No More Mother May I

College C

Eye of the Storm

Dirty Walls and Starry Night Blue

Another Advanced Comp piece, I wrote this to complete an assignment in "Document something you've never done before".  The professor agreed that while its not exactly the approach expected, it is in the "spirit of the assignment'.  Now, I see it as a brief summary of the influences in my life.
 

Imagine standing at a doorway in a dimly lit basement. The door, made of cheap wood, has been painted white and there are some song lyrics scrawled in gold ink along one side. An obviously computer generated sign reads “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself” and another quips “No lewd acts in my bed without my permission or participation.” Pushing the door open is difficult, however, doing so gives way to a small cold bedroom smelling faintly of mildew and dust. The room is dim, even with the lights on and pitch black without. There are no windows. The linoleum floor is stained with paint, cold and dirty against bare feet. The walls are covered in poetry, drawings, some tacked up and many directly on the walls, phone numbers, magazine cut outs, random quotes and song lyrics. This is my high school bedroom. 

I began pulling things off the walls. “I want to erase everything,” I had told Brett and my mom earlier in the day. “There’s nothing there worth remembering.” 

Attacking the task now, though, it seemed all I could do was remember. My high school senior class photo was curling at the bottom from the moisture of the basement. As I removed it, I could see myself sitting next to my three high school best friends; Anne, Brett, and Amanda. Brett and Anne had been best friends since, like, time began. On the surface, they were the type of friends I’d expect to read about in Young Adult Fiction Novels, however, if you really talked to them, they hated each other. I was nothing like them, yet our friendship was not optional: Brett had lived down the block from me, just two doors away, since my mother and her new husband moved into the neighborhood, January of 1993. I could see all that now as I set the photo on top of a pile and turned to pull some magazine ads off the wall. The beginnings of our friendship, meeting Anne who admits she was terrified after her first exposure to my step brother DJ and myself. We spent every afternoon of our first three summers in the neighborhood together, me, Brett, DJ and a gangly guy named Clayton who matched DJ in age but not looks and had a ferocious crush on Brett for most of those three years. DJ would go back to Boston at the end of the summer, Brett and Clayton would go back to school, and I would go back to my father’s house where I had lived since several days after my mother’s marriage to Dan. 

Several days after my mom’s marriage and move, my step dad and I got into a massive fight and I attacked him then ran to hide in the safety of my new bedroom. He broke the door in over my head, puncturing a small round hole opposite the door along the same wall. I called my father and moved that same night to his house in Hoyt. For weeks I refused to speak to my mother, convinced she had chosen my step dad over me. I swore I hated my mother, however in the summer, found myself back in her basement, in that cold basement room that my step dad had painted and laid fresh linoleum in for me as a peace offering. Peace was made, however I continued to live with my father, enjoying the school and having a stepsister around for more than just a few months of the summer. I was removing pictures of DJ and Brett and my step sister Jenny when another wall artifact caught my eye. 

In March of 1997, approximately three months after my sixteenth birthday, I took my mother’s ATM card and drove my car to Childress, Texas. I remained there for a week and upon my return home, refused to attend school. For a week and a half, I barricaded myself in my basement bedroom, slept until four or five in the afternoon, and only left my room at night, creeping around my mother’s silent house for food and entertainment. On the Sunday night that would have marked the beginning of my fourth week away from school, my mother and I started an argument that would result in my eventual relocation to Parkview Mental Health Facility by way of Police squad car. Some would suggest I was not a well balanced sixteen year old. All this was spelled out very easily in the map of Texas and the words “Texas 1997” that I now ripped from my wall and threw in the direction of the trash can. 

My best friend while at Parkview was John McCoy, a small, light fifteen year old boy with long red-brown hair and a round pale pink birthmark along the side of his nose that flamed red when he grew angry. While at Parkview, he painted a small ceramic smiley face in a special color he entitled “Gay John Teal” and gave it to me. He wrote his telephone number in black magic marker across the back. That smiley face had hung on my bedroom wall since my return to mother’s. I carefully removed the tack holding it to the wall and set it gently on the bed in the Keep pile. 

