CRUSH by Cathy Alter

Author:Cathy Alter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

PART 6

It Had to Be You

First crushes can equal transference. Those we eventually love in real life are carbon copies of our crushes, whether we realize it at first blush or years later. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we seek out real-life loves who mirror our crush in looks, actions, or just an indefinable but unmistakable similarity.

DAVID KEPLINGER

Deborah Harry Doesn’t Dance

It is 1979 and I am in the seventh grade and I am watching American Bandstand, where, center stage, Deborah Harry stands behind her stiff steel microphone, slightly smiling, singing. It is the song I heard at the Skate Ranch on Route 309, a driving “One Way or Another,” and she is like all the girls I loved then and all the girls I will love and there’s something else: she doesn’t really look at the camera; she doesn’t really look at the microphone. Her eyes are just rising a little ways behind me to a place about four feet off the floor. Wherever I am watching her from, that spot is just behind me. Which leaves me, twelve years old and five feet tall, hair “feathered back” (as my mother would describe to the beautician), feeling decidedly unsuitable, like I should look back over my shoulder at the lucky guy who is.

Deborah Harry doesn’t dance. She might throw a red scarf around like a giant, ridiculous handkerchief. But no dancing. The scarf accentuates the fact. She is teasing as she reprimands. Then she throws the scarf over her shoulder again.

I see her now, thirty-seven years later, in videos from that period, old television spots that appear on YouTube. This Bandstand episode is one of them. In this one, her boys in skinny ties strum Gibson guitars or bang at the drums. Her post-punk/pre–New Wave raunch kind of flaunts the fact that this is as far as it’s going to go, boys and girls; you will float here in this blue-ball hell, it says to me; you will live in this light between fighting and fucking. It’s excruciating. It’s exhilarating to be between so much, such joy and frustration, anger and ecstasy. It is a feeling I would have described then as “good.” That’s how it was in 1979. It felt good to watch Deborah Harry on American Bandstand. To be her five-foot-tall voyeur. To stand just a little in front of the real guy she’s looking at. I watch the video on my computer. And I feel it all roiling in my gut again. Only now do I see her largesse and intelligence and the sculpted cheekbones, the unblinking eyes, the nearly emotionless challenge—feel good?—rising out of her expression. Only now do I see how beautiful she was then. She won’t dance for you. She is herself.

Only now do I see it: the look that Charlize Theron, to name just one of her emanations, has drawn from Deborah Harry’s early glamour. In the Bandstand appearance Deborah Harry could be Theron’s twin. Only now do I see how those subtle turns

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