christopher gutierrez

My Rosebud.

I’m sure I was a tough kid to buy for. I think my single mom spent far too much on me for holidays trying to make up for the time she spent working two jobs while putting herself through school. But even as a spoiled kid, there was only so much I would want each year. I guess that is one of the benefits growing up in a house where we didn’t have all that much - you never really knew what you were missing. So after all the Transformers were given, she would fill the rest of the mornings watching me unwrap socks, pajama bottoms, and B team gifts. Somewhere in the early 80’s I was given this Fisher-Price tape recorder. I can only assume she was walking down the isle looking for just one more filler gift, grabbed this and tossed it in the cart.

I spent years with this glued to my head. Mind you, if you had a VCR in 82 - you were basically rich. So I would have to push this up against the television speaker to record my Saturday morning cartoons. I remember taking long drives in our station wagon and trying to drown out the Supertramp my mom would be blasting (because all moms love Supertramp) with my tape-recorded episodes of Thundarr the Barbarian.

Between episodes I would tape songs from MTV back when they exclusively showed videos. And before VCRs, you had to wait until the video you wanted to see came on then rush to the TV to press record on your tape player and you had to time it just right because you never knew when your mom would start running that goddamn vacuum cleaner. Devo, The Police, Golden Earring, Van-Halen, and Judas Priest - I remember lying there in the back of our station wagon while driving 8 hours to Minnesota playing the same Priest song ‘You Got Another Thing Comin’ for hours until my mom would yell at me to, “Change that darn song already!”

What I don’t think she realized was that she gave me the means to really explore music. I didn’t have a stereo and I was too young and poor and ignorant to find music on my own, but thank god we had cable and I discovered bands that I continue to listen to every day.

A while ago I was in one of my niece’s bedrooms and I looked over and saw that tape recorder. I was so surprised that it didn’t get thrown away over the years. It was an emotional time capsule, an old friend I hadn’t talked to in decades. I got all warm and fuzzy inside, then a little sad. Sad that my nieces wouldn’t know how liberating something this ugly and bulky could be. I was Gia’s age when I unwrapped this with a shrug but it got me through some rough times. Deaths, abuse, family turmoil - this little tape recorder held my hand as I discovered new wave, hip hop, metal and was recording and listening live when the Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial premiered.

I know that most people wouldn’t see the importance in some tan piece of outdated technology, but when I look at this I see something more dependable than most of the people that I have called family.

This is my Rosebud