You Have To Hear This!
Possibly the best thing Bonnie did for me was to introduce me to a whole world of new music.
When I visualize Bonnie now, I see a girl bouncing wildly on her dorm room bed. Bonnie was so lost in the blaring music, she barely noticed she was dancing. Head shaking, arms flailing, scream-singing every word of the song, she became one with the song – whatever song was playing on the record player.
Before the song ended, she’d leap from the bed – three feet into the air and landing on the floor – yelling: “Oh my god you have to hear this!”
In one practiced, fluid motion, she’d scrape the needle across the spinning record and toss her beloved album on the floor, while pulling a new record from its cover and dropping it on the turntable. Then she’d be back on the bed bouncing, beer in hand.
Whatever music Bonnie liked became my favorite music, too. Bonnie would point out a specific guitar riff in a song which I would then never un-hear. Or she’d sing specific lyrics louder than others, staring at me knowingly, begging me to recognize the significance of those specific words.
Some of the classic rock bands had completely eluded me in high school. I knew the Doors and Jimi Hendrix; she knew the Stones, Pink Floyd and David Bowie. She’d done her high school term paper on Stairway to Heaven, and I didn’t even know how to spell Led Zeppelin. (Her knowledge came in handy when Jimmy Page walked into a bar one day, months later, but that’s a different story.)
The Cure, U2, The Smiths, Yaz, REM, Violent Femmes – these bands provided Bonnie’s soundtrack at Mount Union. So they became my soundtrack, too.
I adored these bands, but I honestly hated The Smiths. When we went to see The Smiths in concert, Bonnie and I spent the entire evening in the bathroom. Morrissey bored me. We listened to The Smiths more than anything else, possibly because she was trying to sway my opinion, and eventually I liked a couple of their songs. But I never admitted this to Bonnie; in my eyes, her opinion was the right one.
Several years later when I introduced Bonnie to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, she snubbed them without more than a minute of listening. I loved my new cassette, bought with my own money after college when I was very poor.
“That fucking sucks,” she said.
I still like Edie, although she didn’t go very far beyond her one hit wonder status. Still, I always tried to like whatever music Bonnie shared, and she never really listened to mine.
In spite of all those hours of Smiths – and my real adoration of bands like Yaz – I eventually learned that what Bonnie thinks about music is all that matters to Bonnie.
She was never swayed by my opinion. And since I didn’t hold much stock in myself, Bonnie’s “rightness” never much bothered me when we were hanging out. I believed that Bonnie knew best, Bonnie knew more, Bonnie loved more deeply and passionately, and therefore Bonnie was always right.
I was nearly 50 years old before I realized that Bonnie never actually cared about me at all.
But this didn’t stop us from spending every waking moment together for my final two years of college.