"Just Like That" and my friend Luis
The Time Travel Magic of a Bonnie Raitt Song
I finally got a chance to listen to (unknown blues singer) Bonnie Raitt 's gorgeous, Grammy-winning "Just Like That." It broke me open. I am reluctant to boil this masterful song down to a few words. I'll just share the limited info I had before I hit PLAY:
Organ donation is a central aspect of “Just Like That”
Raitt, known mostly as a song interpreter, wrote it “like a John Prine song”
“Just Like That” beat out songs by Adele, Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo, Taylor Swift, DJ Khaled, et al
As soon as I heard it, felt it, I learned “Just Like That” also touches on love beyond life, the miracle of science, and how grief shapes and connects us. It moved me beyond time and space.
Through “Just Like Us,” I experienced once again the presence of my dear friend Luis Fernandez de la Reguera, my son Jack's godfather, or, as Luis preferred, Jack’s padrino.
Luis will be gone 16 years on August 14th, but that number means little. In part because not all of Luis died. His kidneys and, to my astonishment and bemusement, his liver, gave life to three people: two women and one man. One of those women, a new mom in 2006, received Luis’s liver. (A testament to the regenerative power of that particular organ, let me tell you.) All in their thirties then, their fifties today. The great likelihood is those recipients’ bodies pulse with Luis’s organs still.
Memories of Luis’s death are among the most horror-filled of my life. But thanks to a choice he made at some point in his thirty-nine years, and thanks to “Just Like Us,” and thanks to science, these recollections do not overwhelm. Hearing Bonnie sing, I weep for the man who’d pledged to help me raise my son, yet those tears flow alongside a fortifying gratitude.
Bonnie Raitt has articulated my complex, unwieldy emotions. I am beyond thrilled to know this seventy-three-year-old lifer is being honored in the public eye, where elders usually go unheralded. Thanks to winning that 2023 Best Song Grammy, “Just Like That” has reached a much, much wider audience. Even as I write, Bonnie has posted a message of gratitude to the thousands who, like me, have shared how her song opened their hearts, brightened the corners.
Going forward, let us never underestimate the potential of a folk song with no chorus, a story that goes where none has gone before, and, like its subject, gives life.
On August 12th, 2006, my friend Luis Fernandez de la Reguera crashed his beloved BMW motorcycle on our Phoenicia street. He was wearing a “brain bucket,” i.e. a substandard helmet, and suffered massive head trauma.
My wife, Holly, and Jack and I are home when it happens, waiting for Luis to get back so we can go to dinner at the Gypsy Wolf in Woodstock. I am slightly anxious because Mexican-blooded Luis has spent 2004-2006 living by his wits in Merida, on the Yucatan peninsula, experiencing beyond-the-pale adventures. Perhaps he’ll be underwhelmed – disgusted maybe – at the Gypsy Wolf’s version of Mexican cuisine. If he is, he’ll tell us, but with a smile and a hilarious story. He is an honest, but kind man.
That is not to be. When we hear the siren from across the Esopus creek, and the approaching paramedics, I know. I run three doors down to where my friend is crumpled beside the BMW. He was about fifty yards from home. A buzzing hive of first responders surrounds him. I shift into a gear reserved for trauma. I stop trembling. I will retain crystalline memories of this time.
“He’s my friend,” I say. “He’s staying with me, let me through.”
I meet the gaze of a dark-eyed woman trying to keep him alive.
“What can you tell me?” I ask. My voice is not the one I know.
She pauses for a nanosecond, sizes me up, decides I can handle these words: “He’s critical.”
Even in her adrenalized state, she is compassionate. But she can afford only a few seconds of her energy, then she’s back in the fray.
The cause of the accident remains a mystery. The engine likely seized up and Luis vaulted over the handlebars.
A helicopter flies Luis to Albany Medical Center. Two days of vigil follow. I walk the windowless ICU, a benumbed foreigner in a strange country with alien customs. I am not ill, not injured. I can’t do anything to help these superior humans working this brightly-lit warren of overcooled white rooms and beeping machines. A liminal space between death and life, where gravity’s pull is stronger than on my home planet. I do not belong here.
