BURNED - Living Through the 80s and 90s as a Rock Guitarist

by Bobby DeVito

  During my third-grade year, something happened with my parents. We had welcomed the addition of both my younger sister and my younger brother, only 11 months apart.Things seemed to be going good with my dad’s job at GTE Sylvania; I even got to see him regularly on TV as the spokesman for the GTE Sylvania Technical Schools. “In the dark about your future?” my dad would say as a single light bulb would illuminate him in the commercial. I would be watching “Speed Racer”, and then my dad would pop up. Slightly surreal, but soon to end. My parents decided to move to my mother’s hometown of Stanley, North Carolina.

  Stanley NC is one of those towns that if you are from there, you describe it in relation to some bigger town. It is simply a town that doesn’t exist on its own two feet. Stanley cannot be simply said, it has to be explained. I typically say I’m from a town “20 miles outside Charlotte”. Most people seem to know where Charlotte is, thankfully. Some even know where Gastonia is, which is an even closer town. But you pretty much need to be from Stanley to know where Stanley is. And don’t even get me started with Alexis, RFD. That’s “Rural Fire District”, for those of y’all who ain’t lived in the country. We ended up moving to the outskirts of Stanley, being in a suburb of a non-existent town. We had truly made it to nowheresville. Yee-fucking-haw.

  At this point in my life, my parents had a somewhat skewed view of me. They had me IQ tested at age 9, and I was off to the far right side of the bell curve. They didn’t understand yet that while I am exceptionally good at taking tests, I “don’t have the common sense that God gave a Billy goat” (classic mom-speak). So here I am in Stanley, forced to enter class at O.L. Kiser Elementary. I can remember the name of this school so vividly; I can recall the weather that day, the angle of the sun, the red mud that seemed to be everywhere. It seems like we always remember the bad stuff in Technicolor. I have a Boston Mass accent, and am at least 2 grades ahead of what they are teaching here in Stanley for 3rd grade. I look funny, I talk funny, and I haven’t taken martial arts yet. How do you spell target? I got my ass kicked for a while, but it was just really difficult getting used to this new environment. While the northeast was cold, it had a stark beauty that was austere yet brilliant, and had a colorful variety of wildlife and fauna that never ceased to fascinate me. My initial impressions of North Carolina were very dark. Lots of red mud, lots of pine trees, everything was uniformly “blah”. I had gone from a fine elementary school outside of Boston, a perfect little house in a perfect little suburb, and summers on Cape Cod, Dad bringing home fresh lobster on Fridays – to pinto beans, cornbread, grits, red mud, and rednecks. All was not lost, however. I finally did manage to convince some girls to get naked for me, as I had attempted in second grade. In true redneck fashion, they were first cousins…welcome to North Carolina.

  I had always been a somewhat introverted child, one who spent a great deal of time alone, either in the woods or curled up with music and a good book. Early on in my childhood, I knew I was somehow different than many of the other children I lived close to, or went to school with. Looking at many of the adults that I came in contact with, I knew that I didn’t want to be most of them. They seemed to live passionless, boring lives that were dictated by jobs, family life, and duties. And once I was dropped into rural North Carolina, these tendencies became even more prominent and exaggerated. My mother’s family just looked at me like many people stare at caged animals in the zoo, especially those with gross deformities. I was sort of a curiosity to them, being raised “up north” and having a fair amount of intelligence and a rapidly skewing view of the world I lived in. Thankfully, there were lots of woods to explore and a very small public library in Stanley that kept me occupied. Although I managed to freak out the librarian Mrs. Weaver more than once by filling out inter-library loan forms for archaic and occult textbooks. I read Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” at age 11. By all accounts, I was a weird kid.

