The Lonely Hearts Club

by Brenda Janowitz

  The drummer clicks his sticks together and they begin doing a cover of Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady.”

  “Do you think your dad would hook me up with the lead singer of the band?” Chloe asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Why don’t you throw your underwear up on the stage and find out?”

  “I think your mother’s got that one covered,” she says and I look at my mother. It’s impossible to stay angry with her, as cute as she looks dancing on the bench with her black leather pants and Chanel Spectators on. She asked both Chloe and me, separately, of course, if she looked “downtown enough” in her little ensemble.

  “I really should be more drunk for this,” I say, pouring myself another shot of vodka from the slide. I consider for a moment if it would be bad form to squat in front of the vodka slide and just chug until I pass out.

  “Girls! Get up here!” my mother calls out, looking at Chloe and me.

  Absolutely not, I mouth back to her. And then to Chloe: “Is my humiliation not complete?”

  “If you can’t beat them,” Chloe says, “join them.”

  “Never,” I say. “I’m such a loser.”

  “Then admit defeat. If you won’t do it for your mother, do it for your dad. Think about how many gigs he’s come to for you over the years. He’s really tearing it up.”

  “He is,” I say, and I can’t help but smile. He is tearing it up. My dad is totally in his element—playing like I’d never seen him before, nailing each key and dancing along with the music. And the band actually seems to enjoy having him up there.

  I grab another shot of vodka in one hand, Chloe’s hand in the other, and jump up onto the bench with my mom. The three of us dance as we sing along with the lyrics.

  “‘She’s a lady,’” we sing. “‘Whoooooa, she’s a lady...’”

  Chloe is right. If you can’t beat them, join them. After all, my actual birthday isn’t until tomorrow. I can always be angry about how pathetic my life is then.

  12 - Owner of a Lonely Heart

  Valentine’s Day. February fourteenth. A day of love and romance and frills and doilies. A day filled with chocolate in heart-shaped boxes and all things pink and red.

  Valentine’s Day is the day on which lovers freely express their passion for each other by sending flowers, candies, and insipid love notes. Lots of love notes. According to the Greeting Card Association, approximately one billion Valentines are sent every year, making it the biggest card-giving holiday besides Christmas.

  Dozens of red roses are sent on this day and hundreds of couples get engaged. Radio stations play love songs and bakeries bake heart-shaped cookies. February fourteenth is a day dedicated entirely to the pursuit of love.

  It’s also the day that five of Al Capone’s men gunned down seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang with tommy guns in a garage on Chicago’s north side in 1929. But people usually don’t send cards for that.

  It being Valentine’s Day, and me being alone, I do what any respectable single woman who’s utterly alone would do—I open a bottle of Stoli and order in some fried food from my local Italian place.

  “That’ll be $32.15,” the hostess says after she’s tallied up my dinner delivery order.

  “But I get the same thing every time,” I say, pouring my first vodka tonic of the evening. I pour way too much vodka into the glass, making it stronger than I intend it to be, but I’m not exactly drinking it for the taste this evening. “Isn’t it $18 and change?”

  “Oh,” she says, “yeah, normally it is, but there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

  “What?” I say, since I must have misheard her. There’s no way in hell this girl just told me that even though I’m ordering in for one, she’s charging me extra because it’s Valentine’s Day. In fact, since I’m ordering for one and it’s Valentine’s Day, shouldn’t I get a discount instead of a price increase? The whole situation really brings out my Irish. Being a Jewish girl from Long Island, I don’t really have much Irish in me, but it brings it out nonetheless.

  “Oh,” she says. “I was just saying that there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

  “But I ordered for one,” I say, pacing around my kitchen with my glass as I speak. “Clearly I’m alone and it’s Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I know. It’s just that there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

  “I heard you,” I say. I take a big gulp of vodka.

  “Okay, yeah, so it should be there in about twenty minutes,” she says, trying to get me off the phone.

  “I ordered for one.”

