The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “Five years ago, cherry boy,” she said, nodding in the direction of the steps Christina had taken. “No competition. You’re mine.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “Tell me, Dolly. Do I stand a chance down there?”

  She nodded and smiled. “No.”

  VI

  Colonel Peter Parher

  I always wanted to get back to Manila. It would be the last trip I’d take, I thought. It would have pleased me to see those Bataan mountains around sunset, out past the ships in Manila Bay. You used to be able to see Corregidor, on clear days, if you knew where to look. Now that I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere, it pleased me to picture the boys there. Sure, that was then and this was now. But some things never changed. The weather, say, the heat that turned you sleepy and stupid at noon, the cool that revived you in the early evening, priming you for beer and horny mischief, and the way the rains came later on, hammering on tin roofs, turning streets into rivers. I wanted them to know what that was like. I wanted them to see how money worked, what it means to be rich and not deserve it and poor, piss-poor, and nothing you could do about it. I wanted them to be strangers, surrounded by strangers, by people who looked at them, and thought, okay, how can I use these Americans? I wanted them to be smiled at, seduced, hustled, used, to learn the meaning of the word maybe, to see what people will do when they’re willing to do anything. I wanted them to get sick and get well down there, to be homesick in the morning and go native at night. And at the end of it all, I wanted to know I could save them.

  They could fly it in three hours, Guam to Manila, with no land in between, only deep ocean and an imaginary line that separates a place that happens to be part of the United States—the Marianas Islands—from a place that used to be part of the United States, but not anymore, the Philippines. And down in the water, that line between first world and third, the lucky and the unlucky, the kitchen and the cockroaches. You’ve got to cross that line at least once in your life, or you’re not human. My father had the Depression: he knew what it was like losing it all and starting over. I had the war, not just the fighting and the prison camp but the hold of the Nagasaki Maru, praying that the American torpedoes wouldn’t miss. Albert and Chester and Ward, too, were part of a generation that never learned how bad life can be. So, for them, the Philippines was perfect.

  Have you ever been to Guam? (There’s a line to try on folks, if you ever need to clear out a room.) Home was in a ranch house in Agana Heights, a sprawling air-conditioned place that suited me fine, three bedrooms, den and TV room, industrial-size kitchen with twin deep-freezes that could embarrass a mortuary, a kitchen nook where we ate all our meals, a dining room no one dined in, a living room no one ever lived in, and a garage that I converted into my office, plenty room for my secretary, plus any lawyers or accountants I might be needing. I needed them plenty, sometimes, but not as much as they needed me and they didn’t mind it a bit, working in a garage.

  These days, there was another room in the house that had a hospital bed and a pharmacy of pills and a dialysis machine, all mine, and a Filipina nurse, full-time. She came when Sheila was dying and she agreed to stick around for my exit. Two one-way tickets to punch. Lupus erythematosus. If it sounds familiar it’s because Ferdinand Marcos had the same disease. He lived with it awhile and stayed ahead of it awhile. You go down, you bounce back up. Eventually, though, the bouncing stops. The boys knew that I needed treatments but I never named the disease. I just had “off days,” now and then, the way an athlete might go on the injured list with a torn muscle or a sprained ankle. That’s how Chester and Albert thought of it, which was just as well. I had some pills, too, for when the off days took over.

  I couldn’t travel much. I hadn’t planned to, but there’s a difference between choosing not to travel and being told you can’t and it’s the difference between a quiet life at home and house arrest. You looked at things differently. This house, for instance. My last. No more moving days for me. That sickroom was the room that I entered alive, one of these days, and came out dead. That hospital bed which I peeked at from the hallway, that was my deathbed, waiting for me, all neatly made up. Nobody knew the exact time of his death and no one wanted to. But I knew the place.

