In Your Room
After having a little Katrina and the Waves YouTube dance party and then getting some laundry out of the dryer, I had this great idea that I hadn't had before. It's such a good idea I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it! I wanted to blog about all the rooms that I have called "mine" throughout the years!
The first room I remember was in my parent's little farmhouse northeast of the village known as Paradise, Kansas. My room was right next to theirs, it had a double window on the western wall, wood paneling on the walls, and a short pile carpet that had sort of art deco-lite geometric patterns with reds, blacks, yellows and other colors I think. By this time, my little brother Brandon was born and we had bunk beds. I often imagined that I saw faces, objects and scenes in the patterns on the paneled walls. Remember this room cause it comes up a few more times!
Sometime when I was four or five, I decided I wanted to grow up and have my own room. My dad had built a little family room in the basement, right under my current bedroom, and it was decided that I was grown up enough to move down there and make that my bedroom. I remember cleaning and moving things all day, but when the moment came, I realized I was too scared to sleep in the basement alone!
A few years later, I would guess by the time I was in 3rd grade, I decided I really was ready, and this time it worked. I moved downstairs and I had, you guys, the biggest bedroom in the house! Even bigger than my parents! It also had wood paneled walls, but they were darker. And the carpet was sort of a red shag with some green and yellow and stuff thrown in. Basically, my room was under my old bedroom (now just Brandon's), as well as part of the hallway, three closets, and part of my parents room. I feel pretty grown up and independent, and even throw a 7th grade Christmas party down there! Also, in the summer time, it stayed much cooler (and darker) than the rooms upstairs.
My eighth grade year, we knew was our last year on the farm as we had, as a family, agreed to all look to move to a city. So, Brandon and I decided to trade bedrooms for the last year. So, the last half of 1990 and the first half of 1991, I moved back upstairs to my first bedroom while Brandon made the basement room his man cave, before that term was invented. (It always smelled like farts.)
As planned, my family moved off our farm in the summer of '91, and to the city of Hays, America, home to Fort Hays and the similarly named Fort Hays State University. By this time, I was in love with the B-52's and, even though Hays wasn't my first choice (Salina was), I felt fortunate to be moving to a "college town."
Our first home was a modest but modern ranch on JP Drive. The basement was partially finished, with one bedroom, but my dad wanted to renovate to create two bedrooms so that Brandon and I could live down there. He moved a couple walls so that what became my room was a little smaller, so the bathroom door was outside of my bedroom, and that what was a small storage room became large enough to be Brandon's bedroom. Since I got to basically design my bedroom from scratch as a result, I asked to have it decorated to look like the Red Room on Twin Peaks. I didn't quite get my parents to agree to that, but they did agree to tile it in black and white, and ordered some red, white and black wallpaper that had music notes on it (music being my other obsession).
I was in this room for two years when our realtor told us about a house two blocks away on Country Lane that was just the most amazing house I had ever seen. We had not been in the market for a new house, and the house was considerably more expensive than the perfectly adequate one we were currently living in, but I would not have taken no for an answer. I needed this house, and I got my mom on board pretty fast. I even offered to get a job if we got the house, a promise I soon made good on.
This was our first ever home that had three stories - a partial basement (remember that for later), a first floor with a foyer that opened to the second story, a formal living and dining room in addition to a family room and breakfast nook in the kitchen, A FREAKIN' WET BAR, a back deck with OMG a hot tub, a master bedroom with it's own bathroom and walk-in closet, and then three bedrooms upstairs for us kids. It was like we were suddenly all ballers, and had made the big time. Movin' on up!
There I lived my last two years of high school. The bedroom I chose was at the front of the house, facing Country Lane, with a false balcony outside the double windows, and a closet that had a small cubby hole to the attic, wherein I hid my first gay porn magazines. It had been painted pink because it was a girls' bedroom by the previous owners, a family who was locally famous because they owned a successful dry cleaning business (they built the home). Upon moving in, my mom and I painted the top half cream and plastered a blue, very masculine patterned wallpaper to the bottom. The carpet was brown.