  There were a few adults other than my parents who made vivid impressions on me when I was young. My father’s oldest brother was “Uncle Joe” DeVito, and I completely loved him. Uncle Joe had been in the Navy too, just like my dad, but had suffered in a horrible explosion that covered him in third degree burns, and he was left alone in San Diego for a year to recover with no family visits. He was a total bachelor, swinging 60s kind of guy and I loved when he came to visit. When he got married to this totally hot young Thai woman named Mu, he came to visit us, and they both took me on part of their honeymoon with them. I thought he has the coolest guy ever, and still do to this day. Uncle Joe is still around, but lives alone in a trailer in Jersey and doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the DeVito clan. I don’t judge him, because I know he’s been through a lot of shit, just like I have. He was very close to me, and it’s always made me wonder if he somehow intuitively knew I was going to go through the hell he himself had endured.

  The other adult figure that really impacted me immediately upon my arrival to North Carolina was my grandfather, Warren G. “Slim” Henderson. He and my grandmother Mabel lived in a JP Stevens mill house on 3rd Street in Stanley. My grandfather is a legendary man, for many reasons. He was a musician, a ne’er do well, a rounder on the railways, a songwriter, an amazing alcoholic. My mother was the eldest child in that family, and she told me that Slim would sell everything of value in the house and just take off, playing music and drinking with the boys all over the country. Slim ended up getting blacklisted in the country music biz for getting drunk on the air and adding some choice obscenities to the song “Frankie and Johnny” on live radio in the 1940s. Slim during the 70s was pretty much on the porch by that time. He had a nice couple acres out in back of the house and grew plenty of vegetables and peppers for stringing. He drank Schlitz 16 oz “tall boys” in the old tin cans, with a little salt around the rim. He liked to hang out on the front porch and play guitar, and that’s one of the early ways that I learned how to play. I watched him a lot, and he showed me things here and there. I never actually got “lessons” from my grandfather. In an interview I did in the 90s, a music journalist asked me if I was my “grandfather’s favorite”.The truth was, I was just the grandkid that he disliked the least.

  My grandmother Mabel is a living Buddha. I cannot say enough about how amazing this woman is, and I always knew and felt that from the age of 9, when I began to have constant contact with her. She was the sort of woman who would make you go get your own “switch” or “hickory” that she would then spank you with. Maybe I’m wrong, but I see a lot of kids today that could use a few swats with a nice limber switch. My grandmother could stripe your legs if she wanted to. But then you would go pick blackberries, bring a bunch back, and she’d make blackberry cobbler. I am literally drooling while typing this, like some Pavlovian rural creature remembering the good old days. Some of them actually were.

  My first drink had occurred even before we left Lowell and had landed in Hicktown. The beautiful house we lived in on Luz Drive had a basement that had been converted into a large family room, with the typical wood paneled walls and avocado green couches. My parents were always very social people, and had lots of regular card games and such with other suburban middle class couples in the neighborhood. One night my parents had a fairly large holiday party, and it went well into the night. The noise kept me awake, and I had to go check it out. As I crept down the steps, I found a nearly full frozen concoction called a “grasshopper”, and it looked good to me. I noticed it tasted kind of funny and mentholish, but that it felt good and warm going down. After downing the entire drink, I went back to bed and slept through the rest of the party.

  My parents have almost always been moderate with everything. I have never seen either of them drunk. My dad can drink one beer, one glass of scotch, one glass of wine. I can’t even have one friggin Entenmanns’s doughnut. If they are the chocolate frosted kind, the whole box of eight is in imminent danger.

  My time in North Carolina had some bright points. For some unknown reason, my father decided upon o
pening an Italian restaurant in Stanley. Even though it was obvious that the menu could not deviate from pizza, spaghetti & meatballs, or lasagna. My father tried to add the obviously subversive manicotti to the menu, and there were months of mispronounced questions about that particular offering. We ended up having multiple locations for a while, and then my father built the huge Log Cabin restaurant that still stands on Main Street in Stanley, next to the bank and Roberts Super Market. Of course I worked for my dad, it’s the Italian way! Plus, although I had begged and pleaded for an electric guitar, my parents had gotten me an acoustic instead. Showing my infinite patience and understanding, I spied a beat up electric guitar at a yard sale, and promptly traded my shiny brand new acoustic for this $15 yard sale special electric guitar. I tried to tell my father it was a “Fender”, and he said “Yeah, a DENTED Fender”. He still recalls this with a laugh to this day sometimes. But back then he was pretty pissed about it, and I knew I had to pay for my next guitar. So I folded pizza boxes, cut onions and tomatoes, did prep and cleanup work to make money. I sold 200 boxes of personalized Christmas cards in July in a town of only 2500 people. I did everything I could to finally get that Gibson SG guitar that was going to make my life worth living. Guitar had become my oasis, my meditation cave away from the world. Looking back, it was as escapist as it can be, me sitting around with a record player or tape deck, immersed in the sounds and notes, the timbres and timings of people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.They represented ultimate freedom to me, free to “wave your freak flag” and do what one wanted. I knew that I wanted to be out of Stanley when I grew up, and that guitar was my way out of this town, this boring middle class existence, and my bad hair.

