High Fidelity

I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign. I hung around Charlie’s hall of residence until some friends of hers caught me and threatened to give me a good kicking. I decided to kill Marco (Marco!), the guy she went off with, and spent long hours in the middle of the night working out how to do it, although whenever I bumped into him I just muttered a greeting and sloped off. I did a spot of shoplifting, the precise motivation for which escapes me now. I took an overdose of Valium, and stuck a finger down my throat within a minute. I wrote endless letters to her, some of which I posted, and scripted endless conversations, none of which we had. And when I came around, after a couple of months of darkness, I found to my surprise that I had flunked my course and was working in Record and Tape Exchange in Camden.

Everything happened so fast. I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions. Some people never got over the sixties, or the war, or the night their band opened for the Rolling Stones at the Marquee, and spend the rest of their days walking backwards; I never really got over Charlie. That was when the important stuff, the stuff that defines me, went on.

Some of my favorite songs: ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by Neil Young; ‘Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me’ by the Smiths; ‘Call Me’ by Aretha Franklin; ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ by anybody. And then there’s ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ‘The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ and ‘She’s Gone’ and ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself’ and … some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

Anyway. Here’s how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you’re frozen, and that’s how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you’ve ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you’d just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn’t it be a

I made sure, however, that I was never in anything, work or relationships, too deep: I convinced myself that I might get the call from Charlie at any moment, and would therefore have to leap into action. I was even unsure about opening my own shop, just in case Charlie wanted me to go abroad with her and I wasn’t able to move quickly enough; marriage, mortgages, and fatherhood were out of the question. I was realistic too: every now and again I updated Charlie’s life, imagining a whole series of disastrous events (She’s living with Marco! They’ve bought a place together! She’s married him! She’s pregnant! She’s had a little girl!), just to keep myself on my toes, events which required a whole series of readjustments and conversions to keep my fantasies alive. (She’ll have nowhere to go when they split! She’ll really have nowhere to go when they split, and I’ll have to support her financially! Marriage’ll wake her up! Taking on another man’s kid will show her what a great guy I am!) There was no news I couldn’t handle; there was nothing she and Marco could do that would convince me that it wasn’t all just a stage we were going through. They are together still, for all I know, and, as of today, I am unattached again.

5. Sarah Kendrew (1984-1986)

The lesson I learned from the Charlie debacle is that you’ve got to punch your weight. Charlie was out of my class: too pretty, too smart, too witty, too much. What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest: I have read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and understood them, I think (they were about girls, right?), but I don’t like them very much; my all-time top five favorite books are The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and, I don’t know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vo