The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “Who is that man?”

  “The American who works with Baby Ronquillo. The Rat. You know him, I think.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “This is what I hear,” he answered. “This American is taken with Malou. Crazy about her, as you say. Crazy, also, without her.”

  “Where are they?” I asked. “Any ideas? All my friends?”

  “Christina, too. God knows.”

  We talked for hours. There were big plans for Subic, Father Domingo said. Tax-free manufacturing zones, duty-free shops, tourist hotels, international airport, the Philippines competing with Singapore and Hong Kong. He had his doubts. When it came time for me to go, he walked me out to the main road. Already barrooms had turned into pool halls and grocery stores. Some were people’s homes. Like that, Subic City had gone from being the nastiest place on earth to just another Philippines town. Remarkable, how quickly the place had changed, as if the difference between good and evil were no more than the clothes that you put on, and took off, depending on the situation. The Americans were gone now. But if they came back—I had to wonder—how long would it take Subic to become what it had been? And, if it happened, if those great gray ships returned to port, would the people here chase chickens out of the cribs, rewire the jukeboxes, restock the coolers?

  “It’s quiet here now,” Father Domingo said. “A man can sleep.”

  I climbed into a jeepney named ROMPIN RAMBO. This was the start of the route, so I sat up front next to the driver and waited while other people crammed in back.

  “I’m sorry to see you go,” he said.

  “Well … anyway … whatever you call what happened to us … you won.”

  He seemed surprised at that. Then he shrugged, like a student who’d been called upon in a class he was having trouble with. It was as though he were asking what I meant, conceding victory to him.

  “The winner is the one who remains in possession of the battlefield when the contest is done,” I said. “That’s the definition, no?”

  He heard me out. Then he checked out the field he’d been left in possession of, which he’d be seeing for the rest of his life and which I was seeing for the last time. A wide spot on the highway, a jeepney pickup zone, people hacking and coughing as they sardined themselves on board. Night falling on a village that was all his, boarded windows and small shops where jukeboxes once had blossomed, when the fleet was in.

  “Another definition,” he said. “The winner is the one who moves on. The loser stays. Where are you going?” Father Domingo asked. It felt as though he wanted to go with me, wherever I went.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m like a Filipino after all. Spin the globe, I might be anywhere.”

  Part Four

  But that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.

  Marlowe,

  The Jew of Malta

  I

  Ward Wiggins

  Sunday is the slaves’ day off. It starts happening in the late morning on both sides of the harbor, Hong Kong and Kowloon, two or three Filipinas parking on the sidewalk, two or three more on pedestrian overpasses near the Star Ferry terminals. Through the afternoon, they keep coming, more every minute, so that if you watch it for a while, it’s like a time-lapse sequence in a film about our crowded planet. A dozen Filipinas become a hundred, a thousand, dozens of thousands, a Woodstock, a refugee camp, a revival meeting. They meet and multiply as the sun mellows over the harbor, as office buildings catch the last of daylight, Victoria Peak mansions gilded with gold, and down below, almost as if they’ve come out of some underground world, the overseas workers converge and claim the empty heart of the city.

  They crowd together—safety in numbers—sitting on sidewalks and on roped-off streets. The parks are closed to them; so are the fountain patios in front of skyscrapers. Roped in, roped off, the Filipinas keep on coming. You hear their voices from blocks away. It happens every Sunday, both sides of the harbor, in Hong Kong and a dozen other cities, from Jeddah to Singapore. They are tolerated, not welcomed. They come to work in places that need them, where they do not belong.

  How could I not be among them, every Sunday, when I would leave piles of uncorrected papers, walking from my studio apartment near the Victoria Peak tram station, taking my walk before supper, when the city cooled off, down to Hong Kong Central, to see the Filipinas sitting on a street lined with closed boutiques—Armani, Salvatore Ferragamo, Wedgwood—lining up to place overseas phone calls, sending money home from mobile bank offices? How could I not be among them, eating, gossiping, just sitting around and staying off the grass? One afternoon wasn’t too much to gamble with, one hour wasn’t too much to walk and hope and wonder about Malou, all the days and miles that had come between us.

