The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “What goes on here?” I asked Malou. “Doesn’t anybody go out anymore?”

  “They prefer not to,” she said. That cracked me up: a line right out of Bartleby the Scrivener. Just say no. Here in a town that always said yes, if the money was right.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. The Graceland women were looking better all the time. Afternoons, I’d seen salesmen coming in with clothing, racks and suitcases, and I don’t mean Frederick’s of Hollywood. Conservative, tailored, dress-for-success stuff.

  “Some of the girls went out,” Malou said, glancing at the sheet where she recorded bar fines. It had some names on it, but not as many as I’d have expected. Thirty out of sixty had hooked up with someone. Any self-respecting American sorority would have a better batting average, any Saturday night.

  “They do as they please,” Malou explained. ‘They don’t always go with the customers. They make enough money as it is. What you see is the result.”

  The result I saw was a dozen beautiful women waiting for the food I ordered. Talk about happiness. Graceland was changing and they were changing too. Graceland was in a state of grace.

  “These foreigners come in,” Whitney said. “And they think they can have us …” She put a lovely tapering hand on my knee to emphasize her point, snapped two fingers of the other hand. “Have us like that.”

  “You know what I say to them?” Now it was Lucy Number Three. Malou’s sheet told me that she’d had a doubleheader that night. If Whitney was fashion-model stunning, Lucy Number Three was our goddess of sex. “Whitney has the face that launched a thousand ships,” Dolly had said, “and Lucy Number Three has the body that will sink them.” Lucy Number Three had the figure you see in cartoons. She was one of the ones who didn’t just tolerate sex, she enjoyed it. Her tricks were contests, conquests. The customers left her, not just poorer, but smaller. She intimidated people. So I was surprised to hear her speak.

  “This American … officer … he is drunk … he wants me to go with him … to his car outside … in middle of show … Dude Elvis is singing ‘I Want you, I Need You, I Love You.’ The American sings along. I tell him he should be quiet. He looks at me, says okay, we go outside now. … I tell him, he should go to Subic City.”

  “There are many other places for him,” Whitney declared.

  “We are not that kind of girl,” Lucy Number Three said. “Necessarily.”

  All of a sudden, we had a talk show going. First they were confiding, then they were bragging about the guys they’d turned down, the customers they’d told off. They were competing, topping each other. I knew that this late-night jukebox bunch were in the minority. Some of our girls would do anything. But these were the elite. Can I say it? The role models? They set the tone and the tone was changing. Suddenly, hearing them talk, I was smiling.

  “Other bars …” Priscilla was speaking. She’d been “married, or something” to an Australian, Malou had said. She’d gotten overseas and she could have stayed. Her English was good but she rarely wasted it on someone who wasn’t a customer. I’d never had two words from her. Until now. “Other bars the girls attack the customers. As soon as the American sits down, one girl is in his lap, another is giving a shoulder massage, number three wants drinks for the table. Other bars, the girls ask, ask, ask. The customer says yes or no. At Graceland …,” she turned and nodded at me, “the customer asks, the girl says yes or no.”

  “And we know who made this happen,” Whitney said. Before I knew it, she leaned into me and planted a chaste kiss on my lips. Startling. “Biggest Elvis.”

  Happiness.

  When I got back to the beach the day after the fire, my neighbors were sorting through what was left of my house, separating smoked metal from charred wood. They stood around, as if in mourning, as if it were their fault. They told me they’d help me rebuild. They wanted me among them, they said, though they were sure there were many other, better places I could go. These weren’t Graceland customers either. They were people who fished a little, farmed a little, waited for checks from relatives who were working overseas. They lived in houses they put together after every hard wind. But they liked having Elvis around. Happiness.