  Granted, it’s not exactly a news flash when you learn, at the age of seventy-two, that you’re running out of time. Everybody did. The boys kept it light around here, disorganized and noisy, phones always ringing, cars in the driveway, people knocking on the door or not bothering to, just coming in to sleep on couches and eat. Till they left, my nurse spent most of her time cooking pork barbecue for Chester’s freeloading compadres. We had our own way of speaking about my problem. If they asked me how was I feeling and I had a bad day, I’d say, “Don’t ask.” If it was an okay day, I’d say, “Next question.” On a good day, they’d ask me that same question and I’d fire back, “None of your damn business!”

  I’d been getting weekly phone calls from Baby Ronquillo, telling me more than I needed to know about how Graceland was doing. She sent me copies of the bookkeeping, she sent me photographs, newspaper clippings, tape recordings. She pleaded for me to come visit. Maybe she sensed I couldn’t travel or maybe she wanted me to tell her that I couldn’t and explain why. There was also the chance she really wanted to see me. Her driver would pick me up at Ninoy Aquino Memorial Airport, Baby promised. I could stay at her home. “I have an entire mansion to myself, Colonel Parker.” She made it sound like she was sitting alone in a heart-shaped bed, doing her nails, waiting for me to call. “You have your own bedroom, your own bathroom, a maid, a lavandera, a driver.” My old flame. In at the beginning, in at the end.

  When Chester came up with this Elvis idea and Dude went along with it and they found Professor Ward Wiggins singing in a pay toilet, I realized I needed a partner in Manila. I was too sick to handle both ends of the deal. Several dozen Guam-based Filipinos were more than happy to suggest investments, from mining to mariculture, garment factories to five-star hotels. Joint ventures, limited partnership, tax holidays, repatriation of profits: I heard it all. But when I said I was interested in a bar nightclub, the M.B.A.’s went blank. A bar nightclub? Yes. Not a hotel, then? Or a golf course? No, a bar nightclub. Not in Manila, either, not in Cebu, Palawan, or Mindoro or any of the islands marked for tourist development. I wanted to open my bar in—are you sitting down?—Olongapo. That’s right, the liberty port, the Navy town, the big bad Babylon of the Philippines. So, in the end, I called Baby Ronquillo.

  We’d done business before. Twenty years ago, when Saipan was opening up, I started importing labor from the Philippines for the new hotels they were building along the invasion beach, Chalan Kanoa to Garapan. I brought in construction workers, electricians, plumbers, gardeners, waitresses, entertainers, you name it. Back then, I’d looked into Baby’s background and it was quite a story. She’d come out of nowhere. She’d done what was necessary. She was a piece of work. And play.

  “One final question.” This was in my suite at the Manila Hotel, fifteen years ago. We’d spent the day planning how to bring Filipinos into Guam and Saipan, where they were needed, that’s for sure, needed if not welcome. No one seemed to have told Pacific Islanders that those hotels they wanted to build and get rich off of required laborers. Two jobs per room. Modern hospitals required doctors and nurses, those bars and karaoke parlors, those farms and fishing boats, they all generated jobs that locals didn’t want or couldn’t do. And then there were the maids—even the welfare cases on Saipan hired maids back then, $150 per month. So we were bringing them in by the planeload, Baby and me. She handled her end, I handled mine. Money was in the air.

  “One final question,” Baby Ronquillo said. We’d signed contracts. We’d eaten a room-service meal, shared a bottle of Piper-Heidsick, we’d opened the curtains for a view of the bay at sunset. By day, the bay stinks, but at night it twinkles.

  “What’s that?”

  “Have you tried a Filipina?” I loved her nonchalance, as if she were
asking, had I revisited Corregidor.

  “Not lately,” I said. “I’m married.”

  She nodded gravely. “This is good, to be married. Everybody should marry, someday. I hope to myself.” She laughed. “Many times. Nevertheless … you haven’t?”

  “Like I said. Not lately.” Sheila and I had been together thirty years and I hadn’t stepped out on her, not once. But here was Baby Ronquillo, kicking off her shoes and walking across the room toward me and I guessed she’d be right against me in a minute and that would be it, case closed. But she stopped, just out of reach, and let me look at her, at what I could say yes or no to. Take a good look. At a body toned and tuned and taken care of, but a peasant body to start with, generous here, strong there, hair that was bunched in the back of her head, though a wisp of it had come loose around her ear and she was kind of playing with it, wrapping it around her finger, as if waiting for me to say whether she should tuck that bit of hair back in or let it all come tumbling down.

