The Rites of String : The Guys Who Pass Their Time at Santa Ana’s Guitar Center Have a Most Excellent Dream

How you approach Santa Ana’s Guitar Center is telling. If you say “Oh, look--a Trader Joe’s down the street, let’s pick up a Brie wheel and White Grenache,” here’s the ugly truth: You are not a teen-ager anymore. You are not destined to be a rocker. You are not prone to dream of Eddie Van Halen licks and an amp that goes to 11.

And, hey, speaking of not, you probably do not care for Wayne and Garth, two metal-head stoners from Illinois starring in the box-office rage.

The latest film version of dweeby high school dudes, the stars of “Wayne’s World” are extreme versions of teen-agers who converge week after week at such places as the huge guitar shop on Main Street.

At this den of male bonding and music, moppy-headed guys hunker squint-eyed over Stratocasters, making sounds reminiscent of a cold car ignition in dead-of-winter Buffalo. In the same room are middle-age suits strumming through their lunch hour on vintage Les Pauls. Nearby are immigrants eyeing guitars for their mariachi bands, and aging lounge lizards purchasing keyboards.

As people-watching spots go, Orange County’s largest music store is most excellent.

“Metal-heads are mostly what we cater to,” offered salesman Kirk Lallmars. “Every day we get the Waynes, the guys who go ‘Hey, dude, my parents are gonna, like, buy me a set.’ ‘Dude, let’s kill a drum set.’ ”

He watches a rheumy-eyed teen-ager gazing at the autographs of famous rock drummers over the upstairs sales counter. “Kids come up here to dream,” he says.

Adds another salesman: “When you’re 17, anything that’s aggressive and loud is cool.”

This, then, is hip central.

Although the street windows are painted in loud pink and green letters, it’s a rather nondescript storefront in downtown Santa Ana, easily overlooked in the drive-by blur of title companies and banks, the Greyhound bus station and Norm’s coffee shop. Don’t let that fool you. When you open the front door, it’s the same effect as that beer commercial where suddenly loud rock music starts and everyone inside is having an extremely marvelous time.

Don’t panic if you suddenly feel you’ve become your parents and that you are incredibly square and old and might as well wear Hush Puppies just because you lack waist-length hair, Rod Stewart bangs and at least three pierced earrings. This just means you are incredibly square and old.

It’s Saturday afternoon and the store is a jambalaya of sounds. This daily cacophony leaves even manager Luis Garzon--a classical guitarist--unfazed.

Most days it’s difficult to find street parking around the shop. It is impossible today, the peak of a sale and the busiest day of the week, when underpaid, underemployed musicians linger all day playing instruments their “day jobs” won’t afford, and working parents can accompany their budding Stevie Ray Vaughns and Bonnie Raitts downtown for the big buy.

Mom and Dad, prepare to be hustled. For no price is ever fixed, and the staff approach can best be described, in the words of one grinning salesman, as . . . “like a used-car salesman? Yeah, it definitely has similarities.”

Veteran shoppers know this, and the most successful haggle price as if they are shopping for ceramic E.T.s at the Mexican border.

None of this pressures Bobby Bernardino of Brea, though, sitting in cutoffs over on an amplifier. No way is he buying the vintage beauty with which he’s attempting to make music--and badly at that. Salesman Victor Delgado seems to have aptly sized up the situation. Given the Gibson guitar’s pale-yellow surface with faint cracks, the 18-year-old, self-named novice player probably thinks he’s cradling a bargain.

“I don’t sound totally terrible, but I’m just learning,” Bernardino confides. “You’ll see.” He points to the amplifier. The volume goes to 10. He gazes around at other vulnerable shoppers lurching over instruments. “I’ve got it on 1 for a reason.”

Delgado supplies him with a plug for the amplifier, then ambles off, noting, “He’s playing a 25-year-old Les Paul.”

Translation: A better deal could be found on U2 concert tickets from a scalper.

There’s no harm in an inexperienced player test-driving a $5,000 instrument, of course, but this is not the shopper to court for an hour or two.

“You don’t,” says salesman Anthony Grana, “want to show someone a Cadillac when they can only handle a Volkswagen.”

Working this car analogy over to death, 15-year-old James Gilabert is not even in the market for a moped, a bicycle, a skateboard, a--well you get the idea. Like ex-smokers who have just quit buying cigarettes, some shoppers chronically test the merchandise but never buy. That is the very charm of the store, though.

Gilabert isn’t buying today or tomorrow, but one day he will be back here with the money. For now he likes to wander among the hundreds of guitars for hours.

“I like heavy metal but I like all different kinds of stuff, like rock and maybe jazz, and like there’s lots of types of music,” says Gilabert, a bushy-haired teen-ager who visits often from his father’s neighboring home. He lives in Laguna Beach, where he plays in a band called Gothic.

“This is pretty much a standard-issue Fender. Pretty much,” he politely explains as we wander the guitar lair. Of Slayer, the band on his T-shirt, he says: “It’s pretty much like the slasher band.”

While Steve Vai, former guitarist with Whitesnake, is the latest rage, Gilabert says, “I pretty much haven’t heard him. I really like the really old guys: Jimi Hendrix, Van Halen, guys like that.”

At the other end of the room, two longhairs are examining guitars like combat veterans cleaning their guns. Brian Horban of Oregon holds up a $2,000 custom Jackson and looks down its face for blemishes. There are none. It’s shiny black with white and red lightning bolts, but he knows that’s all pricey show.

“I’m just lookin’ for today,” he says, adding that he already owns two guitars, one of them green. He grew up in Irvine, where he began playing guitar in high school, as did friend Chad Sullivan, 21, who is standing beside him. Horban has since moved to Oregon, where it’s cheaper to live. But they hope to form another band soon, perhaps called Highland Dry.

“We’ve been playing in bands since school, everything from Anthrax to the Eagles,” said Sullivan, articulate on subjects ranging from the quality in guitars to myriad music forms to how he wards off split ends on his head of lustrous elbow-length hair.

“A lot of people come in here to dream,” Sullivan added with a laugh, “like I used to.”

The weekday lunch hour brings in one notably different element: office workers in business attire. Guys like Greg Avants, 44, in charge of computer services for a neighboring mobile-home maker. He has bought and sold several guitars at the shop but today is content to play but not buy.

“I like to talk to the salespeople, play a bit,” says Avants, of Mission Viejo.

Leaning over a shiny red Fender Telecaster, he tries out chords in his work suit, looking the way he might at one of his band’s wedding gigs. “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave is a good song to try on a prospective guitar, he says.

Ten feet away, two Dana Point dudes ditching class dart around the same room, lighting on one guitar after another. Two others in black canvas PF Flyers lope into the keyboard room where state-of-the-art equipment resides.

Two teen-age girls in tight jeans and winning smiles head upstairs. They try to look unimpressed as they watch two hunky young men drift around the upstairs drum sets and circle tentatively before sitting down, furtively sizing up other players in the room.

“We are seeing more and more girls trying drums,” says Lallmars. “They come in the first time and they’re like wearing baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Then maybe they realize a lot of guys come here, so next time we’ll see them in makeup and dressed up where we might not even recognize them. I guess,” he says with a smile, “it’s all part of the game.”