  I’d gone back to the States from Olongapo, back to New Jersey, where I’d stayed with my sister, married and the mother of two, who lived in the same town I’d grown up in. New Jersey’s curiosity was limited. There was no question they asked I could not have answered after one week in the Philippines, questions about food and weather. That covered it. There was no way Biggest Elvis could get a college teaching job. My transcript was old, my recent employment unimpressive. I had to come down the ladder a step or two, to high schools and prep schools. I called placement services, I read ads, and a month after arriving in New Jersey I left it, for a foreign school in Oman.

  In a game of spin-the-globe, it was an odd place for a finger to land. I had a comfortable, sterile apartment to which I added not one trace of myself. In the community of overseas educators—adventurers, misfits, missionary types, ex-Peace Corps volunteers, bedraggled trailing spouses—I was another character. For my birthday, my colleagues gave me picture frames, encouraging me to decorate. When I left Oman four months later, the frames stayed behind, with the same pictures they’d been bought with: bright, smiling women, winning children, dogs, sailboats, flowers.

  I was funny in other ways, as well. Oman is where Biggest Elvis melted away. I started my walking at the edges of the day, before sunrise, after sunset. Then I ran. Sometimes—madly—I ran in the middle of the day. That gross, gorgeous oversupply of flesh, that I-don’t-give-a-damn excess that dripped from my cheeks and pressed against my belt, disappeared. Why, I sometimes wondered, do we picture romantic, self-destructive types as lean and haunted? Show me the fat man, and I’ll show you someone tempting fate.

  Spin the globe. I had an affair with a fellow teacher whose contract had outlived her marriage. Fortunately, her contract ended before mine. There was truer love in Subic City in back of the Blow Hole Bar than there’d been between us. I didn’t sing anymore, not even at parties. Spin the globe. Endings are for movies and mortuaries. Stories don’t end. Love and friendship don’t end, or curiosity and wonder. I was almost as far from Olongapo as it was possible to go. Look here, look there—at the quality of light, the color of the land, the feel of the air, you wouldn’t think you were on the same planet. The nights in Olongapo were heavy, liquid, sexy things, all sweat and perfume. The sun set but the heat lingered past midnight and the air never changed. In the desert, the temperature dropped fifty degrees, the air was clean and clear and, if you drove out of town, the stars were there for you. Your thoughts traveled high and far. All the way, in my case, to Olongapo.

  Spin the globe. Whatever I found, I didn’t find an ending. Half a world away, there were plenty reminders. There were Filipinos everywhere. You couldn’t fly around the Middle East and not see them at airports. I’d noticed them flying home at the end of contracts, carrying cardboard boxes with stereos, electric guitars, cans of sausage, chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, four-foot teddy bears. And somewhere—taped to their stomachs, sewn into their clothing—there’d be wads of $100 bills which their relatives peeled off, one at a time, in a matter of weeks. I’d spot them on the return, too, back to their “three-d” jobs—dirty, difficult, degrading—smiling all the way, surging toward customs and immigration. Where the lines were slow. The whole world kn
ew they couldn’t be trusted. Was there a race held in less regard? They faked passports, forged contracts, changed names, traveled in disguise, under pseudonyms. The newspapers were full of it. At an athletic meet, a Philippines team marched in, marched off, melted away. In Hong Kong and Singapore they manufactured slugs to cheat the telephone companies. In Malaysia they jumped from contract to contract. On departing for Saipan, they swallowed bags of marijuana and crack, landing with drugs in their bowels. They were all over the world, my old friends. They could be anywhere.

  Day in, day out, you were as likely to be talking to a Filipino as to an Omani. The Philippines were home to an army of mercenaries who fought not to win but to survive, and every airport, every immigration booth was their beachhead. They did what was necessary to go wherever they could. Their uniform was a Snoopy T-shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes, their packs were cardboard and Naugahyde, their specialty was whatever they could get someone to pay them for.

