The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “You don’t understand,” I finally said. “We’re the Elvis Presley show. You hired us. We don’t pay to stay here. As a matter of fact, you pay us.”

  “Just a moment,” the clerk said, and out came a busy-looking Japanese man, barely polite, who admitted, yes, this was where we were booked. But he’d canceled, he said. The hotel, as we could see, was half-finished and ten percent full. He hadn’t heard from our manager, Ms. Baby Ronquillo. He still awaited her response. He agreed, as a professional courtesy, to give us lodging while he sought to reach her again. The cost of the lodging would figure in any later settlement, of course.

  “So … no show?” I asked.

  “Who for?” the manager replied. “There are thirty guest now in hotel. They go scuba diving all day. They come back tired, eat, go sleep.”

  “Suppose you invited local people,” I suggested. “Introduce them to the new hotel?”

  “Not a good idea,” the manager said. His meaning was clear. This place wasn’t for local people, not today, maybe never. I figured we should leave now. But the next plane to Manila wasn’t for three days. We’d have to buy tickets and—when I asked the manager for the registered packet that had waited for us at every other stop—we got a shrug. Our salary had been deposited in the Philippines all along but expenses and onward tickets were sent everywhere we went. Except Palau.

  After a long back-and-forth, they agreed to throw in three days of meals—alcohol at our own expense—and gave us keys to some rooms that weren’t quite finished. There were empty soda cans in the bathroom, a tube of putty on the bottom of the bathtub, a pile of wood shavings in the corner, waiting to be removed or maybe to stay forever underneath a carpet that was rolled up, out in the hall. And there was a hole in the wall, like a giant empty mailbox, where the air conditioner was going to sit.

  All the rest of that first day, I tried to reach Baby Ronquillo. She was out of the country. Why wasn’t I surprised? This wasn’t a string of accidents. We were being fucked over, not up. The following morning I went to the local government, to the office of the president of the Republic of Palau, and explained the jam we were in. Maybe the president was an Elvis fan, I don’t know. They turn up in the oddest places. So the next night we gave a free public concert at the local high school, in a crowded auditorium that doubled as a basketball court, and that night was a sauna.

  Knowing then what I know now, I should have paid attention to every minute, filing it away for forever. We’d sagged some lately, I admit, but that night in Palau we were pumped up, knowing that we were singing in exchange for tickets that would get us out of there, singing for our freedom almost. There were a couple of other things, besides. There was a challenge in the air. We sensed something about Palau, something sullen, something that said, hey, you came here, you came to my island, you came to me. So how big a deal are you, if you’re here? How big—really—could you possibly be? To come to a place that isn’t yours, a small place where you don’t belong? And with what? With funny costumes and old songs, that you want us to pay for?

  Even Ward perked up, one last time. They were the youngest audience we’d ever faced, grade school, high school, community college. They hadn’t paid to see us. The choice was between us and homework. But as soon as we saw them, laughing, restless, noisy, chewing betelnut and popping gum and snapping open soda cans, fanning themselves with papers while overhead fans slapped at locker-room air the way a lazy cow swooshes its tail at a swarm of flies, as soon as we saw all that, I think the three of us decided to see if we couldn’t just kick ass.

  We did the hard songs we hadn’t done for a while. Chester did “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” I unloaded on “Jailhouse Rock.” Ward couldn’t quite tear himself away from “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” his recent theme song, but then, when his act could have ended, he brought us all onstage for “American Trilogy,” half-horseshit, half-holy, I used to say, but this one night we traded off on it, back and forth, the three of us, like it would never end. And yet we knew it was ending, I swear we did, that this was our last stop and that’s why we kept singing, because we didn’t want to let go of it, because when we stopped that would be it for us. So, in the end, Ward won another argument with me. I was the guy who said that those old songs would go flat, the more we sang them. But here we were, end of the road, end of the world, and we were never better. We had them, just like in Olongapo. On the way back to the hotel, driving across a causeway with the windows open and the tide high and the warm wind coming in off the lagoon, we kept singing. We sang all the way back to the hotel, where Baby Ronquillo was waiting.

