No Flowers. Anymore
Midnight Music Confessions
First, I’ll admit that I still love Neil Diamond, or at least the Neil Diamond of circa 1966-74. Afterward, well I guess we all take ourselves too seriously after a while.
I saw Diamond live at a local radio station’s biannual Shower Of Stars (Birmingham’s WVOK-690AM, “The Mighty 690”), in the summer of 1970. Fourteen-year old me thought he was brilliant, especially his renditions of “Holly Holy” and “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.” Maybe I’m a sucker for the gospel tent and beat, but other things leave me cold.
Like the later 70’s Neil.
Sure, there were a few people in college that I hung out with who liked mainstream musical acts such as The Captain and Tennille, or who considered BJ Thomas better once he found…”The Lord.” Other friends still craved The Fab Four, or had, like me, branched out into country-er strains of Rock, from Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Poco, and Bonnie Raitt.
These were the people I tended to spend the most time with. We might also venture to Birmingham to dance, usually at Gay Discos. Wedding Chic or Gloria Gaynor to Joe Walsh or Karla Bonoff or Nicolette Larson isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
Our wilder college parties centered on Apartment 16 in the Hidden Valley community of my college town. Three young women from my hometown lived there, and they accommodated as many people as they could on weekend party nights, until they got sick of it all and threw almost everyone out. There were a few of us, however, who seemed to have a free pass, carte blanche, to stay as long as we wanted and sleep on whatever couch or piece of shag carpet we could find, when sleep was called for.
One of these women, Flora (real name redacted), kept the site supplied with Pepsi-Cola, Fritos, and many ounces of pot. I don’t much care for Pepsi, but it tastes pretty thrilling on the heels of a well-rolled doobie (and do I feel dated or what using such terms?).
Flora, during this era, was the most dependable friend I had, and we’d often take long drives out into the countryside—easy to do since our college was in the middle of “Ruralville.” FM radio had discovered its AOR formula by then, and so smooth Rock accompanied our drives, as we talked over what life and love were like. Being stoned added a truly green effect to everything I saw and felt.
You might wonder why, as I often did, that Flora and I never went past the friendship stage, but I suppose that even less-than-fully-mature college students have, if they listen to it, an innate sense of who might be right, who is likely not right, and who it would be safe to at least take a chance on. Flora and I had the sense not to wreck an already-safe sense of intimacy.
Regarding other people, though, we could be train wrecks, hopelessly devoted to near annihilation.
I could tell you my own travails, but this confession concerns Flora and a guy named Chris, and what I saw one morning just outside Apartment 16.
Chris was a frat guy who dated a girl most people considered a few rungs above him on the aesthetic and social ladder. That he dated her didn’t bother or concern me, except in my wondering why or how she couldn’t tell that Chris was gay. Perhaps Chris didn’t know or hadn’t admitted that either, and I know this isn’t an original scene I’m describing, but if you remember that I’m talking mid/late-1970’s rural Alabama, then maybe all things will, as they must, pass into sense.
What Chris did with his own life, on his own time, only mattered when he and that girl split and Chris started hanging out at Flora’s. It mattered because Flora—who was generally pretty wise—developed something more than a crush on Chris.
I’m not in the business of outing anyone, and who knows: I might have been wrong about Chris. Still, I wish I had spoken up, or at least shared my suspicions with Flora, because he wrung her out over the course of at least a year with promises of fidelity and happiness—that she was the one for him. He’d show up unannounced at her place on many party nights, and she’d lose all sense of time, and the moments we used to spend, attending to him. And later, after he left and she didn’t hear from him for days, she’d start crying about him. It was one of those “bad hurts.”
I tried to like Chris for Flora’s sake, and maybe even for his sake. Sometimes, he could be fun, warm even, and he loved dancing and seemed to like the various forms of music other than Disco that we’d play. I think he especially liked Styx’ Grand Illusion and Supertramp’s Breakfast of Champions, and regardless of what I think of these records now, back then, they were hot—about as hot as it got for that strange way of telling someone that you loved them.
Did Flora and Chris profess their love? I was never privy to such talk, or the gossip later. I think, though, there was a moment when I urged Flora—in one of her desolate/desperate times—to quit letting him run over her, to quit letting him come over at all.
I don’t know how or exactly when, but eventually she did, not that he quit coming over, at least not at first. But it was strange: he’d sit by himself on Flora’s couch, stoned, red-eyed, mumbling and clearly in some kind of pain. Someone could have reached out to him, but I, for one, still felt too loyal to and protective of Flora. I wondered how Chris reconciled his various loves within his frat community, though truthfully, the frat he joined got rather notorious as being a safe haven for guys who were sexually ambivalent.
I think that even had I met Chris’s eyes and told him what I suspected about him, he would have denied it. Though we spent a lot of time together during those months, we never knew each other well, nor, I believe, did we want to.
Two moments from whatever friendship we had, at the opposite ends of depression and elation poles, stand out for me.
Elation first.
Once, after hours of partying, someone put on the title cut to the soundtrack of Fame (“I want to live forever”), and Chris leaped to his feet like a demon on LSD. Was this his song, I wondered? If not, in those moments he made it his, and not to read too much into or lose ourselves in the dance, I could see why someone like Flora had wanted him.
But then…
I mentioned earlier what I saw, and No, it wasn’t something obscene, violent, or anything I needed to act on. This occurred on the morning after Flora told Chris to quit playing with her. I had slept on the couch that night in Apartment 16, and walked outside early, just to breathe. I didn’t know what happened to everyone else, and I hadn’t been thinking of Chris, even though it registered with me that he had left at some point.
He hadn’t gone far, though. There he was, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, his tape deck blaring. His head was back, eyes closed, but he was singing along to…
“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers…Any More,”
that hit by Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand.
Somehow the photo on the link doesn’t do justice to the schmaltz of the song, and by this point, they truly knew their schmaltz.
Whatever you or I think of the song, though, Chris clearly…adored it? Was obsessed by it? Thought it spoke to him and…Flora?
Or…?
I can’t, and don’t want to, listen to it any more, and I never wanted to listen to it then. And yet, when I think of it, or Flora or Chris, I understand that each of us has our unique bend of love and pain, and so each of us attaches that to a song that, for us, says it all. Maybe I could learn more from the lyrics, but it’s too late really, since I haven’t seen Chris in over 45 years, and Flora for almost as long.
Still, I saw him that morning, and
I want you to know that I did tap on his window to ask if he was all right.
“I am,” he said, and then he went back to the song and to all he’d never brought or accepted from someone he loved.