By Myles Ludwig
Sometimes I Google around to see if I can find out what’s doing with old friends I haven’t seen in many years.
Facebook and LinkedIn have their place, especially for reconnecting with childhood classmates or former colleagues, but neither have the kind of depth to allow a peek over the ledge of our psyches to see very far into the meaning of the past. Patient research is required for this.
I can usually find them, and occasionally, I’m shocked to learn they’re gone, passed away years ago. Where did they go?
This month, I learned Peter Ainslie had suddenly died at a relatively young age several years ago. Peter was a good friend, a soft-spoken Tennessean whom I’d met through my wife at the time. He was part of a quartet — we four amigos — that included my wife and a young lady who worked for me for a while and has since made quite a name for herself as a novelist.
Peter worked at Women’s Wear Daily then. He was their rock ‘n ’roll critic, back when that was a pioneering occupation with literary pretentions. But he was not pretentious in any way I can recall. He was always kind and always invited us to the record pre-release parties of many musicians who are now either legendary or dead or both. That was before the Download Era. Those parties were extravagant, exclusive (The List was everything) and just a teeny bit debauched.
Our friendship extended beyond that. The four of us were weekend hippies. We all had media day jobs, but spent many weekends together cavorting on a small picturesque estate in New York’s Hudson Valley within sight of the Shawangunks and Mohonk Mountain. It was a lovely property, the gentlemanly retreat of an ad guy qua country squire. We were there to visit with Christopher Tree and his girlfriend Roxanne.
Christopher was a Big Sur hippie (not hipster), a gentle sort of guru, and he and I had become friends after I saw him perform in Manhattan, and then interviewed him. He called his act “Spontaneous Sound” and his shtick was the charming notion that everyone had music within and anyone could play it, even if — maybe especially because — one had no musical training or schooling on any instrument.
He and Roxanne lived in the small caretaker’s cottage on the estate. Their living room was a veritable orchestra pit, filled with a large, carefully arranged array of musical instruments from a wide variety of traditions and cultures, recognizable and exotic: African and Middle Eastern drums shared space with multiple cymbals, Tibetan temple horns so long one had to stand across the room to bellow through them, Gamelan gongs, flutes, strings, etc. It was like living in a crowd of potential music. In those psychedelic days, introduced us to a vegetarian diet and convinced us we could play any one of those instruments. Well, we did make a kind of beautiful cacophony together.
Although I had played drums in jazz combos in high school and college, I was inspired to pick up a clarinet, maybe because I recalled my Uncle Herb playing it at my bar mitzvah. I bought it on Music Row at Manny’s where all the musicians bought their “axes” and talked myself into believing I could play it. In retrospect, I had no idea what I was doing.
Peter’s great gift to me was, of all things, a love of baking. On a spontaneous self-improvement tear, we signed up for lessons on the Lower East Side at a Hebrew social club and school. My wife and I were living in a loft in Manhattan recently vacated by a light-manufacturing operation. It was the top floor and the other nine were occupied, one to a floor, of not quite legal live-in photos studios. These were days when “loft” was not a real estate developer’s amenity. It was about 90 feet long by 26 feet wide, with a perfectly framed view of the Empire State Building through the back window.
We had exposed the brick wall with our amigos’ help, surreptitiously disposing of the plaster one garbage bag at a time, and had divided the back lengthwise with a DIY counter-cum-storage unit that started in the kitchen and ended in the bathroom area. Every week after those baking lessons and for several years thereafter, I’d roll out the dough on that counter, knead, let it rise. It was a simple pleasure. A hands-on task, relief for a guy who usually made a living by his wits or lack thereof. The high point of my experience was making Danish pastry. It was, I recall, delicious.
After my wife and I divorced, I lost touch with Peter. Sadly, in a divorce one often loses some friends who have divided loyalties.
It’s frightening to consider that friends like Peter are gone, because it forces me to confront my own mortality. But I understand now why we of a certain age read the obituaries: We’re glad not to see our names there.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.