Wiggins

  When Colonel Parker found me on Guam, he had asked what Elvis meant to me. It was a harmless question in itself but what he really wanted to know was whether I was nuts. Was I one of those pathetic nobodies who attach themselves to larger personalities, whether as lost love, best friend, missing child, separated twin, or—not to dance around the key question—reincarnated self. Was he entrusting the Lane brothers to a head case?

  “I’ve listened to the records,” I answered. “Not all of them. I’ve read some of the books. Not all. I could say that about a lot of people I’ve studied, from D. H. Lawrence to James T. Farrell. I’ve done some homework, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” Colonel Parker countered. “But you don’t go into a bar at night and do a … was it Lawrence? … routine. Whatever that would be.”

  “Fair enough.” I wanted to give the man an honest response. I hoped that one would occur to me. “Look, I admit it. Things haven’t worked out too well for me. I haven’t done the things I thought I would. And the things I have done … haven’t pleased me. Or anybody else.”

  “Meaning?”

  “My book. My marriage. My teaching. You name it.”

  “I won’t ask about the marriage,” he said. “That happens all the time. All over the place. But I’m wondering about the teaching.”

  “I wasn’t happy. That’s the short answer.”

  “So you just … chucked it … ?”

  “Time to move on, Colonel. Before time runs out. Look, I’ve been a disappointment to myself. And, lately, whenever I was way down, I all of a sudden found myself singing.”

  “Singing …”

  “That’s right. In the shower, singing Elvis songs. Then, out of the shower, in front of my mirror, my hair, still wet and soap in my eyes, grinning, scowling, posing. Coaxing those sideburns south, a quarter inch at a time. He’d come to me. Elvis. At home. Or driving, especially at night, around the back of the island. Listen … you don’t have to worry.”

  He looked worried, though, downright alarmed. I’d gotten carried away and that business in the shower didn’t sound healthy. Sideburns on my face? Why not hair on my wrists? What would it take to kill a resurrected Elvis?

  “This isn’t Jekyll and Hyde,” I assured the Colonel. “I know who I am and I know what I’m doing. I’m Ward Wiggins and I’m sorting out a way of living that makes sense and that …”

  “Yes?” I’d gone too far but there was no avoiding it. The Colonel had a way of opening people up.

  “… that has some magic. Because what I found, Colonel, was that the happiest part of the day was when I was walking around as Elvis. That part was magic. The rest was so-so. I decided to follow that magic and figure it out. That’s it. That’s all. I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re sure about that, son?”

  “This is something that I step in and out of. I know when to stop and where it ends. Trust me.”

  I gave the Colonel a straight answer, I thought, based on the best information available at the time, as they say in court, when they’re on trial for perjury. But as the weeks in Olongapo slid into months, as I got into a pattern of afternoons on the beach, nights and early mornings at Graceland, the coming and going of the fleet, I realized that, if the Colonel asked the question again, my answer would be different. I was getting further and further into the role I played. Notice, please, that I did not say I was sinking into it: this isn’t about immersion, drowning, disappearance. Better to say I was advancing into it, day by day, and better still to say that it wasn’t a role, with lines all written, exits and entrances. No: this was a fate. This wasn’t something I was reading. This was something I was living, that I didn’t know the ending of.

  Magic. Maybe it came to me on Guam when the sound of my own voice, singing, lifted me out of the dumps. Or on Saipan, when I saw those Japanese secretaries turning sentimental about the death that they knew awaited me, offstage. But that was nothing, compared to what happened in the PI. When an old man waited for me in the moonlight, so I could bless his fighting cock, that was magic. Or, late afternoons, when I stepped out of the bungalow and walked along the beach, sailing a few notes toward the sunset and the kids surrounded me, dozens of them, “Hey, Elvis, hey Elvis,” and when they followed me along, singing scraps of songs, spinning around in the water, using driftwood for guitars, yes, that was magic too. Or seeing the girls of Graceland cross themselves during “All My Sorrows.” Moments like that, everything flowed through me, all kinds of connections were made and I became—wisecracks aside—part of something big. And more, I sensed that something was about to happen, that I wouldn’t be waiting long. I could see it the way people looked at me, when I was onstage.

  People were staring at me wherever I went, staring at me as though they’d have to testify about what I looked like the last time they saw me. Filipinos stare a lot, unself-consciously. Gawk should be a Tagalog word. They were credulous and I think some of them believed I might be the original Elvis after all, the one who never died, who faked his death and hid out and showed up here, in the best of all possible disguises, as his own imitator. Or—this wouldn’t play in cold climates but it was plausible here—Elvis did die, and was buried and was raised from the grave and where else to return on earth but Olongapo, the worst booking his heavenly agent could make?

  Graceland relaxed when the fleet was gone. The house was full, don’t get me wrong, but it was a different kind of crowd. On weekends we got outsiders from Manila, tourists and expats and rich locals, older and more refined. They got the standard show. But on weeknights we drew guys from around the base. They weren’t like the fleet; in fact, they disappeared when the fleet came in and for a week after that, giving the girls time to get checked and cleaned up at public health. The station guys were repeat customers, savvy consumers, our most discriminating audience. I changed the a
ct for them. I talked more, segueing in and out of songs, raps on Elvis returning to Olongapo, Elvis philosophizing about women, about death and time, about other performers, about meeting the Beatles, about singing with Sinatra, about shaking Richard Nixon’s hand. I had Elvis wondering about people who died before him, like Hank Williams, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Chuck Willis, Johnny Ace, and about people who came after he died, Prince and Michael Jackson. I talked around the songs and sometimes around Chester’s and Albert’s also and then one weekday night I was watching Chester working on “Don’t Be Cruel” and I had an idea.

  “Don’t Be Cruel” was a tired song. It combined sad, predictable lyrics with a daffy, mildly upbeat tune. And everybody knew it, top to bottom, front to back. Chester sang it because someone had to and his vitality could pump it up. Still, it was the flattest part of his act, maybe of the whole show. One night he turned to us while we were watching and rolled his eyes.

  “You know something, Ward?” Albert said. “That old dog won’t hunt anymore.” He enjoyed his brother’s discomfort. It’s not that Chester was dying out there—he always had the audience on his side—but he was working awfully hard. “It’s a good thing the girls like him,” Albert continued. “Go figure. I screwed most of them and paid the going rate. Chester calls them ma’am and gives them a big grin. He’s the one they bring the food to. ‘Is Chester home?’ I open the door, it’s ho-hum, Monday morning at the office. Shit, he’s in pain out there tonight, though. And before long, Professor, all our songs are gonna feel like that one.”

  “So you think.”

  “I know. These songs are like clothes or cars or women. They get used up. I know that you’re a professor—or you were—and you like thinking things last forever. But not this stuff. I guarantee it. These babies are way past ripe.”