My Little Debbie

Living in Music Land pays off.

When Michael LaMarca, owner of Legz (the Valley Stream “nightclub” where Mike and I hung out), hits me over the head with a cocktail table, the hundred dollar bill he subsequently thrusts into my hand (adding Did I do that? Sorry, kid. Get that looked at.) buys me a used Carlo Robelli Gibson SG copy my mother makes me return (I’m behind on the rent) to Music Land. Charlie, my regular Music Land connection, takes the guitar back because I’m in the store several times a week, ogling guitars and amps I can’t afford, buying shit I can and generally being a pain in the ass. On one trip to Music Land for new strings, an eighteen year-old crosses West John Street’s double yellow line, plowing his 1976 silver AMC Pacer head-on into my 1973 green Plymouth Satellite, totaling it and sending me to the hospital in an ambulance. I sue the kid in Small Claims court, discover he’s recently arrived in America from Poland, speaks no English and doesn’t exactly have a license. I prevail, awarded eight hundred dollars in compensation after my mechanic Richard Tripoli of Tripp’s Auto successfully testifies about recent repairs to the Satellite. I need a car and spend the eight hundred bucks on the classiest American ride I’ve owned: a black 1966 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, gray interior, power everything and 426 cubic inches under the hood. The man who sells it to me says It belonged to my grandfather who drove it back and forth to Miami and little else. It’s all highway mileage. I believe him. The car has 80,000 miles on it and is pristine. First thing I do is install a quick-release cassette deck of my own design (this is before “Benzi Boxes” and other such car stereo contraptions become commonplace), ensuring my inaugural tape is Black Sabbath's Paranoid.

That first day of ownership I drive my Cadillac for hours, still amazed it’s mine and wishing I could see what I look like behind the wheel. Me and friend Alex Totino, guitarist of The Misguided, wander all over in that Caddy, getting at best seven miles to the gallon. Twenty-eight days after buying the car we visit two sisters we’d met a few weeks earlier at a Hoboken house party. They’re in a two-bedroom Journal Square apartment on Sip Avenue near the VIP Diner. Alex hits it off with Syd but I’m so nervous around Tiffany – former go-go dancer – I drink too much wine and start cadging cigarettes from (I’d previously only indulged in the occasional cheap cigar). We’re with the sisters until Midnight, then leave Jersey City and an hour later I’m dropping Alex off in Queens. I make my way to the main drag, Woodhaven Blvd., and I'm chugging along in the right lane, wondering if Tiffany likes me, when I come around a blind curve and smash into a pallet of New York Newsday Sunday editions piled six feet high, eight feet wide and eight feet deep. The last thing I see is a man flying over the newspapers onto the curb. I’m not sure if I hit him or he jumps clear before impact but soon he’s at the driver's side door, banging on the window, yelling MISTER?! MISTER! He opens the door and I fall out into the crisp October air and sickly sweet smell of anti-freeze spurting from my radiator. The man who went over my hood says I knew that was gonna happen!! The other guy chimes in We knew someone was gonna come around that curve and hit us! I don’t ask the obvious – “Then why were you there?” – but apologize for nearly killing them. Then I see the mangled police barricade – like a sawhorse – they'd put up, its flashing yellow light no longer flashing. The cops show up and immediately suss out what happened: Damn pile of newspapers shouldn’t have been in the right lane. There’s no sobriety test –  they’re only concerned about possible injuries (I’m okay, a scraped-up knee) – and getting the Caddy – it’s front end demolished – out of traffic before the morning rush. Somehow, we dragged the car to the side of the road and I use the last quarter in my pocket to dial Alex from a payphone. His father answers, understandably pissed because of the hour. In Portuguese he yells for Alex to pick up the extension. Alex does and I find myself beginning to cry as I tell him what happened. Alex has no idea what to do and sounds more annoyed than worried (after we hang up we’ll rarely speak again). Dreading what’s coming next, I pick up the phone again and collect-call my mom. It’s almost three AM and my mother can’t believe what she’s hearing. A fucking collect call from her son Chris? She answers the operator with an annoyed Yes, I’ll accept.

