The Biggest Elvis Read online

  Also by P.F. KLUGE

  Eddie and the Cruisers

  Gone Tomorrow

  Copyright

  This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2009 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © P. F. KLUGE, 1996

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-46830-793-1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:

  “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” by Lou Handman and Roy Turk. © Copyright 1926 by Bourne Co. and Cromwell Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission of Bienstock Publishing Company on behalf of Redwood Music Ltd. for the territory of Canada.

  “Suspicious Minds,” words and music by Mark James. © 1968 Screen Gems-EMI Music.

  Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  Pledging My Love,” words and music by Don Robey and Fats Washington.

  © Copyright 1954 Duchess Music Corporation. Copyright renewed.

  Duchess Music Corporation is an MCA company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  International copyright secured

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-46830-793-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Pamela Hollie

  who keeps me traveling

  and has sometimes heard me sing

  Contents

  Also by P.F. Kluge

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Part One

  I: Ward Wiggins

  II: Colonel Peter Parker

  III: Albert “Dude” Lane

  IV: Malon Ordonez

  Part Two

  I: Father Domingo Alcala

  II: Ward Wiggins

  III: Malou Ordonez

  IV: Albert “Dude” Lane

  V: Chester “Baby Elvis” Lane

  VI: Colonel Peter Parher

  Part Three

  I: Ward Wiggins

  II: The Elvis Trio

  Part Four

  I: Ward Wiggins

  II: Whitney Matoc

  III: Ward Wiggins

  Epilogue

  Part One

  I

  Ward Wiggins

  You should have seen us when we had our act together, top of our game, toast of the town, walking and talking miracles and—you’d better believe it—the real American thing. We were realer than real, if you ask me, more real than the Original because there were nights back then it felt like he couldn’t have opened for us, couldn’t have come close to us, not on the best night he ever had, not when you compared it to the nights we were having. I know it sounds crazy but I’ve got to say it. We went way beyond him. We crossed borders he never traveled, lived in a time he never saw, played in places he couldn’t picture.

  My name is Ward Wiggins and, though I’m not in that line of work anymore, I used to be an Elvis Presley imitator, one third of a trio of Presleys who played overseas for a while, 1990-1991. If you stayed home, you never saw us and you never will. Our time onstage is over now. There were three of us: the young Elvis, the middle Elvis, and the terminal Elvis, three ages of man, three lives in one, and also, I now realize, three versions of America, as it went out into the world. The youthful romantic, the jaded movie star, and the fat, doomed Las Vegas headliner. That last Elvis, that was me.

  We showed up in a lot of places: Okinawa, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Macau, Guam and Saipan, all through the Philippines, down to Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Sri Lanka. That was our territory, the Pacific Rim. We played the military bases. That’s where we started. We entertained more troops than Bob Hope and ours were paying customers, drunk and horny, not some captive audience grinning up at television cameras. We played inside the gate, at officers’ clubs and baseball fields, and outside, at some of the roughest venues on the planet. We played hotel resorts and convention centers, we opened casinos, gambling ships, soccer fields, and cockpits, we pounded it out to soldiers and sailors, high rollers and refugees, hookers and nuns, oh yes, we did it all and we did it all over the place, but if I have to go back to just one night, there’s no escaping Olongapo, the Philippines city that lived off the big naval base at Subic Bay. Used to live, I should say. The base is gone now and the Americans have left, those twenty thousand sailors who came romping into town, when the fleet was in. The party’s over, for better and for worse. But, in its time, it was something to see. A kind of high watermark for America, our power, our party, our mighty good times. The Americans went back where they came from and it’s just as well, I think. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  I can close my eyes this minute and still smell Olongapo, that mix of spilled beer and barbecued meat, of talcum and cologne venting out of barbershop air conditioners, diesel fuel belching out of jeepneys and taxis, and underneath it all, that blend of shit and urine that the hardest rain couldn’t wash away, all of this in that hot, heavy Philippines air, fecund, fog-thick stuff that invited you to drink and fornicate and sweat and rot. I can smell it, all of it, and I can miss it too, right now, that and the noises, the sidewalk hustlers, shoeshine boys, sellers of lottery tickets, satay sticks, newspapers, anything you want Joe, and the shills outside of nightclubs, what you want, baby we got it, country western, hard rock, mud wrestling, foxy boxing, full-body massage, what you need, baby we got it, money for honey, honey for money, quick pop, one-night stand, local wife or partner for life, and the sounds that surged out onto the street and into the traffic, horns, mufflers, and all, the music from a dozen different nightclubs, each one a tributary spilling into that great river of noise, sounds from Detroit and Nashville, New York and Chicago, music from every time and everywhere.

