The needle and the damage done

Before me and Lopez! moved from El Paso to Austin, we owned a house. And in spite of all the ass-centric pain that comes with home-ownership, I loved that house. I never watered its lawn, but I loved it

It was a few minutes drive from Downtown, in a historic neighborhood that was quiet and urban at the same time. Wood floors, high ceilings, huge backyard, a sunroom and a half-basement – even more than we could have asked for, seriously.

Even better, our built-in-1928 house had been almost completely refurbished by the previous owner (crazy nutbar – if you know us, you know the stories) so there weren’t any major repairs we had to make.

You sharpie – you noticed the “almost,” didn’t you? Everything had been repaired and updated EXCEPT for the plumbing. Jeez, that friggin’ plumbing, man. If it wasn’t one thing, it was damn well the other, laughing at us for thinking we’d finally gotten a handle on its copper and steel pipes.

There were two major events with the plumbing; one involved having a trench dug, by hand, from the house to the alley. We’re talking CALICHE here. Damn, I feel like I should put Angel the Plumber’s kid through college or something. The other is what we refer to as the Great Flood.

One morning I wandered down to the basement and … aw, shit. At least, I was pretty sure there was some in there, since all that dirty-looking water probably meant our sewage line had backed up. Crap!

In the end, it wasn’t the washing machine like we really, really, really had been hoping it was, and we had to throw away about three-quarters of the stuff we had been storing down there. Out went old paperwork, knick-knacks in warping cardboard and, worst of all, absolutely worst of all, my turntable.

Don’t get the wrong idea – my record player was a late-80s, early 90s style piece of crap stereo. You know the kind. Hollow-sounding speakers. Dual-cassette. C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Still, it was the only record player I had, and at the time they were already getting hard to find, and if you could find one it was super-expensive because all of a sudden everyone thought they were freakin’ Beck with their two turntables and a microphone.

I still remember letting out a monstrous, chest-deep sigh when I threw it out. Man, I'm sighing just thinking about it.

For the next – what, six, seven years? – I’d look for a record player whenever I was in the electronics department or, more likely, in a second-hand store. And I always had the same problem. Either it was too expensive (department store) or it was too junky looking to be trustworthy (thrift store). Whatever wax I owned or had access to languished, mute and looking at me with shame in its one eye.

“Don’t you love us anymore, Nel?”

Aw, c’mon, you know I do.

“Then why don’t you ever play us anymore? Is it the hissing? The pops? What?”

You know that’s not it – I love those things about you. It’s just, do you know how hard it is to find a record player nowadays? I mean, everybody listens to CDs now. Nobody listens to records anymo … oh …

" … "

Oh, baby, you know I didn’t mean …

That’s usually the part where I’d start crying, so we’ll leave it at that. The point is that last night we went to First Thursday, a monthly shopping party here in Austin. Along a five-block or so stretch of South Congress, all the shops and boutiques stay open late and people set up booths and blankets and sell their hand-made goods and art. Me and Lopez are pretty addicted to First Thursday, and we go almost every month and poke around our favorite stores.

And what did we find at one of these stores? This.



At first I thought it was an amp – I mean, I had just strummed a Hawaiian steel guitar, so I don’t think I’m totally retarded for thinking it was an amp. Lopez saw me eyeing it and said, “What is it?” I said, it’s an amp, duh, but checked the other side of the “$44” tag while I said it.

Holy shit.

I asked the lady who works there if I could get someone to show this to me, because I did not want to screw this up. So Mustache Guy comes over and tells us how, yeah, he just got this in about a week ago and they really just put it out yesterday. He tested it with an old Searchers 45 and it works great. They get record players every once in a while, but they never stay in the store long.

Of course they don’t.

As he’s talking he’s cracking it open until my turntable Venus is sitting there, pearly and cool in its vintageness. Mustache Guy’s record is still in there so he plugs everything in and starts to play it.


God, I love that first fuzzy pop when you drop the needle, almost as if the record player is clearing its throat.

I turned to Lopez, and she already knew. “If you want it,” she said, “it can be your birthday present.”

I’ve never been happier to lug a heavy piece of former school equipment five blocks in my life. And I’ve never been happier that I don’t have a basement.