“Mom, I've had a really bad accident.”

My mother yells I told you not to go to Queens!

Thanks, mom!

Not knowing what else to do, I collect-call my sister Joanie, living upstairs at my grandmother’s house in Copiague. My sister answers, hands the phone to her boyfriend – an engineer and quiet guy – and I tell him what happened, practically hyperventilating. He says Chris, first thing I want you to do is calm down. Are you okay?

“I'm fine.”

Can you ask the police for directions to the nearest train stop?

“Yeah, I guess I can do that.”

Because if you can get the train you can come out to Copiague and we're within walking distance of the train station.

“Okay, I think that's what I'll do.”

I have little choice. The officers are kind enough to drop me off at the Long Island Railroad stop in Jamaica where I sit waiting an hour for the next eastbound train. It gets me into Copiague at five-thirty as the sun comes up. I’m shaking when I get to my sister's door. She makes me some coffee and I sit down and tell her the entire story. Then I realize it’s Halloween, a bad day for my car – though demolished – to be sitting on Woodhaven Blvd. with all those school kids armed with chalk and eggs walking by.

“I gotta get it out of there because that’s everything I own, that piece of junk car.”

I walk the few blocks to Tripp’s Auto, also in Copiague, find Richie.

“Can you get a tow truck out to Queens?”

He looks at me like I’m insane.

You want me to go out to Queens on Halloween with a tow truck?

“Yeah. I have to get my car out of there.”

Richie – who works on all our cars and sporadically employs my brother Mario and brother-in-law Keith – relents. We climb in the tow truck, drive to Queens., hook the Cadillac up and drag it back, depositing it at Keith’s body shop. I put an ad in the Pennysaver (“1966 Cadillac For Parts”) and a week later Keith tows the car to my mother’s house, needing the room at his business. Within days a guy shows up and offers me four hundred dollars cash for the Caddy (he’s only interested in the interior, which is immaculate). This being Long Island and it being impossible to get around without one, I’ve already acquired another car: a 1971 Plymouth Satellite (this is the era when even classic Mopar muscle cars are plentiful and cheap: I never pay more than a thousand dollars for a car). When the Caddy buyer hands me the cash I think of the Carlo Robelli and decide to go buy a new guitar. I head to Music Land and I'm talking to my man Charlie when a young blonde woman in faded jeans hurries in and lays a beat-up guitar case down on the counter. Charlie goes over and asks:

Can I help you?

My boyfriend just split and this is the only thing he left behind... I wanna sell it.

Charlie opens the case and I lean over to see what’s inside: a bastardized Les Paul. Someone has run roughshod over what was once a beautiful instrument, slapping a Harley-Davidson #1 sticker on its turning-to-green goldtop (the clear coat wears away and the metals that give the guitar its golden hue oxidize with exposure to air), replacing the volume and tone controls with switches (!) and reaming out two P90 pickup routs and adding a third to accommodate three Dimarzio humbuckers. Whoever the ex is he's ruined the guitar. Charlie turns to the woman, says:

I'll give you two hundred bucks for it.

She doesn’t hesitate or haggle, just replies Okay.

Charlie and I both know this Les Paul, even in its diminished condition, is worth more than two hundred dollars. After the woman leaves with cash in hand I leap into the void.

"Hey Charlie! I'll give you two hundred and twenty five dollars for that guitar right now!"

Charlie looks at the guitar, then back at me and shrugs Okay.

Charlie is a happy-go-lucky sort who doesn’t own Music Land, so why would it matter to him? We’ve built up a solid relationship over the years and he’s happy to make twenty-five bucks. I always go to him to make my purchases and now’s he rewarding my loyalty. I give him the forty-five dollars in me as a deposit and he agrees to hold the guitar until I return with the balance. Don’t ask me where I got the rest of the money from (my first bank account is still years away) but within a day I’m back at Music Land paying off the Les Paul. I greedily grab the guitar and run it home where I quickly decide to have it refinished to destroy every trace of its past owner. Alex and I painstakingly strip the guitar down, removing all the hardware and taping up the body and neck for a re-paint. But I don’t want to use a rattle can, like we did with Alex’s Gibson SG Junior, one walnut and now white, sold to Stan Lee before a CBGB show by his band The Dickies. This Les Paul paint job requires another trip to Tripp’s, but not the main location, the body shop annex on Marconi Blvd., across from my grandmother’s house and ruled by Richie’s brother, Paint Master Ronnie. I hand him the Les Paul and say:

"Ronnie, I want you to paint this guitar!"