  Daytime, Olongapo was nothing to look at: tin roofs and rotting wood, metal that rusted and concrete that grew moldy the day after it got poured. Nothing stayed new in Olongapo and nobody stayed young. It was crowded streets and poor, much-pissed-upon trees and if you looked down at the river that separated the town from the base, it was all gray and bubbly and fermented, a black hole of oxygen debt, like someone popped the lid on a septic tank. Beyond, the bay curved off into the distance, toward those brown, dead Zambales mountains, forests long gone, like the hair that falls out of a cancer patient’s head once they start the chemo. Daytime in Olongapo was like a movie theater between shows, spilled popcorn, sticky floors, bad lighting. But at night, it made Manila look like a one-pump town, and especially those nights when the fleet was in and the town opened itself to those thousands of American kids, guilty, guilty, guilty of everything you charged them with and yet—you only had to look at them, six years out of Little League—they were innocent too, clueless and young, the best and worst of all of us, let loose in the greatest liberty port on the planet, paid and primped for Saturday night, stepping across that bridge and into Magsaysay Street, striding past the T-shirt shops—AS LONG AS I’VE GOT A FACE, BABY YOU’VE GOT A SEAT—the phosphorescent jackets with flags and logos and ports of call from Pusan to Diego Garcia; barbershops offering shampoo, haircut, m
anicure, pedicure, shave, facial, ear-cleaning, shoeshine, and in-chair massage; souvenir shops with whole flocks of carved, screaming eagles, herds of carabao, six-foot salad forks, women with bimbo bodies, men with porn-film hard-ons, all made out of the rarest rain forest hardwoods. Out they’d come into a town that wasn’t America and it wasn’t the Philippines but some gorgeous hybrid, some scabrous, misbegotten mongrel, anyway just one of a kind, dream and nightmare, and though there are moments when I look back in shame, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t miss it. It was our town. Our world. The burned-off mountains. The bay which swallowed fleets and a town which swallowed the men who came off the ships. Babylon and Fort Lauderdale. Sodom and Camelot. And now, show time! Show time at the ramshackle, pink-and-white-painted one-time movie theater that was known as Graceland.

  Chester Lane went out first. He had the hardest job of all, or he would have if he weren’t such a natural, if it weren’t so effortless for him. It’s not easy, stepping out in front of a house that’s half hookers, half sailors. The girls had seen the show dozens of times, the sailors acted like they had. The girls were hustling drinks—those 300-peso margaritas that were tea and food coloring, you could drink a bucketful and never feel it—and the guys were noisily checking out women and walloping down San Miguel beers. This wasn’t Carnegie Hall, these people weren’t there to read the libretto by pocket flashlight and suck sour lemon balls, waiting for the fat lady to sing. You didn’t get respect automatically, not in this town. The Original Elvis had been gone awhile now. He belonged to these kids’ parents. Add to that the scattering of soul brothers in the house and you get an idea of what Chester was up against, stepping out in front of a bunch of people who figured our act was a joke, a clown show for used car lots. Or so they thought till Chester Lane knocked the shit right out of them.

