April 18, 2019

Points of My Own

(Some items I would object to were I the “Dark Haired Beauty With Big Dark Eyes” immortalized in Bob Seger’s 1976 song “Night Moves”)

• You were not “a little too tall.” That is not even a thing. Admittedly, yes, you were not particularly well, built, but it’s not like I’d write a song about your peculiar physique and turn the weird shape of your anatomy into the stuff of musical legend. Cuz, like, that isn’t something you and I would do to each other, right? Oh, wait.
• You never got to second base. Anyone who listens carefully to the song will understand this. If you had got to second base, you would have known that my breasts weren’t pointy, or even particularly firm. I understand that it was 1962, and brassieres back then were a bit like armour, but there was nothing pointy about it. This wasn’t Madonna in a cone bra. I don’t even know what this is about. And the way you dwell on their height, when you yourself are still going on about how you’re too tall—you realize this makes me sound like I had tits growing out of my neck, right? Just stop it. It’s weird and embarrassing.
• Your pants were tight, but not because of fashion. They were also really short and we used to call you “Floods”—but once again, I never wrote a song about that to humiliate you.
• You sang, “I used her, she used me, but neither one cared.” I cared, Bob. I did. I liked you, which is why I kept going on dates with you in futile hope that you might take me somewhere that was NOT the “the backroom, the alley, the trusty woods.” The woods were creepy, Bob. Out past the cornfields, it’s downright terrifying, and I thought maybe we could go out for a milkshake, or go see a movie, and you’d tell me, “Relax, babe,” and I kept doing what you told me because my dad was abusive and I was unaccustomed to challenging male authority.
• The most solid proof I’ve got that my breasts weren’t actually pointy is that I never stabbed you with one of them.
• You were not a bad guy. You never made me do anything I didn’t want to do. And that I feel grateful now all these years later for the fact that I was never sexually violated in the backseat of your ’60 Chevy makes me feel depressed, Bob, about the culture we grew up in.
• I wasn’t using you. Seriously, what exactly would I have been using you for? I thought we had something. I was flattered that you liked me. I thought the other kids were mean when they made fun of your pants, and I felt a bit sorry for you. I never used you. And if I had used you, well—and you know where this is going—I wouldn’t have written a song about it. Because that would not be very respectful.
• Sometimes I wonder if you ever figured out that breasts aren’t pointy.
• I don’t know what “front page drive-in news” is, but of all the things I wasn’t trying to make back then, this definitely was it. Which was why we kept going out beyond the cornfields where the woods got heavy, because if people had found out that we were necking in your Chevy, my reputation would have taken a beating. So thank goodness you eventually recorded a song about it in 1976, eh, Bob? Just to keep the whole thing really fucking discreet.
• You got this right: we were young and restless and bored. I’ve never been so bored in my life. What I would have given to have you take me to a movie. Honestly, at the movies I probably would have let you touch my boobs. Looking back, I regret that I didn’t, because it would have made a better song.
• I don’t remember any thunder. It was a really dry summer, if I recall correctly. It hardly rained at all.
• Possible songs you were humming from 1962: Mashed Potato Time, by Dee Deep Sharp; Patches, by Dickie Lee; If I Had a Hammer, by Peter, Paul and Mary; Duke of Earl, by Gene Chandler; or Dee Deep Sharp’s most ambitious follow-up Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes).
• Man, if you thought autumn was closing in in 1976… What is UP with Baby Boomers and premature nostalgia?
• Working on mysteries without any clue. INDEED.
• My favourite song that year was Palisades Park, by Freddy Cannon, about a guy who took his girl somewhere that wasn’t a backroom or an alley. They kiss at the top of a ferris wheel, and I don’t have any details about her breasts, because Freddy Cannon was a gentleman.