It was date night, and we had reservations at Guavas, a nearby Cuban restaurant that promoted a date-night special that included paella, sangria, and live music!  Since it was January, we brought in an unwelcome blast of cold air as we entered, but it was soon absorbed into the warm and cozy atmosphere of the cafe.  

A corner of the space had a small wooden platform where a musician was plugging in amplifiers and tuning his instrument.  Even though we had reservations, the tables were fully occupied.  The host assured us that several would open up soon; the previous walk-in guests had been informed that they could not remain into date-night-protected time slots.

As we waited, the guitarist started playing.  The music sounded familiar.  Flamenco music.    Rhythmic, melodic, percussive.  I had heard this unique style before, many years ago.  Half a century earlier, while attending university, I was sharing a house with three other roommates.  We were all in our twenties, working and studying, sharing expenses.  

One of my roommates was a musician, trained in classical guitar, but now concentrating on a specialty: flamenco guitar.  I had a room on the ground floor of a three-story Victorian house (with stained-glass windows in the closets!), and Louie had a room one floor up.  The house was kept warm in the winter by “gravity heat”, meaning that hot air from the furnace was delivered by convection: hot air rises, cool air sinks.  For this to work, open grills between floors are necessary, and so during the evenings, studying in my room, the sounds of flamenco guitar as Louie practiced his art on the floor above, were convected throughout the house.  It was an exotic sound, and I enjoyed it.  It was one more new experience to me, another bonus to being among a mix of interesting people in that shared living arrangement.

I looked at the musician playing in the restaurant.  He was about the right age, my age, and for a moment I wondered if this was Louie, years later.  We all change over the decades, but I have concluded that we don’t change enough to become unrecognizable.  If you have attended a high school reunion, you may not recognize someone right away, but in short order the looks and mannerisms and speech patterns penetrate the disguise of age.  This was not Louie.

But the music was just as I remembered from the days of sharing that house with him.  

We were now seated, and our paella meals arrived.  We continued to enjoy the music, especially when accompanied by a young flamenco dancer, whose bright costume lit up the little stage.  The castanets and her dramatic and percussive dance steps drew our attention.  She flung her arms and waved the wings of her dress.  It was a marvelous performance, the intensity of her foot stomping on the stage eventually dislodging one of the amplifier connections, and suddenly, we had a mix of guitar and feedback.  They managed to gracefully end the piece, which was the end of the set anyway.

At this point, we had finished our meal and were preparing to move our date night back home.  As I put on my coat, I decided to compliment the musicians on our way out, so I approached the guitarist, Mateo Davies, who was still trying to fix the broken sound connection.  I expressed our enjoyment of their performance and wondered how large the flamenco community was.  When he said it was very small, I told him about listening to the sounds of my roommate 50 years ago.  Could he possibly know of him? 

To my surprise, he did!  In fact, they were good friends!  He told me that he had buried his friend in 1994, a shock to me, as I have trouble acknowledging our shared mortalities.  They had known each other in the years shortly after my own connection with Louie.   By then, Louie had established himself in the specialized flamenco world of the Midwest.  His personal work in the art had become a distinct style, “primitivo”, an indication of the emotional passion that infused his performances.  He took on the moniker “Luis Primitivo” and eventually moved to Chicago, where he became well-known in the local flamenco community. 

His musical talents found a home and flourished in Chicago, but his personal life did not.  His childhood history and subsequent challenges were too much.  He eventually succumbed to an unsustainable lifestyle, dying at the age of 46.  There is a tribute to him in the Chicago Tribune.

Learning this history made me think back to Louie as a roommate in that big dilapidated Victorian house.  He was a fit and active young man, perhaps 5 years older than me.  We had many fine evenings sharing beer and peanuts as we could afford them, with our other roommates, two sisters originally from a city on the other side of the state from Minneapolis.  

We all had part-time jobs, making our way, covering the rent.  Louie worked at the famous (later infamous) Shinder’s News, on Hennepin Avenue in the heart of Minneapolis. Shinder’s offered the latest newspapers, magazines, comic books, trading cards, and in the back, adult materials.  They were open 24 hours, and Louie worked the graveyard shift as a salesclerk.  

It put some pressure on his social schedule and his flamenco practice schedule because he had to sleep sometime, often during early evening hours when his other roommates were active.  I was among those other active roommates, and I was impressed at Louie’s routine, getting up at 2:00 am and riding his bicycle to downtown Minneapolis each night to fill his shift. I especially recall the time he set his alarm to compensate for the fact that daylight savings time was changing. Unfortunately, he shifted the alarm the wrong way, arriving at work two hours before his shift started.  We’ve all done it.

I have fond memories of those days, though Louie may have had a different experience.  While he was making music upstairs, I was making my own noise in my makeshift workshop that carried throughout the house via the same gravity heat exchange panels.  Eventually he chose to leave our rental collective to find an environment more conducive to his goals.  It seems to have worked.  He became an important figure in the flamenco community.

Date night provided me an unexpected encounter with a local musician, one that tied off a loose end.  I have lost many connections with people who were influential to me in an important time of my life.  It is nice to find out about them, even if I can no longer express my appreciation to them.

And it’s nice to listen to and watch a flamenco performance!