Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico Read online

  George Herald, I mean McGraw, was no doubt very boastful of his friendship with Presley and would imitate him in the most pathetic way: he wore a sorry excuse for a toupee, an overly compact mass that looked like Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap from the front, and from the side, since there was no tail, like a bellboy’s hat, though without the chin strap. He admired or envied Presley so much that he wanted to be more than Presley, he didn’t want to lag behind in any respect, but to be a kind of paternalistic partner, as if the two of them were singers at the same level of success and he were the more experienced and dominant. Except that McGraw couldn’t sing at all (even in the airborne choruses of that ill-fated journey which for me was the last), and his ability to rival Elvis was no less delusional. He would shamelessly appropriate Elvis’s phrases, so that if Elvis said to the pilot and me one afternoon, “Come on, Roy, Hank, let’s go to FD,” referring to Mexico City, Federal District in his language, and then added: “FD sounds like a tribute to Fats Domino, let’s go to Fats Domino” (whom he admired tremendously), McGraw would repeat the quip a hundred times until he had entirely stripped it of any conceivable charm: “We’re off to see Fats Domino, to Fats Domino we go.” You start to hate the joke. In the throes of this half-adulatory, half-competitive zeal, he spent the two days of his visit exaggeratedly tripping the light fantastic wherever he happened to be (on the beach, in the hotel, in a restaurant, in an ele­vator, in what was supposed to be a business meeting) as soon as he heard a few notes nearby or even in the distance, and there was always music playing somewhere. He danced in the most unseemly fashion, doing a big loco act, aided and abetted by a towel which he rubbed at top speed against his shoulders or along the backs of his thighs as if he were a stripper, it was truly a vile spectacle since he was husky verging on fat but moved like a hysterical teenager, shaking that broad head from which not one of his Davy Crockett hairs ever came unglued, and spinning his tiny feet like tornadoes. And he did not stop. In the plane, on the way out (for me there was no return trip), we had to ask Presley not to sing anything that was too fast, because the owner of the George Herald would immediately go into his dance fever—those wee vicious eyes of his—and endanger our airborne equilibrium. McGraw didn’t like slow tunes, only “Hound Dog,” “All Shook Up,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and so on, songs that let him go nuts and do his number with the towel or whatever scarf or handkerchief happened to be at hand, his indecent bump and grind. It may be that he was what we would call in Spanish today un criptogay, a homosexual who hides it even from himself, but he boasted of never letting a tasty chick—his expression—get away from him without putting his hands on her or making some lewd remark.

  That night, in addition to Presley, on whom he was always pathologically fixated, he had his eye on an actress, very young, very blonde, who played a bit part in the film and who happened to come along on this particular expedition to the DF; I always went along to act as interpreter, Hank could get out of it when we went by car. But that night we were flying. The girl was named Terry, or Sherry, the name has gotten away from me, it’s strange, or not so strange, and McGraw had the gall to compete in that arena, too, with Presley, I mean he was putting the moves on her without waiting to see if the King had any plans in that respect, which was a serious lapse in manners in addition to being idiotically oblivious, since it was clear to one and all that the young lady had ideas of her own which in no way included the moronic magnate.

  It wasn’t Presley’s fault, or mine, except secondarily, it was primarily McGraw’s fault, and for that reason alone have I spoken, very much against my will, of that fake frontiersman. When the five of us walked into a dance hall or disco or cantina—five if we had flown to Mexico City; ten or fifteen if we were in Acapulco, Petatlán, or Copala—a riot would usually break out the moment those present realized that Presley was there, and women would be fainting all over the place. As soon as the owners or managers realized he was there they would put an end to the commotion the more bold-hearted girls were making and throw out the swooners so Elvis wouldn’t get annoyed and leave right away—I’ve seen night club bouncers scaring off harmless teenage girls with their fists, we didn’t like it but there was nothing else to do if we wanted to have a quiet tuscaloosa or watch a chattanooga—and once order had been reestablished, what generally happened was that all eyes without exception were on us, to the great detriment of whatever show was being performed on stage, and nothing ever went any further than that and a few furtive autographs. Once we had a kind of forewarning of what would happen that night, a few young fellows got jealous; they started trying to provoke us and made some seriously inappropriate remarks. I decided it was best not to translate any of it for Mr. Presley and convinced him to get out of there, and nothing happened. Those guys had knives, and sometimes you see the capataz embodied in anyone with a bulging wallet.