  I said I’d pay for the lumber, the roofing, the wiring, the plumbing. And their labor. And the property. In Malou’s name. I guessed that we’d be back in a matter of weeks, they were that anxious to have me. After the other neighbors left, I talked awhile to Santos. He was the old man who’d met me on the trail with his fighting cock, which was the first time I knew for sure that there was magic around me. Santos didn’t sleep much, he now told me, and almost never at night. The older he got, the less he slept. When he died, he said, he expected that he wouldn’t sleep at all. He wasn’t joking and I didn’t laugh. He wanted to spend the nights on the porch of my next house. He would watch while I slept, he said. I had just thanked him when I saw Father Alcala walking toward me.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said. He looked as if he’d had his own house burned. He was red-eyed and ashen-faced and unshaven. We’d both been up all night but I’d had Malou. God knows what he’d been wrestling with. Guilt, probably.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” I said, staring at him closely. “I wish I could offer you a seat.”

  “You’re all right?” he asked.

  “As you see,” I said. “We were down the beach, at a baptismal party.”

  “I was invited there,” he said. “I forgot.”

  “Elvis Presley de Ocampo,” I said. “The hits just keep on coming.”

  This spawn of Elvises bothered him, I knew, but he managed a weak smile. I should have left it at that but out came one of those half-ironic, half-funny—half-assed—lines I couldn’t resist around him. “Don’t worry, Father. It’ll be a long time before we catch up with all the kids in this country named ‘Jesus.’”

  He nodded, too polite or appalled to respond. Still, I wasn’t done.

  “We’re gaining, though.” I was usually the kind of man who thought, too late, of things he should have said. Around Father Domingo, I said things that I later realized I should have withheld.

  “I’ve been missing you,” I said. “You don’t come to Graceland anymore.”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “I want you to know that I’m sorry that whatever is happening … is happening.” Awful sentence but I saw him nod agreement. He needed me a little more than I needed him. “I consider you my friend,” I said. “No matter what.”

  “So am I,” he said. “I’m sorry too.”

  “I know I’ve given you some hard times,” I said. “Those wisecracks of mine. I pushed them too far. Once you start with that kind of—”

  “I’m glad you survived,” he interrupted. At that moment, I think he was glad. Though he didn’t look that way, walking away from me.

  Sometimes I thought that it would go on forever, I was that happy. Other times, I was sure it would end: nobody was supposed to stay happy that way, that long. And my happiness was just mine. It was like the songs we sang, something that was passing, bit by bit, words and music, into the public domain. I think first of Chester Lane, who was in love the way people weren’t supposed to fall in love in this wised-up age, in this of all towns, chastely in love in a place where sex cost the price of a six-pack. Everybody who met Chester worried about him, and with reason. He was innocent and the flip side of innocence is ignorance. You can’t have one without the other. So everybody worried, that he’d get picked off by some shrewd little hustler who’d trade ring-wise screwing for a green card and a ticket to the States and would end up breaking Chester’s heart. Or maybe he’d find some female version of himself, someone equally naive, and then they’d both get taken advantage of. If they lived in the Philippines her family would be all over him, and if they left, then another kind of disaster would result because you couldn’t picture Mr. and Mrs. Chester Lane hacking it on the mainland. She’d be homesick and miserable. And he’d be bro
ke. I doubted the Elvis act would travel. What else would Chester come up with? Summer camp counselor? But then God dropped all his other projects and Baby Elvis hooked up with Christina.

  “He thinks the world of you,” Christina told me, the first time we met. She never set foot in Graceland but orders had come from Baby Ronquillo that we should do a concert at a college in Baguio. Somebody owed somebody else a favor, I guessed. I resisted special appearances. We had something special going at Graceland and I felt uncomfortable before an audience that didn’t have Malou in the corner by the jukebox, or Dolly organizing tables full of drunks, or Whitney peeking out from one of the VIP lounges, scanning the room for Mr. Right. But Malou said we couldn’t say no to Baby Ronquillo. So we formed a convoy—a van and a jeepney—and headed north.

