We've All Gone Crazy Lately

I bet you can sing every word to “Someone Saved My LifeTonight,” or at least your interpretation of every word. So can I. The song was released in 1975; I was 11 years old. That was the year we had our first “girl/boy parties,” the year we pretended to be cool while slow dancing stiffly and terrified, the year I circled “Yes” when Scott Nesbitt slipped me a note asking, “Will you go with me? Yes or No,” but avoided him ever after. Pure-T adolescence. Almost innocent.

When I think back on the Elton John of my early adolescence, I remember yelling. I can barely write the words “Bennie and the Jets” without waking the grandchildren. “HEY KIDS, SHAKE IT LOOSE TOGETHER, THE SPOTLIGHT’S HITTING SOMETHING THAT’S BEEN KNOW TO CHANGE THE WEATHER!”

We stacked our Elton John albums on our $100 Sears stereos and sang at the top of our lungs, taking breathers only to copy the lyrics down in
our eternal journals to help us memorize every precious word. Sometimes we might stand on the wooden picnic table on the patio and put on concerts for our friends. Sometimes we might drive our parents to drink, to hide in the den with the doors closed tight.

"It's one more beer and I don't hear you anymore."

Here's the line we loved to sing the loudest: “IT’S FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, DAMNIT, LISTEN TO ME GOOD!” Oh how we loved the swear word tucked safely into the song lyrics, allowing us to not only repeat it but to own it, damnit. DAMNIT! I’ll quit shouting with all caps, but chances are, if you are my age, you are right now singing at the top of your lungs. You are probably up to the “Oooo ooo oo oooo ooooo oooo oo oooo” part. And this is probably pleasing to you as some swirly nostalgia takes you back to the postered bedroom of your own adolescence. Sugar bear.

My Movie Man was out of town recently, and I found myself walking around the park with just myself and the dogs, listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy over and over. I was enjoying that phenomenon of hearing things you never heard the first hundred times you listened to an album.

Then came “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”  I sang along the first time but felt unsettled. I listened again, and again, and again, and by

then I wanted to scream. Not just sing along, not yell as I did in my adolescence, but scream.

That lovely butterfly song is not just lovely at all. It is dark, raw, and full of heavy depressive cloaks and disturbing imagery.

“Butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye bye.”

Did you hear that? Bye-bye.

When I sang that line at age 11, gangly arms and twig-thin legs twirling around dizzily on my shag-carpeted bedroom floor, I don’t know if I knew it was a song about a gay man who almost married a woman he did not love. I only knew it was deeply felt. I sang it with passion.

“I could have walked headlong to the deep end of the river.”

I heard that line. It was followed by a bit about stocks and bonds and HP demands forever. I didn’t know what HP demands were but they sounded worse than the deep end of the river. At 11 years old, did I, did we, know what that river was? Did we know that as adults we would at least touch our toes in that river more times than we’d ever admit on Facebook?

I sang that song, you sang that song, everyone sang that song. We identified with it even though we were just kids, far from the terrifying prospect of marrying a Prima Donna, sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair. My God in heaven, can you imagine writing that line?

I have no idea when I understood that Elton John was gay, or for that matter, when I was introduced to the thing called homosexuality. I do, however, remember my sheer incredulity at learning that everything in the universe is composed of atoms and that atoms are always in motion. I stared at
my desk in wonder that it was made of moving parts. “Even my desk?” I asked my teacher. “Even your desk,” she replied, and my world shifted.

Men love men? Women love women? Some people are sort of man and woman combined? Meh. Have you heard about atoms? Did you know that the
atoms that make up our bodies and everything else come from the remnants of exploding stars?

But back to the screaming. We, the children who were coming of age in 1976, should have

been the most kick-ass, in your face, rabble-rousing gangsters of love on the planet. Y’all. We should have internalized this. All love. All the love. We had peace times, men on the moon, we could still ride bicycles around downtown and make prank phone calls with impunity. There was more than enough goodness and prosperity to share. We were handed a beautiful world on a platter. My God, didn’t we just do this civil rights thing around race? Weren’t we happy that our class was integrated since first grade? But that’s a whole ‘nother topic for a whole ‘nother day.

Back to the screaming.

I have many friends. Some of my friends have curly hair. Some are short in stature. Some of my friends don’t like chocolate. Some like pie. Some of my friends are musicians, and some just want to read books all day long. Some of my friends don’t fit into the binary gender roles we fall back on
when we don’t know what else to call them.  Those friends who like pie may raise an eyebrow or two, but they are never called evil, and they never incur the wrath of influential politicians who set out to make their lives a living hell because they too like pie but their constituents disapprove.

But to the part about wanting to scream.   

Some of these friends who don’t fit the gender molds are young enough to be my own children. I
have heard stories of the trauma they experienced grappling with their souls as they came of age, which range from the tortuous anguish of wanting to die to wishing they had never been born at all. Imagine your parents and your church telling you that there is this one kind of specific evil being in the world that is condemned to hell for all times, and realizing that that evil
abomination is you.

“I never realized the passing hours of evening showers, a slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams.”

Listening to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” at age 11 over and over was to be awash in something just out of reach of my understanding. It tickled my soul in a salty, chocolate way, affirming a deeply rooted knowing in my young heart: we humans can’t survive in other people’s butterfly nets.

Listening to the same song over and over at age 55 is to weep and scream in fury that some of the very same adults who got it at age 11 don’t get it now, even when it comes to their own children. They lost what they knew before they had the words, that everyone should be righteously joyful in who they are and who they love. Forever and ever, world without end.