  We happened to wander into an inhospitable and not very well-policed joint, or else the thugs inside were there to protect the owners rather than any patron, even if he happened to be a famous gringo. We would generally stop in wherever we felt like it, going on how the dive looked from the outside and what its posters promised, pictures of singers or dancers, almost always Mexican, a few unconvincingly Brazilian women. There were quite a lot of people inside, in an atmosphere that had a listless, thuggish savor to it, but it was the third stop of the evening and we hadn’t been stinting on tequila, so we went over to the bar and stood there all in a row, making room for ourselves in a way that wasn’t exactly the height of good manners, but anything else would have been out of place.

  Across the dance floor was an eye-catching table of seven or eight people, who looked as if they had a lot of money if not a lot of class, five men with three women who may have been rented for the night or hired on a daily basis, and both the men and the women were staring at us fixedly despite the fact that we had our backs to the dance floor and to their table. Maybe they were just guys who liked to watch other people dancing from up close; the women danced, but among the men only one did, the youngest, a limber individual with high cheekbones and the look of a bodyguard, a look he shared with two others who stood by and never left their bosses alone for a second. They didn’t appear to have any connection to the place, but it turned out they did, and so did one of their bosses; he was a common enough type in Mexico, around thirty-five with a moustache and curly hair, but in Hollywood they would immediately have put him under contract as a new Ricardo Montalbán or Gilbert Roland or César Romero, he was tall and handsome and had neatly rolled up his shirtsleeves very high, displaying his biceps which he constantly flexed. His partner, or whatever he was, was fat with a very fair complexion, more European blood there, his hair combed straight back in a dandified way and too long at the nape of the neck, but he didn’t dye it to take out the gray. Nowadays we’d call them mafiosos lavados, “whitewashed gangsters,” but that expression wasn’t in use then: they were intimidating but for the time being irreproachable, owners of restaurants or stores or bars or even ranches, businessmen with employees who accompanied them wherever they went and protected them when necessary from their peons or even from some angered capataz. In his hand the fat man had a vast green handkerchief that he used, by turns, to mop his brow or to fan the atmosphere as if he were shooing flies away or performing magic tricks, sending it floating out over the dance floor for a second.

  Our arrival hadn’t created much of a stir because we had our backs to the room and because Hank, who was enormous, stood, looking very dissuasive, between Mr. Presley and the three or four women who first came up to us. After a few minutes, Presley spun around on his bar stool and looked out at the dance floor; there was a murmur, he drank as if nothing were going on, and the buzz diminished. He had a certain glassy look that could sometimes appease a crowd, it was as if he didn’t see them and canceled them out, or he would shift his expression slightly in a way that seemed to promise something good for later on. He himself was calm just then, drinking from his glass an
d, watching the hermanos Mexicanos dancing, sometimes a kind of a melancholy came over him. It didn’t last.

  But there was no stopping the exasperating George McGraw, who of course was relentless when it came to making demonstrations of his own prowess; if he saw Presley in a moment of calm, far from adapting to the mood or following his lead, he would seize on it to try to outshine and eclipse him—fat chance. He wanted Sherry to dance, practically threatened her, but she didn’t go with him to the dance floor and made a crude gesture, plugging her nose as if to say that something stank, and I saw that this did not pass unnoticed by the fat guy with the oiled-back locks, who wrinkled his brow, or by the new César Montalbán or Ricardo Roland, who flexed his right bicep even higher than usual.

