by Bobby DeVito
It only took me about 30 seconds to decide. I hated my current guitar at that time, and I knew I could get another amp somehow. My Legend amp was really cool though, covered in a wood cabinet and a real wicker grille, it looked like something that would not be out of place in someone’s high-end Florida room. But I simply HAD to have that Strat. So at the end of the night, they carted away my guitar and amp, and I took the Strat home.
I had that guitar completely rebuilt and refretted by Dick Boyden, a great guitar and amp tech in Pensacola. It was BEAUTIFUL. I could tell the look in Dick’s eyes that he hated seeing me have that guitar, because he knew I would fuck it up somehow. And he was right.
So here we are on the road, Arthur and Dwight and I are in the back of the truck, drinking beer all the way to Ft Benning. There is a local rock club just off base that we play a few times a year. I literally had a woman walk to my table, grab my hand, pull me outside, go to the band truck, blow me in the band truck, bring me back in and have a drink before the break was over, with absolutely no conversation. Military girls have always seemed to like me for some reason. We get to the club and set up. For some reason, I end up with Dwight’s smelly leather bomber jacket. Unbeknownst to Arthur and I, Dwight is a SERIOUS pill head. So as I am wearing the jacket, I feel a pill bottle in the pocket. I pull it out and put the contents into my hand. Blue Valiums. Yum. Brings back memories of my mom’s medicine chest back in the 70s. So Arthur and I take a few, about 4-5 each, which is enough to “tranquilize a horse” as my mom would say.
I don’t even remember the actual gig. Jon tells us the next day that I told him he could sit down, and I would three-piece the band. I am more than sure the results were atrocious. I’m surprised we weren’t fired, but it was a Tuesday night and it was a slow night anyway.
Dwight comes STORMING into my hotel room, demanding to know where the rest of his pills are. To Arthur and I, it was no big deal. We had no idea we were dealing with someone as addicted to those pills as he was.
“Where are my fucking pills?” He screams, grabbing me off the bed. Arthur rises up and grabs Dwight, and we pin him to the wall. “What the fuck Dwight?” I scream back. “It’s just some fucking pills…do you want the money for them or something?”
He just slid down the wall and almost started to cry. “It’s just that we’re on the road, and I can’t get anymore of them until we get back, and I NEED them, I NEED THEM” he wailed. “And I’m gonna kick your ass if I don’t get them back!” he threatened.
I had never really seen this level of addiction before, and I immediately looked at Dwight like he was pond scum lower than low trash. I told him to fuck off, and to take his amp with him, I didn’t need to play it that week. I got the band truck, loaded Arthur in it, and headed to a local Podunk Music Store.
You have to love some of the local little music stores in small towns. I love how items that cost me $5 in New York cost me $20 in Selma, Alabama. Occasionally I will find something amazing in these places, like a vintage unsold Minimoog synthesizer I found in a mom-n-pop shop in Sarasota for $200. EBay has about killed that, however. Very few treasures left to find now that they are all online.
I pull into this music shop, and cart in my pristine 1964 Strat. I pick out a new Hondo guitar, a cheap amp, and a couple of cheap effects pedals. I show the shop owner the guitar, and he literally salivates over it, immediately calling his brother to come to the shop. I see myself doing this as though outside my own body, the Valium is still coursing through my veins and I am in some kind of post-pill popping bad dream. Arthur tries to stop me, but he cannot. Lots of people since have tried to stop me as well, but I am nothing if not determined.
So, for the price of some cheap beer, a handful of Valiums, and some misplaced anger – I traded a guitar that today would be worth right around $30,000 for the cheapest piece of shit guitar I ever owned.These are consequences of my drug and alcohol abuse, as well as nothing greater than sheer stupidity. I still have the little yellow receipt for that transaction, and the guitar’s serial number was #L- 24365 - Anyone know where she is these days?
