Column: True confessions of a lonesome loser
And I’m gonna’ die just a little more on each St. Valentine’s day . . .
-Tom Waits, Blue Valentines.
How I once dreaded Valentine’s Day, that cavity-inducing, flower-killing, quasi-holiday designed to make owners of a lonely heart, like me, feel like a turd in a tin cup.
I envied any guy who was gifted something by a significant other, even if the gift was a mere Brach’s KISS ME candy heart.
Why him?
I’d see couples holding hands and desire their invisible handcuffs of love—oh, how I longed to be bound in love’s restraints, even though most women I courted seemed stricken by what Richard Thompson called a “rambling itch” in his song “Beeswing”: “She said, as long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay/And you wouldn’t want me any other way.”
Why not me?
A particular Joe Jackson record rotating on the radio burrowed like an earworm, “Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street.” Each overpriced Hallmark gifted at the gorilla convention sliced my heart like a paper cut. It seemed every woman possessed a Jane Goodall complex. My epitaph was destined to be: DEATH BY 1,000 HALLMARK PAPER CUTS.
Where was my BE MINE candy heart?
In elementary school, we arrived with Valentine’s Day cards, one for each homeroom classmate—male and female. We’d drop our mass-produced, cartoony cards into each shoebox atop each classmate’s desk. I couldn’t wait to find the cards from girls on my pre-pubescent Romeo radar, rejoice in their generic puns. A cartoon duck with a thought bubble: “Don’t Try to DUCK Me Today.” I would never DUCK you, I’d think. Also, I glanced at my teacher, whom I had targeted with a card that read, “Teacher, You’re The Only One For Me.” I had a case of “puppy love” for Mrs. Phillips. Luckily, I was all bark and no bite.
Looney Tunes introduced us to Romance 101. Pepe’ Le Pew, that amorous, hopelessly aromatic-romantic skunk, was a role model for those dying inside due to unrequited love. Pepe’s perpetual pestering of Penelope wouldn’t pass today—rightfully so. A #LePew movement in the making.
Little River Band had me in its crosshairs.
RADIO: Have you heard about the lonesome loser?
ME: You mean the loser who still keeps on trying?
Clearly, “Lonesome Loser” was about me.
Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” delivered a gut punch: “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely/Hey, that’s me and I want you only/Don’t turn me home again/
I just can’t face myself alone again.”
Lonesomeness is a form of solitary confinement—except the sentence is served in full view of others. Think time-lapsed public execution.
Paul Simon’s “Graceland” was the soundtrack to my forlornness: “She comes back to tell me she’s gone/As if I didn’t know that/As if I didn’t know my own bed/As if I’d never noticed/The way she brushed her hair from her forehead/And she said, ‘losing love
is like a window in your heart/Everybody sees you’re blown apart/Everybody sees the wind blow.’ ”
On Valentine’s Day, this lonesome loser had dinner for one at a table for two. An obligatory red rose mocked me from a vase at the center of a wobbly table closest to the kitchen’s swinging doors, each open and close emitting a mousy squeak, bringing to mind creaky footfalls of an approaching heartless Tin Man, smoke signals rising from candle wick spelling out LONESOME LOSER to accentuate my solo state, the empty chair across from me hard to stare down, the daring dating with myself, my heart clock in full view, ticking, while dinner dates clinked wine glasses together, toasting their sparkling time together.
This lonesome loser glanced up from his shame sandwich only to be force-fed a Valentine’s Day vision of the picture-frame people hiding engagement rings in cakes or nestling necklaces in cream pies, hoping their significant other’s tongue detected the jewelry before cracking a tooth or, even worse, swallowing a precious stone, the latter scenario setting up an awkward, delayed “proposal” the next morning.
SHE: I’m sorry. When you said “enjoy your Karat cake,” I thought you meant carrot cake. Before you slide that on my finger, let’s rinse it first.
HE: Of course, my dear. There. Marry me?
SHE: Yes, my daring romantic darling.
HE: You may flush now, my future blushing bride.
Most of my life, Valentine’s Day delivered yet another blow to my punching bag heart, a withered pugilist of love doubled over a plate of cold, limp fries drowned in ketchup, sipping tepid java from a cracked cup, catastrophic clouds in my coffee, alone at a wobbly table nearest the restaurant’s rear, sitting so far back that the wait staff was allowed to smoke nearby, as if secondhand smoke were a side order, Valentine’s Day nothing but a death sentence.
“Romeo is bleeding,” Tom Waits first croaked 47 years ago. My heart hemorrhaged almost as long. The upside: as long as you still bleed, you are still alive—hope flickers eternal.
Fortunately, during my 50s, I met Brynne online—she entered my lonely life like an email- order bride. We’ve been married eight years now, and we still try to make up for lost Valentine’s Day time.
This year, we shared a heart-shaped pepperoni pizza and chewed chocolate-covered strawberries. Brynne arranged fresh flowers in a vase—a bouquet that she bought for me. We rooted for butcher bachelor Ernest Borgnine in 1955’s “Marty” (“You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.”) while a heart-shaped helium balloon floated through our house, towed by Cupid’s ghost perhaps. I long for nothing new, only for that which exists in the now. I’m grateful. It happened to me. It will happen to you.
See Scott’s columns on his Substack account. https://saalmania.substack.com?r=44og91&utm_medium=ios
