Gary thinks I don’t like him.

He’s gay.  Can you get a straight decorator?

Felice used him to do her bathroom.  She got him from Koz.  Koz’s kondo is a showplace and so is Felice’s bathroom.  I’m afraid to take a pee in it, for fear I’m gonna fuck it up.  Actually, I’ll take a pee, but if you use the sink, and my dad taught me to always wash my hands after doing my business, it’s almost impossible not to get drops on the marble and it fucks it up and my middle class values can’t handle it and so I usually wash my hands in the bathroom off the bedroom.  But everybody who sees Felice’s bathroom oohs and ahhs.  You would too.

And now she wants to do the living room.

It’s been five years, almost six since she moved in.  The question arises, should she vacate the premises, get a new abode, or fix up what she’s got?

First Felice went into a frenzy for new property.  You see where she lives is just over the hill from Mulholland, and I could explain all the angles, but the end result is you get little light.  In a perfect world you’d rip off the roof and put in something retractable, like at a sports stadium, but that’s impractical.  But moving is so expensive.  Even worse, you’ve got to find a place you like.

And while Felice was searching, she ran into Gary.  And somehow in this discussion about real estate, which is foreign to me, I lived in the same home for my entire growing up and have lived where I do now for decades, the concept of redecorating emerged.  And all of this transpired while I was on the road.  It was a fait accompli.  Not that I truly care, except for the stereo.

If you had asked me my number one possession in the seventies, that would have been it.  My parents wouldn’t let me get a good system while I was in college, they believed it would be stolen, like my Peugeot bicycle, but when I was finally ensconced in L.A. I went shopping.  And shopping.  I knew the speakers I wanted, but the rest of the equipment?

The speakers I wanted were JBL L100s.  The speakers I was going to get were the Large Advents.  Which cost $125 apiece instead of $333.  But in conversation at Pacific Stereo, my buddy Tony, a hondler extraordinaire, got the salesman down to $450 for the pair.  Of JBLs.  Which he didn’t buy.  Because negotiation was a sport and he was ultimately satisfied.  But hearing about this, I dragged Tony back to the store a few weeks later and got ’em for $470.

And then I needed a receiver.

I’d had this Sony picked out.  A brand new model.  List $600, I thought I could get it for four something.  But every salesman I spoke with, especially the cat at Federated, said that receiver would sound shitty with those speakers.  The JBLs were bright, and so was the Sony. What did he recommend?  Lux.  Which for my money gave me fifty watts and distortion, I couldn’t afford enough power.  My alternative was a Sansui, they had the right sound.  But I didn’t want Sansui.  But there was this super high end line, of integrated amps, I could get 110 watts a channel for $525 plus tax, one third off.  I pulled the trigger.

The sound was devastating.  It was like being at the show.  After I replaced my Dual turntable with a direct drive Technics, with a Stanton cartridge, since the Shure I thought I wanted from the ads was too bright for my speakers.

I was in heaven.  My idea of a good afternoon was dropping the needle and sitting in front of the speakers…  Remember when they mastered records to sound good instead of loud?

That Sansui burned up.  The smell frightened me.  I replaced it with an NAD with more power than the salesman wanted to sell me.  I told him, I didn’t EVER want to hear distortion.

But now I spend more time at Felice’s.  And she’s got  Bose.

Speak with any audio nut.  He’ll pooh-pooh Bose.  But it was installed before I met her, and it’s great for a girl, because it’s small!  It barely shows.  Except for the subwoofer.

That’s where we started today.  With Gary.  What were we going to do about the subwoofer?

Put it in the wall!  But then the sound will suck and you can’t just replace it with a better unit because it powers the whole system.

So we can replace it.  Everything!  We started off getting rid of the subwoofer, then Gary wanted to get rid of the satellites.  But if you replaced everything, you’d have to spend five or ten grand, and the front speakers would still have to show!

Finally Gary admitted it.  He’s all about show, I’m all about sound.

Can you sacrifice your identity?  Can you stop being Jewish?  Can you turn from a guy into a girl?

Trust him.

I don’t trust anybody with my audio.

He can do it for much less.

But then it will sound shitty!

And Felice doesn’t want to spend five or ten grand, but she’s enthralled by Gary, it’s like he’s Rasputin and she’s a Romanov and suddenly I’m the enemy.

How did I end up out?  I just want it to sound good!