After Renee, of course Tina and I had gotten back together; we always eventually did no matter what trouble she had gotten into. We were living in a trailer in Warrington, a little suburb of Pensacola near the Navy base. Her grandparents owned a large farm outside of Pensacola near Cantonment, a ten acre spread with a four bedroom house and a huge barn. There was much family discussion, and it was decided that Tina and I should live at the property and watch it. This was great news, as I hated living in the trailer park. We had a couple of neighbors, a cool local Pensacola guy named Greg, and his girlfriend Kristie. Greg was a great guy, just a local stoner who worked a day job and liked to hang out and play guitar. His girlfriend, however, was a different story. He had met her on the streets of Birmingham Alabama and had taken her in. Kristie was sketchy at best, and I always knew not to trust her. She had that look in her eyes that reminded me of an abused animal, one that is bent on revenge. However, the two of them seemed to have a happy life, and they spent a lot of time with us, sharing meals and smoking pot whenever one of us had some.
Naturally, about a month after Tina and I had moved to the farm, Greg and Kristie got evicted from their trailer. Kristie called Tina and cried to her about their plight, and stupidly Tina offered them one of the extra bedrooms in our new house. I could not believe it, seeing as how we had just escaped having to deal with the two of them on a daily basis, but here we were moving in their stuff the very next day. For one brief month, Tina and I were normal, well-adjusted young homeowners in a beautiful house on ten acres of prime farmland. And then the night of blood.
I was still playing in The X-Statics at this time, and we were performing at a bottle club in Pensacola called “The Nite Owl”.Tina was there with me, we had left the house around 11 pm, to get to the club on time. We left Greg and Kristie at the house alone, as they were getting settled. I did my show that night, and Tina and I drove home and made it back to the farm around 5 am that morning. As we entered the dark house, I didn’t see either Greg or Kristie up and about, and figured they were asleep. I heard a soft moan coming from their bedroom, and figured they were either having sex or talking in their sleep. The thought of the former gave me involuntary chills.
I awoke around 2 pm that afternoon, and rolled over and tickled Tina awake. She was always a morning girl…and an afternoon girl…and an evening girl. We fooled around a bit, then got sort of dressed and went to the kitchen to make coffee. As we entered the kitchen, we could see Kristie’s blood covered body lying in the kitchen floor, and the floor was stained with blood as well. She was conscious, but badly beaten. I raced through the house to find Greg, and immediately had Tina call 911. As I reached their bedroom door, I tried to open it but to no avail. There was blood seeping out from under the door, and I managed to force it open eventually. As I forced the door, I felt Greg’s limp body slumped against it fall to the floor. He had been badly beaten with a baseball bat, and I noticed the feathered flourishes of blood where it was obvious someone had been swinging a bloody implement repeatedly. Greg was not conscious, and I urged Tina to tell the 911 operator to send the Life Flight Helicopter, as I knew Greg was in bad shape.
After what seemed like ages, but was only around an hour, the ambulances arrived and the helicopter touched down on our previously quiet little farm. The ambulances took Kristie away, and the helicopter flew Greg to the Emergency Room. Tina and I looked around at the sheer carnage and blood, stunned that this could have happened. Kristie insisted that some biker had broken in and tried to kill them both, because Greg owed him $250 for a quarter-pound of pot. Something about her story never rang true with me. I knew that bitch was crazy the first day I met her. Before we left the house, we managed to locate Greg’s stash of weed, and we took it with us. It was about an ounce, and boy we needed it. It didn’t seem like either of them were going to be needing it anytime soon.
So, stoned and shaking T
ina and I went back to the gig that night. I told the band what had happened, and they just shook their heads. None of them had ever really liked Tina, although she had blown both Jon and the drummer Scott on two occasions. I never really got past that, although we had continued to play together. On this particular night, Tina got really drunk and took off into the night with some of her friends and did not return. Scott’s girlfriend at that time, Beth, had gotten into a drunken fight with him, and he had left her at the Nite Owl alone. So there we were, at 5:30 am, drunk, left alone, and disturbed. She got into my car, and we started driving toward her apartments. We were driving down Navy Blvd in Pensacola when Beth suddenly asked me to pull into an apartment complex. I knew it was not where she lived, as she lived in Gulf Breeze out on the water. I pulled into a parking space, and Beth literally gave me one of the most amazing blowjobs I have ever had in my life. No words were spoken, I brought her home, she gave me a kiss and a wink as I dropped her at her driveway, and drove away smiling into the morning sun. Fuck you Scott and Tina. Beth and I just reset the karmic balance.
