Loser

By Gary P. DeMarco

Have you ever awakened in the morning to discover that you forgot to set the alarm and saw to your dismay that you were going to be late for work? You fly out of bed almost as fast as the speed of sound, race into the bathroom to brush your teeth, shave and maybe even take a quick shower. You throw on your clothes from yesterday (hoping no one from work will notice), grab your briefcase and race out of the house. You pick up the morning paper and jump into the car only to notice the date on the newspaper and realize...it’s Saturday morning! Duh! This is similar to what my life is like: no matter what you do or what your intentions were, you’re either going to do something wrong or if you do it right, it’s the wrong time. Sometimes, you just have to hope for dumb luck like rolling the dice and hitting that winning number. This is a story about some of the dumb things that have happened to me and how I have managed to keep a stiff upper lip (if for no other reason than the lower lip got hit by a wayward baseball) and find some success in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rocket Science Productions LLC
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937121563

Book preview

LOSER

Gary P. DeMarco

CREDITS

Written by Gary P. DeMarco

Edited by Lea Ellen Borg

Cover Design - Meredith Hancock

Published by Rocket Science Productions

SMASHWORDS EDITION

© Copyright April 2012 Gary P. DeMarco

All rights reserved

ISBN-13: 978-1-937121-28-0

e-ISNB: 978-1-937121-56-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936594

DEDICATION

To my wife, Marietta,

who always believed in me

and stayed the course

no matter how rocky it became.

All my love and thanks, babe!

INTRODUCTION

This was a great day to be on the golf course. Of course, I wasn’t going to be playing golf; au contraire, I was merely out on the driving range with my father, an 87-year-old curmudgeon, from the Washington, DC area. It was warm, temperature around eighty degrees, with a light breeze, bright sunshine, and a few scattered clouds dotting the azure sky.

Dad and I walked toward the range area where the stalls are under the overhang, consequently avoiding rain or hot sun. I dropped a few balls into the tray, then grabbed my formidable seven iron and stepped onto the green mat. I placed a ball on the mat in front of me, took the requisite practice swings, then lined up squarely in front of the ball, steadied myself, assumed the textbook grip, met my stance, strutted my butt a few times and bent my knees. I pulled the club back and then yanked it back down meeting that little white orb lying quietly on the mat, minding its own business. As I followed through with what I thought was a swing to make even Phil Mickelson envious, the club did its thing…and sent the ball about fifteen feet in the air; about that same distance ahead…and about that same number of degrees in a horrendous slice that has become the DeMarco trademark.

The ball managed to bounce a few times and continue in its pathetic direction and would have made a drunken crow sober up…even for a few measly seconds while it laughed itself to death.

Such is my fate. At age fifty-eight, going on ninety-nine, I suddenly realized—that for all the times dad and I went out together to play (if that is the proper term for what I do) the game of golf or do a little putting on the training green, or to hit a bucket of balls on the driving range—I just don’t seem to be able to do anything well.

I remember when I was in my early teens I had a yearning for baseball. I would lie awake nights, when I should have been getting sleep for school the next day, listening to the Washington Senators lose in late inning comebacks. Yeah, that’s me: a Senators’ fan to the bitter end…and that’s exactly what happened to both of us: we met the bitter end. I would brag occasionally to my late brother about what I’d do when I got to the major leagues. He laughed, as he always did, whenever I bragged about some incredible feat I wanted to accomplish. I never realized for a long time that he was only doing what others had always done—which is, laugh at me because I had dreams that I wanted to see to fruition, but dreams that were never going to come true. When I was in grade school, and even in high school, teachers as well as students, would poke fun at me or just ignore me. It took a few years, but I finally got the message: I was a loser. That’s how people saw me, and that is what I eventually accepted for myself.

When you have no encouragement, or anyone to lead you or properly inspire you, whatever dreams you may have, will wind up floating away like a wrecked raft on tumultuous rapids.

What is the old adage? He who lies down with dogs inevitably wakes up with fleas. In my sordid, sorry case, I never did wake up; the fleas are still crawling all over me like an incurable rash.

I remember people would ask me about my SAT scores. Well, guess what? I remember taking the SATs, but I just don’t remember what my scores were. At this point in my life, I’m not sure I care anyway. I got online to find some information regarding getting SAT scores from the ancient past, and sure enough, you can—for a price! Somehow, though, after fifty-eight years of life, an eighteen year marriage, fifteen years in a home that’s now paid off and thirty-seven years of employment (that is–getting paid–by a very large telecommunications firm)—those elusive SAT scores just don’t seem to matter. After all, what have I accomplished? I have a good, loving wife, I am now losing weight (maybe being a loser isn’t that bad after all!), good health, had a good job (am now retired), money in the bank and an otherwise great family (though we have no children).