  Malou shrugged me off when I asked her to come along. “Why would I want to do that?” she asked. Baby Elvis brought Christina, though. And we sat together in the van. Dude was there too, stretched out in back, sleeping. Christina was tall for a Filipina, a little like Whitney, but where Whitney was languorous, Christina was lean and athletic, straight up and head-on. I liked the looks of her but I wasn’t expecting much in the way of conversation, considering who her boyfriend was. “Hi, darling, what’s your favorite food?” Not a peep out of her, for those first miles, up the hill and out of Olongapo, then into the rice country of central Luzon, through fields of volcanic ash, headed for Tarlac. For a while Chester and I discussed the night’s program. We were headed for a church-run college and so we replaced some of the sexier songs—“Jailhouse Rock,” for instance—with “Crying in the Chapel.”

  It was hot inside the van and there was something about riding through the Philippines provinces that stupefied you, something about the endless fields and villages. The land itself was tired, so you got tired too. All the green and open places were claimed, stepped on, used, as if not only the farmers in the fields, not only the water buffalo that dragged plows through the mud, but the land itself were a beast of burden, carrying more than it could bear. After a while, there was nothing new. The cities that we drove through were forlorn Mexican-looking places, built mostly around bus terminals. They came and went and before long I was nodding off, my head against the window, a line of drool forming at the side of my mouth. Falling asleep, I heard our driver honking at everybody—warnings, greetings, insults—playing the horn like an instrument. I slept awhile but I stirred when I sensed a change in the ride. We were going uphill, going around curves that pressed me against the window, to my right, and against Christina, to my left. Now we were among mountains, the kind of landscape you see in old westerns, a river full of boulders, a hillside of more boulders, ready to let go, and pine trees here and there, and tufts of grass along the stream. The air was cool now and smelled of trees. Still groggy, I looked to my left and saw that Christina was studying me. No telling how long. I felt spied upon.

  “You awake?” Chester asked.

  “I guess if I answer I’m awake,” I said.

  “He says he’s awake,” I heard him tell Christina. “You can ask him now. Ward, she’s got a question for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Elvis a drug addict?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. “From your brother?”

  “Was he?” she repeated.

  “He didn’t think so.”

  “I asked you,” she said. “You have studied his life?” No nonsense. She’d bristled when I implied her brother was using her. Now she stayed right on me. You could teach for a long time and not have a student stay on you like that.

  “Well,” I said. “He took a lot of medicine. He had prescriptions from a number of doctors. Tranquilizers, sedatives, uppers and downers. They might have killed him. It’s not entirely clear. Heart arrhythmia, the report said.”

  “That means …” She glanced at Chester to make sure he understood. “His heart stopped. That would be arrhythmia. It means you’re dead. That is like saying you are dead because your heart stopped.”

  I was wide awake now. I saw that Chester had found himself a substantial woman. In the back of the van, Dude kept snoring. He’d been replaced. And he knew it.

  “All right,” I said, determined to give Christina the respect she deserved. “Elvis’ position—if you’d asked him—was that he was not a junkie. All the drugs he took were prescribed for him. They were legal drugs, legally obtained.”

  That was the way I’d once spoken in classrooms, with a certain finality, a tone that said, all right that’s enough class discussion for now, let’s move along. I wanted to keep talking, now that I knew she was worth talking to, but about other things, the school she taught at in Subic City. Her brother. That world—I still didn’t understand it—of down on your knees Saturday night, down on your knees Sunday morning.

  “What you say doesn’t make sense,” she said. Quiet and polite … and direct. “What if the drugs were legal? If a man shoots someone with a legal weapon, it is still murder. And if he drinks himself to death with legal whiskey, he is still an alcoholic. So?”

  I turned away, out the window, to hide the smile on my face. Going up, up, up to Baguio, the cool-weather retreat the Americans built in the mountains of the Luzon Cordillera. They brought in Daniel Burnham, who’d designed the Chicago Midway, to lay out the city, the park and gardens. There were corn and roses in the markets and, from after sunset until midmorning, you wore a jacket against the mountain chill. I liked the way Christina had stayed on me.

  “Sounds like she got you,” Chester Lane, the famous logician, decided.