He takes it from me and gives it a cautious once-over.

Really? I've never painted a guitar before.

"Really.”

What color?

"Metalflake blue!"

Wow! That would be really nice, I've never seen a metalflake blue guitar.

"Yeah, me neither. That's why I want one.”

Ronnie goes to a loose-leaf binder, thumbs through it, writes some numbers down on a piece of paper, hands it to me and directs me to a paint store on Sunrise Highway across from the Johnny All-Weather Drive-in. When I get there I hand the paper to the man behind the counter, adding "This what I need." The guy comes back with a small jar and I think What the hell is this?! Then I notice the tiny blue flakes and it opens a whole new universe of understanding. So this is how they do it? The man also hands me a can of clear lacquer base. I pay him and run the flake and clear lacquer back to Ronnie, who paints my guitar for a hundred dollars. It takes a few days but soon Alex and I are reassembling the guitar, replacing the Dimarzios with three Seymour Duncan humbuckers (a ‘59 upfront, JB in the center and Duncan Distortion in the treble position) and upgrading the tuners to the new locking Sperzels. We also set the wiring right. Then Alex takes a picture of me in the tub of the pink bathroom at my house, posing with the newly dubbed “Debbie” (as in Debbie Gibson, because she’s from Long Island, too).

The next time I’m in Music Land, the owner – a smarmy fuck named Michael – reads me the riot act.

YOU KNOW CHARLIE SHOULD’VE NEVER SOLD YOU THAT GUITAR!

I shrug.

"Oh well. He did."

This is not the Carlo Robelli and I’m not about to bring it back.

I often wonder who the boyfriend was and why he went all Frampton/Frehley on his Les Paul (how many Les Pauls have Ace and Peter to blame for being mutilated?). Years ago I do some research, discover my guitar is a rare one-piece body and neck 1968 model, the reintroduction year for the “true” Les Paul (in 1961 Gibson changed the singe cutaway Les Paul body style to a thinner double cutaway design subsequently dubbed the SG after Les Paul complains). I reach out to Gibson and they confirm my guitar left the Kalamazoo, Michigan factory in August of 1968. Back in the ‘80s I make the pilgrimage to Fat Tuesdays and have Les Paul himself (pictured, with yours truly) engrave the truss rod cover on my guitar (he kept an engraver handy for just such purposes).

Debbie became my main guitar from 1983 on and I regrettably sold the Ibanez 2350 Les Paul copy my Nana bought me when I was fourteen and getting serious about guitar. I probably wanted the money to finance “upgrades” to Debbie. Because there was no internet and I had no idea my guitar was a 1968, I stupidly swapped out all the hardware: stop-bar tailpiece, ABR-1 “Nashville” bridge, “poker chip” switch surround, back cover plates, strap buttons, the aforementioned tuners (though, in my memory they original tuners had already been replaced by Grover’s). All those 1968 parts are now worth a small fortune. I even got rid of the beat-up original case, opting to buy Debbie a new Gibson-branded plush case (which is now worth a bit itself). Soon (Dec. 10 – see the receipt, below), it’ll be forty years since I bought my Les Paul. It’s the one guitar I’d never sell. In “unmolested” condition a 1968 Les Paul can be worth as much as twenty grand. My guitar appraised at roughly four thousand five years ago. I’ve thought of shipping it back to the Gibson Restoration shop and Jack for it set right but it would cost a fortune and that ship has sailed.

Music Land is still in Lindenhurst but a bit further south on Wellwood Avenue. I have no idea what became of Charlie or the blonde whose boyfriend left town.

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