I suppose that if I was to speak with the likes of Dr. Phil McGraw or Dr. Mehmet Oz, they might be inclined to say something quite philosophical, medical or psychoanalytical like, Get a life, fool! or, Why don’t you grow up and act your age? or even, Everybody has bad days, Gary!

True. We all have bad days. But there are those great satisfying moments we all experience from time to time: birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries, Thanksgiving and the all-important St. Patrick’s Day. Life’s great moments are, seemingly, always just around the corner for most of us. And when they occur, they seem most timely; they couldn’t have come at a better time.

But while we revel in those little pleasurable events in our lives interfering in our otherwise day-to-day pedestrian existences, many of us want to feel…well, something more. While I like being invited over for dinner or a bar-b-queue, or going to a movie or show…just some little distraction from my daily drab life—I always felt as if there had to be an avenue of escape that didn’t wind up in an alley with no exit. But, what?

While I loved my brother, father, mother and the rest of my family, and appreciated my Catholic upbringing, there was this feeling that I wanted something else in life. Perhaps I wanted acclaim; my entitled fifteen minutes. Or, just the respect so many others had. But how would I go about accomplishing it?

When you believe that you are a loser, you actually begin to live that way. Every time you do something, no matter how well intentioned, or go somewhere to do something (like a quick trip to the store for the wife), when you think you’ve done what you thought was right and you get slammed by loved ones or someone like the boss—you then realize just how almost ‘worthless’ you can be to modern civilization.

I can well understand why some people commit or contemplate suicide. I was there myself once when I was in my mid-teens.

Perhaps I should explain. Being a very shy, non-committal individual, and not having done anything of note in high school, and feeling lonely and depressed (though I concealed the latter from my parents pretty well), I discovered something was missing in my life that many other young teenage men were now experiencing in their lives: females. I knew that I was 100% heterosexual, but unfortunately, getting the attention of the opposite sex was like getting CNN to say something positive about political conservatives. It just wasn’t going to happen. So the next best thing available was the ubiquitous pornography of the day: Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse and the like. I remember once in my senior year of high school (an all-male, Catholic high school), I had someone procure a rather hard-core magazine for me. I also knew the head of the Photography Club. Together, he and I managed to copy the pictures from this sordid periodical and we then attempted to sell these pictures to underclassmen; unfortunately, our beloved Prefect of Discipline discovered the plot which was divulged by the senior class stoolie and the two of us (myself and the head of the Photography Club) were asked to take a few days leave from school. It was late in our senior year anyway, so there was no point in expelling us, I guess. Anyway, we came back, managed to keep our noses clean for the remaining month and graduated and received our diplomas.

The lessons of life can sometimes be harsh, but they are nevertheless part of growing up. Even if I had been copying pictures of butterflies, birds or pictures of art and architecture, I wouldn’t have been able to vend those pictures, no matter how good, to even the most ardent students of those respective fields.

I often felt that I never would have been able to sell bottled water to desert travelers dying of thirst. That’s my lot in life. Thank God I had a cushy job where I never had to deal with John Q. Public. I never had to work in retail, or visit clients’ houses to do a job like electrical work or plumbing. Even with the communications outfit I worked for, I never had to work outside and deal with the public. I always worked inside a central office or at a desk somewhere watching for alarms on a computer screen. Even when I worked in the fast food restaurant back in the 1970’s, I prepared fried chicken in the back and still never had to deal with customers directly.

My life has been a good one overall and I have very little to complain about. Once, I remember I told my best friend my real secret: I wanted to be a writer. But when I looked around and visited the bookstores, I saw so many publications and wondered with all the yo-yo’s out there (like these myriad sports figures with their ‘you know’ laden responses given in before-, during-, and after-game interviews)—I asked why can’t I write something that could get published? Then it hit me like my fifth grade teacher slapping me up side my head for something I had done wrong: these people had names!

Yes, a name is an important thing. It doesn’t matter what your line of work is, where you came from, or how respected or hated you were—as long as you had a recognizable name, you could get published. And it didn’t matter if the book sold millions or just a few copies here and there: as long as you had a recognized name, there was a publisher out there.

Contrary to popular belief that publishing companies are always looking for new ‘talent,’ it was aggravatingly obvious to me that unless I went out and blew up the Washington Monument or went into a Post Office and wasted a bunch of people with an AK-47, I was a John Q. Whozit, going nowhere on the fast lane to…the proverbial dead end.

But, I digress.

Let me say that sometimes, being a loser in life has its great moments, and I hope to expand upon this theme later in this treatise. But at the same time, it is also one of life’s biggest ‘gotcha’s’…when you buy that new