  I had friends in Stanley; probably the best two were Chip and Jeff Anderson. They lived with their mom Ruth in a house up the street. Ruth was a very uptight woman, and had her hands full raising these two, I guess. She hated me for some reason, and didn’t like that we all hung out together. While I was there during these days, plenty of odd stuff happened to me. Another neighbor’s son tried to sexually molest me. A group of teenage boys from up the street tried to sexually abuse me. They say that childhood is a battlefield, and I would agree...but North Carolina was Pearl Harbor in my youth.

  To try and chronicle all of my experience there almost seems futile. I went from public school to a private fundamentalist Baptist junior high. I was the kid who showed up to Bible class with a copy of Thomas Paine’s “Age or Reason”. As anyone can imagine, I was thrown out of that school for various offenses against fundamentalism. I ended up back in Stanley Jr High, and ended up getting busted in 7th grade for wanting drugs. Not actually possessing drugs, just simply wanting them. We had a 9th grade kid named Goldman Carver, and he allegedly dealt drugs. I had written him a note in class, asking him if I could buy “some speed and some joints”. Of course I signed my name to it, and later that day when there was a big undercover drug bust at our school; Goldman was busted, with my note in his pocket. So, a week later I was on my way to live with my Uncle Augustino back in Long Branch New Jersey, and attending Holy Trinity Catholic School. And my parents actually thought this school was going to be better for me than going to Stanley Jr High. I could have gotten a lot more and a lot better drugs at Catholic School.

  I was born dead. “Black as the Ace of Spades” my mother used to say. When I arrived into this world, they had to do some serious work on me to bring me back. Sometimes it seems like I have had more than my share of these experiences over the years. When I was eleven, I had been introduced to “huffing” chemicals by some of the older boys around my neighborhood. First time, they had made up a bag of model glue, and then forced me to hold onto their bikes while I ran behind them breathing into the bag until I passed out from the fumes. I had tried it with gasoline as well, and would sometimes go under our house in North Carolina and inhale the gas fumes until I could hear loud helicopter noises in my head. I did not know what auditory hallucinations were yet, but I was already experiencing them.

  One night we were all camping out a short distance in the woods behind my parent’s house. Jeff and Chip Anderson and I were all cozy around the fire. We had all inhaled some fumes from a plastic milk jug of gas, and I had it between my legs. I think I must have passed out, as the jug spilled onto my pants and all over me, eventually reaching the campfire and lighting me up into one big flaming torch. I immediately ran as fast as I could, heading towards a stream about a half mile south. Luckily, Chip was a local football hero and athlete, and he chased me down and gave me a good football tackle that brought me down. He put me out, burning his hands and arms in the process. I was in shock, and managed to walk back to my parent’s house. I had 3rd degree burns on 40% of my body, yet I walked in as calmly as possible and tried to hide in my bedroom. My mother, ever the RN, was tending to Chip’s burns, and he kept insisting that she had to take care of me. I had already attempted to get in the shower to see if I could “wash off ” the burns and escape undetected. No such luck.

  My mother says she went to the bathroom first, and found a tub that was covered in charred, burnt flesh and skin. I was huddled in my bed, trying to hide. Trying to escape from what would have been one tremendous ass-whipping had I not been so injured.