  Of the three of us, he least resembled the Original. But, with Chester, the look-alike question somehow never arose. He didn’t imitate, he embodied, jump-sliding across the stage, jump-starting the evening, baggy pink slacks with black stitching, jacket to match, hair piled high. He could have been Ritchie Valens or Buddy Holly or—hell—Otis Redding, it wouldn’t matter. Puck or Till Eulenspiegel. After five seconds, the crowd’s show-me attitude was gone, replaced by openmouthed wonder. Before he finished “Blue Suede Shoes” they’d gone from I-can’t-believe-I’m-here to I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing. Chester walked onstage and Elvis lived, the drop-dead good-looking punk angel truck driver from Tupelo, the swivel-hipped whippersnapper working his way through the up-tempo early stuff, “Tutti Frutti,” “Hound Dog,” “All Shook Up,” “Ready Teddy.” Chester had all the early moves, the legs-spread backward lean, the one-foot swivel, the pumping hips, the fall-forward faint, the down-on-his-knees croon, even the sweat drops coming off the end of his chin, as if it were blood and tears, not perspiration.

  Chester Lane did something I never talked to him about. If we’d discussed it, if he’d started thinking, it would have been gone. If I told Chester Lane to combine macho bravado with an air of youthful vulnerability—well, he’d be a lost ball in tall grass. But that’s what he accomplished. You could see it when he shifted into a slow tune near the end of his act, “Loving You” or “True Love” or even “Old Shep”: out came that hurt boyish side of Elvis, the poet-in-spite-of-himself, the embarrassed romantic. “From hard-on to heartbroken”: that’s how Albert Lane described Chester’s act. That was Albert’s way of talking.

  Albert—“Dude”—came out next. He did the middle years, the movie years, the blandest patch in the Original’s life, when he cranked out thirty mediocre movies while music passed him by. The rot was already there, the self-destructive games, the fawning entourage, the mother-love and self-loathing. Chester’s Elvis was familiar and likable. Albert’s Elvis made you uncomfortable. There was a sense of danger, of things getting out of hand. Maybe this was where the audience sensed that the life being enacted in front of them wasn’t a happy one. Sure, it was Saturday night in the fun-town of Olongapo and, before long, everybody could get drunk and laid. But what unfolded in front of them was close to tragedy. They weren’t counting on tragedy, on loss and death, not with all this fine stuff in easy affordable reach, not here of all places. But tragedy was what they got at Graceland. With music, beer, and girls.

  Albert began with the movie stuff, even some of the novelty songs, and at first he came off as a bozo, a genial loafer, leering at starlets and laughing all the way to the bank. But then he did this slow, menacing version of “Devil in Disguise.” You could just see the anger and cynicism take over, his shit-eating movie star grin turning into a snarl. Then Albert dashed offstage, shed his aloha shirt, and came back as the Elvis of the famous 1968 comeback special, black leather jeans and jacket, reprising early hits with new energy, so that they sounded like different songs. Chester’s “Jailhouse Rock” was detention hall fun-and-games. Albert cut into “Jailhouse Rock” and it was maximum security, three-time losers, throw-away-the-key. And “Love Me Tender”! What Albert did with a microphone during that song would get him arrested in some states: the gasps, the groans, the timely stroking, the slow stride off of chairs in dark corners of the lounge. Albert’s “Love Me Tender” was good for business.

  Now, me. My Presley, the final incarnation, bloated and sequined, spaced-out and psychic, druggy and delusional. I was the Presley people remembered. Chester’s Elvis was a face on a postage stamp. Albert’s Elvis came to you in faded Technicolor, film turning magenta with age. But my Elvis was the one they buried and mourned, the guy they still glimpsed from time to time at convenience stores around America. The demands placed on my third of the act were—well—heavier.

