ELVIS of MH del Pilar & MELANIE




           
Good morning.
Dirty eyes blinking.
   
 Elvis dreamed no more.  Elvis dreamed no m Elvis dreamed no more. more.  Elvis dreamed no more.  Elvis dream  Elvis dreamed no more. Elvis dreams.
Elvis dreamed no more.  
 Elvis dreamed no more.  Elvis dreamed no more.  Elvis dreamed no more.  Elvis dreamed no more. Elvis dreamed  Elvis dreamed no more. No, no more.

     
Why, if Buddha sucked, if wisdom was a transvestite, if understanding was a pyramid of shit. Elvis blew his snot on them all, wanted to puke on all the diamonds of the world, the sweat on his asshole gleamed worthily more than any banker or any so-called wise crap that stunk meaninglessly against the clarity of eggless, black, hairless sleep, of oily ejaculation, of good beer, of girl-legs that he could lick on forever, longer than any fascination of wisdom, thank you so much, it was nice to die, he did not need to grope bright dreams that made you want to believe you were not dreaming, then merely wake to find every particle as it was as it is, the benign hypocritical faces, the requirement to piss many times in the mouth of the day. Dreams equalled such lies, two dimensionally profound on the dusty surface of the brain, chalkboard on which idiots and idiot-geniuses dumped on. Like squashed jellyfish were dreams, whose tentacles poisoned the clarity of hangovers or the ecstasy of pain. It was enough now to live through the day, the cliche of the eternal moment, yes.
Hilarious how everybody, especially Western fucks, the high nosed ones, ones who tanned pink, serial killers, and cannibals, the sweet good boys and girls, drinking alone or running for high office, seemed to know everything, way they talked from their cells, carried the wisdom of God, yes, on the fingertips of their brains. The sweet voices of teachers. They made Elvis, the one in the dumpyard, want to vomit on his shit. He struggled to erase them from his morning masturbation and concentrate on his now different days. Fantastic not to care. A great tease. It was morbid to need anything. Even paintings in museums. His days were too fat with headache-real color, too brutal with hunger. His days forced him to live in them. He could not turn away from his days. When it came time to sleep it was time to die. Again. He closed his eyes, covered them with the silken panties of his lids, with the hot colors of the night, the alien night, the night of butterflies, of giant moths, of razory flowers - went away and he slept through his dying until the light came again and it was too hot to sleep. He dreamt of dice, of roulette, losing a thousand pounds of gold, making love too bizarre he could not recall, dreams of pissing vultures, air so pure it burned his eyes. He dreamt of not dreaming. Until the sweat sucked on his skin and tickled the hair on his balls, lizard's balls, in the too hot morning. Finally. Ants sunned in the drops of sweat in the pox-holes in his face. He thought of masturbating, that blood-choked word more obscene than foot-long pricks of horses, but he hated the sweat the feel in the heat of the sticky semen on his stomach. And a moth flew over his eyes, white flat fuzzy zig-float-zagging at the sun.
Good morning, Manila.
Sipping the coffee in the glass jar that he found beside him, he studied the wall and the large hole through it separating the dumpyard from the street.


The wall would be gone in five years, the city destroyed in a thousand. Thoughts of forever made Elvis giddy, a sensation he enjoyed, the earth shifting, the air coughing in tantrums of light. There steamed the garbage pile, in it plastic bags like aneurisms. A rat sniffsniffed along a water pipe. And next to discarded bricks, Mario and Carina, who found the dumpyard two nights ago, asleep yet in each other's arms - in the heat. It seemed impossible! Was it love? Elvis remembered the morning before. The same. The sweat. No dream. Beyond the wall the traffic stank, shook the ground, and shrieked in the eternal present that machines had, memoryless, no future to frighten them. For him everything foolish lay in the past, or a joke of the past, with tensions absurdly simplified, like art simplifies - one image, one thought, the world's jungle dehydrated into symbols. Ah - he recalled a face, body, a moan that rushed his fingers to his crotch, and his eyes bumped the rat again, humping the water pipe, tail twitching at its ass, licking the pipe, and to Elvis's musing came the image of a street in some town in America that was kept clean by serial killers. He pushed that image away through a cloud of nausea, looking at his face in the coffee's surface and bubbles and wondered where Melanie was, yes, Melanie, Melanie.