  “Your uncle … your father … Colonel Parker died,” she said.

  Chestnut and I were flying back to Guam where Uncle Pete’s ashes were waiting for us to take them out to sea. Ward walked us out to the parking lot. He wanted to go to Olongapo. We knew why. When it came time for us to split—which meant split up—he just stood there, looking at us. I remember that hot heavy air, that greenhouse tropical morning, that sense of sharing our lives for the last time.

  “Thanks for everything,” Ward said. “For putting up with me and all.”

  “I’m thanking you,” I said. “We had a real good ride.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “We were good. We were better than I ever thought we’d be.”

  “Well …” Biggest Elvis fumbled. He took compliments badly.

  “Let me just get this over with, damn it,” I said. “I gave you some shit, especially at the start. But in the end you were right, Ward. We had magic. And you were the magician.”

  “Not me. The time and the place.”

  “That’s what a magician does. Finds the time and the place. You did that. And I’m thanking you. Uncle Pete used to say that if you were good at something, no matter what, you wouldn’t settle for anything else that was second-rate. So that’s what I’m taking away from this. Thanks.”

  “You guys are talking like it’s over,” Chester protested. He was a wreck. I was hurting, but not like Chester.

  “Not as long as you remember,” Ward told him. “Then it’s not over.”

  Ward Wiggins

  “The night they announced that the Senate rejected the bases treaty, late that night,” said Billy Bowers, “is when it happened.”

  I saw black smoke stains around Graceland’s doors and windows. I saw carpet puddles and broken glass around the bars. The sinks and coolers were gone, the chairs and light fixtures also. The balcony level, where the VIP lounges had been, had collapsed down into the main showroom and part of the roof had followed. Malou’s jukebox was still there, the front bashed in, where someone had reached in to steal the records. The back bar and dressing room had been picked clean too. The place dripped and stank and I knew no phoenix would be hatching out of this pile of ashes. So, a small moment of silence among the rot and drips. Elvis had left the building.

  “I’ll tell you what was in the newspapers,” Billy said. “Some radicals burned you out. Torched the last stronghold of American imperialism. A symbol of exploitation. Like that priest says: ‘Disgraceland.’ The will of the people. All that bullshit.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “Hey, friend, what do I know?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “The fire department? They showed up before the fire started. They were out back, drinking beer. There’s important people own the neighboring buildings.”

  “Say it, Billy.”

  “I’m saying nothing. But I’ve been around.”

  At the Palau airport earlier that day, I had seen Baby Ronquillo sitting in the department lounge. She was by herself. The dozens of Filipino contract workers waiting for the same flight kept their distance. They worked for her, after all. But I didn’t, not anymore. I sat down right next to her. Then I just stared out, as if we were next to each other on a subway or a bus.

  “I’ll miss him,” she said, after a while. “You don’t know.”
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  “Colonel Parker.”

  “He was one of the old-time Americans. The ones who never apologized. That was their way.”

  I wondered why she was telling this to someone she’d never see again. Then I saw that the question answered itself.

  “You don’t know this,” she continued. “How … fragile … you Americans are. The most fragile. The Japanese never change. Nor the Chinese. A Frenchman or a German, they stay as they are. But the Americans … I always knew they wouldn’t be around forever.”

  That’s when she stopped and she didn’t say another word, from then until the time they called us out to the plane to Manila.

