Jean Michel Jarre

See, Eric had a girlfriend. In all the time we were friends and roommates, neither one of us ever had a real serious girlfriend. We both had relationships in high school, but your opportunities to intimately mingle with the opposite sex were few and far between at a boarding school (which is how boarding schools encourage homosexuality). We had always been each other’s friend first and foremost and it seemed that’s the way it would always be. That is, after all, the main reason I had come down, to get a dose of my buddy Eric. But he had just started getting involved with this woman Emily (beautiful, but crazy) and had recently discovered the joys of sex, and was hungry for more. So, while he was gracious and genuinely glad to see me, his real interest at that moment was in Emily, and me showing up unannounced and camping out in the foamy living room cramped his style. And I wasn’t a great guest because I was stone broke and had to beg and borrow money from him in order to eat (in fact, I made it through one day just eating slices of stale French bread lightly fried in slivers of butter). The first night I was there, Emily came over and we had dinner together and then went back to the apartment and chatted. Their desire to be alone was clear, so I yawned and stretched and said I thought I’d turn in early, if they didn’t mind. A look of relief crossed Eric’s face as he jumped up to help me get my sleeping bag in order. As we were getting ready, I noticed a Walkman, and asked if I could borrow it to listen to his new tapes before going to sleep. Which I sincerely wanted to do, but I also knew that listening to the Walkman would drown out the other sounds of the apartment and might make the two E’s more comfortable grunting and panting and making whatever noises they were so anxious to start making.

I told myself I understood, but I was hurt. And jealous. I desperately wanted a girlfriend and had had no luck (or no guts, really) in getting one and it didn’t help that my best friend was slithering off to bed with a beautiful, exotic model while I lay alone on the cold basement floor. And I really wanted to connect with Eric, that’s the whole reason I had come down, but he was distracted by the siren in his bed and really didn’t want me around right then. It wasn’t until years later when I finally had a good, solid, intimate relationship that I understood just how one’s priorities can shift. So, I sighed, put a tape in the Walkman, slipped the headphones over my ears and pressed play.

One of the ways Eric and I communicated was by making tapes. We were constantly striving to find the perfect combinations of songs to put together to share with each other and savor for ourselves. And the tape I had pulled out was his most recent, showcasing new discoveries and new releases by old favorites. I don’t remember much about the tape in general, but halfway through side two, I ran across an absolutely incredible track. Lushly produced with a persuasive dance beat, the track swirled and shimmied and featured a compelling wordless vocal line and stunning sound effects. The track seemed to be made up largely of bits of broken up words, and I almost burst out laughing when I heard what I still swear is a machine voice saying “exploding vomit”. I couldn’t believe how cool the track was and as soon as it was over, I rewound it and played it again. I must’ve played it a dozen times in a row, marveling at the layered sounds and transported by the glorious “toot toot” of the vocal line (sung, as it turns out, by Laurie Anderson).

In the morning, I asked Eric about it and he told me that that track, called Zoolookologie, was from the new Jean Michel Jarre album. I couldn’t believe it. It was so exciting and so different from his other work. The entire album, I was to later discover, was made up largely of different vocal samples cut apart and woven into music. And although the whole album is interesting, nothing else quite lives up to the stunning energy and exciting technological wonder of Zoolookologie. And Jarre would never again achieve anything like this. His later releases were unbearably sappy, and I stopped listening to him entirely until the 1997 release of the pointless sequel to 1976’s landmark Oxygene album, done on much of the same equipment and sounding true to its roots, but entirely, and depressingly, redundant.

The discovery of this track was the one good thing to come out of that weekend. Eric and I, still friends, had slipped into a different kind of friendship, one I wasn’t sure I wanted or liked. I was no longer as important to him as he was to me. This realization, along with the gnawing hunger in my belly and the knowledge that soon I’d have to go back to Hampshire, more alone than when I dejectedly boarded the bus, was all the motivation I needed. I went out and spent my last two dollars on a pack of Camel Filters. And there, in that cold and lonely apartment, I taught myself to smoke.