Usual upon awaking, dread mingled with the murmur of flies and the excitement of the sun, resulting in a sense of unease that he sought to defray, so he inhaled deeply of the air and thought purposely of where he was, of the wide ocean protecting him from the home which in any form provoked in him sad and evil beats of his heart. His eyes fixed on the weeds, the ants being blown by the wind. His breathing slowed, humor crept into his lips, and again the dumpyard blazed like a paradise, the rat became prince, the water pipe his scepter of gold, and the flies annoying angels of timeless being.
Again, he no longer wondered about happiness for he knew with the certainty of pain that to wonder was a constipation of unutterable uselessness and he spat, furious even at the thought, splattering the weeds with saliva. He felt inside of him the expansion of something lustrously negative, like the breath of a butterfly on the new stainless steel of his heart. Thus, he relaxed in the weeds, in the clouds over
him. But, some moments, it bothered him still. It. Whenever his mind worked very well, whenever he saw with self-conscious clarity, it beguiled him and for a very quick while made him pause to wonder what he might have been. It was the waste of his talent.

Melanie, with a plastic baggy of green mango slices, appeared through the hole in the wall into the dumpyard. "Good morning!" she shouted, teasing, "Sleeping too much, you!"
Kneeling next to him, her short denim skirt rode up on her brown legs. She smelled of night and cigarette smoke, and her hair gleamed like glue. She sprinkled raw salt on a mango piece and plopped it into her mouth and squinted at its sourness. She smiled at him. He stroked her knee. Her legs made him hard.
"Thank you," he said.
"What for?"
"The coffee."
"Yes. You are welcome."
He looked at the mango.
"Where did you get the money?"
"At Raymond's."
The beer garden across the street.
"Last night I met customer."
"He fuck you?"
"Of course."
"Was it good?"
"This mango better."
He ate one, brought tears to his eyes.
"you suck his cock?"
"You shut up, eat!"
'You did, didn't you?"
"Why, you like, huh? You like to watch?"
"You have a sexy mouth."
"You, too!"
He nodded, lay back in the weeds, teased his lips with his fingers, producing an erotic-like glow. He enjoyed it until it became irritating, then threw his offending hand down, breathing in the air that wafted over the dumpyard, silent, glancing up at Melanie. Soon, a tickling at his finger revealed an ant exploring him with its antennae as it perched on the edge of a leaf. He plucked it up, gently not to squash it, studied the shiny black body, the automatic brain, and, suddenly, threw it into his mouth. He didn't swallow it at once, but felt it struggling on his tongue. He allowed in a little light, lifting his teeth like clouds swept in the roar of his breathing, and wanted to imagine its terror. The terror of an ant. He swallowed it. Immediately, he felt sad.
"Eh, you crazy!" Melanie said.
"You are so beautiful," Elvis said, "if you only really knew it. If I were so beautiful," tears came to his eyes, "I would want to die right now before another second had its chance to claw me."
He took her hand and pressed it against his cheek with his eyes going faraway and she watched him and thought into the few days that she had known him, the nothing that she knew in which she found a certain joy and a certain peace, of the few things she knew about him, words and angers and exhultations out of his fragile moments, and she said, "You will write a story today?"
He kissed her open palm, odor of fish, odor of candy, her skin blurring too close to his eyes, silently into the moisture and the bitterness of the ant's blood.
"Why?" he whispered.
"You can make good story," she said, "I know."
He recognized in her voice a certain tone, as if cute were reason enough for him to obey her. Perhaps unconsciously, she moved so her skirt rode farther up her thighs; so, after her legs, he looked into her face and thought he saw there the fun of ignorance asking for something she could not possibly understand. It irritated him.
"You don't even know my name," he said.
"Elvis," she said.
"No," he said.
A way he acted sometimes, when he pouted and swaggered, and moved like an escaped killer with nothing more to lose, eyes sparkling, hair curling over his forehead, then the street kids in their wisdom recognized in him a desperate charisma, and gave it a name they could understand. Bargirls, and dizzy characters, and cripples with elegant bodies, along MH del Pilar street hailed him as "Elvis".
His money had gone. Thugs left him alone. Beggers shared their food with him. He no longer worried about diseases with exotic names. Anything that could be named, he sensed, had an ulterior motive. The wound on his knee, dripping pus, was real and honest. Melanie, cold San Miquel beer, jeepneys behind the wall - real, real, he had murdered their names. What was familiar was sham. Only the exotic, the unusual, had any hope of beauty or sensual momentum, like gangarene or death or a butterfly lost in a city of steel.
"So what is your name?" Melanie said.
"Elvis," he said.