  And I was one of them. Granted, I carried that coveted passport. The country they dreamed of, I called home. I worked for better money, got assigned an apartment in a compound, not a cot in a barracks. My place had walls around it, theirs had barbed wire. Still, we were working in the same market, we had the same bosses, we were out there taking chances in the world. And on Sundays, at dusk, in parts of Muscat, I went out and walked among them. Slaves’ day off.

  I cut an odd figure. They’d be sitting around by the dozens, bantering in a language I had never learned, so that they sounded like birds, crowded into the branches of a single tree. They’d be eating, reading letters, passing around months-old newspapers and magazines, singing. They’d look up at me as I passed, look cautiously, because foreign predators passed among them, foreign males looking for women to buy. I smiled and nodded and kept moving.

  No endings in life, no real closure. Things die down, not out. Pictures came to mind, sounds that were echoes. Biggest Elvis, exiled and much reduced in size, remembering Graceland. On Magsaysay Street, I’d found a place that I’d needed and—I would always believe—had needed me, where ships sailed in and women came down to meet them. Now that they’d vanished into the Philippines diaspora, I saw that there was something special about the women of Graceland. They’d lived in a rough town, practiced a degrading trade. They put themselves on the line and when it was over, they didn’t go home. They wouldn’t. They moved on and out, joining millions of other Filipinos overseas. I wondered what the odds were against my ever finding them again, Malou or one of the others who’d gathered around the jukebox. Or maybe just someone who had seen me onstage. The odds were bad, I thought, on any given Sunday. But it seemed unreasonable, statistically unreasonable, that my long shot would not come home. Also, though fairness didn’t come into it, it seemed unfair—outrageous—that I should never see, or at least hear about, Malou again. I couldn’t accept that. I found myself saying her name sometimes, just saying it to myself. Malou. An oath, a curse, a song, Malou. Wondering how you are, Malou, and wishing you were here.

  There were nibbles. Once, when I was visiting Riyadh, out on a Sunday, a Filipino walked over and asked me if I’d ever been to Olongapo. When I said yes, he nodded and walked away, before I could follow up. Maybe he’d settled a bet. And once in Dubai, passing a construction site near the airport, the frame of a building swarming with Filipinos, I heard someone singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” just as I walked by. I stopped dead. The singer stopped too. The digging, banging, hammering, riveting kept up but the singing stopped. Someone had recognized me. I scanned the place, looking at one worker after another, but no one waved and nodded. I resumed walking and the singer started up again, only now there were a couple of them, joining in on “Suspicious Minds.” I stopped, they stopped. I moved on, they sang again. They were singing till I passed out of earshot.

  After the school term ended in Oman, I accepted a similar job in Hong Kong. I missed the Pacific. If an ocean can be your home, the Pacific was mine. Oman had been comfortable and they’d have been happy if I stayed. There were schools in Rome and Munich, also. But I missed the noise and the neon and the smell of cooked pork mingling with diesel, the crowded sidewalks, and the … action. So I went to Hong Kong and the Filipinos were there ahead of me, more than one hundred thousand of them. So my Sunday walks continued.

  Do not think of me as altogether melancholy, stepping among people who came from a place where I’d been a kind of king, living off memories, looking for lost love. It wasn’t quite like that. Say what you will about Filipinos or repeat what everybody else says: that they are hapless but tenacious, undisciplined but persistent, “too stupid to be useful, too smart to be helpful.” But, more than any other people I knew, they were of good cheer. They sang in their chains. (No wonder the people who hired them thought so little of them.) The thousands of maids who sat on streets and sidewalks around Statue Square ate and laughed, held hands, smiled, sang. I felt good, wandering among them, even if the lightning I was hoping for didn’t strike. And then, one afternoon, after I’d been in Hong Kong for three months, it did.

  I’d looped around the square, crossed the pedestrian overpass, gone across the harbor to Star Ferry, walked the promenade in front of the Cultural Center, had tea in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. Then I crossed the harbor again and was on my way home—feeling better, always feeling better, than when I started out. But I paused near where a group of Filipinas stood in a circle, singing hymns. There was nothing pious about it. It was more like a pep rally for Jesus, one maid with a megaphone shouting verses, dozens of others following, some of them getting into these dancing, sexy little moves that would have worked fine in Olongapo, but now they were going out to the Almighty.

