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 and, 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.