The local Pensacola cops did not believe a word of Kristie’s story, and of course Tina and I were suspects #1 and #2. The detectives came to an X-Statics gig the very next night at the Nite Owl, and respectfully watched us play our last set. They stood out in their polyester suits and brown shoes in the dingy late-nite bottle club. After I had finished the last song and was putting my guitar in the case, they came to visit me.
“Hey, Robert DeVito right? We need you and your little girlfriend Tina to com with us and answer a few questions about your friends Greg and Kristie”.
So off we go to the Pensacola Police department headquarters. They grilled us for 24 hours straight, administered lie detector tests, busted Tina for having a joint in her purse, and basically did everything they could think of to break us down. The only problem was, we didn’t know anything.The cops eventually figured that out, and let us go, threatening us severely if we had withheld any pertinent information. I had managed to piss them off by essentially going into a meditative state while they attempted to administer to me lie detector tests. I knew that I was not guilty and knew next to nothing about what had happened, so I took the opportunity to experiment with my meditative practice and see if it could really influence the results of the lie detector tests. Plus, these detectives had quite possibly some of the worst fashion sense I had ever seen. Foster Grants, mustaches, and polyester…it made me feel like I was in a surreal Village People video.
The evidence would eventually reveal that it was indeed Kristie. The crazy bitch had taken a baseball bat and nearly beaten Greg to death with it, and then had turned it upon herself to make it look like she was attacked. An even more disconcerting part of the story is that she was several months pregnant with Greg’s kid at that time (as far as we knew). Greg eventually somehow recovered, but with some lingering severe brain damage. Beware of trying to fix anyone, especially slutty women, I say. There’s nothing worse than a reformed whore – Oscar Wilde had it right.
At least I got to smoke all the rest of Greg’s pot. He didn’t remember that he had it anyway, due to the brain damage. Why let it go to waste? Any respectable druggie would have done the same – clean the area of any drugs and paraphernalia so that no one got busted, and to the survivor go the spoils.
I drank a lot during these days. In the early part of my drinking career, I favored Black Russians, preferably made with real Kahlua and at least Smirnoff vodka, if you please. I never liked drinking “well-brand” alcohol, always leaning towards the top shelf stuff. I joined a local beer club in Pensacola that featured a “drink your way around the world”program, where you got your very own personalized beer mug that hung at the bar once you ran through the entire imported beer gauntlet. It was quite a moment of belonging, something that I am sure many an alcoholic has felt -- the glowing friendship of a beer-forged brotherhood. Usually at my gigs, I drank an average of 6-7 drinks a night, sometimes more. There were several times where we were on the road, and my bar tab at the end of the week would exceed my pay for that week, and I would be “in the hole”. Jon took care of all the band money and I paid little attention to the business end of what was going on. It was just too much fun partying my life away during that era.
We used to play a club in Vicksburg, Mississippi on a regular basis, and one of the bartenders there was just one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She was the runner-up Miss Mississippi, and was the epitome of a beautiful southern belle. On one of my trips to play this club, I had called home to talk to Tina, only to have her tell me that she was going off To Biloxi to date the keyboard player from the band The Heat. I got really and properly pissed off, slammed the phone down, and headed straight for the bar. Paula the beautiful bartender saw the look in my eyes, and I simply ordered that she give me a fifth of Crown Royal and a rock glass. I filled the rock glass with the sweet Canadian whiskey, downed it, refilled it, and downed it several times in rapid succession. Within 45 minutes, I had emptied the bottle, and was working my way towards finishing another, when everything went black. Great, another blackout episode.
As I awoke, I was aware of being spread out soaking wet on the hood of a car.The entire parking lot is full of people, where it had been empty an hour before. I am not sure of how much time has gone by. I turn over and look up at Jon, who is standing there with an empty five gallon bucket. So THAT’S where all the water came from. I ask Jon “Where did all these people come from?” He looks at me, pissed off, and shouts “They got here while you were passed out, you drunk fucker! I just dumped an entire bucket of ice and water on you just to wake you up! Now let’s go play or we’re gonna get fired!”
We rush into the club and hit the stage. Once again, I am seeing myself perform from outside my body. Somehow I summon the strength to play, and play pretty well, except I don’t do any guitar solos. Strictly rhythm on this evening, I play the guitar like a possessed man, and even Jon is somewhat impressed at how well I pull it off. We alcoholics do have an amazing capability to make things happen, to pull through in the nick of time, to pull it all together for the big finale. I have met some of the most creative people in the world at bars and at AA meetings.