A nurse with a tattoo at the nape of her neck applies gel to Luis’s unseeing, opened eyes. She will gently tell me his brain is receiving no signals, the machines are keeping him alive. She leaves me with the bloated, but still living, body of my friend. His spirit is perhaps elsewhere.
On the Albany Med lawn, I make tearful calls on my flip phone. Luis’s and my friend Bill comes from Boston to say goodbye. Like me, Bill is a brother to Luis. Our mutual friend Deb comes and sits with me on the browning grass. We share priceless Luis stories. We laugh, even as our eyes glaze. Deb and I both knew Luis back in the 80s East Village, when he’d been a crazy punk rock kid with a heroin habit, a survivor of a teenage suicide attempt, possessed of carpe diem charisma and a melodious New Orleans accent. Riotously funny. Unparalleled storyteller. We’d witnessed Luis get his shit together in the 90s. He’d cleaned up, become a popular bartender, an independent contractor, a productive musician, and, in the early ‘aughts, an award-winning filmmaker. With Steve Buscemi’s help, Luis’s debut feature, documentary Rockets Redglare! screened at Sundance 2003.
Luis and I had morphed from acquaintances to friends as salaried members in ex-Jesus & Mary Chain member John Moore’s band. Luis on guitar, me on bass. 1992. John was an asshole. Luis and I had tolerated his verbal abuse for a few weeks. We were getting paid to make music with “the next Billy Idol,” a guy who’d nabbed the brass ring of a record deal (Polygram)! Nevertheless, Luis eventually told John to fuck off, and stormed out of rehearsal. John was stunned. I followed Luis into the night. Against my desperate protestations, he quit, said he’d rather shovel shit. I fell in love with him that night. (A few months later, I quit, too. Decades on, John would apologize, saying, “I was a tit!”)
Luis and I would bond as fatherless young men. Mine had died in 1972, and he had cut his out of his life. The stories he told of his abusive sociopath father, and of his childhood, were harrowing in the extreme. My mother was far away in Georgia, and Luis allowed no contact with his/ He rarely spoke of her except to point at a beautiful biracial young woman and say, “That girl is the spittin’ image of my mama. I can’t stand it.” Like many in the teeming playground of East Village youngsters, Luis and I needed friends and family-of-choice.
As the 90s played out, Luis opened an analog recording studio. He loathed digital tech, and was the first to tell me CDs would never last. He purchased a circa late 60s 16-track Ampex tape machine. I helped him install it in a basement studio on Ludlow Street he would name Big Plate. I would record the best sounding music of my career – so far – on that machine. In years to come, the Ampex would become a coveted piece of gear.
Like me, Luis was of storyteller stock, and this urge would not stop percolating within him. He closed Big Plate, sold the Ampex for a profit, and moved ever closer to making films while I fitfully struggled to find a career as an actor-musician. More than anyone in my life before or since, Luis was emotionally invested in my work. It mattered to him. Once, on an Avenue B sidewalk, he chastised me for hiring shitty musicians to play my songs.
“That’s not you!” he yelled. “You are better than that!”
I would subsequently woodshed intensely as a soloist. Today, I am somewhat known as a kind of troubadour. That transformation began on Avenue B.
Some intense personal struggles would follow, some very dark nights for me. Luis showed up. I could reach out anytime, and I did. He would seek me out, too. One night he requested I help him dump a contractor bag of possessions into the East River. Illegal and, yes, environmentally unsound, but I just said OK and drove our Volkswagen Fox to his apartment. The contents of the contractor bag reminded him of a woman who’d broken his heart. After it sank, we sat on the riverbank, smoked cigarillos, and talked deep into the night. We’d just passed thirty. We were still figuring things out, and fucking up royally. Looking back now of course I see two millionaires.