  So McGraw got out on the floor, swaying his hips and taking very short little steps all by himself, his button eyes ablaze with the trumpeting rumba that was playing, and he couldn’t keep from displaying his repertory of dreadful movements or from emitting sharp, ill-timed cries that were a mockery of the way Mexicans shout to urge someone on. Hank and Presley were watching him in amusement; they burst out laughing and young Sherry started laughing too, out of contagion and flirtation. The owner of the George Herald was dancing so obscenely that his crazed thrusts of the hip were getting in the way of some of the women on the dance floor; the bodyguard with high cheekbones who moved as if he were made of rubber shot him dead with a glance from his Indian eyes, but nothing stopped him. The other dancers did stop and stood aside, whether out of disgust or in order to get a better view of McGraw I don’t know: he was giving his trapper’s or bellhop’s cap such a vigorous shaking that I was afraid it would go sailing off and come to a bad end, forgetting that he wore it securely glued to his scalp. The problem was that he didn’t travel with his towel, and he must have considered it an indispensable element in his dance routine; consequently, as the pale-skinned fat man, in a moment of carelessness, flung his handkerchief up to aerate the atmosphere, McGraw filched it from him without so much as a glance and immediately flung it over his shoulders, holding it by the two ends, and rubbing it against himself, up and down, with the customary celerity that by then we had seen all too often. The fat man kept his limp hand extended during the moment following the loss, he didn’t pull it back right away as if he hadn’t given up on recovering his beloved green handkerchief—some kind of a fetish maybe. In fact, he tried to reach it from his seat when McGraw came his way in his increasingly indecorous dance. What finally made the fat man lose patience was a moment in McGraw’s sashayings when he both withheld the handkerchief and started voluptuously toweling it across his buttocks. The fat man stood up for a second—he was a very tall fat man, I saw—and angrily grabbed the handkerchief away from the dancing fool. But the dancer gave an agile spin and, before the fat man had resumed his seat, snatched the handkerchief back again with an imperious gesture, he was used to having his way and having his orders followed back in Tupelo or Tuscaloosa. It was a comical moment, but I wasn’t happy to see that Gilbert Romero and his crowd were not at all amused, because it really was funny, the fat man and the semi-fat man quarreling over the green silk at the edge of the dance floor. I was even less happy to see what happened next: the impatient expression on the stiff-haired fat man’s face changed to brutal cold rage, and he seized the handkerchief back from McGraw with a swipe of his big hand just at the moment the elastic bodyguard delivered a blow to the magnate’s kidneys which made him fall to his knees, his dance stopped dead. As if he were well-rehearsed at this sort of gesture—but how could he be?—the fat man’s next swift move was to twist the handkerchief around the kneeling McGraw’s neck and start pulling on the ends to strangle him right then and there. In a second the cloth lost all its glide and stretched thin and unbelievably taut, like a slender cord, and its green color disappeared, a cord that was tightening. The fat man pulled hard on the two ends, his complexion red as a steak and his expression heartless, like a man tying up a clumsy package hurriedly and mechanically. I thought he was killing McGraw on the spot, like a flash of lightning and without saying a word, in front of a hundred witnesses on the dance floor, which in an instant emptied out completely. I admit I didn’t know how to react, or maybe I felt fleetingly that at last we would be free of the small-town tycoon, and I did no more than think (or else the thought came later, but I attribute it to that moment): “He’s killing him, killing him, he is killing him, no one could have seen it coming, death can be as stupid and unexpected as they say, you walk into some dive without ever imagining that everything can end there in the most ridiculous way and in a second, one, two and three and four, and every second that passes without anyone intervening makes this irreversible death more certain, the death that is happening as we watch, a rich man from Chattanooga being killed by a fat man with a bad nature in Mexico City right before our eyes.”