  I can feel him in my head!

  I can feel him in my heart!

  I can feel him all over me!

  I watched them for a while, noticing how they put themselves into it, pointing to head, pointing to heart, then hugging themselves, to show Jesus’ all-over love. Out of nowhere, I wondered about Father Domingo. I remembered how irritated he’d been when I asked him what was the difference between saying God was love and love was God. Now I realized we weren’t enemies. We were allies. We were the ones who tried to make sense of life, who traded in meanings and endings, who raised our voices in prayer and song. From thinking about him I got to thinking about the others, all the ones I’d been missing and looking for, in my way. Maybe it was lost love. Maybe it was unfinished business. But it stayed with me.

  Filipinos look alike. They resemble each other more than most people do. The hair, for instance, is always black and almost always straight and fine. Their skin is usually light, though not white, their bodies short and slight, their eyes always brown so that what marked one from another are the nuancey things, a matter of nose and cheekbone, a small turn of figure. So a Sunday never passed that I did not see someone, sometimes several someones, who might be Malou. Or Whitney. Or—more rarely—Elvira. Or any of the others.

  I can feel him in my head!

  I can feel him in my heart!

  I can feel him all over me!

  They cheered and applauded when they were done and—with Jesus still offstage but one song closer to returning—they started another. I sensed that someone was standing behind me, what’s more, had been standing there for a while, and then I heard a voice I recognized. And a name.

  “Biggest Elvis?”

  “Dolly?”

  It was awkward. She couldn’t resist approaching me but, when it turned out her guess was right, she regretted it. She was with a guy, an Australian named Geoffrey Gilchrist. She said he was her husband. It sounded made-up. He gave her something between a smirk and a smile before he nodded to me and glanced at his watch.

  “We worked together in the Philippines,” Dolly explained. “In Manila.”

  “That so?” He wasn’t interested.

  “He was my boss in Manila.” She gave me a hard look, to make sure I caught the message. Olongapo was our secret.<
br />
  “It’s more like she was my boss,” I replied.

  “She’s a natural boss, all right,” Gilchrist said, dropping an arm around her shoulder. “Honey, we’re late.”

  When I heard that, I decided to take my shot. I didn’t have long and if I postponed—if I asked for a phone number, made an appointment—I knew she wouldn’t be there. This was it, and this was all.

  “Dolly … after I left … where did you go?”

  “Biggest Elvis …” she floundered.

  “Biggest Elvis?” the Australian asked. “What are you, buddy? A porn film star?”

  “Just an English teacher,” I said. Dolly nodded her head gratefully. “And I used to sing a little on the side.”

  “Oh.” Now he’d lost interest completely. “Doll? We’ve got to go.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “America,” she said. “That’s what they told us.”

  “Where?”

  She shook her head again and again, not wanting to tell me because she knew if she told me, I’d go. Or maybe she just didn’t want to remember.

  “I left and ran way. The others are still there.”

  “And Malou?”

  “Don’t go, Biggest Elvis. You wouldn’t like what you see.”

  “Where, Dolly?”

  “All right.” She leaned forward, though I saw no need to whisper, but she was still afraid. And then she gave me the name of a place I recognized, the piece of America that the girls of Graceland had gone to. The following day, I bought my ticket to America. Back to Guam.

  Guam. “Where America’s Day Begins.” The slogan of the island. The beginning of my story. And the ending. The green rugged hills below the plane, rutted red clay roads leaning to tin-roofed boondock farms. Coastal highways looping around coves with nests of hotels. Land, lagoon, reef, and the deep sea where Colonel Peter Parker had gone. As soon as I arrived, I rented a car, found a hotel, and went looking for the other two thirds of the Elvis show. Peter Parker’s name was still in the phone book. The new owner—Chinese, from the sound of his voice—gave me the name of the realtor who’d handled the sale and he told me where to go, to a boatyard in Apra Harbor.