  When I had pictured the girls of Graceland, I saw them in Elvira’s apartment. I saw Dolly cooking and Whitney reading a paperback, Elvira and Priscilla and Lucy Number Three looking through magazines, ransacking closets, trying on clothing, and Malou just sitting there, being Malou, watching it all, waiting for the right minute, waiting for me. They’d had plenty to talk about, I bet. After the treaty rejection, there’d have been endless roundtables about where to go and what to do. That was the talk I wanted to hear. What next for the girls of Graceland, what next for Biggest Elvis? I still thought we were in it together, that I’d come walking in, throw my bags on the floor, hear them arguing out in the kitchen. I’d surprise them. Whitney would jump up and hug me. “Did you bring me any books, Biggest Elvis?” Dolly and Elvira and the rest, even Lucy Number Three, they’d all embrace me. Malou would let all the others get to me first, watching with deadpan eyes. “So,” she would say, “you’ve come back.” I’d sit at the table, take my place among them, order out for food and say, “All right, let’s start putting it all back together.”

  Elvira’s apartment was the best in Olongapo. It had a fountain in front, even though it was dry and filled with mango peels. It had a circular driveway. It had a doorman who told me that the place was empty. The gentleman from Brunei had stopped paying rent and Ms. Elvira was gone. I could look for myself if I wanted. Graceland was next: a burned-out ruin that wasn’t worth tearing down because there wouldn’t be much action on Magsaysay Street for a while. Soul City was open but empty. Billy was small-time, no live music, only a few girls who came and went as they pleased. He could hunker down, live off his retirement, run his bar out of a refrigerator. Up and down the street, the biggest places were sunk or sinking, the Corral, Foxy Lady, Disco Inferno, Plato’s Cave, Heavenly Harbor, Miss Liberty, a long row of boarded windows and tattered awnings and signs that offered bar/restaurant fixtures for sale.

  It wasn’t just the bars and nightclubs either. The restaurants and barbershops were folding up, the T-shirt and sandal makers. No more gaudy silky jackets, no more carved water buffalo. I’d guessed—and hoped—that it would get wilder and wilder here, as it came nearer to closing time for Uncle Sam. I was looking for a crescendo, a countdown, the last week, the next to last night, the last, the twelfth of never. But the base was just dribbling away.

  I left my luggage with Billy and took a jeepney out to Barrio Barretto, to the neighborhood that had been known as Elvisville. It started raining as I headed down the path toward my house, a hard rain that sent people scurrying for shelter, except for some women who were doing laundry in the stream. It didn’t matter to them, those sheets of rain.

  Wet past caring, still I hoped that I’d see a house or half of a house coming at me out of the rain. Just something that would tell me Malou had been taking care of business while I was gone. I would stand in a doorway, maybe, shelter under half a roof, considering the decisions that Malou had made. It was all going to be her design—she’d enjoyed making sketches—and I wondered what she’d pictured for us.

  If I lingered upon my anticipation, it wasn’t because I really believed that something would be waiting for me on the beach. I could feel in my bones that nothing was there. But I wanted to remember what I’d been hoping all those months, I wanted to review those pictures that I’d carried in my mind, the way I might remember the words of a song I wouldn’t be singing anymore, “Auld Lang Syne,” on the eve of a new year I wouldn’t be around to see the end of.

  So: nothing. The old burned-out house had been cleared away. The makings of a new home, the cement blocks, the piles of lumber, the metal roofing that I’d seen piled there, the day before we left to Brunei, those had also vanished. There was nothing to show that I had ever lived there. Or ever would. I stood there for a while—not long—and headed back up the path. And then, at the very place where he’d stopped me once before, on a moonlit night, at the very beginning of the magic, the old man was waiting for me. Santos: I was glad I remembered his name. He’d kept his promise to watch over my house, he said. Day and night, he’d stayed there, sleeping on—or under—the same plastic sheet that covered the lumber. But the workers stopped coming. No one told him why. Then the landowner said that the woman Malou had never come to pay the agreed price. And, one day, some people came, more than he could talk to, and the pieces of my house disappeared, up and down the beach. Here, he said, handing me a piece of paper that was wet and much folded, like an old treasure map, the names of the people who took and a list of things that they had taken. So I could get back what was mine. I nodded and thanked him and said that what was lost was lost and I didn’t think I’d be living there anymore, but wherever I went I would never find a neighbor as good as he had been. I made a mistake then. I reached for my wallet. He shook his head and slipped off the trail, back into the muddy field, and walked away.

