Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

Author:Warren Zanes [Zanes, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826414922
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2003-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three:

In the Land of Make-Believe

I had my own madness, my own recklessness when I was young. And I had my elsewheres to make it all more bearable. Without the imagination and the landscapes the imagination allowed, navigating adolescence and pre-adolescence would certainly have been a more hopeless, messy affair. My initial attraction to Dusty in Memphis surely hinged on the fact that upon listening to the album I felt like I was hearing from someone who shared my favorite elsewhere. The singer sounded like she had just returned from there.

* * *

If it all goes back to youth, I should say this much: where I grew up, looking into the neighbors’ windows was simply a part of the game. With time to kill on weekend nights and only a single road extending for miles in either direction, boredom closing in on us, it was inevitable that my friends and I would get around to peeping. And at one point, fixed on a window’s grid, something happened that left a mark on my imagination, something that applies here.

We were pre-teens in rural new Hampshire. It was a matter of being too young to drive and not quite ready for drugs, which weren’t easily found even if you were prepared for their transport, which, when it came, was something like a trial run for actually getting out of that town. Sex, if a matter of constant discussion, was still just something to lie about to keep your standing.

All of which meant that we sat in a lot of bushes and kneeled in a lot of dirt, waiting for something to happen on the other side of the glass. Mostly we saw neighbors watching TV. And when that got to us, my friends and I would give up and watch a little ourselves. That or we’d slide back into playing with the few things from childhood that still pertained as we waited for adolescence to offer us something better, the BB guns and the firecrackers, both of which could be made new so long as there were new ways to relate to our targets (it wasn’t a good time in the local animal kingdom).

For the most part, despite our commitment, all we could boast for our long hours of peeping was that we saw a few middle-aged women slipping into Lanz nightgowns. And while this wasn’t the stuff of anyone’s most bold erotic fantasies, it was a lot when one considers the no-man’s-land in which we were stranded for the time being. Making use of the narrative structure that we learned from Penthouse letters, which both confounded us and left our imaginations infused with possibility, we made these nightgowned ladies matter.

The Penthouse letters of which I speak, crucial in forming my view of the world and its machinations, were kept in a neighbor’s barn. As many of my generation know well, these letters were the literary offshoot of popular pornography and implicitly suggested that sex could—and quite possibly would—happen anywhere, anytime, with anyone.

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