Radiohead
Fake Plastic Trees

Winter 2004

At the time, I was not yet sixteen.

I was a fifteen-year-old carefree boy, full of dreams and hopes for the future.

A dreamer, a carefree dreamer with a bit of a stoner look, including the ever-present cigarette clenched between my lips.

I attended a classical high school in Naples, more famous for its anarcho-insurrectionist stance than for its teaching methods. In short, at fifteen, I didn't know a word of Greek, but you could say that I knew who Marx and Che Guevara were, at least by hearsay.

It was another era, that one.

Full of carefree students like me who, somewhat naively, believed they could emulate the glory of the '68 through slogans and protests.

In short, the pseudo-youth of 2004 was made up of lazy brats who wanted to extend their Christmas vacation by a couple of weeks.

But no, at least for me, it wasn't just that.

I was a carefree guy but also very shy.

And it's only thanks to the banners and pickets in front of the gate of that school full of stoners that I met her, in the early days of December.

Her name was Lydia. She had long wavy hair that draped down her back. It was a bright red that alone was enough to spark my worst fantasies as a pimply teenager.

And she had big brown eyes, full of life, in which I got lost countless times.

She was a tease, but she inspired sympathy in me.

We started seeing each other, between one joint and another rolled within the walls of that gloomy building that by now was at the mercy of all the addicts in the area.

Everyone used that occupied high school to get high: it provided excellent shelter from prying eyes and the weather conditions of that damnably cold winter.

Yes, because in Naples, the winter of 2004 was damn cold.

The leaden sky matched well with the withered trees. The average temperature was four degrees Celsius, and it wasn't uncommon to see the sun set at five in the afternoon. There was room only for icy days of pouring rain. And it was on one of those days that I gathered the courage and kissed her.

It was December 20, 2004. I had just turned sixteen.

Three days later, I was supposed to hold a sort of concert in the school gym, which was supposed to complete the pseudo-educational project carried out by the "grown-ups."

"We want an alternative education," they shouted in a shrill voice from their megaphones. Shrill voices of a madness and recklessness that only adolescents, with their load of existential dramas, can have. An alternative knowledge that consisted of nonstop screenings of films like Trainspotting and long "engaged" debates about drugs, which always ended in a collective smoke.

Where were we? Ah, the concert

Yes, I was very tense; I had been playing bass for a few months, and performing with the "grown-ups" made me feel a bit uneasy.

I found shelter from the growing anxiety at her place. It was a small rundown hovel, located in one of Naples' working-class neighborhoods. In a micro-apartment lived she, her three brothers, and her two unemployed parents. It seemed a bit sad. But more than sadness, it was melancholy that I read in her eyes. Her father had lost his job. For the umpteenth time. What lay ahead for her couldn't be called a "holy Christmas." I tried to cheer her up. I pretended to be a karateka, hoping at least to share one of her passions. She floored me in no time. I tripped her on purpose, and she fell on me. Loud laughter broke out, and with it, passion. We made love.

"Are you playing tonight?"

She asked me with a raspy voice while playing with my hair.

"Dunno,"

I replied while anxiety consumed me inside.

"What kind of music do you play?"

I pulled out my trusty CD player from my backpack that I always carried with me.

Inside was an album a dear friend had lent me. It was The Bends by Radiohead.

I passed her an earbud, and she put it in her ear.

On track number 4, Fake Plastic Trees, she exclaimed with joy:

- "Oh, how beautiful this song is, it feels like a Christmas song to me."

Fake Plastic Trees, with its nearly five minutes of pessimistic spleen embodied in an electroacoustic ballad, Fake Plastic Trees, with its three sustained and crystalline organ chords, reminded her of her Christmas: melancholic, cold, decadent but not for that less happy, alive, lived.

An authentic moment in a fake, plastic world.

In January, Lydia disappeared from my life. I knew what I was getting into, and the premature goodbye I had anticipated.

Along with her, like an organ fade, the revolutionary movements of the students, the banners outside the schools, the joints in company, and also a bit of my carefree innocence that until then had characterized me, gradually vanished.

Today, a little over twenty years later, what remains is the melancholy linked to that period and the oppressive cold of that winter of 2004 that's still in my bones and easily resurfaces every time I play this song.