Someone is Gonna Take My Heart…But No One is Gonna Break My Heart Again

Everyone has a game changer, a love so intense, so consuming, so embedded in your soul that it affects every relationship you have, even after your broken-hearted husk has been cast aside and forgotten.

They’re the heartbreakers. The soul crushers. The lovers you play tear-jerking ballads for. They’re the ones who make you think drinking an entire bottle of scotch will actually make you feel better.

Claire Van Hooten was my soul crusher. She didn’t just change the way I played the game of love; she rewrote all the rules.

In 1973, at the age of seventeen, I reached a level of self-confidence I never thought was possible. My shyness and machine-gun stutter magically disappeared. I discarded my plastic glasses that made me look like Steve Urkel’s nerdy dad for a cool pair of aviator specs. I’d also morphed into a smooth-talking, popular student with an A- average who could also cover any baseball field like a blanket and hit the ball where no one could catch it.

I had life by the throat. Too bad I was about to choke on it.

I became friends with a dozen paralyzingly beautiful girls who liked to eat lunch together. There wasn’t another boy in sight, so competition wasn’t a problem. My plan was to worm my way into the girls’ hearts and pluck them off one by one.

Standing at the head of the table talking with Susan “Shorty” Wren (I called her that because she was 5’ 11”), I scanned the rest of the group. At the end of the table was one of the most enticing women I’d ever seen, a blonde with long silky hair, misty green eyes, a sculpted nose, and a contented Mona Lisa smile.

Claire Van Hooten was a first-generation Scandinavian blonde, a true lady amongst bra burners, hippies, and hot pants-wearing hussies (all of which worked for me as well). She wore skirts and blouses, while most of her girlfriends had switched to jeans or form disguising kaftans. I figured if she was a classy dresser then she had to be a classy woman. At least I was right about that.

I also thought if she was hanging out with the school’s most desirable girls, she was probably bright, shy, and naturally manipulative. (Right again!). I decided the best plan of action was to make friends with all her girlfriends before making my move, that way she’d be comfortable around me and oblivious to my dastardly motives. Right again!).

There were a few complications. One was Cissy Friedman, who wanted to upset her parents by bringing home a Black man who would confound their preconceived notions of what a brother should be. I managed to evade meeting her folks for close to a month. Predictably our version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” didn’t go well. I was shown the door and Cissy was grounded.

I lost a few more weeks dallying with Sharon Grant, a plush hippie who thought the Kama Sutra was a Middle Eastern bible and a teenage rite of passage. I converted overnight. Who was I to make fun of her beliefs?

I finally made my move when Claire and I found ourselves the last two people at the lunch table. She smiled politely and found everything I said to be amusing, letting out the type of genuine laugh that told me she was at ease with me. We soon discovered we had a study hall at the same time and often sequestered ourselves in a corner of the library where we could be alone.

My friends soon registered their disapproval. “You’re going out with her?” “She’s boring.” “She’s too quiet.” “She’s too weird.” Forgetting that English was her second language, the guys labeled her a dullard.

She taught me some Dutch. My friends rolled their eyes, dropping their jaws in disbelief whenever we parlayed in her language. We were in our own world, and as far as I was concerned, we didn’t need anyone else.

We became a couple in every sense of the word, walking arm in arm as we traveled the hallways. We were in several plays together. One, in which we played an old married couple who were as comfortable with each other as an old shoe, seemed to pull us even closer.

I joined a co-ed volleyball team to be with her. One day during practice, I was so determined to impress Claire that I spiked the ball over the net with all the force I could muster. Unfortunately, she was on the other side and the ball bounced with deadly force off her forehead. She flopped on her back like a dead carp. Crap, I thought, I’ve killed her. Claire sported the impression of the stitches on the ball for a day or so, and I learned some useful Dutch cuss words.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was deeply in love with Claire. I thought about her all the time. When she walked into the room my body temperature soared, my mind spun, and I breathed like a fully stoked locomotive. Whenever she spoke in her soft Monroe-esque breathless whisper I shivered with delight.

Why did I fall so hard for Claire? She gave me the impression she cared. She hung on to my every word. She laughed at all the right times and made me feel as if her world revolved around mine. Claire was the first girl I brought flowers for (without having to be prompted). She was the girl I opened doors for, the first girl I wanted to spend my life with.

“You’re the craziest guy I know,” she purred.

“I’ll try to act more sensible.”

“Don’t you dare! It’s what makes you you. Too many guys try to be something they’re not.”

“I’ll be anything you want me to be.”

“That’s cute. You know, it’s funny, I can be having a horrible day and then you come along and make things seem a lot better. I feel lucky to have found you.”

The three months I spent with Claire were the happiest in my life. If that wasn’t love, it was the next best thing.

Then I made the mistake of telling Shorty.

Claire was away with her parents that weekend, so I went to a house party at Nancy Houlihan’s opulent mansion. We did what teens do – we drank too much, got sick, and did it again. We gossiped and did a great deal of bragging about our love lives.

Shorty and I were laughing about her latest failed relationship when I blurted out, “I want to thank you for introducing me to Claire Van Hooten. I love her.”

Shorty’s head spun around faster than Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist.”

“La…la….love?” she stammered. “You can’t love her!”

Her tone made it seem like I wasn’t allowed to.

I don’t know if it was because she didn’t have a boyfriend of her own and was jealous, but Shorty went to Claire and lied to her. Maybe she said something like “He’s got a bad reputation,” or she hit Claire with the ultimate breakup line, “He’s Black and you’re White.”