  Dead silence on the line.

  “I’d like to speak to a manager,” I say, polishing off my first glass in just one large gulp.

  “Um, okay,” she says. “Hold on.”

  “Hi there,” the manager’s cheery voice announces, as I’m pouring vodka tonic number two. To call this one a vodka tonic would be a bit of a misnomer. Glass number two is more like a vodka with a splash of tonic. “I’m Greg. I’m the manager here.”

  “Hi, Greg,” I say as I sit at the kitchen counter and swirl the glass to mix my drink. “I understand that it’s Valentine’s Day and that means that you have to gouge the eyes out of all the lovesick puppies who come into your restaurant tonight. I would do the exact same thing, Greg. The same thing. I mean, fuck them, okay? Fuck ’em, Greg. But I am home—alone—ordering for one. How dare you charge me extra for my goddamned Caesar salad and chicken parm. Tonight of all nights. I mean, what the fuck, Greg? What the fuck?”

  “You are absolutely right, miss,” Manager Greg says to me as I down the second glass of vodka. “I’m so sorry.”

  My Caesar salad and chicken parm arrive hot on my doorstep twenty minutes later, and the delivery guy presents me with the bill. I glance at the bill, ready to pay, but then I notice something. It’s not a bill for the usual amount—it’s a bill for the jacked-up Valentine’s Day price.

  “I’m not paying this,” I say, handing back the bill to the delivery guy.

  “Um,” he says, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Whaddya mean?”

  “I mean you can tell Manager Greg to go fuck himself,” I say.

  “Um, wait? What?”

  I hand the delivery guy a tip. “This is for you. You can tell Manager Greg I’m not paying for this. If he has a problem with that, he can come up here himself.” I grab the bag of food just before I slam the door.

  I barely even taste the chicken parm. Minutes later, I realize that I must have eaten—the takeout container’s empty—but it’s like I didn’t even have a bite. Anger coursing through my veins, my face getting hotter by the second, barely processing a thought. Just seeing red. Blinding red. I look down at the takeout container and realize I’m still hungry.

  But I don’t want to eat. I want to rage.

  Put it into a song, I tell myself. Get it out with your music.

  But the words don’t come. There’s no structure, no rhyme or reason—I just want to scream at the top of my lungs for a while. To blow off steam.

  A tear comes to my eye as I think about everything that’s happened to me in the past few months. All the things that I’ve lost, all the things that were totally out of my control. The job, the guy, the freelance gig, the wedding.

  The guy. My eyes burn as I force the tears back, refuse to let them out.

  I look at my computer across the room, its black cursor against the pale white screen flashing in the dark. Talking to me. Beckoning to me. Write. Get it all out.

  So I do.

  Part Two: Dog Days are Over

  “You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive”

  13 - Love Stinks

  I’m sleeping on the couch, one too many Valentine’s Day vodka tonics heavy in my belly, when I hear my answering machine across the room.

  “This is some seriously antisocial stuff, Jo-Jo,” Andrew
says in the distance. “If you’re not out killing people at random, call me back.”

  I don’t know if I’m dreaming it or if he’s really just left me a message, but I’m too tired to even try to figure it out. As I determine that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Andrew left me a message, the phone rings again, leading me to the undeniable conclusion that I’m actually half awake.

  “Why are you so angry at Walt Disney?” Chloe says into my answering machine.

  “What?” I say, grabbing at the portable phone that’s on my coffee table and turning it on.

  “‘Fuck Disney.’ That’s what you said,” Chloe says. “You said, ‘We grew up on Walt Disney, believing him when he assured us that “someday” our prince would come. He made us think that love was that one kiss that could bring you back to life, when in reality, love makes you feel just like Bambi, after his mother gets shot.’ Kind of harsh, don’t you think?”

  “What are you talking about?” I say, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and sitting up on the couch. My laptop is still turned on, sitting on my coffee table, staring at me like a one-night stand you’d really wish would just leave your apartment already. “When did I say that?”