Once I graduated high school, I had these big fantasies of independence, and for some reason I was taken with the idea of moving back to the farm by myself, possibly working in Russell, about 16 miles north. In retrospect, I feel awful, because I made my parents come and put the farmhouse back into living conditions for me (it had been vacant for four years since we had moved to Hays). That included hooking up the water and electricity, phone, and getting a post office box in town. I moved back in to my first ever bedroom, but I had painted over the top half of the paneling and sawed open an entry way from the living room directly into the bedroom to make it more of a den. I lived there for maybe a grand total of a week before I moved back home (so similar to my first venture out of my first bedroom).
After that summer following senior year, I moved out and lived in the dorms for my freshman year in college, even though it was only a couple miles from home. I stayed in Agnew Hall, the co-ed dormitory that my mom had lived in when she went to Fort Hays State. I had a roommate who was a decent guy and we got along OK but mostly stayed out of each others' business. Our room was dreary, with a beige tiled floor and a window-unit air conditioner, but neither of us spent much time there anyway.
When the school year ended, I didn't want to give up my newly acquired sense of freedom, so I found a trailer house in a little "suburb" of Hays called Meadow Acres - affectionately known as Ghetto Acres. If memory serves, my rent was $260/mo for a two-bedroom trailer. I could just barely afford it on my McDonald's salary. This is where I finally really became friends with my younger brother, since now I was finally the cool older brother with his own place. I also finally had a real best friend, upon who I could throw my exploding homosexual fantasies upon. Although completely straight, he was a good friend who helped me deal with my demons and encouraged me to get my first boyfriend, who I would eventually move in with.
But not before moving back home to Country Lane again. When school started back up, I had to scale back my hours at McDonald's, and the $260 rent each month was killing me. However, in the time that I had vacated the house, my younger cousin Andrea had moved in, finishing her senior year in high school in the big city of Hays, so my mom and I fashioned a makeshift bedroom in the unfinished part of the partial basement, complete with waterbed, gigantic poster of Alicia Silversone, and lattice with fabric behind it as a ceiling.
After living here through the fall and some of the winter of my sophomore year in college, I finally found that first boyfriend, and we decided to move in together. He lived in Russell, oddly enough, so I agreed to move there to live with him, and finally fulfilled that earlier fantasy of working in Russell. I transferred to the local McDonalds, and he found a house. I packed up my car to move in there, site unseen. It quickly became apparent what a mistake the whole thing had been, because the house was dingy and dated, and our relationship soured the minute we moved in together. To help make things better, my aforementioned best friend moved in to the spare bedroom, and eventually his girlfriend joined him. Our bedroom shared a closet. They were both at the back of the house and had this disgusting puke-green carpet. I put red carped, saved from my parents house on Country Lane when they redid their bedroom, over the gross green carpet.
Once my first gay relationship had deteriorated to the point where I had to move out, but by now I was making decent money, between working at a local hotel and keeping my early morning shifts at the local McDonald's. I ended up finding a 4 bedroom house with a backyard, including a separate shed, and a family room downstairs in the basement. My bedroom here was the bedroom in said basement, which was the only one with it's own bathroom. I moved in by myself but soon after, loneliness and a desire to spend less money in rent once my junior year in high school began caused me to find roommates. First, a girl who waitressed at the hotel restaurant where I worked had me take her boyfriend in as a roommate to bedroom on the first floor on the front of the house. He was nice enough and we stayed out of each other's business. Then, my best friend and his girlfriend needed a place to live so they moved into the back bedroom. We had a great time for about a year and then the lease was up and we decided to part ways.