  “Maybe so,” I said. If this woman loved Chester Lane, he was the luckiest man on earth. After a while, it was Chester’s turn to rest. Christina just told him to get some shut-eye and, like that, he closed his eyes and was gone. As soon as that happened—the kid tucked in and put to sleep—she gave me this look that said, okay, now let’s talk.

  “So how’s your brother?” I asked.

  “Lonely. He was lonely before you came. Now he’s even more lonely.”

  “I’m not in control of what’s happening here,” I said. “This Elvis thing … and how he feels about it. We’re just …you know … out there. Bumping into each other.”

  “If you worked together …”

  “It’s not that way,” I said. “I wish it were. With gods … it’s not the more, the merrier. There’s only so much belief around. Faith. Hope. Only so much.” I glanced over at Chester, curled up in a position that would torture a contortionist, sleeping like a choir boy. “How are the lessons?”

  “They will never end,” she said. “Not if it’s up to my brother.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s up to me, I think.”

  The Baguio Concert was just okay. I remember a basketball court, bleachers left and right, chairs on the floor and the stage we played on at one end, underneath a hoop. Chester charmed them. I spooked them. And—to my surprise—Dude did best. He’d been on automatic pilot in Olongapo but he did a “Peace in the Valley” that went from poignant lyric to gospel shout and back again. It gave me goose bumps. Still, the trip confirmed what I’d felt all along. We were an Olongapo act and I couldn’t wait to get back there. The backups and setup crew wanted to stay overnight and into the following morning. I couldn’t blame them. Baguio was a resort, Olongapo was a dump. But then Christina volunteered to drive the jeepney and take us back down the mountain. We’d leave at midnight and, with luck, we’d meet dawn on Magsaysay Street.

  “Jeez, I don’t know,” Dude said. “She doesn’t look old enough to have a license. Besides, did you see some of those ravines on the way up?”

  “Stop worrying,” Chester said.

  “Worrying? I wouldn’t trust your girlfriend on a bicycle that didn’t have training wheels.”

  “Well, you can stay,” Chester replied. It was the sort of thing he’d never have said a few months ago. Dude knew it. And Dude gave way.

  “You want me to stay here by myself?
In this fresh air?”

  “The place isn’t uninhabited,” Christina countered. Dude looked at me for help but I wanted to get back early. I wanted to surprise Malou.

  “Well,” said Dude, “I’ve heard of plane crashes, motorcycles, cars. Overdoses and shootings. But a jeepney crash.” He looked at Christina. Christina looked at her watch. “Rock and roll heaven.” Dude jumped into the back of the jeepney … and right out. “What is this shit?” he shouted. You couldn’t see out the back of the jeepney, or the sides. It was loaded with dark bundles, baskets, corrugated boxes, and more of it was lashed onto the roof. We looked like refugees.

  “Christina did a little shopping,” Chester apologized. “Down to the market. They grow vegetables up here you can’t find down below.”

  “Corn, cauliflower, beans, eggplant,” Christina said, as though checking a manifest.

  “How many people is she feeding?”

  “Cabbage, cucumbers.” She reached for a bag next to the driver’s seat, opened it, and held it out to Dude. “Strawberries,” she said.

  Dude reached in, inspected, swallowed. Then he smiled at her. He had a devastating smile, when he smiled. Now it felt as though he were smiling at his brother’s wife. Looking back at it now, I realize that Chester and I were what we were. We stayed the same. But the man in the middle was always changing.

  “Got many more of those?” he asked. She handed him the bag. “Okay,” Dude said. “Let’s roll.”

  It was better we went down the mountain road at night, the Marcos Highway, when darkness saved us from seeing what we were going to hit, head-on, and how far off the road we were going to fall. I’ve heard people say you can tell the character of a nation from the way it handles traffic: the tension between public interest and self-interest, discipline versus anarchy. I could tell a few things about Christina, that was for sure. I knew that she could downshift, that she could take curves, calculate passing distance, the speed of oncoming objects, and that—while she did this—she could feed us strawberries and make us sing. We all sang and the idea—her idea—was that we could sing anything that was not by Elvis.