  “Santos!” I called out after him, hating myself for offering money. At the end of it all, I made a beginner’s—a dumb tourist’s—mistake. He stopped and turned toward me. “Thank you. Thank you.” He waved and disappeared into the rain, which was harder now. I couldn’t see if the Elvis scarecrows were still standing in the gardens.

  I dried off and changed clothes at Billy’s place, in an upstairs room that some girls once used as a crib: a bed, a crucifix, a bucket of water, austere as a monastery cell. I spent three days there, trying to get a line on Malou and the others. I asked jeepney drivers, guards, street kids, regular customers, departing military I saw on the street. At nights, I cruised the bars that were holding on, all the way from Olongapo to Subic City. I found a few of the girls working in other clubs and they told me about others, who’d gone back to the provinces. But no one knew about the gang at the jukebox. They’d left early, before Graceland burned, they’d left together and that was all anybody knew.

  I tried Baby Ronquillo. If they’d gone overseas, as I suspected, chances were that Shipshape had placed them. She’d promised to take care of Graceland girls and maybe she’d kept her word. I called Manila and got nowhere. “Who may I say is calling?” “What is this in reference to?” And—rudest of all—“I’ll see if she’s in,” followed by the response that she was in a meeting, or out of town, or overseas. Could someone else help me? No one could. Job placements were privileged information. And so forth. I called Baby Ronquillo’s home and got past the maid. A man came on the line. He didn’t identify himself but I recognized his voice.

  “Where’d they go, Jimmy?” I asked. “Malou and the others?”

  “Somewhere across the sea,” he sang. “I guess. Who the hell knows?”

  “Do you?”

  “Give it up, Biggest Elvis.”

  “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll take it from there. And I’ll never bother you again.”

  “The right direction? Where would that be? Hong Kong and Tokyo and Taipei are north. Singapore is south. Kuala Lumpur is west, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Europe, east and west, depends which way you travel. The world being round and all.”

  “Where’d they go? Please?”

  “Anywhere there’s a squealing baby or a drooling grandparent, a pile of dirty dishes or laundry, a runny nose or a stiff cock.”

  Before long, my search felt foolish. It felt foolish when people recognized me, Biggest Elvis out of costume, out of work, another big American
lumbering around the sidewalks of Olongapo. I didn’t like the looks I got, even from the Graceland girls I found working in dirt-floored dives, serving warm beer with ice cubes. So, their looks seemed to say, you’re still here. You want anything? Want me? One morning—my last in Olongapo—I took an inch of sideburn off my face. After that, people weren’t so sure about me. Even Father Domingo Alcala had trouble recognizing me.

  “I thought of you the day the Senate voted down the treaty,” he said. I’d come late in the afternoon, waiting on his porch when he came back from his walk. He recognized me by my voice. Then he grabbed my hands, held them, said he’d missed me. He gave me dinner, brought out cognac. “I talked to you, Biggest Elvis. What I’d worked for had come to pass. All those years of speaking and marching and letter writing. But I pictured you. We talked. I said to you, See, my people tell you that money isn’t everything. And you laughed back at me and said, That’s only because we didn’t offer enough of it. You were there. And you were there the night that Graceland burned. I was there, watching your … your temple … turn to smoke. And I thought, well, that’s two victories in one day. Next to me on the sidewalk are some Graceland girls and they were crossing themselves and weeping. And you were there.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s over now. … Just for the record, Father … who burned Graceland?”

  “The same man who burned your house,” he said nonchalantly. As though he’d been reading sports pages and I’d asked him the score. I couldn’t tell whether he was admitting to two crimes or to none.