SUE CONFUSED GIRL REPORTER debates, not for the first time, the pros and cons of real people talking to fictional characters as well as real people who are fictionalized on pieces of comic-strip paper. Besides, she herself struggles with double-identity issues, having contracted this condition by existing, as it were, both inside and outside the pages of the comic book. SUE BLOODHOUND GIRL REPORTER now, for the first time, considers the danger, when all is said and done, of such an existence. Would individual lives—and even the universe—be clarified by choosing one or the other? She flips through the DC comic looking at images of the young, innocent, future-before-him Pat Boone, fans swooning after his performance at the Rialto.
SUE ABLE-TO-PREDICT-THE-FUTURE GIRL REPORTER now realizes that the exact moment he, Pat Boone, steps from the pages of the comic book—once he has free will—once he’s able to speak his own mind, no longer controlled, as it were, by Jerome “Jerry” Siegel, then the proverbial #%&**# will hit the fan.
Siegel, creator and main writer of Superman comics, the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania no less, knows, after all, a thing or two about changing identities. He was also known, at times, by his less-Jewish-sounding pseudonyms Joe Carter and Jerry Ess and was, ironically, POSTHUMOUSLY inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. But only posthumously. So maybe he also knows a thing or two about hall of fame conspiracies and snubs?!
In short, the only solution for Pat Boone to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is to cloak his true, conservative Christian identity by remaining inside the pages of the comic book, consorting with ever-popular superheroes, where the future is knowable, where GOOD DEFEATS EVIL, or where Siegel and Superman will predictably map out his future. A future where it always remains the 1950s, always celebrates Pat Boone’s red-white-and-true-blue America. Where Pat Boone won’t get embroiled with hippies, the British invasion, hard rockers . . . where he’ll never even meet Sarah Palin or be clutched to the heaving chests of the Birthers, the Tea Partiers, etc., etc., etc.
But Pat Boone, as if reading SUE WHO-WEARS-HER-HEART-ON-HER-SLEEVE GIRL REPORTER’s mind, looks determined. “I yam what I yam,” he proclaims.
Aren’t we all?
Aren’t we all just superheroes but afraid to dash into the first phone booth we find, strip off our ordinary clothes, reveal our true, human selves, and speed-dial heaven? I mean, just try to even find a phone booth anymore.
Pat Boone stands as if to make a move, to step outside the comfy confines of the comic book. Sue, despite having looked up to, and needing, Pat Boone for years, now feels as if she is the one who needs to lend a helping hand to Pat Boone, to grasp his hand, pull him back inside the comic book, where time, blessedly, stands still, where no one ages or changes.
“I want to matter,” Pat Boone confesses, putting one foot outside the margins of the comic book . . . and right on a banana peel.
SUE, whose role as GIRL REPORTER dwindles to an end, solemnly turns to the final page.
Encore
After the election of Barack Obama as president, I dream I’m wandering a beach in Florida with Pat Boone. We reach a swampy inlet of water that we must cross in order to continue on. I’m not wearing shoes and worry I’ll be bitten by an alligator. Pat lifts me, safely carrying me to the opposite shore.
“I’ve been in love with you since junior high school, you know,” I say to him when he sets me down.
He nods. “I haven’t known you, though.”
“The Republicans lost the election because they lost their way trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive.” I refer to politicians who sued to keep this brain-dead woman on life support, against her husband’s wishes. I didn’t watch the Republican convention, but I read on the Internet that Pat Boone attended it.
“But what did you expect them to do?” he says. “Just let her die?”
The Florida sun reflects off sand and water. I look up at him, though it’s difficult to see his features in this dazzling halo.
“What would you do to keep me alive?” I whisper.
For you, he says, I would iron the night.
About the Author
Sue William Silverman’s memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, is also a Lifetime television movie. Her memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a professional speaker (suewilliamsilverman.com).
In the American Lives Series
Fault Line
by Laurie Alberts
Pieces from Life’s Crazy Quilt
by Marvin V. Arnett
Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Illness
by Charles Barber
This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir
by Mary Clearman Blew
Body Geographic
by Barrie Jean Borich
Driving with Dvořák: Essays on Memory and Identity
by Fleda Brown
Searching for Tamsen Donner
by Gabrielle Burton
Island of Bones: Essays
by Joy Castro
American Lives: A Reader
edited by Alicia Christensen
introduced by Tobias Wolff
Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis
by Mary Felstiner
Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life
by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament
by Evelyn I. Funda
Falling Room
by Eli Hastings
Opa Nobody
by Sonya Huber
Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood
by Jonathan Johnson
Local Wonders: Seasons inthe Bohemian Alps
by Ted Kooser
Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir
by Dinah Lenney
What Becomes You
by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz
Such a Life
by Lee Martin
Turning Bones
by Lee Martin
In Rooms of Memory: Essays
by Hilary Masters
Between Panic and Desire
by Dinty W. Moore
Sleep in Me
by Jon Pineda
Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior
by Brandon R. Schrand
Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed
by Mimi Schwartz
My Ruby Slippers: Finding Place on the Road Back to Kansas
by Tracy Seeley
The Fortune Teller’s Kiss
by Brenda Serotte
Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard
by Fan Shen
Just Breathe Normally
by Peggy Shumaker
Scraping By in the Big Eighties
by Natalia Rachel Singer
In the Shadow of Memory
by Floyd Skloot
Secret Frequencies: A New York Education
by John Skoyles
The Days Are Gods
by Liz Stephens
Phantom Limb
by Janet Sternburg
Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land
by W. D. Wetherell
To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.
Also by Sue William Silverman
Memoir
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (Winner of the Association for Writers and Writing Programs Award Series)
Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction
Poetry
Hieroglyphics in Neon
Craft
Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
Connect with Sue at
www.SueWilliamSilverman.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SueWilliamSilverman
Twitter: SueSilverman
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 23