  In the matter of appearances, I did not disappoint. At six-foot-one-inch and two hundred forty pounds, I had height and bulk. In my college-teaching years, smoking a pipe, wearing an oxford shirt, a corduroy jacket, jeans, and loafers, I was just another out-of-shape academic, sedentary and slack. Ah, but add those glaring sideburns, that hair all oiled and piled. Cast off those elbow patches and force-feed the whole package into a pair of white linen tights. Yes! And circle my belly with a bejeweled belt that might have been borrowed from the World Wrestling Federation. Then give me a shirt that billowed at the sleeves, a collar that peaked in back of my neck, and generous lapels that opened, like French doors, on my sweating, hair-matted chest. Yes! And then sprinkle me with sequins and with stardust and Elvis lived!

  In truth, the Original wasn’t so hard to imitate. Elvis was a common American type—possibly the most common—the gone-to-seed athlete, the aging hick, yesterday’s wild youth, running to fat and trailing memories of some earlier, leaner, dreaming self. Those earlier selves intrigued me. I was the last stop in the transit from punk to hunk to hulk. An aura of imminent death surrounded me when I walked onstage, as if death were waiting in the wings and, on any given night, if it all came together—maybe when I reached down for those low notes in “Suspicious Minds”—I might offer that final gift which the Original failed to deliver: public expiration. But it was more than the sense of death around the corner. In truth, I was the survivor. I was the last to die, because Chester and Albert had already passed on, only nobody noticed, because there was another Elvis coming along, a newer model. What that meant, unless I’d screwed this up entirely, was that their lives converged in me, they lived on in me. I contained them. I tried explaining this to the Lane brothers one time.

  “You … contain us?” Albert asked. Albert was the smart lazy student in back of the classroom, the guy with the baseball cap turned backward on top of his head and his legs stretched out on the chair in front, a show-me smirk on his face. He was the kid who rated your performance but rarely glanced at the books you assigned. Still, he could fire back at you when he felt like it.

  “Youth dies first,” I said. “So Chester’s Elvis died about the time he went in the Army.”

  “So we’re like dominoes. One falls into the other. …”

  “I’m not w
rong, am I? After, say, 1957, no one ever saw Chester’s Elvis again. Because then your Elvis emerged. And that ended when—”

  “I see where this is headed,” Albert said. “And I think it’s kind of sickening.”

  “We all died. But you two went first. I was the last to die. Also the last to live. So if you lived on at all, you lived in me. See?”

  “I’m going to say this once,” Albert said, shaking his head. “And I’m going to put it into simple language that everybody can understand. Let’s say you have a deer, a maybe ten-point buck, close to a hundred fifty pounds. This is a handsome damn beast. It runs like the wind, it jumps creeks, it flies off cliffs, and it’s got big brown eyes besides. Okay?” Albert glanced at his younger brother, who was already deeply absorbed, waiting to see how the story came out, wide-eyed and wondering, like a kid around a campfire.

  “Have I said anything you don’t understand, so far?” Albert pressed. He had a smart-assed edge I often liked, but not now. “If I have, stop me.”

  I nodded. Go on, get it over with. I wasn’t supposed to know, but Albert had been looking at Filipino movies, the action films they made here, rape and revenge films produced in three weeks. He figured that might be a way for him to get started, the way Jack Nicholson began in low-budget Roger Corman thrillers. He would leave the act someday and not look back, I guessed. Elvis was just a role he played. A role and not—as in my case—a fate.

  “So you’ve got this beautiful deer,” Albert continued. “A stag who gets shot on the first day of hunting season. End of act one. Shot, gutted, and strapped on the hood of some drunkard’s Wagoneer. Skinned and butchered and marinated and turned into venison. Steaks, chops, sausages, and stew. And that’s the end of act two. You with me, Chester?”

  “So far,” Chester said. The kid was all ears. I wondered whether Dude would take Chester with him and whether he’d look after him, the way Chester needed looking after. Albert was cocky and arrogant. And he kept me honest, deconstructing my notion of the three Presleys, of continuous and cumulative time, of transcending and returning. Albert “Dude” Lane didn’t buy it.