No. 173 – Welcome to the Machine

Performer: Pink Floyd

Songwriter: Roger Waters

Original Release: Wish You Were Here

Year: 1975

Definitive Version: Tongue, Tied & Twisted, 1988.

When I saw Pink Floyd with Scott in 1988, as the video that introduced this song came on the screen behind the stage, I yelled out: “Here comes the loudest song you’re ever going to hear.” That it features David Gilmour on ACOUSTIC guitar made no difference. However, for today’s story, set the way-back machine to a year earlier, Shermy …

After Jessica made known her intentions concerning me at a party she threw the night before my aborted journey to Bronner’s in Frankenmuth, Mich. (good ol’ No. 674), I was like a kid on Christmas Eve. Christmas couldn’t arrive soon enough for me to open my shiny, new package. Less than a week later, October 1987 became a joyful time of year.

Jessica was my first lover since Beth, and when you go from zero to hero and back again, a break in the action tends to make one wonder whether heroism ever will return again. Or maybe that’s just me.

Jessica and I had some fun times together during the Halloween season. I introduced her to some of my Northwestern friends one night at the Hidden Shamrock, and she introduced me to some of hers at the Heartland Café. In retrospect, I think I got the better of the deal there in terms of location.

Actually, our relationship involved Northwestern to some degree. Jessica took classes there, working—haphazardly—toward a possible masters in English. She had a Monday-night class not far from Fiske Hall.

After my evening copy-editing class (yes, the one that later would save my journalism career), I’d swing by Center Hall to meet her after her class. Then I’d accompany her back to her Rogers Park apartment and—better—her Rogers Park apartment bedroom to spend the night.

Jessica never didn’t appreciate seeing me waiting for her outside the classroom—sometimes holding flowers—and I enjoyed doing it. It made it so I looked forward to Mondays, which I didn’t think was possible.

My roommates, however, were less than enamored of me showing up at the crack of dawn to get cleaned up for class. It couldn’t have been too pleasant for Andrea to have her daughter ask why the man in the back bedroom came home early in the morning.

Halloween was particularly interesting. Jessica wasn’t interested in the holiday per se but wanted to take the train down to Pullman to visit friends who moved there to gentrify what once had been a bustling community but since had become more or less a ghost town.

I don’t remember a lot of details about the day. It was a cool but pleasant fall day. We walked around the neighborhood, visiting Jessica’s friends’ home and going to a nearby café for some coffee. In the light of the sunny weekend day, I didn’t feel unsafe in Pullman despite its lackluster reputation.

Pullman was fascinating in a way that any desolate city is. I got to see the long-closed Pullman Palace Car Co. plant before it went up in flames (since restored). But the most impressive thing that day was the view of The Midway at Chicago University from our train. I didn’t know it existed until we went past it, and it seemed like it could have played the part of Hardy’s Christminster in Jude the Obscure.

Jessica and I spent the entire day together, which was nice. We ended up back at her place to carve a pumpkin before playing our own version of trick or treat. It was like we were in an actual relationship.

It turns out we weren’t. Our relationship, such as it was, ran its course soon after Halloween. Nothing in particular happened; it was just that Jessica and I were at different points in our life. Before Jessica, the only person I’d been with was someone who I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. Jessica had left that person in her life long behind and was enjoying being a single woman in a big city and all that that would imply.

The bottom line is I didn’t have enough experience at the time to process a relationship that was meant to be merely a beneficial one between friends. She was. If I had been a bit further along, I would have appreciated what we had a lot more than I did.

I wasn’t devastated when it ended, but I wasn’t really happy about it either. At least I had no more awkward early-morning entrances to make.

There was one thing, however, that I took from my relationship with Jessica that stayed with me ever since. When we hooked up, I still was fresh off seeing Pink Floyd for the first time. Jessica had three Pink Floyd albums—Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. One morning, I taped all those albums, and those songs made up the soundtrack of the Summer of Love in 1988.

There are other reasons to do so, of course, but for that reason alone—supplying the first Pink Floyd to my music collection—I owe Jessica eternal thanks.