Low-Tech Postings of His Holiday Loneliness

In the early hours of a recent Thursday morning, after working the night shift as a Cerritos office building security guard, Sean Davidson drove to a shore-side neighborhood of Long Beach and began stapling freshly photocopied sheets of paper onto lamp poles. He started near the basketball courts where he sometimes plays pickup on days when he doesn’t have much else to do, which is a lot more often than he’d like. He zigzagged up and down the streets, past darkened homes and a stretch of boutiques and singles bars, covering this quiet corner of the world with his message.

“I drove my little Honda CRX hatchback up to these poles, you know, and got the ol’ stapler out,” he says now, several weeks later, after all that has--and hasn’t--happened because of those fliers, “and it was a good thing for the soul, you know?”

In this neighborhood, most sentiments stapled to poles last only a few days and feature photographs of lost dogs, but what Davidson left here at 4 a.m. was a more lasting, more universal declaration, a simple black-and-white cry stuck to every surface he could reach. It began:

WANTED

Man seeks woman’s company during holiday season

*

This was followed by a carefully worded invitation to share a difficult time in an even more difficult year, and an e-mail address in case anyone was interested. During a season in which solitude is demonized and ideas such as family and togetherness are frequently overdrawn, Davidson, a 24-year-old community college student, security guard and amateur photographer, decided to take what he considered drastic action. He posted his wound on a pole and said aloud something that most in his position keep to themselves.

“All this stuff that I’m saying, you can throw it into a pot of things you’ve seen on TV and on the news and hear everywhere,” he says during a long, sometimes meandering conversation about the holidays, the war, the breakup of his marriage, the loneliness of men. “I’m not the only one who’s feeling like this.”

With short red hair, blue eyes and an athletic build, Davidson does not look like the poster child for aloneness that he has made of himself. He looks like, well, just a guy in his 20s, tall but not broad, a little awkward, smiling nervously or not at all or, sometimes, too much. He talks in run-on sermons that drift from philosophically sound to downright desperate, and he speaks, for a moment, about what drove him to announce his handicap to the world, what it means for him and others steeped in solitude at this time of year.

“Everything’s come to a pinnacle in my life, not only with Christmas but with me being on my own and lonely and everything,” he says, “and being lonely does not mean killing yourself or smoking or drinking, if you’re me. It just means kind of sitting there and knowing you’re lonely.”

He laughs at this, almost scoffs, and looks away, into the empty, newly retro-decorated lobby of his downtown Long Beach apartment building, a cold, sunless room through which a security guard occasionally passes. He waves to him and says, “Hi, Tom.”

How Davidson got to this point, how anyone gets here, is a story he tells in awkward fits, one moment cocksure, having figured it all out, the next wallowing in uncertain self-reflection. I recognize his tale as, on some level, that of my friends, that of myself, that of most guys I’ve known at one point or another. Yes, each lonely man is lonely in his own way, but most share the same strange pressures of solitude, visit the same dark corners and never speak of them. Very few try to explain this with staples and photocopies, and perhaps Davidson alone can decipher and understand what his fliers actually mean.

He says he’s only dated two women in his life, one for about three weeks when he was 19 and then, a year later, the woman who would become his wife of four years and the mother of his two children. They separated after what he calls a difficult union, and he’s been on his own for most of the year in a one-room apartment, visiting his ex in Baldwin Park when he can. Otherwise, he describes his life as devoid of friends, love prospects, anything to keep him from focusing on the loneliness.

“Sometimes, man, I think I’ve got a shield around me or something. I mean I’m obviously not Prince Charles, but I mean, geez, I’m healthy, willing, genuine,” he says. “I know that the biggest fault is that I’m very intense, as you can tell. I’m very matter-of-fact.”

Davidson talks about humbleness and simplicity, words he repeats to describe his job, his daily life. He explains that he can’t fake having fun, how he turns people off by demanding that they be real and upright, how he loses confidence in large groups and second-guesses himself at every turn. He developed this attitude during a life growing up “in the system,” he says, describing a childhood of foster homes and military school and a few weeks in juvenile hall. He insists that he stayed out of trouble by sticking to a strict set of morals, by being suspicious and standoffish and intense, keeping everyone at arm’s length. Which now, he knows, is a problem a hundred strategically posted fliers will not overcome.