When Holly and I decided to try for parenthood in late ‘96/early ‘97, she got pregnant remarkably quickly. Luis was the first person I told. It was a warm night. He was bartending at the Lakeside Lounge on Avenue B. I walked across Tompkins Square Park to share the news. In the dim of the Lakeside, he lit up with joy, came out from behind the bar, and practically knocked me over with a hug. The drinkers, the cigarette smoke, the cacophony, the befouled floorboards, all receded. My friend’s dark eyes widened as he focused on me with palpable heat.
“You have intent on your face,” he said. “Intent.”
He was correct. I’d been floundering, unsure I was investing my energy wisely. But I knew I wanted to be a father. This had always been true, since I was tiny. And I wanted to father a child with Holly. Now it was happening. Luis recognized my energy shifting, concentrating on a single point, a spark of life Holly and I would name Jack. I would retreat from chasing record deals and remunerative acting work, and instead be Jack’s primary caregiver while his mother worked in midtown Manhattan. The happiest years of my life would follow.
I was not supremely confident, however. I wanted Luis’s help. A couple months into Holly’s pregnancy, on a wee small hours morning after my shift at Beauty Bar, I found myself sitting across from Luis at the Dynasty Diner (AKA the Die Nasty) at Avenue B and East 14th. Over an omelet, I asked him to be Jack’s godfather. Meaning: Luis would be an integral part of my son’s life. I wanted to bind him to an agreement, a pledge.
The Mexican culture in Luis’s heart and blood has a concept for this: padrino. “Little dad.” While godfather implies a man will help raise his friend’s child in the Catholic church, padrino is more fluid. (Luis had been abused by priests in Catholic school, and hated the church more than anyone I know.) A padrino is family-by-choice. An elder to participate, to impart wisdom, to set an example, to show how we navigate this life.
Luis was one of the bravest people I knew, and he made me brave. He cast light on a bigger, broader picture of life. His ability to take the long view had given him the confidence to listen to his gut and take chances, to say fuck off when it seemed like sucking up would be more practical. Luis had done this more than anyone I knew. He had ultimately benefitted, in mind, body, and even bank balance, from risky choices.
Luis was stunned by my request. In subsequent years, after a few drinks, he would express mild resentment that I’d saddled him with such a duty. He was still struggling to strike a balance between no-strings-attached freedom and promises of responsibility, familial obligations. Still, I retained faith he and my son would find a distinctive relationship rhythm, and both would be enriched. I was sure of this, down to my bones. Luis agreed to my request, unconditionally.
The following January 21st, when Jack arrived three weeks early, Luis was the first to visit us at St. Vincent’s. Google tells me it was a Wednesday. Early afternoon. A couple days later, Luis would drive us home in a blinding, record-breaking rainstorm, to the safety of our St. Mark’s Place apartment.
In my NYC stay-at-home dad years, I saw Luis frequently. We wrote and recorded some hilarious music, and he often visited me at the one bartending shift I held onto at the Beauty Bar - Truckstop Tuesdays. I retain a memory of him covered in soot on 9/11, when he’d gone to Ground Zero to help, then came to the bar, bug-eyed and freaked out. (And yes, I went to work that night.) In this timeframe, Luis wrote, shot, edited, and co-starred in his first movie short, Differently Able. It was a guerilla-style production, but he got it done.
Luis remained in NYC when we moved upstate in 2002, visiting several times in those first two years before heading to Merida in 2004. Through phone and occasionally epic, sadly unsaved email, we remained connected. We understood that wherever Luis landed during the timeline of Jack’s life, padrino and godson would forge a relationship, picking up the thread of an ongoing conversation.
Our first couple of years in Phoenicia were very hard for me, and Luis repeatedly offered me haven in Merida. To “just sit on the roof and look at the sky,” he said. One of my top five regrets is not taking him up on that.