  “How far down does it go?” I asked.

  Later—a couple years later—I asked Baby Ronquillo whether we’d have gone to bed if we hadn’t done business, if we’d met at a party or a dinner. Or if the business we’d done hadn’t gone well.

  “Of course not,” she said. She thought it was a foolish question, the idea of sleeping with someone just because you liked the looks of them. It wasn’t just silly, it was frivolous and wasteful. It was kid stuff and Baby Ronquillo, as I came to discover, took life seriously.

  “So it’s all about business?” I asked. Baby on top. Did I detect a small change of expression as she felt me enter? Her hair brushed over the tops of my legs. Amazing.

  “My colonel,” she said. “One thing, it leads to another. We negotiate. We agree. We sign contract. Your name, my name. Now we … we dot the i. No?”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes …” I could feel her moving. “And we cross the t.”

  Baby and I got together often in the late seventies and early eighties, when the Japanese were turning Saipan into Florida. During that time, she was married twice, once to a Marcos cabinet minister, once to a Chinese-Filipino banker. Never mind. Baby was faithful—to old lovers. We managed to dot the i and cross the t.

  Saipan was full, pretty much, by the late eighties. Enough hotels, resorts, duty-free shops. Too many, probably. The Filipinos kept coming—by 1990 they outnumbered the locals, the Chamorros—but the big real estate deals and construction projects were over and I’d taken my money out, just ahead of court rulings that challenged outside ownership of land through local proxies, my usual method. Locals complained they were losing their culture. Besides, a recession was choking off investment from Japan. So Baby and I lost touch. The last time I heard from her was a fax she sent when Sheila died and I thought that was kind of classy, her condolences, like you never apologize for the things you do or the love you have.

  I didn’t hear much from Baby after that. No business, no pleasure. It was that simple. But I heard about her. The woman who’d started handling an endless stream of copycat Filipino bands—you name it, we play it—was an international commodities trader now. A competitor. In Singapore she competed with Tamils and Sri Lankans, in Malaysia with Indonesians and Pakistanis, in Saudi Arabia with all of those, Egyptians and Palestinians as well. In Europe she competed—but only in some categories—with Turks, Algerians, Tunisians. They got the manual labor. But no one wished to leave their child in the care of an Algerian maid. Those demure, English-speaking Catholic Filipinas owned the market for maids, also for entertainers, everywhere in hotels, at resorts, on cruise ships, the Manila band, the Manila masseuse, hostess, dancer. Some categories stayed constant, others rose and fell. It was a commodities market. People’s labor—people themselves—were commodities, like coffee and pork bellies. An oil glut, a revolutionary Islamic government, a tariff or a value-added tax or a change in quotas on television sets, all affected the lines of people outside her Shipshape offices, the newcomers and repeaters, the virgins and whores. Once, people moved freely from place to place, settling new lands. No more. They couldn’t enter as citizens. They could not come as slaves. Baby’s business was somewhere in between. And Baby’s business was good.

  As soon as I contacted her about doing something together in Olongapo, Baby had a Guam lawyer sniff around for what he could dig up about me. She may have loved me once, but she wanted all the information she could get, business being business. She wanted updates, suits, filings, recent figures, whatever there was. She didn’t get much and, knowing her, she was aching with curiosity, practically humming “We’ve Only Just Begun” when she sent me the monthly totals from Graceland. When she called, she never failed to ask, “How can I better serve you?” It was a business question but she made it sound like she was proposing sex. And she was. They went together, for Baby Ronquillo. Sex and business got stuck together a long time ago. Both were about screwing someone and getting paid for it. “What do you really want?” she asked, long-distance, from Manila. Bedroom and boardroom, all the same to Baby.

