my glamorous life
episodes & recollections
#70 adios, amigo
Mrs. Lawrence taught me to play the flute when I was sixteen. I already played keyboards, but they weren’t yet considered hip, and for the space of a pop–cultural hiccup, flutes were.
Not that that motivated me. I just wanted to make a sound like Ian MacDonald had made on the first King Crimson album, which I listened to obsessively, with and without chemical refreshment, in that strange year of my thin adolescence.
Mrs. Lawrence must have been 35 or so—she had a son my age—but I had a feeling about her in spite of the gap in our years. I didn’t articulate it, and it wasn’t crude, in spite of my being sixteen. I simply liked it when she showed me how to hold the flute, how to blow into it, when she stood near me and told me I was doing well.
I also noticed I tensed when her husband came home from work, though again I did not articulate to myself what my reaction meant. Call it innocence. The Pittsburgh Police had a file on me, I’d seen the inside of two jail cells, and I’d performed grown–up acts with some girls I knew, but I was still a child.
Mrs. Lawrence had been teaching me the flute for about a month when Roberto Clemente died and she asked me to accompany her to a recording studio, where everything changed.
Roberto Clemente was a ball player for Pittsburgh, the town where my family had relocated some years prior. I paid no attention to sports, particularly baseball, having earlier been exposed to the New York Mets in what must have been their worst season. I could play better than the ’65 Mets, and I was always the last kid chosen for softball. They’d pick girls and blind boys before they picked me.
But everyone knew Clemente. He was the hope of the team, and a popular figure for more than his athletic expertise and grace. Roberto Clemente was on a relief mission to assist Nicaraguan earthquake victims when his plane went down.
The city of Pittsburgh mourned, and Mrs. Lawrence wrote a song in tribute to the fallen ball player.
“Adios, Amigo, Roberto,” she called it.
We entered a Pittsburgh recording studio to cut the track—Mrs. Lawrence, her son’s rock band, and me, with four weeks’ experience as a flutist.
For four weeks, I wasn’t that bad. I’d been playing music for eight years, and could improvise around my limitations. As she sang and the band rocked, I tossed out little flute flourishes behind her.
My track was killed immediately on remix.
“It’s hokey,” said the recording engineer, who earned his bread and butter producing local radio commercials.
Besides King Crimson, I’d been listening to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and had noticed that in the midst of their brilliant cubist bop, they often threw in bits of corny little tunes to amuse themselves. So I’d done the same in my improv for “Adios, Amigo, Roberto,” tossing in little five–note snippets of Spanish and American folk tunes I thought the dead Clemente would have liked.
Mrs. Lawrence took my side against the engineer, insisting that my part remain in. I may have realized then that I loved her, in my hopeless, sixteen–year–old way. Or perhaps I only know it now.
But the engineer prevailed. My part was cut.
A week later, the song itself died, when Robert Clemente’s widow, or legal representatives acting on her behalf, denied permission to release the track.
I had a girlfriend my own age but soon broke up with her, mainly because she was in love with a friend of mine who was three years older than me—but perhaps for other reasons, too. Last time I saw my old girlfriend she was wearing my friend’s wedding band, but that was long ago.
I continued with the flute lessons for a while and eventually played out, but things had changed. After the lessons stopped, I never saw Mrs. Lawrence again.
Eventually I owned my own recording studio, which I lost when habits I’d acquired in adolescence finally caught up with me. At the time of that crisis, broken, jobless, and divorced, I was the age Mrs. Lawrence had been when I loved her.