Wake Up Little Susie
Ed Gorman
“There’s not much to see in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.”
“There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.
Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.”
Part I
One
So Elvis leaned over to me and said, “You know what it looks like?”
“What what looks like?”
“That grille.”
“No,” I said. “What’s it look like?”
He grinned. “It looks just like a woman’s-” He whispered a word naming the most private part of a woman’s anatomy.
He wasn’t really Elvis, of course.
On this Saturday, September 14, 1957, in Black River Falls, Iowa, on the lot of Keys Ford-Lincoln, there were at least a dozen Elvises, maybe eight James
Deans, six Marlon Brandos, and maybe as many as twenty Kim Novaks. Everybody had to be somebody, so why not be somebody famous?
I suppose it’s kind of sad, feeling that you need to be somebody else. For a long time I wanted to be Robert Ryan. I really like that crazed Irish intensity of his. But he didn’t wear anything distinctive-l Elvis’s hair or James Dean’s red jacket or Marlon’s rolled-up T-shirt-s even when I walked down the street pretending to be him, nobody knew. It was real frustrating. Maybe Ryan will start wearing an eye patch.
Being something of a car aficionado, I had been waiting for this day for months. This was the day that the Ford family of Detroit, Michigan, would bestow upon us the most futuristic, the most exciting of all family automobiles, the Edsel.