My friendship with John didn’t really build until he moved to Wichita in February of the next year. I wrecked my car the day of his going away party and my mother decided it was time I went to a high school closer to home. He and I started at our new schools, 150 miles apart, on the same day. We began to talk on the phone every night, and he’d visit on the weekends. We were sitting in my room one Saturday afternoon some months after the move, staring at my blank white walls. We were listening to Paula Cole’s “I am so Ordinary” and John had declared it “our song.” He picked up a black marker and began to write the lyrics out on the wall, next to my mirror so I could see them every morning. Shaking a can of Killz four years later, I sprayed over the words, blanking them out again to white. John was now a staple friend, easily reached and I no longer needed to be reminded of him. I smiled a bit as I sprayed the wall, though. 

Cleaning my walls didn’t just involved removing papers and painting. The summer following my junior year of high school, my life seemed to speed up. My stepbrother DJ moved in with us from Boston and engaged the friendship of two of my younger brother’s acquaintances, Darin and Ewan. Darin and Ewan would creep into our basement through the fire escape window in DJ’s bedroom, and along with anyone else who happened to be over at the time, we’d laugh and drink and horse around all night. I scrubbed three-year-old sweet and sour sauce from the wall above my bed and declared it to a memory I did NOT mind erasing. 

As the summer progressed, DJ began to date Brett and, it being convenient at the time, Anne began to date Ewan. Anne and Ewan’s relationship resulted in a lot of activities in my room I would rather not discuss, as well as a number of poems by Anne on my walls, some good, most bad. My friendship with Anne, though many years in the making has been, by far, the most stable. We first grew close over those long nights when I would listen patiently to her rants about Ewan and various other guys in her life, and I remember very clearly the night we sat up late, I writing quotes and she writing poems, for the first time putting color on my walls. As I sprayed over her words with the deadly can of Killz, I realized that not everything I was erasing was bad. 
That same summer, DJ and Brett and Anne and Ewan and John and I and a whole collection of other misfits and delinquents gathered in my back yard for a smoke break that would become infamous in later years. Standing outside, the tension thick as there was a fight brewing, my mother’s voice cut like glass as she hollered out, “Christine. Daniel Jay. Get in here!” 

DJ looked directly at me and declared, “She went downstairs.” I have a feeling that those words will forever be etched in my mind. What we had left, and what my mother had found, for she had, indeed, gone downstairs, was fourteen different bottles of alcohol, lying out open in the dying light of DJ’s bedroom floor. DJ and I were ushered off to our separate parents where we each in turn swore that all of the alcohol was our individually. I claimed I had “found it” and DJ claimed he had “won it in a bet.” My parents were so moved by our attempts to take the blame for one another, we were not punished. I left the last surviving bottle of that party, empty but otherwise untouched, in the corner of my bedroom and threw sheets over my unmade bed and side table. My walls were now completely blank again, however white was too pure a color for them now. 

My mother and I had spent over half an hour in line at Wal-Mart buying the paint. I had chosen the color and though she disapproved, she had long since given up trying to persuade me to be more “feminine.” The color I had chosen, appropriately titled “Starry Night” was a blue so dark it was nearly black and would be perfect to cover the scars my adolescence had left on my bedroom walls. When we finally did make it out of the line alive, we were still in high spirits and she offered to do my laundry while I did the painting. A year ago, just getting in a car together would have nearly killed us. I smiled as I heard her familiar footstep on the stairs and she poked her head in to give approval. The walls were nearly complete, a dark blue that looked far fresher than the dirty white of just hours before. My mother smiled and nodded then noticed a small round hole in the wall, opposite the door but along the same side. “You should have Jimmy fix that for you,” she suggested, reaching out to touch the edge gingerly. 

I looked at her for a moment, wondering if she remembered what the hole was. “I think I’ll leave it,” I suggested, reaching out to touch the edge as well. “I don’t want to erase EVERYTHING.”