On Christmas he visited his grandmother (she lives in Long Beach, with Davidson’s mother, from whom he is distant). And then he worked until midnight. For New Year’s, no plans--he’ll be “playing it safe.”

His isolation, however self-imposed, eased during the weeks after Sept. 11, when he talked more easily to people--and they listened. Shortly after the attacks, Davidson even tried to join the Marines, only to be told there wouldn’t be room for him in boot camp until December. He wasn’t willing to wait that long--he either goes with something or he doesn’t. He doesn’t wait around. “Now,” he says, “things are already back to the way they were.”

So he’s channeled his intensity and energy into a regimen, familiar to so many, meant to either deflect or corner the loneliness: He works nights, takes computer and photography classes at Cypress College, visits his kids here and there and hopes he doesn’t have too much free time. Or, God forbid, a day off.

“Geez, man, then hopefully there’s a Laker game on,” he says. “Then, I mean, I set my whole day up to watch the Lakers. I clean my apartment, do my dishes, do some laundry. I might go out to the beach, play some hoops, then sit down and watch the Laker game. After that, have a little strawberry milk, you know, maybe think about some photography. That’s a complete day for me right now.”

It was on a day like this, then, that he came up with the flier, his message to the world. The text, the plan and the goal were all quite simple, humble and maybe a little too intense. Davidson drafted his appeal on his laptop, while at work, nervously printing it on school machines in the middle of the night. He admits the prose might read as corny, maybe too straightforward to be taken seriously, but you know what? That’s him. That’s who he is. “I wasn’t going to put fancy colors and all this stuff trying to throw trick phrases all over and fool somebody into actually calling,” he says. Black sans-serif type on white paper outlines how one man would like to spend the season:

Some of the things that I would like to do and share, include:

*Christmas tree shopping

*Home cooked meals

*Eating out

*Going to the movies

*Television marathons

*Quiet times

*Rainy days

*Cozy winter days & nights

*Acceptance, compassion, peace & humility

*

After four hours of stapling and driving and stapling and driving, Davidson checked his e-mail three times a day, paying by the minute for Internet access at a nearby cafe. Each time, his mailbox was empty. He started checking once a day, then every three days, then not at all. He knew the fliers had already been replaced by photocopied pictures of people’s lost dogs. He can’t explain exactly why he posted no second round, no follow-up campaign, but the initial rush was gone. The idea was no longer romantic but a chore.

When finally an e-mail arrived, it was from a reporter who wanted to know why so many of us walk around with fliers in our hands, unsure about where to post them next.

“I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I’ve tried, and nothing’s come back, and with the flier thing “ he trails off, shifting in his seat, a rare unguarded moment of desperation. “Basically if ... anyone, if anyone promising at all says that they’re halfway interested in me, they can have everything I have. They could have it all.”

Davidson insists that he hasn’t--and won’t--get involved in the traditional singles thing, the bar scene, the smiles and small talk. That, again, just isn’t him. It doesn’t fit into his humble, straight-up methodology. He cannot and will not fake interest in a nonsense conversation, hold his tongue while people spout something stupid and, as he says, “run around being all giggly.” And neither does he drink nor smoke nor indulge in casual sex, readily calling himself a square, describing off-time activities as maybe burning a day at the bookstore reading self-help titles, watching the Lakers, playing basketball, going to the movies. “I do,” he says. “I isolate myself.”

Like so many, he’s unwilling to take part in the single-people circus, but that doesn’t mean Davidson hasn’t thought about who he’d like to meet. He dreams about a mate, imagines the things they will do together. But he can name few specifics about her, can draw no profile, and his flier is just as vague, inviting no one in particular and everyone at once.

When pressed, he says he wants a romance like those he saw in “Braveheart” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” and then he adds: “I’m looking for somebody who wants to eat right and exercise and keep the heart going and who loves to go outside and breathe and dance in the rain, maybe, you know? Something like that. Enjoy life.”

With this in mind, at a time between the start of a war and the shortest day of the year, Davidson launched a plan to find this person, whoever she may be, a single-stage scheme born of one man’s way of doing things, of reaching out, of talking to the rest of us even if we don’t listen.

“It was to be expected, I guess,” he says. “But if I had met someone, and we would have been happy for the rest of our lives, it would’ve been the smartest thing I ever did.”