On that fateful 2006 Phoenicia visit, Luis was in transition. He’d restored and sold the Merida house at a sizable profit, and he intended to buy property in Costa Rica and open a B & B. Although Rockets Redglare had garnered awards and that Sundance screening, Luis had been burned by a distributor, and was disillusioned with the film business. I hoped that, after decompressing in the Costa Rica countryside, he would return to that storytelling mode, at which he excelled. In the same way he’d expressed belief in me when I’d been dispirited, I offered him wholehearted encouragement.
He’d driven to the Catskills in a Winnebago. He planned to collect stuff I’d stored for him while he was in Mexico, including that BMW. He would strap the bike to the Winnebago, and head south.
Luis spent many hours of the last full day of his conscious life – August 11th, 2006 – with then-eight-year-old Jack. Google tells me it was a Friday. Holly and I were elsewhere that August day while padrino and godson explored our sleepy Catskills neighborhood. They brought back rusted relics from the long-abandoned Ulster-Delaware train tracks. These items would remain on our porch for years. Jack says he and Luis talked all afternoon.
On day two of the vigil at Albany Med, Luis’s Uncle Billy, his next of kin, arrives from Florida. The nurse with the tattoo on the nape of her neck will note Luis had checked YES on the organ donor box on his driver’s license. Uncle Billy, a veteran, and clearly Luis’s ancestor, an older version of Luis that will never be, will give the OK to remove Luis from life support. I will say goodbye to Luis’s body, and begin the process of putting our plans and shared dreams in a different place within me. Months later, Uncle Billy will divulge the veiled information about the beautiful fate of Luis’s viable organs.
In the days following Luis’ death, the smoke alarm outside the room in which he’d been staying will go off three times, with no smoke in the house. A blackbird will fly through the open French doors into the dining room and perch, and then shit, on a tribute poster we’d made for Luis’s memorial. Our cat, Sis, will catch an electric green hummingbird in her mouth, a horror to which Jack alerts me. I will pry the bird loose from the irritated cat, praying it will survive. After lolling stunned in my palm, it rises, hovers before my face, and zooms away.
Partly to assuage my grief, I jump into the business of making children’s music as Uncle Rock, surrounding myself with little humans untouched by loss. I am predisposed to tapping into their vibrant, just-under-the-surface souls. Uncle Rock will be my livelihood until 2010, when, after yet more personal upheavals, I begin writing in earnest, publishing, creating opportunities to perform, and teaching guitar and bass.
Around that same time, Jack will enter his teens and focus his creative energy on filmmaking, following not in his father’s footsteps, but in his padrino’s. He will eventually graduate with honors in Film from Wesleyan University in 2016, and, after some covid delay, move to Brooklyn, where he now lives, writing and making movies, and, like Luis, hustling. More than once, when he asks my advice, I will refer him to my memories of Luis. “What would Luis do?”
(Needless to say, I implore him to stay the fuck off motorcycles.)
Which leads us to this moment, right now.
If you do not die young as Luis did, you learn so much about loss, and about what it does. That knowledge is the price of a long life. I have learned grief is not bound by our perception of time. You never “get over it.” You carry it. Some days the loss is heavy, some days you don’t even know it’s there. With work, you can willfully move it out of your way. Temporarily. A song, an image, or scent will revivify it as if no time has passed at all. But survival, clearly, is possible.
Patti Smith recently posted following Tom Verlaine’s death: “Grief is not an affliction, but a privilege.” I think it is both.
Today, Bonnie Raitt’s artistry brought all of that out of the abstract and into the room with me. “Just Like That” broke through a lot of distraction, a lot of grappling with notions of years passing, moments slipping away, losses encroaching. All slipped away, as if by magic, albeit a spell that ultimately wore off. But I will take it.
Going forward, if I need to connect more deeply with my beloved friend Luis Fernandez de la Reguera, who changed my life, I will listen to that song. I’ll realize, with profound wonder, humility, and gratitude, how he also changed the lives – saved the lives – of those organ recipients.
RBW
Phoenicia
2-11-23
Beautiful.
I am moved by this story of friendship, grief, and love. Thank you for sharing it with the world and teaching 23 year old me, a little bit more.