  “Just now,” Chloe says, “on your blog. Well, on your old band’s blog anyway. And on Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram, probably, but I haven’t checked that yet. I thought I told you that it wasn’t healthy to try to revisit the past like that?” As Chloe is still talking, I flip through my computer’s index of Web sites recently visited. “You said, ‘There was a man I loved. A man I loved more than anything in the world. More than anyone I’ve ever loved before. After two and a half years together, that man tore my heart out and didn’t look back. And the worst part is that I didn’t even see it coming. I thought that I had love, but I now realize that there’s just no such thing.’ No such thing as love? Jo, are you even listening to me?”

  “I’m listening,” I say, as I hop onto my band’s old Web site. It takes a few seconds to load, but I’m soon on the blog page, clicking around. My words are staring me right back in the face. My drunken, angry thoughts that were meant to be kept to myself are there on the screen, apparently there for all the world to see.

  I was never particularly computer savvy, so when I wrote all of my deepest, darkest secrets on the blog, I just assumed that since the site wasn’t really active anymore, they’d just stay there for me, password protected. But in my vodka-tonic-induced haze, I must have somehow posted it so that anyone who hopped on the site could see it. “I’m just trying to figure out how I posted this stupid thing and how to unpost it. I didn’t mean for it to be public. Anyway, they’re the drunken ramblings of a lonely idiot who’s alone on Valentine’s Day.”

  “‘I see couples,’” Chloe parrots back to me. “‘Everywhere I look, everywhere I go. Happy couples in love. The city’s just lousy with them. The only consolation I have when I see these lovesick puppies is that they are just mere moments from being as hopeless and angry as I am. They are one gold stiletto, one bottle of wine away from having their worlds cave in on them. From being buried alive in their own misery. Because I know something that they don’t yet know: It won’t last. It never does.’”

  “Yes,” I say, still typing away furiously, trying to take down what I wrote. “Enough. I can read. But how did you even know that there was something new on there?”

  “You linked to it on Facebook. And Twitter.”

  “I don’t even know how to tweet,” I say.

  “Apparently you do,” Chloe says. “Oh God, whatever you do, don’t check Instagram.”

  “Why not?”

  “No reason. Anyway, I also got an e-mail from your mailing list,” she said. “Remember how the blog was set up to e-mail your entire mailing list when a new post went up?”

  I immediately sober up. What have I done?

  “No,” I say, slowly backing away from my computer. “I did not remember that at all.”

  What have I done?

  What. Have. I. Done. This is not possible. This is just not possible.

  My face heats up. Somehow in my Valentine’s Day–induced rage, I thought it would be a good idea to send this rant to everyone on the Lonely Hearts mailing list, Twitter feed, and Facebook page. Which means that the same messages that Chloe received were also sent to more than 2,500 people throughout the tristate area. In one fit of fury, I have completed humiliated myself, my friends, and, quite possibly, my family.

  My only hope is that the e-mail gets caught in everyone’s spam filters since the site was set up such a long time ago.

  All 2,500 spam filters.

  And that no one checks Facebook. Or Twitter. Or, apparently, Instagram.

  “My God, Jo, how drunk were you?”

  “Very, I guess,” I say as I read more of what I wrote on the blog.

  “My favorite part is where you start attacking the grandmothers,” Chloe says. “It has to be someone’s fault, right? Why not blame the grandmothers? Here we go: ‘All men suck. All men will lie to you and let you down. There is no such thing as a good man—only a man who is temporarily being nice to you because he wants you to have sex with him or to give him money. Grandmothers—I know what you’re thinking.’ She obviously hasn’t met my grandson. ‘But, no, this goes for you, too. Your grandsons suck. They lie. They are assholes. They cannot commit.’” Chloe laughs. “I love that part.”

  “I didn’t mean to attack grandmothers,” I say.

