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.
I guess it’s kind of funny how we look at cars. I remember this Russian diplomat saying that Americans were the only people he knew who wrote pop songs about their cars. Heck, I did even better than that. I dreamed about cars.
Oh, sure, I dreamed about girls, especially the beautiful Pamela Forrest, but I also dreamed about cars. About owning, in addition to my red Ford ragtop, a black chopped and channeled ‘di Merc. Or one of those little red street rods.
I even had a couple of dreams about the Edsel, and what it would look like would be downright fantastic…
According to Time magazine, Ford had spent
$10 million advertising this launch. Even poet Marianne Moore had been asked to help name the vehicle. Her choice had been the “Moongoose.” Declining her suggestion was about the only smart thing Ford had done in bringing this car to market.
Keys Ford-Lincoln was so crowded, they’d had to hire extra cops to direct traffic. An hour before the unveiling, right on the same concrete slab where the cloth-covered Edsel would be brought, there had been a talent show. All the expected acts appeared-baton twirlers, tap-dancing twins, pig-call masters, Elvis impersonators, Lawrence Welk imitators, baggy-pants drunk acts, and two (god love ‘em) little girls wearing spangly top hats who sang “God Bless America” with tears in their eyes-but the one I liked best was the saw player who kept cutting himself on the teeth of his instrument. By the time he’d finished “Ebb Tide” he was badly in need of medical attention.
There was the high school marching band. There was a speech by the mayor. There were pennants and three dozen Brownies with hula hoops and two dozen Cub Scouts in Davy Crockett coonskin caps and twenty-three college boys trying to stuff themselves into a single phone booth.
And then there were all the Elvises.
Not only wasn’t the guy next to me really Elvis, his opinion wasn’t even original.
A number of other men had expressed the same thing earlier in the day. About what the Edsel grille looked like, I mean.
And that was about the only good feature on the whole car. The rest of it looked like something out of a cartoon. Piss elegant was the proper term.
It had gadgets previously unseen in automobiles; it had pastel colors heretofore unknown to automotive metal.
This wasn’t just my reaction.
You could see it on virtually every face. It was like opening a birthday box to find a rat crawling around inside.
Being small-town folk the way we are, we didn’t say any of this to Dick Keys, of course. The usually cool Dick Keys looked nervous. His story was that as the handsomest kid, not only in his class but in the entire valley, he would go on to marry his own kind: a beauty.
Instead, he married a plain stout girl who just happened to be the wealthiest girl in the valley.
There was no smoother salesman than Dick Keys, and he ran the Ford-Mercury dealership well day-to-day. But it was rumored, and I believe true, that his wife, who’d put up the money for the dealership, made most of the important decisions. Today, Dick wore a white button-down shirt, red-and-blue regimental-striped tie, and a pair of blue slacks. He was good-looking in the sort of way that the second lead in romantic comedies is good-looking. He never gets the girl. Dick’s graying hair lent him an air of earnestness, and his slightly loose midsection reminded the rest of us mortals that when we reached Dick’s age-he was in his early fifties-we too would be faded by time. If it could happen to Dick Keys, it could happen to any of us.
Dick was one of hundreds of Ford dealers who were just now realizing that Edsel Ford and Robert Mcationamara had stuck him with one hilariously ugly sonofabitch of a car.
Elvis snapped his collar up a little higher, gave me a lurid wink, cracked his gum, and said, “I gotta find me some chicks, man.”
I got a hot dog and went over to where Keys had set up a little carnivaclass="underline" a small Ferris wheel, a few battered bumper cars, a pony ride, and some clowns who vaguely scared me the way clowns had always vaguely frightened me.
Keys had also rented some green park benches that pigeons had been decorating. I sat down on one and ate my dog.
I was just finishing up my lunch when I saw her, and it was a good thing I was almost done because my stomach did its usual flip-flop. The same kind of flip-flop it had been doing since that first day of fourth grade when I’d instantly fallen in love with her: the beautiful Pamela Forrest.
I once asked my mom if our family had ever been hexed. You know, if somebody had a grudge against Mom and Dad and put a curse on their firstborn, which would be me. Condemn him to love a girl forever beyond his reach. I am twenty-three, a lawyer, and have what they call “prospects.” And I have a ‘ea red Ford convertible with the custom skirts, the louvered hood, and the special weave top that most of the guys around here, even the cool ones, envy.
That’s my story. Hers is, she’s been in love with Stu Grant since ninth grade, just the way I’ve been in love with her. He’s big, good-looking, rich, and powerful. He’s also married. Pamela’s convinced he’ll someday leave his wife and take his rightful place at her side.
Right, just like Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher’ll break up someday too.
She was licking an ice-cream cone. She wore a crisp pink blouse and pink pedal pushers and pink flats. The blouse and pedal pushers had cute little black and white poodles on them. Her golden hair touched her shoulders, and her blue eyes looked fresh and bright.
Everybody says she looks like Grace Kelly, and that’s the neat thing: she does but she doesn’t try to. It comes naturally for her.
Just the way it does for Grace Kelly. If you see my point.
“Hi, McCain.”
“Hi.”
“May I sit down?”
“Nah.”
She looked startled. She’s used to me making a fool of myself around her, so when I do otherwise it shakes her faith in how the universe works.
“No?”
I grinned. “Sure.”