The next time I saw Claire was at school the following Monday. She was standing in the hallway with Shorty and Carole Duran, a brilliant bombshell brunette I’d come to trust as my best friend. Carole always greeted me with a hug and a smile.

I walked down the hallway toward the love of my life. She looked at me like a deer in the crosshairs of a Sherman tank.

Without a word or an explanation, Claire spun on her heels and walked out of my life.

I have never felt as much heartache and despair as I did at that moment. The closest hurt was when my father died twenty years later in 1993. I knew he was going to die; he knew he was going to die, yet his passing left a hole in my existence that has never been filled. My father’s death numbed me, but the pain dissipated with the passing of the years. The heartache Claire inflicted on me is still as strong today as the moment it happened.

I felt as if someone had ripped my heart out, stomped on it and thrown it into a bottomless well. Maybe I made the mistake of loving Claire more than she loved me. Maybe I shouldn’t have given myself to her so completely, because now I was lost without her. I existed as a walking cadaver for the rest of the week, then sat in my room for the entire weekend playing the most depressing music I had, telling myself love was for suckers. The most poignant song I listened to was “I Used to be a King” by Graham Nash, which had a rhyme that went, “Someone’s gonna take my heart, but no one’s gonna break my heart again.”

Eureka.

I decided I was going to crush women’s hearts the same way Claire had destroyed mine. I told myself that from this point on I was never going to completely give my soul to any woman, that I wasn’t going to trust them or fall in love again.

Of all the things in life to be good at I had to pick that one. It proved to be the most asinine, wrong-headed idea I ever took to heart, and it screwed up every romantic relationship I attempted for the next forty years.

I was willing to accept rejection, knowing I’d experience more of it during my lifetime. (Right again!). What I couldn’t fathom was why I’d been rejected. I needed closure like Paul McCartney needed his bass.

No matter how much I badgered Shorty, she never told me what she’d said to Claire, or even so much as admitted she’d sabotaged our relationship. Pretending I was enraged when I was actually wounded, I cornered Shorty and Carole outside of the science wing, ranting like Joseph Stalin in the midst of a purge. Hoping to scare Shorty into telling the truth, I tore the handle off the science wing door. I threatened to brain Shorty with it, but she maintained her innocence, while Carole babbled, “Please don’t,” over and over. Determined to give Shorty a good scare, I brought the handle down, knowing she would take a step or two back, avoiding any damage. Wrong again. Shorty moved forward and I brought the handle down on her foot. Her big toe broken, Shorty hopped around wailing as passing students muttered, “See! That Jefferson’s crazy.”

Despite having to wear open-toed footwear in the still chilly spring, Shorty never mentioned the incident, which convinced me she had poisoned my relationship with Claire, and felt a broken toe was a fair enough trade-off. Although I repeatedly told Carole that I hadn’t intended to smash Shorty’s toe she started distancing herself from me, telling Sharon Grant if she ran into me on the street, she wouldn’t hug me.

You would think that since we went to the same high school, I’d run into Claire and get the explanation I so desperately sought. I never saw her in school again, not even the days I circled her girlfriend’s lunch table like a vulture looking for roadkill.

Shorty and I dated briefly that summer. She came to the park one day more undressed than dressed, to see me play in a baseball game. I was talking with Gina Pasquale, a former girlfriend when Shorty spotted us. Anxious to end our flirtatious talk, Shorty ran toward me. The immediacy of the moment was too much for her long legs and she tripped – breaking the same big toe. She jumped on my back, and I gave her a piggyback ride to her doctor’s office a few blocks away.

Our relationship ended when Shorty’s mother came to pick her up at the doctor and saw her daughter holding me against her towering bosom. They say the seventies were enlightened – don’t believe it.

I did manage to see Claire three times over the next four years. The first time she drove past me was when I was hitchhiking. I saw her grip tighten on the wheel and her eyes pop like a toad being squashed as she drove by.

The second time was when our sixteen-year-old manager/shortstop announced he was bringing his new girlfriend to our next baseball game. Having just turned eighteen, I was feeling very adult, so I thought his pronouncement of puppy love was cute. When he introduced me to Claire, I pretended it was the first time we’d met. She never looked up at me or said a word, hurriedly moving on to the next player.

When I dug into the batter’s box to lead off the game, I turned toward the stands, zeroing in on Claire, who was sitting with her head between her knees as if she was going to eject her lunch. I hit the farthest home run in my sixty years of playing baseball, because yes when the ball was pitched, I told myself her face was on it.

After stepping on home plate, I turned, looked at Claire, and spit.

She got the message. When I came out of the dugout to take my position in the outfield she was gone.

The last time I saw Claire, I was two years removed from college. I was walking toward a local pizzeria. Claire was walking toward me with her head down, deep in thought. We were still some distance apart when she looked up and recognized me. Claire took on that same shocked expression she wore the last time we spoke and suddenly bolted to the other side of the street. Quickening her pace, she was around the corner and gone before I could call her name. I was denied closure for the last time.

After Claire’s wordless rejection, I went on a bimbo blitzkrieg. Blonde, brunette, redhead, short, tall, freshman, senior, it didn’t matter, as long she was a dimwit, and the word love was never mentioned.

I never married, and while I take responsibility for being gun shy and a commitment-phobe, I can trace the moment my love life became a study in denial and self-torture to when Claire turned her back on me. From that time on, the second there was the slightest possibility of forming a relationship with a woman I became distant, disinterested, or departed, still following the credo, “Someone’s gonna take my heart, but no one’s gonna break my heart again.”