  Then I saw myself shouting something in Spanish out on the dance floor, all of us were there, Presley grabbing the lapels of the rubber man who twisted out of reach with a hard slap, Hank with the handkerchief in his hand, he had given the fat man a shove that sent him flying back to his seat and sent all the glasses on Roland’s table crashing. This crew wasn’t carrying knives, or not just knives, they were full-grown men, not peons but capatazes and landowners, and they carried pistols, I could see it in the way the other two thugs moved, one at the chest and the other on the hip, though Montalbán restrained them, opening out a horizontal hand as if to say, “Five.” Hank was the most excited, he always carried a pistol, too, though fortunately he hadn’t put his hand on it, a man with a gun gets more excited when he sees he may be using it. He wadded the handkerchief into a ball and threw it at the hotheaded fat man, saying in English, “Are you crazy or what? You could have killed him.” The silk floated in its journey.

  “¿Qué ha dicho ese?” Romero asked me immediately, he had already realized I was the only member of the group who spoke the language.

  “Que si está loco, ha podido matarlo,” I answered automatically. “No es para tanto,” I added on my own account. What was the big deal?

  It was all coming to nothing, every second that went by now, every panting breath we all drew made the tension diminish, an altercation of no importance whatsoever, the music, the heat, the tequila, a foreigner who behaved like a spoiled brat, he was standing up now with Sherry’s help, coughing violently, he looked scared, unable to comprehend that anyone could possibly have harmed him. He was all right, either there hadn’t been time for much harm to be done or the fat man wasn’t as strong as he looked.

  “La nena vieja se puso pesada con el amigo Julio y Julio se cansa pronto,” said Romero Ricardo. “Será mejor que se la lleven rápido. Váyanse todos, las copas están pagadas.”

  “What did he say?” Presley asked me immediately. He had his own urgent need to understand, to know what was happening and what was being said, I saw him slipping into belligerence, the ghost of James Dean descended upon him and sent a shiver down my spine. His own movies were too bland to satisfy that ghost. Hank jerked his head toward the door.

  “That we should get out of here fast. The drinks are on them.”

  “And what else? He said something else.”

  “He insulted Mr. McGraw, that’s all.”

  Elvis Presley was a good friend to his friends, at least to his old friends, he had a sense of loyalty and a lot of pride and it had been many years since he had taken orders from anyone. It’s only a short step from melancholy to brawling. And there was his nostalgia for boxing.

  “Insulted him. That guy insulted him. First they try to kill him, then they insult him. What did he say? Come on, what did he say? And who is he to tell us to get out of here anyway?”

  “¿Qué ha dicho?” now it was Roland César’s turn to ask me. Their inability to understand each other was enraging them, a thing like that can really grate on your nerves in an argument.

  “Que quién es usted para decir que nos vayamos.”

  “Han o
ido, Julio, muchachos, me pregunta el gachu­pín que quién soy yo para ponerlos en la calle,” Montalbán answered without looking at me. I thought (if there was time for such a thought) that it was odd that he said I was the one asking who he was: it was Presley who was asking and I was only translating, it was a warning I didn’t pay attention to, or that I picked up on too late, when you relive what happened, or reconstruct it. “Soy aquí el propietario. Aquí soy el dueño, por muy famoso que sea su patron,” he repeated with a slight tremor of one of his mobile biceps. If he was the owner, as he claimed, he was very unfriendly, my boss didn’t impress him, they hadn’t come over to say hello when we came in and now they were throwing us out. “Y les digo que se larguen y se lleven a la bailona. La quiero ya fuera de mi vista, no espero.”

  “What did he say?” It was Presley’s turn.

  I was getting tired of the double onslaught of this crossfire. I looked at McGraw, la bailona, as Romero had called him, he was breathing more easily now but was still terrified—the tiny psychotic eyes were glazed—he was pulling at Hank’s jacket to get us to leave, Hank was still making gestures with his head tilted towards Presley, Sherry was already heading for the door, McGraw leaning on her, maybe taking advantage, he was one of those guys who never learns. Fat Julio was in his seat, he had recovered his composure after his exertions, his whiteness had returned like a mask, he was following the conversational match with his hands crossed (rings glinting), like one who has not abandoned the idea of re-entering the fray.