I briefly moved back to Country Lane for the last time, back to my original bedroom, having since been vacated by cousin Andrea. Within weeks, Brandon and I had found a suitable home down near 4th and Main, across from the town swimming pool and near the main city park. Mom and Dad wisely took my advice to buy the house for us to live in, selling it later at a profit, as I had predicted. My bedroom initially was, once again, in the basement. Following in my father's footsteps, I had gone to the home improvement store and "finished" the basement to include an office/laundry room, a rec room/band rehearsal space, and my bedroom. I initially painted it dark, dark green, but later repainted it white and blue with some glitter and a glowing planetary theme. This room was pretty cool, but whenever it rained, water seeped in to the basement, wetting the carpet, and then making everything smell like mildew.
The spring of my second senior year in college, it rained so much that I had no choice but to move upstairs in "the nursery" - a spare bedroom we had had initially rented to a couple of successive roommates before making it essential a marijuana den.
Finally, the big day came when I graduated FHSU and left for Los Angeles. I'll quickly list the bedrooms that I quickly proceeded through after my arrival. Brandon and I shared a studio condo in the west valley - I built a makeshift divider so we'd each have our own space; then Brandon left and a friend and I rented a two bedroom apartment on Vineland in North Hollywood near Circus Liquor. Then I moved out to share a bedroom on the 2nd floor of a townhome with a bartender I was infatuated with. After the unit was tagged with the 2nd eviction notice (none of the four of us living there were paying rent), I moved out to my own studio apartment in Koreatown, or South Hollywood as I called it, with a killer view of Downtown LA. It was here that I finally, for the first time, truly felt like my own person. I was working in Hollywood and living on the top floor of this old building in a room that had been renovated just before I had moved in. After a few months, my boyfriend at the time announced that he was going to have to move out of his home so I offered to share my studio apartment with him.
After a few years, we decided we needed a bigger place, and we were both making decent money finally, so we found a one bedroom place in West Hollywood where we've been ever since. Our bedroom is nothing too special, but it has a very long closet on the west side of the room, a wide window looking out over Romaine Street with a fantastic old metal sculptural screen just outside, and we've painted it like an Andes Mint. Two walls are glossy mint green and the other two walls are flat chocolate brown. We change the furniture around every 9 months or so, in order to avoid the doldrums of having slept in the same bedroom for the longest amount of time either of us has ever had a bedroom.
16 years later, and I'm really ready for my next room!
The first room I remember was in my parent's little farmhouse northeast of the village known as Paradise, Kansas. My room was right next to theirs, it had a double window on the western wall, wood paneling on the walls, and a short pile carpet that had sort of art deco-lite geometric patterns with reds, blacks, yellows and other colors I think. By this time, my little brother Brandon was born and we had bunk beds. I often imagined that I saw faces, objects and scenes in the patterns on the paneled walls. Remember this room cause it comes up a few more times!
Sometime when I was four or five, I decided I wanted to grow up and have my own room. My dad had built a little family room in the basement, right under my current bedroom, and it was decided that I was grown up enough to move down there and make that my bedroom. I remember cleaning and moving things all day, but when the moment came, I realized I was too scared to sleep in the basement alone!
A few years later, I would guess by the time I was in 3rd grade, I decided I really was ready, and this time it worked. I moved downstairs and I had, you guys, the biggest bedroom in the house! Even bigger than my parents! It also had wood paneled walls, but they were darker. And the carpet was sort of a red shag with some green and yellow and stuff thrown in. Basically, my room was under my old bedroom (now just Brandon's), as well as part of the hallway, three closets, and part of my parents room. I feel pretty grown up and independent, and even throw a 7th grade Christmas party down there! Also, in the summer time, it stayed much cooler (and darker) than the rooms upstairs.
My eighth grade year, we knew was our last year on the farm as we had, as a family, agreed to all look to move to a city. So, Brandon and I decided to trade bedrooms for the last year. So, the last half of 1990 and the first half of 1991, I moved back upstairs to my first bedroom while Brandon made the basement room his man cave, before that term was invented. (It always smelled like farts.)
As planned, my family moved off our farm in the summer of '91, and to the city of Hays, America, home to Fort Hays and the similarly named Fort Hays State University. By this time, I was in love with the B-52's and, even though Hays wasn't my first choice (Salina was), I felt fortunate to be moving to a "college town."