  “I posted a comment,” she says. I quickly click on the link for guest comments. This is going from bad to worse.

  “‘Amen, sister’?” I say, skimming over Chloe’s entry quickly. “Since when do you say things like ‘Amen, sister’?”

  “Isn’t that the problem with a blog?” Chloe asks. “You end up writing stuff you would never say out loud. Actually, maybe that’s the beauty of a blog. That’s why you did it, right?”

  “No,” I say. I don’t really know why I did it. “It was just to let off steam, I guess.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really.” And I don’t feel any better. The rage is still coursing through my body. My face feels hot and there’s nothing I can do to cool it down. I’m still angry—I still feel like opening my window and screaming at the world. The rage quickly turns to sadness as I read the rest of Chloe’s entry:

  Love is selfish. Love is a lie. Love is waking up in the middle of the night to a phone call saying that the love of your life OD’d after he’s been promising you for months on end that he’s been sober. Love is having to call your boyfriend’s parents right before Christmas to tell them that their son is dead and you don’t know why and you don’t know how because you weren’t even there.

  Love tears your heart out. Love kills your soul.

  “Oh, Chlo. I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Thinking about Billy always upsets me,” she says. “Nothing unusual about that.”

  “I really didn’t know it was going out to my whole mailing list,” I say, taking the throw blanket that’s draped over the back of the couch and putting it across my shoulders. “You know I would never do anything to hurt you, right?”

  “You didn’t hurt me,” she says. “Billy hurt me. When he cared more about drugs than he cared about me, that hurt me. And he hurt you, too, right? The band broke up after he died. But you? You didn’t hurt me. You know, I always think of him on Valentine’s Day. Getting that all out on your blog actually made me feel better, you know?”

  “I’m glad it made you feel better,” I say, wondering why I didn’t feel any better after I vented all of my feelings. “Anyway, what are you doing on the Internet when you have a Valentine’s Day date? Did you get rid of him already?”

  “I sent him home,” she says. “He took me out for drinks. Who does drinks on Valentine’s Day? No matter how casual you are with a guy, on Valentine’s Day, a girl deserves dinner. Don’t you think?”


  “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

  “I wasn’t going to date him past this weekend anyway, so there’s really nothing to say.”

  “I meant, do you want to talk about Billy?” I ask, drawing the blanket over my head and lying back on the couch.

  “Didn’t I say enough?” she asks, laughing. I’m happy that I got her to laugh, but then I remember that for Chloe, she really has to cry it all out until she feels better.

  “There’s no limit on how much you can cry to your best friend,” I say.

  “You said it best, Jo: ‘We’re believing in a lie. True love isn’t really out there; it’s a myth. It’s no different than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. So, I say—let’s just grow up already and call a spade a spade. Let’s just stop deluding ourselves and admit that there’s no such thing as love.’ That’s what you said. Didn’t you mean it?”

  “I guess,” I say as I read the rest of what I wrote: I’m done with love. I’m giving up on love before it breaks my heart again. And I’d suggest that you do the same thing, too. “I just didn’t mean for that—for how angry I feel—to upset you,” I say.

  “Everything you wrote, everything you said, is exactly how I feel,” she says. “How I felt, I mean. I think I’m still mad at Billy for dying. I keep thinking that I’m over it, that I’m ready to move on, but then the tiniest thing will happen—like I’ll hear some song he loved, or some song he hated—and everything just comes flooding back to me, you know?”

  “I know,” I say.

  “And I’m still on the mailing list for the goddamned Guitar Center,” she says. “Why is that place still sending me mailers when I haven’t even shopped there in over two years? I just got one yesterday.”

  “That sucks,” I say, making a mental note to call Guitar Center tomorrow.

  “I just wish I could stop thinking about him, you know?” she says. “When do you think I’ll stop thinking about him?”

  I try to formulate a response, but I can’t. I don’t think that she will ever stop thinking of him, much in the way my father never stops thinking about his own father, who died when I was only three years old.