At the end of the night, the band leaves me on the stage. I completely pass out on the nasty stage carpet right in front of my guitar amp. I awake the next day, face down on this carpet at 2 in the afternoon. Realizing the band had left me there on purpose, I decided to say “fuck them”. I cranked up our massive PA system, put in a tape, and started drinking beer until they showed up later that afternoon. Don’t leave the fox in the henhouse, you idiots.
My Vicksburg love affair was the former beauty queen Paula. She had light brown chestnutty colored hair, big brown eyes, and a body that made me want to sob openly. My short time dating her is a testament to the power of persistence. I swear to this day she slept with me simply so she could get rid of me. I was not easily put off, and kept asking her out every time we played there. I sent her flowers, and wrote her letters from Pensacola. And finally, on of my last trips up there, she acquiesced and allowed me to come home with her one night after work. I was ecstatic, as she is truly one of the most physically beautiful women I have ever been with. We go to her house, and she brings me to her bedroom. This bedroom looks like Strawberry Shortcake on acid; everything is some shade of pink, there are what looks like a battalion of stuffed animals and pillows on the bed, and her bed is covered in pink mosquito netting. It is the most girly room I have ever seen, but I remind myself that she’s a former beauty queen and blow it off. After months of trying to sleep with Paula, I am determined not to let my mouth ruin it by making snide comments about her décor and teenage fashion sensibilities. She begins this evening by pulling out what seems like endless photo albums. One after the other, I saw Paula in her southern debutante upbringing. One child beauty pageant after another. It was interesting, yet somewhat creepy to look at all at once. She plowed through these memory b
ooks, and I got to see her grow up in that strange netherworld of beauty pageant life. After what seemed like a couple of hours of photo overload, she gathered them up and placed them on her Georgia pine desk in the corner of her room.
“I’m going to go freshen up” she said in that lilting southern drawl of hers. “Be back in a minute” A minute turned into another half hour. By this point, my mind had already thought of many possible scenarios – that she had escaped out the bathroom window, that she had changed her mind about the evening, that she and her father were busy loading the shotguns. Being alone in my head is a dangerous place to be.
Finally the bedroom door opened and she rushed inside and closed it immediately. Now I knew why she had taken what seemed like another hour to freshen up. Paula came back into the room looking like she was auditioning for the Fredericks of Hollywood Fall Catalog. I have nothing against fine lingerie, but this was overload. It took me nearly 20 minutes to get all of that “wrapping” off the poor girl. I would have been more turned on if she had just re-entered the room fresh from the shower, hair dripping wet, in nothing but a towel. Men are simple, it’s true. We spent a couple of lovely hours in her pink mosquito-netted girly bed, after a long ritual of placing the stuffed animals “just so” on the floor. This was a woman who had her life in order, and I was just an aberration in her plan. Regardless, Paula taught me that with persistence nearly anything can be surmounted. Or mounted, if you prefer. Ok, maybe I’m a bad person. But I’m still glad I slept with her. I wrote her several times after our encounter, but she was finished with me evidently. I still swear she slept with me just to get rid of me.
The gigs with The X-Statics continued, we played all over the south regularly in towns like Biloxi, Pascagoula, Birmingham, Atlanta, Opp, Hot Coffee, Greenville. Did you know there is a Greenville in nearly every state in the south? We once ended up in Greenville, Mississippi when we were supposed to be in Greenville, Georgia. Somehow by the grace of God we all managed to make it through those crazy years largely unscathed. We had been thrown out of Albany, Georgia and asked never to return, we had been arrested in a Burger King in Oxford, Alabama for unruly behavior, and we had nearly been arrested for breaking into a nightclub that owed us money and would not pay.The problem with the band was becoming evident to everyone – we were just not an original act. After 6 years of being The X-Statics, Jon had written a sum total of 5 songs. We played 95% cover material. After seeing right in front of my eyes what happened with REM, I knew that our band had no future, and I began to plan on leaving the group I had spent years of my life touring with. My songs seemed to never get into the songlist, and I had just about had it with merely being a jukebox for alcoholics all over the South.