Our first home was a modest but modern ranch on JP Drive. The basement was partially finished, with one bedroom, but my dad wanted to renovate to create two bedrooms so that Brandon and I could live down there. He moved a couple walls so that what became my room was a little smaller, so the bathroom door was outside of my bedroom, and that what was a small storage room became large enough to be Brandon's bedroom. Since I got to basically design my bedroom from scratch as a result, I asked to have it decorated to look like the Red Room on Twin Peaks. I didn't quite get my parents to agree to that, but they did agree to tile it in black and white, and ordered some red, white and black wallpaper that had music notes on it (music being my other obsession).
I was in this room for two years when our realtor told us about a house two blocks away on Country Lane that was just the most amazing house I had ever seen. We had not been in the market for a new house, and the house was considerably more expensive than the perfectly adequate one we were currently living in, but I would not have taken no for an answer. I needed this house, and I got my mom on board pretty fast. I even offered to get a job if we got the house, a promise I soon made good on.
This was our first ever home that had three stories - a partial basement (remember that for later), a first floor with a foyer that opened to the second story, a formal living and dining room in addition to a family room and breakfast nook in the kitchen, A FREAKIN' WET BAR, a back deck with OMG a hot tub, a master bedroom with it's own bathroom and walk-in closet, and then three bedrooms upstairs for us kids. It was like we were suddenly all ballers, and had made the big time. Movin' on up!
There I lived my last two years of high school. The bedroom I chose was at the front of the house, facing Country Lane, with a false balcony outside the double windows, and a closet that had a small cubby hole to the attic, wherein I hid my first gay porn magazines. It had been painted pink because it was a girls' bedroom by the previous owners, a family who was locally famous because they owned a successful dry cleaning business (they built the home). Upon moving in, my mom and I painted the top half cream and plastered a blue, very masculine patterned wallpaper to the bottom. The carpet was brown.
Once I graduated high school, I had these big fantasies of independence, and for some reason I was taken with the idea of moving back to the farm by myself, possibly working in Russell, about 16 miles north. In retrospect, I feel awful, because I made my parents come and put the farmhouse back into living conditions for me (it had been vacant for four years since we had moved to Hays). That included hooking up the water and electricity, phone, and getting a post office box in town. I moved back in to my first ever bedroom, but I had painted over the top half of the paneling and sawed open an entry way from the living room directly into the bedroom to make it more of a den. I lived there for maybe a grand total of a week before I moved back home (so similar to my first venture out of my first bedroom).
After that summer following senior year, I moved out and lived in the dorms for my freshman year in college, even though it was only a couple miles from home. I stayed in Agnew Hall, the co-ed dormitory that my mom had lived in when she went to Fort Hays State. I had a roommate who was a decent guy and we got along OK but mostly stayed out of each others' business. Our room was dreary, with a beige tiled floor and a window-unit air conditioner, but neither of us spent much time there anyway.
When the school year ended, I didn't want to give up my newly acquired sense of freedom, so I found a trailer house in a little "suburb" of Hays called Meadow Acres - affectionately known as Ghetto Acres. If memory serves, my rent was $260/mo for a two-bedroom trailer. I could just barely afford it on my McDonald's salary. This is where I finally really became friends with my younger brother, since now I was finally the cool older brother with his own place. I also finally had a real best friend, upon who I could throw my exploding homosexual fantasies upon. Although completely straight, he was a good friend who helped me deal with my demons and encouraged me to get my first boyfriend, who I would eventually move in with.
But not before moving back home to Country Lane again. When school started back up, I had to scale back my hours at McDonald's, and the $260 rent each month was killing me. However, in the time that I had vacated the house, my younger cousin Andrea had moved in, finishing her senior year in high school in the big city of Hays, so my mom and I fashioned a makeshift bedroom in the unfinished part of the partial basement, complete with waterbed, gigantic poster of Alicia Silversone, and lattice with fabric behind it as a ceiling.
