The Biggest Elvis by P. F. Kluge

Author:P. F. Kluge [Kluge, P. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9780670869749
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I got into the habit of stopping in to talk to Billy Bowers, even between shows, still in costume. I’d just grab this plastic raincoat and pop across the street. It tickled him to see me, Elvis at halftime, dressed in black and pink, sitting at a bar with a bunch of brothers who’d as soon go square dancing as watch what was happening at the place we were calling Graceland. Billy had thought a lot about Olongapo. He said it was like this valley in the old Tarzan comic books, a secret valley where elephants went to die, so they left their tusks all over the valley, a treasure of ivory.

“Olongapo is like that valley,” he said. “Look around, Baby Elvis. You got a harbor full of ships and a street full of bars like you ain’t had in America in a hundred years. Even the air smells old. And you’ve got all these sidewalk characters, hookers, hoods, newsboys, cripples, out of an old movie, black and white. You’ve got a bar like this and an old bullshitter like me. … You don’t find that anywhere but here, no more. It’s a junkyard, man, it’s a museum, it’s the magic valley. Everything that used to be in America—everything that America used to be—it’s here. It washed up here. My bar included. And your act.”

Maybe Billy was right. There was no place we could have hit the way we hit in Olongapo. From the start I knew that we were part of something special. And it wasn’t just, hey, you catch this act, here’s a fun place to go. Ward was weird, Dude said, but Ward was right. Elvis was back, the second time around, in triplicate. I wasn’t the only one who knew this. It spread through the girls. It was out on the street. And I could feel it, whenever I sat down with Father Alcala. He was tired and worried, quiet when he should have been talking, and laughing when there was nothing funny around, at least nothing I could see. He said that this outbreak of Elvis was the latest local social disease. He was a man standing in the way of something that he couldn’t stop. Elvis in Olongapo.

“He is dead, isn’t he?” I asked Ward one night. Dude had been going on about how Ward was losing his grip on reality, that before much longer we’d be needing an exorcist. It was one thing, he said, for some street kid to gawk when we walked by, thinking Elvis was back, but it was something else when we started acting that way ourselves, turning a whore bar into a revival meeting.

“Elvis Aaron Presley?” said Ward. “Deader than hell.” I’d joined him up in the VIP lounge, watching the house fill. The showroom opened an hour before our first show and the band did fifties music, the sort of stuff that was around when Elvis came on the scene, Ink Spots, Mills Brothers, Bill Haley, Frankie Laine.

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