  She was good. I put $100,000 into Graceland and I had $30,000 back after six months. I wouldn’t have been doing that well if Baby didn’t think there were bigger deals yet to come. If she was cooking the books, she was doing it in my favor. Bars and nightclubs didn’t make that kind of money. She was out to impress me. And commit me. And—just warming up—she hooked Dude.

  Those first months, Dude did nothing but complain about the dirt, the food, the heat. It was one pitiful letter after another, and late-night phone calls, like a prisoner calling a lawyer. Then it stopped. Suddenly. Totally. Disturbingly. No news was not good news, not when you send Albert and Chester Lane to the Philippines. For several weeks I sat tight, fighting off the urge to call. And then the phone rang at one in the morning and for once it wasn’t one of their old friends, looking for one of the Lane brothers. It was one of the Lane brothers, it was Dude, looking for me.

  “Uncle Pete?”

  “Where are you, son?” I made myself sound calm. At least it was him calling, not the police, the embassy, or some funeral parlor. Damn, when you’re young and the phone wakes you in the middle of the night, you worry about your mother and father. When you’re old, you worry about your kids. So I told them never to call, put it in writing. When the phone did ring, though, I worried that much more. And I worried when it didn’t. That’s family for you.

  “In Olongapo. We just finished for the night.”

  “How’s it going down there?”

  “Going good, Uncle Pete. You were right about this. It’s going real good.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, son.”

  “I know my letters sounded down. We arrived and the place hit me kind of hard.”

  “I guessed it would.”

  “Culture shock, they call it. A whole world of hurt out here. It wasn’t my fault. But still …”

  “I only wanted you and your brother to see it. I never figured you could cure it.”

  “I’m better now. That’s why I’m calling. You know Mrs. Ronquillo? The lady who set things up for us down here?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s gone way out of her way for me. She practically adopted me. She’s had me over to her house. …”

  “Yes …”

  “Well, she makes movies down here. They’re not great movies. But she’s starting to use me in them. She sees that I’m an actor more than anything, that Elvis is just a part I’m playing. Not like Ward. We’ve got to talk about Ward. Uncle Pete, sometimes it feels like Jonestown down here. It’s getting weird.”

  “Tell me about yourself, son. You’re family. He’s not.”

  “Little parts. Walk-ons, really, a couple lines. You want to hear the first?”

  There was silence. My son getting into character, I guessed. Then it came.

  “I have ways of making her talk.” More silence: coming out of character. “How’d you like it, Uncle Pete?”

  “I’ve h
eard it before,” I said. “But I can’t say I’ve heard it better.”

  “It’s a start. Mrs. Ronquillo signed me to a contract. She says she wants to develop me.”

  “Did you sign it?”

  “Sure. But I haven’t told you the best. Baby’s dream, she says, is to make a film that will break out of the local market. Not just sex and violence but drama, character-based drama. That’s what I’ve been working on.”

  “You mean you’re writing?”

  “Every minute I get, Uncle Pete. I don’t go around the clubs, I don’t chase women anymore. They don’t chase me. I barely drink beer.”

  “I’m happy to hear that, son. You’re making me happy.”

  “Happy’s just the start, Uncle Pete. I’m going to make you proud.”

  I choked up then, I barely finished the call. Then Dude sent me the contract Baby Ronquillo had gotten him to sign and I choked up again. Basically, she owned exclusive and continuing rights to represent him forever, anywhere, no matter what. I was going to have to do something about that; he’d signed his life away to Baby.

  Then, Chester. They’d never invented a game that Chester Lane couldn’t play. I don’t mean basketball, football, track, and swimming. Those were snaps. I mean you could take Chester to a bullfight or a jai alai court and he’d be out there doing fine. He could fish, fix cars and toasters. But he couldn’t read or write much. Hell, back when Sheila was alive, just barely, Chester took a piece of mahogany into shop class and turned it into a serving tray that was beautiful, polished, even, and straight. Except he put a message on it that he carved himself: TO ANT SHEILA, LOVE FROM CHESTER. My wife looked at that. It was the last time in her life she laughed. Then she told me Chester would be attending the University of Guam.