The Muralist, and a picture from June 1987

My bedroom used to be my parent's room. It had dirty mint-green walls and cruddy white baseboards. Several years after my sister and I moved into the room, I painted it white and the baseboards a light brown. These changes were meant to make it look less dingy, but also to allow me to paint on the walls.

When I was 11 or 12, I painted an enormous black and white illustration of a horse standing on rocks in a mountain-like landscape on the wall at the foot of the steps. As I got older, it started to mock me with it's imperfections. My mother protested, but I painted over it and promised to try again some day with a better horse painting. I was sidetracked by my infatuation with KISS so the horse never moseyed back to the foot of the steps. From the time I was 13 to 21, I painted KISS on my walls several times. One was a very large mural that never quite worked for me so I kept fussing with it until I grew frustrated and painted over  it. I was a perfectionist which allowed me to constantly fail.

I was painted my room's walls and even the floor in an effort to transform a pig with lipstick. It was never clean enough. The paint was never smooth enough. It always looked like paint had dried over dirt no matter how hard I tried, but it was better than the rest of our house. The lack of a carpet made it better yet since our pets "accidents" couldn't permanently stain or stink up our bedroom. I made the space mine, and filled it with things which divorced me from the rest of my family's tastes and interests.

My bedroom contained two pieces of exercise equipment that I paid for myself when I decided to lose weight and get in shape. One was a cheap exercise bike that had a tension control courtesy of two fiber pads that pressed on the sides of the front tire. The other was a mini trampoline. I used each of these for 45 minutes every day in an effort to bring my body to heel. It worked, but only so far. I was the only one in my family to ever do any sort of structured exercise, though my mother once bought one of those exercise pulleys that can be attached to a door handle. It was used once or twice and abandoned.

This is the second photo of me that I sent to Tito. I'm sitting on my trampoline with a poster of Paul Stanley behind me. My college graduation tassel is hanging on the wall and some ancient curtains that someone gave us are covering the window. During that time, I was experimenting with style and wearing bejeweled bolos with button-down shirts. I was also wearing black pants and sitting in such a way as to obscure my fat belly from view in pictures.