Beeswing and My First Love

My brother shared a Spotify playlist with me sometime ago called “What You Left Behind”. It’s a little heavy on music from the National, which is a group I think I would like more except I overloaded on their music during my tenure at the Current, who once considered the tagline “The National, Brandi Carlile and sometimes other bands”. They’re both great artists, but it just added up to a ton of hours hearing their music. But the first tune on the playlist is Beeswing by Richard Thompson and it caught me immediately.

Whatever this song does is what music does better than art, than film, than literature, than poetry. It’s nostalgia with commentary and musical counterpoint. It’s the way Richard Thompson tells his story, but somehow sings mine. It’s the way my heart makes the journey from verse one to the end with complete freshness each time I press play. I academically understand I’m playing the song over again, but my heart is breaking new ground. My heart is breaking new ground in the spot it just broke new ground in five and a half minutes ago.

As I sweated it out in the sauna (they improved the sauna at the Midway Y, come back if you’re looking to sweat baby) and listened to this song I started thinking about who my first love was. I loved intertwining my stories with Thompson’s. The character in Beeswing was wild, enthralling and in Thompson’s retrospect there was no way they could last based on their trajectories. Young love fated by some combination of timing and chemistry to be fleeting. Something designed to feel like it would last forever while it fleeted.

I first loved a girl I’ll call Mary from where I grew up in Massachusetts. I don’t know why she loved me. She’s been a punchline for a lot of my life. She loved a lot of people. She went to third base with one of my best friends on the very evening of the morning my family left for Minnesota, and yes, we had plans to stay together forever so it was cheating. She was a punchline because she broke my heart and because she was promiscuous before, after and during our dating. But I know I loved her. I know she loved me. She taught me what it’s like to have a girl treat you like you matter more to her than her friends and family do. I don’t know why we got together. Or more accurately I don’t know why she paid attention to me. I know we both played in the pit for the musical Kiss Me Kate. I couldn’t read music so I mainly just played quiet and pretended if there were notes written out. Otherwise I played the chords and the teacher Mr. Moors tolerated this. Mary was wowza good at flute. Going places. Doing auditions. Private lessons, a beautiful sound. A beautiful spirit, she loved the flute. She’s also beautiful. Long brown hair. Sat on the sand in her senior black and white photo and she wrote a long note to me on the back that spent a handful of years as my most prized possession. And in that pit she fell in love with me. We didn’t share mutual friends. She was two years older than me. She was beautiful. I might’ve given off a beautiful spirit, in fact I’m sure as shit I did, but I don’t think I was a particularly hot catch. Didn’t dress well. Took a relaxed attitude towards looking good. But something about whatever I was doing and whoever I was worked for her. As this Thompson song plays I wonder why. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t fake. She was inarguably out of my league, but I think I might’ve been playing in the wrong league. She was a junior when I was a freshman and she cared less about the pecking order and the who-is-cooler-Olympics that plagues ninth grades to this day. She liked art, music, tenderness. I’ve got that. I’m a talker. I’m a charmer. I’m an artsy guy who can talk about it and isn’t 100% self-involved. Lots of practices for the musical pit, lots of hanging out, lots of sitting around and suddenly, largely through her initiative, she starts to like me. I have no idea what to do. Mary has a car. I repeat, Mary has a car. She isn’t borrowing a car. She is driving a car. She drives it home. She had a boyfriend recently in Albany. Albany is almost an hour away. HOW? How did you meet him? This boyfriend at one point listened to Pearl Jam’s “Indifference” on repeat in his room for a whole week whether he was there on not. HOW CAN I COMPETE WITH THAT MARY? WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME TO COMPETE WITH THAT MARY? But we were falling in love.

I remember kissing her early in our relationship. I remember kissing her breasts for the first time. I was a huge fan of that. We drove to Northampton all the time to see a singer-songwriter named maybe Rafe? We’d go to Fire and Water. I can’t tell you how cool I felt to be at a VEGETARIAN PERFORMANCE SPACE WITH A GIRL WHO LIKED ME AND LIKED WHEN I KISSED HER BREASTS LISTENING TO A PERSON SING THEIR OWN MUSIC. Here’s a picture of the owners of Fire and Water standing in front of it.

What exactly more do you want in life than this? The room is full with young people hearing these songs, falling in love, telling their own stories they’ll think back to for years. If the show was at 8pm Mary would still pick me up at 11am. She’d drive the hour to Northampton. She had a stick shift. Maybe it was a Honda. A girl who can drive a stick shift. Priceless. Every human is priceless. But if you can drive a stick you’re priceless plus a million dollars. Plus the magic of hearing her play the flute. She was incredible at something which mattered to me. Nothing sexier than being boss at something you care about on your terms. An amazing flute player. Probably going to go to college on scholarship for the flute. She had cool mixtapes in her car. She painted her toenails. She liked records. We’d get to Northampton and just walk around. The record store was Dynamite Records and it was amazing. Shop for records. Walk somewhere else. Did we eat? We must’ve ate? What did we do? On these trips we didn’t fight. I think we fought but not on these days when we were apart from all the difficulties of navigating a romantic relationship around fellow teenagers and meddling parents. I remember the band I was in learning to play “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” by the Allman Brothers while Mary just sat there listening to us rehearse. I was being taught a difficult song by my much more talented brother and I was struggling with some turn. As I struggled Mary asked if I was mentally challenged but she used the R word that none of us should’ve ever used. We fought that day. But I don’t know, I don’t think we fought that often.

We weren’t intertwined in the same friend group at first. We ended up of course intermingling in all those ways and it was all terrible. My mom didn’t like her and Mary didn’t give a shit, which made me love Mary more. My mom said she could tell Mary was promiscuous cause my mom said she had been the same way, my mom used the world slut which none of us should’ve ever used, but I couldn’t tell my mom that in 1995. Mary had a confidence in her sexuality that probably did remind my mom of her own but I think my mom was wrong to hate it. I think my mom could tell she would break my heart but she should’ve known there wasn’t shit she could do about it. I had a lot of firsts with Mary and I learned a lot. I doubt I taught her a damn thing. She told me she had first masturbated when she was young with some part of a broken phone that vibrated. This amazed me. The courage to do it. The courage to tell me. The seeming lack of fear about telling me this. Part of this is because we were in love, we were close. I say this next part with love and respect, she was a freak. I couldn’t match up, I couldn’t hang, I didn’t get it, I didn’t know anything and I learned a very little bit of what I needed to know from her, but she was older than me, more mature than me and I think more grown and comfortable in her own skin than most people her age. She was out of my league, but maybe I had been playing in the wrong league. Growing up fat in America I was convinced my body couldn’t bring joy to anyone under any terms. Mary disavowed me of that thought quickly. Maybe there was a world of girls who liked Ben Folds Five, who wanted to get more piercings, who wanted to go to concerts and who wanted to date a boy like me. Maybe there was a league in which I could be a starter.

There are few joys in life more amazing than being in love and in over your head with a precocious sixteen year old wearing a sundress driving around Northampton waiting to take in a show at a vegetarian cafe. She loved me without reservation. She loved me without agenda. She loved me without a plan. She loved me with abandon. And I loved her back. And it could never last. And it did not last. And it hurt like almost nothing has hurt when it ended, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. If you offered me a million dollars to be without these memories I could laugh in your face. I’m not me without that time with Mary. I do wonder if it’s the same for her. And I like to wonder while Richard Thompson’s Beeswing plays.