  One of the many small miracles of my life occurred this night. There were two ambulances sent out that night – one for Chip, and one for myself. They put me in the ambulance and rushed me to Lincolnton Memorial Hospital, about 20 minutes away. Chip was placed in the other ambulance, and for some reason this ambulance died on the spot, and it took them an hour to get it running again. If I had been in that ambulance, I would have died right there in my parent’s driveway.

  Recovery was a long, slow process, beginning at Lincolnton Memorial and then later I was transferred to Charlotte for all of the surgeries. I was told that I’d probably never walk again, that I was lucky to be alive. I had numerous skin graft operations, and endured bandage changes every 4 hours for months straight. I also got two pints of chocolate milk and a nice yellow Valium 5mg tablet every time they came to change those bandages. I drank so much chocolate milk that I burst out in hives and caused one of the skin graft operations to completely fail. The doctor was PISSED. It took them all a few days to figure out it was the chocolate milk.

  I endured a lot of pain, and got a lot of sympathy from the local people of Stanley, lots of prayers from all the churches, and lots of chili cheeseburgers on demand. And occasionally a lobster dinner when I could guilt someone into hitting the local Red Lobster for me. I never had childish tastes, and would as soon order Lobster Thermidore at age 5 as a cheeseburger. And as far as sympathy goes, the only thing that topped the lobster was a certain young candy-striper who used to come listen to me play guitar in my room a lot during the end of my stay in the hospital. It was my first sexual experience, and I’m sure it was a pity blowjob. I enjoyed it all the same and felt like I was truly “the man”. I still couldn’t walk at that point, and they sent me home to my family house, with a hospital bed set up in the living room. My mom was in charge of my physical therapy, and literally motivated me any way necessary for me to do my physical rehab. She cajoled, bribed, kicked, screamed, and slapped me silly at times, but I did get up and walk again. In fact, I ended up running the mile in track at high school.

  I got a lot of solid stuff from my mother. She is a no-nonsense southern woman, a collector of antique milk glass, a hardcore thrift shopper and yard-saler. She felt there were already “enough useless men in this world”, so she impressed upon me that I needed to be able to do all the household stuff like dishes, laundry, housecleaning, typically femalespecific tasks in those days. She also gave me “The Joy of Sex” to read when I had questions about sexuality. Having been a nurse, and working in the medical field nearly all of her life, she was always very open with me about the facts of life. I guess it was difficult for both her and my father to understand me as a child. According to both them and the test results, I was supposed to be
an “A” student bent on college and medical school or an advanced degree. But I was a smart-assed young guitar player who had already by age 12 dodged death several times, would not accept the fundamentalist Baptist religion my parents had embraced (my father got converted, not like St Paul on the road to Damascus, but at a freakin WAFFLE HOUSE in Gastonia, NC), and simply was not turning out quite like they had imagined.

  After my recovery from the burns, my parents brought me to see a psychiatrist. This went on for what seems like a year, hour long sessions where I would have to go to this big facility in Gastonia, sit in a lobby with brightly colored geometric 70s carpets and Naugahyde waiting room couches with scattered “Boys Life” magazines on them. The place smelled of too many people, magazines, and dusty Naugahyde. Coming to this place was always fraught with anxiety for me. What were we doing here and why was I being made to see a psychiatrist if I was not crazy? I focused some of my reading on Freud and Jung, read some clinical literature, and began to heavy-handedly feed the shrinks with stuff I had gleaned from perusing their literature. One episode I remember quite vividly was the counselor handing me a female doll to represent my mother. He also handed me a hypodermic syringe to use on the doll. “OK, now give your mommy a shot anywhere you want to”, he intimated softly, in his prescription Foster Grant eyeglasses and strong aroma of Hai Karate. I immediately took the needle and plunged it into the doll’s neck, sticking it furiously and exclaiming “I would give her a shot right here in the neck so she would finally SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!” I think that was about the end of my psychiatric “treatment”. All I ever got as a conclusion from those “treatments” is that the counselors told my parents that I needed to be beaten more and given a lot more discipline. I wonder how much that sage advice cost my poor parents. I am sure anyone in our town already figured I needed a few more good ass-whippings.