After living here through the fall and some of the winter of my sophomore year in college, I finally found that first boyfriend, and we decided to move in together. He lived in Russell, oddly enough, so I agreed to move there to live with him, and finally fulfilled that earlier fantasy of working in Russell. I transferred to the local McDonalds, and he found a house. I packed up my car to move in there, site unseen. It quickly became apparent what a mistake the whole thing had been, because the house was dingy and dated, and our relationship soured the minute we moved in together. To help make things better, my aforementioned best friend moved in to the spare bedroom, and eventually his girlfriend joined him. Our bedroom shared a closet. They were both at the back of the house and had this disgusting puke-green carpet. I put red carped, saved from my parents house on Country Lane when they redid their bedroom, over the gross green carpet.
Once my first gay relationship had deteriorated to the point where I had to move out, but by now I was making decent money, between working at a local hotel and keeping my early morning shifts at the local McDonald's. I ended up finding a 4 bedroom house with a backyard, including a separate shed, and a family room downstairs in the basement. My bedroom here was the bedroom in said basement, which was the only one with it's own bathroom. I moved in by myself but soon after, loneliness and a desire to spend less money in rent once my junior year in high school began caused me to find roommates. First, a girl who waitressed at the hotel restaurant where I worked had me take her boyfriend in as a roommate to bedroom on the first floor on the front of the house. He was nice enough and we stayed out of each other's business. Then, my best friend and his girlfriend needed a place to live so they moved into the back bedroom. We had a great time for about a year and then the lease was up and we decided to part ways.
I briefly moved back to Country Lane for the last time, back to my original bedroom, having since been vacated by cousin Andrea. Within weeks, Brandon and I had found a suitable home down near 4th and Main, across from the town swimming pool and near the main city park. Mom and Dad wisely took my advice to buy the house for us to live in, selling it later at a profit, as I had predicted. My bedroom initially was, once again, in the basement. Following in my father's footsteps, I had gone to the home improvement store and "finished" the basement to include an office/laundry room, a rec room/band rehearsal space, and my bedroom. I initially painted it dark, dark green, but later repainted it white and blue with some glitter and a glowing planetary theme. This room was pretty cool, but whenever it rained, water seeped in to the basement, wetting the carpet, and then making everything smell like mildew.
The spring of my second senior year in college, it rained so much that I had no choice but to move upstairs in "the nursery" - a spare bedroom we had had initially rented to a couple of successive roommates before making it essential a marijuana den.
Finally, the big day came when I graduated FHSU and left for Los Angeles. I'll quickly list the bedrooms that I quickly proceeded through after my arrival. Brandon and I shared a studio condo in the west valley - I built a makeshift divider so we'd each have our own space; then Brandon left and a friend and I rented a two bedroom apartment on Vineland in North Hollywood near Circus Liquor. Then I moved out to share a bedroom on the 2nd floor of a townhome with a bartender I was infatuated with. After the unit was tagged with the 2nd eviction notice (none of the four of us living there were paying rent), I moved out to my own studio apartment in Koreatown, or South Hollywood as I called it, with a killer view of Downtown LA. It was here that I finally, for the first time, truly felt like my own person. I was working in Hollywood and living on the top floor of this old building in a room that had been renovated just before I had moved in. After a few months, my boyfriend at the time announced that he was going to have to move out of his home so I offered to share my studio apartment with him.
After a few years, we decided we needed a bigger place, and we were both making decent money finally, so we found a one bedroom place in West Hollywood where we've been ever since. Our bedroom is nothing too special, but it has a very long closet on the west side of the room, a wide window looking out over Romaine Street with a fantastic old metal sculptural screen just outside, and we've painted it like an Andes Mint. Two walls are glossy mint green and the other two walls are flat chocolate brown. We change the furniture around every 9 months or so, in order to avoid the doldrums of having slept in the same bedroom for the longest amount of time either of us has ever had a bedroom.
16 years later, and I'm really ready for my next room!
Comments
I suppose I should undertake this exercise at some point.