Delivering Flowers on Valentine’s Day Isn’t a Bed of Roses

First of all, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don’t even like flowers.

Roses especially bug me. Oh sure, I know they’re a fact of life, especially on Valentine’s Day. But so is open-heart surgery.

Maybe that’s why I was the perfect candidate to be a flower deliveryman for a day Friday. You wouldn’t see me blubbering salty tears when the little missus sniffles in joy as she opens the card that comes with her precious flowers.

Just the plants, ma’am, then I’m outta here. Places to go. The lovesick to see.

Actually, the job looked simple. You got your dozen roses. You got your Thomas guide. You got your own car and your own gas. And you’re off. But don’t you dare call me Cupid.

*

I was working for Conroy’s flower shop in Glendale. They’d put out a sign the previous day advertising for one-day work hustling flowers. I showed up early, only to find a half-dozen eager-beaver delivery dudes ahead of me, loading flowers into their trunks, whistling happy Beach Boys tunes.

Marci Magana, the manager in charge of the madhouse operation in which more than 400 bunches of flowers would be delivered across northern Los Angeles, showed me the ropes. I was to make seven deliveries per trip and would be paid $3.50 per stop. But the cash came only if I struck pay dirt--the flowers had to go directly into the recipient’s trembling little hands.

Magana handed me a stack of invoices with big numbers written on them and showed me to the walk-in cooler, where I spent nearly a half-hour locating my flower arrangements among hundreds of look-alikes.

This was where I gleaned my first real insight into flower shops, one that would make any Valentine’s Day celebrant’s blood run cold: The flowers get treated like prisoners of war in these places. There were broken roses on the floor, their heads smashed, their stems shattered.

When I carried one large arrangement out, a female worker gasped and said the roses were old. Before my eyes, she yanked out the fragile-looking flowers, threw them on the floor and replaced them with fresher ones. I gulped.

Get this: Some ingrates aren’t even happy to get their flowers. Magana said sometimes they send them back because they were the wrong color or they didn’t have balloons with them or they didn’t match the setting.

Then Magana made a confession: “I don’t even like flowers after dealing with them all the time. For Valentine’s Day, my husband usually gets me cologne or a box of See’s candy.”

Richard Reicks, a veteran deliveryman who has plied his trade for more than 17 years, offered me an insider’s tip before sending me on my way: Keep smiling.

Reicks has seen all kinds delivering flowers. Once, a guy in Hollywood tried to give him a bag of cocaine as a tip. “You know Hollywood,” he deadpanned.

Yes, he blushed, he’s been kissed by joyful women: “You never know what turns ‘em on.”

*

Ten minutes later, my car jammed full of flowers, I pulled out of the parking lot with the nicest and most expensive arrangement next to me in the front seat. I called her Queenie. She was going to a lucky woman named Sandy.

As I pulled out onto the street, I was already sweating. After so much time in the cooler, it was hot outside. My eyes filled with sweat. Then I heard the first trickles of the telltale rush of water that would soon turn into a river. Queenie’s base had been filled to the brim. She was leaking all over my front seat.

But I couldn’t stop. I had deliveries to make. So with one hand holding Queenie upright, the other handling both the wheel and my Thomas guide, I lurched off.

Over the next three hours, I got lost a half-dozen times as I snaked around the Los Feliz district delivering flowers. Horns blared and middle fingers raised as I stopped in traffic to ask directions or consult Mr. Thomas.

Here’s a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned: Women should stay home on Valentine’s Day. Apartment managers and half-awake neighbors get grumpy when asked to accept delivery of flowers that aren’t addressed to them.

At one door I rang impatiently. Then I rang again. (The flower deliveryman always rings twice.) The woman squealed in delight as she opened the door. She was wearing curlers in her hair and said she was rushing off for a ceremony to be inducted as a U.S. citizen.

I was excited for her. I asked her who the flowers were from. She said she didn’t know.

Then she opened the little card. “Oh, they’re from Tom! I know Tom. I think.”

The next stop wasn’t much better. There was a broken toilet outside. Dogs howled and growled in the yard. A guy with a white muscle undershirt and a cigarette dangling from his lips accepted the flowers because the woman wasn’t home.

He said he was her brother. He didn’t say “thank you.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

The dogs barked.

Halfway through, I realized that I had forgotten to take the big yellow numbers off the arrangements. Now that’s really romantic, I thought, to get a bunch of flowers marked No. 388.

With my long and hard delivery day over, I have to get my car interior cleaned.

It smells like roses in there.