I was young once. I know it’s hard to believe, looking at this broken-down piece of machinery now, but I was. And when you’re young, you think you’ve got the whole goddamn world figured out. You think you’re a king, a god, a beautiful, indestructible force of nature. And women? Christ, women were just a game. A beautiful, stupid, and completely winnable game.
You’d see them across a crowded room, all bright eyes and cheap perfume, and you’d feel that old, familiar itch. The hunt. You’d lay on the charm, the bullshit, the quiet, dangerous promises you knew you’d never keep. And when you finally got them back to your shitty little room, with the unmade bed and the overflowing ashtray, you’d fuck them like you were trying to erase your own name from the world.
And in the morning, when they were gone, you’d lie there in the wreckage of the sheets, smelling their cheap perfume on your skin, and you’d feel… victorious. Another notch on the bedpost. Another battle won in the great, meaningless war. You’d think, “I know what I’m doing. I’ve got this all figured out.”
That’s the first verse of the song, isn’t it? The part where the young buck thinks he’s a goddamn lion.
And then you get older.
The wins start to feel a little hollow. The mornings start to feel a little colder. The faces of the women start to blur together into one long, sad, and beautiful accusation. You start to see the cracks in your own armor. The quiet desperation in your own eyes when you look in the mirror.
And you start to think about your own old man, your grandfather, all the poor, broken-down bastards who came before you. You remember them sitting at the kitchen table, their hands all gnarled and stained from a lifetime of hard work, a quiet, weary wisdom in their eyes. And you remember the things they tried to tell you, the warnings you were too young and too stupid to hear.
“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.”
That’s the chorus, isn’t it? The punchline to the whole goddamn joke.
What do I know now?
I know that all those women I thought I was conquering, they were just as lost and just as broken as I was. They weren’t the enemy; they were just fellow soldiers in the same goddamn trench, fighting the same losing war against loneliness.
I know that the thing I was chasing, that hot, blind, and beautiful fire, that wasn’t love. It was just a different kind of hunger. A way to forget, for a little while, the quiet, gnawing emptiness in my own gut.
I know that for every woman I left behind, I left a piece of my own goddamn soul in her cheap, rented room. And I know that you can’t get those pieces back. They’re gone for good.
I know that the real prize wasn’t between their legs. It was in the quiet, honest moments in between. The shared cigarette in the dark. The sound of their breathing while they slept. The way their face looked in the cheap morning light, before the mask went back on.
That’s the stuff that lasts. That’s the stuff that haunts you.
So you sit here, a fifty-six-year-old man in a world that’s mostly forgotten you, and you look back at that young, dumb bastard you used to be. And you don’t hate him. You just feel a kind of sad, weary pity for him. You want to reach back through the years, grab him by his stupid, arrogant face, and tell him the truth.
But you can’t.
So you just order another drink, and you listen to the song. And you sing along with the old man’s words, a quiet, broken little prayer from the bottom of your own goddamn heart.
“Ooh la la. Ooh la la.”
Yeah. That’s about right.