 


"Crazy," she said, pressing her stomach.
Throwing a mango bone over her shoulder, she stood up and quickly went behind a pile of tin cans where she lifted her skirt and squatted easily. Her urine whizzing came sharply over the weeds. Over a rusted tin of mackerel he could see her knee and, occassionally, her hand with the peeling red polish. Hot air stirred through the tall weeds. In the smells and sounds of the morning, insects floated like golden dust. Aphids alighted on blue miniscule flowers and ladybugs rose high to be lost in the sun. Sweat, dirt, hunger, unnameable yearnings, staring into blue hot skies, and the prickling of moments of overflowing energy, were the irritations of a wanton happiness.
"You take me to America," Melanie said, behind the cans.
Never.
Sure, she wanted a bed, car, money, a house, food, to be forever beyond the reach of want, from where she might speak of her happiness, but he would know the truth, the change that would murder her for the sake of a hamburger or for the approbabtion of people who could never understand.
Now he watched the dragonflies darting over the cans.
"Hey!"
He put on his shoes, not answering her, even as he got up, dusted his pants, checked that the ballpoint pen was in his shirt pocket. He hadn't lost it.
"You take me to America," she called, impatiently.
"Sure," he said.
Hungry, he took a mango slice out of the baggy Melanie left on the grass. The green mango, very sour, brought tears to his eyes, and he looked up to look away from the dumpyard and since the clouds were up there he studied them, having all the time in the world, with the sun insistent in his face. The clouds were unblemished, like the cheeks of angels. As he swallowed the mango pulp, he hoped the coming night would at least be dry, then started for the hole in the wall. A fart resounded behind him.
"Where you going?"
"Raymond's."
A moan made him turn again. Mario was fucking Carina. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. She raised her knees to squeeze him. He grunted. He pressed her face between his hands. She clutched at the grass around them. His ass rose up, but his thighs were constrained by his trousers. He kissed her, then bent his head violently away. Her hands were about to embrace him, but fell back to thrash along the ground. He started fucking her hard. The cardboard flat on which they lay shoke, then tore in the creases wet from the grass beneath.
"Hey, you got no money," Melanie said, "How you gonna get drunk again, huh?"
"Bahala na," Elvis said.
What happens happens until it doesn't, until all cliches get a stroke on a clear day. Melanie farted more. Other odorous jazz dropped to the ground below her raised knees. When he was out behind the wall she immediately felt the fatigue of her working night.
She closed her eyes. She saw the light bulb, saw the customer's flesh, saw the cigarette on the edge of the night stand, heard again the Stevie Wonder melody that haunted the radios and the dark bars of Ermita. They bothered her like reflections in slivers of a shattered mirror. A little dizzy, she reached down her hand against the grass to keep the earth from throwing her. The ground felt sincere and undeniable. In that moment of dreamy clarity and wistful peace, she yearned to feel that Elvis really loved her, that he protected her. One thought led to another, until, abruptly, she wondered about her appearance and, staring at her raised knees, wondered how earlier she might have looked to him. This inflamed her doubts.
"Dios," she sighed.
She felt then that she was floating over the ground, detached from the world, and she was frightened. Thus, she clutched at her thights for the comfort of her flesh, for the obedience of the familiar. The pungent odor of the grass stains on her knees helped to distract her. Two, three brown tears rolled down on the skin of her cheeks. She sniffed at her knees. Then wetting the tip of her finger in her tears, she played with her lips until she felt a mild erotic quality. She kept doing it for a few moments. Nevertheless, she was sure that she loved him, that it was love.


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