The Family That Paints Together Complains Together

By Bob Wire, 9-05-08

	Caption: This is an especially hard-to-find shade.

Rusty, my strapping young lad of 11, has entered middle school. He has new responsibilities, his own locker, and a bustling social life. Puberty is just around the corner, and it’s time to remove the teddy bear wallpaper from his bedroom. 

Barb and I like to encourage free expression in our children, so we decided to let Rusty choose the color we would paint his room. He immediately announced that he would cover all four walls with graffiti, inspired by the dozens of wildly painted boxcars we saw on our cross-country trip this summer. I envisioned our crew, I mean family, crowded into his 10 x 12 bedroom, light-headed and brain-damaged from Krylon fumes while hip-hop thumped from a boom box. In my mind’s eye, I saw bold dimensional lettering on Rusty’s walls exhorting people to suck this or eat me, or bragging how Rusty is the king of the rail yard and slept with your mother. 

“How ‘bout we let you do that to just one wall?” suggested Barb, apparently sharing my vision. Rusty groaned in disappointment, but then asked if he could choose the color for the remaining walls.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Black,” we said at exactly the same moment.  I stood in the center of Rusty’s room, hand on hip, looking around at the cream-colored walls with the wide band of teddy bears and alphabet blocks ringing the room at the top. “Look, I know you’ve outgrown the Playskool thing, but I have to put the kibosh on black walls and graffiti. I mean, we’re expecting you to go to college someday, buddy. If we allow you to have black walls and graffiti in sixth grade, by the time you drop out of high school you’ll be huffing Pam, robbing garage sales for meth money, and listening to Rob Zombie. And from there it’s a short leap to getting a neck tattoo and knocking up some governor’s daughter. So no graffiti, and black is not a color.”

My speech brought surprisingly little resistance, and Rusty capitulated, deciding to go with orange. Not salmon. Not melon. Not tropical mango mist. Orange. “Like a traffic cone,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Orange, like a hunting vest.”

“Like a road flare,” said Rusty.

“Like the surface of the sun!” shouted Speaker.

Barb’s look of horror told me that she was not on board the Dayglo Express. “To Home Depot!” I said, and the kids scuttled outside to the car chattering excitedly.  “Don’t worry,” I said quietly to Barb. “I’ll cut it with some white paint when he’s not looking.”

So we dropped a couple hundred bucks at Home Depot (which, incidentally, is painted orange) and spent the better part of a week getting the room ready to paint. I’m using the royal “we.” The editorial “we,” as the Dude would say. Being trussed up in a block sling, I’m one-handed and pretty useless. I sat in my recliner in the living room most of the time, watching Austin Powers movies and listening to Barb steam off the teddy bears, scrub down the walls, and move all the furniture out. She was so busy she could hardly find time to fix me sandwiches and microwave popcorn.

In all fairness to me, I was able to provide some valuable assistance with the wall prep. I used a laser pointer to show Rusty where all the nail and tack holes were so he could fill them with Spackle.

Finally, it was time to paint. I had told Barb that we could paint the room quickly and efficiently with a minimum of trouble and splatter, or we could let the kids get involved. But we couldn’t do both. She insisted on letting the kids paint, though, and she was confident they’d lose interest after a few minutes of getting yelled at and called names such as “Sloppy Joe” and “semi-gloss retard.” At one point they both climbed into the recliner with me, asking for protection. I told them that this is why Van Gogh cut off his ear: to get out of having to paint his room.

Toward the end of the project, I was brought in to paint the trim, which required a steady hand and a keen eye. And a couple of Lortabs. I banished everyone from the room and cranked up the new Black Crowes CD while I applied a smooth coat of terra cotta on the windowsill and door frame. I was playing my brush like a tiny guitar when Rusty appeared in the doorway to deliver a lunch question from Barb.

“Smoked turkey and provolone,” I told him. “And tell her to slice the tomatoes a little thinner this time. Chop chop!”

He nodded and returned to the kitchen, leaving a perfect handprint where he’d gripped the wet doorway moulding. I was momentarily angry, but then I decided to leave it. As Rusty matures and becomes more and more scarce around the house, and eventually leaves for college, I’m going to look at that handprint and realize it’s the best graffiti ever.

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