She Painted Skeletons on the Walls

  I wouldn’t’ve had it on my walls.

  But someone thought it was the “hot” thing to have.

  The house was done in leopard skin wallpaper.

Actual factual pic of wallpaper in question...

  I saw it while out yard sale-ing at an estate sale.

  Estate sales afford the unique experience of just walking right into a stranger’s house to see what’s for sale.

  “What are you looking at,” asked The Lady of the House.

  “This wallpaper,” I said, “It’s intense.”

  “The word I’d use would be ‘garish,’ she said.  “I find it interesting that it bothers you.”

  “It overwhelms the rooms,” I said.

  “This from the man who didn’t mind skeletons painted on his walls or that each wall was a different color,” said The Lady of the House.

  I should explain.

  Muriel* painted skeletons on the walls of the house we lived in in the hippie town of Bisbee, Arizona back in the 1990’s.  Muriel made sure that each wall was a different color.  In the living room, for instance, there was a blue wall, an emerald green wall, the mustard yellow wall and the Chinese red wall.

  Each wall featured a full-sized skeleton painted by Muriel.  Not on canvas or in a frame, right on the wall.

  Muriel said the different colored walls in the house were for variety’s sake.  The skeletons were to pay tribute to her arthritis which had a big influence on her life.

  That’s what she said anyway.

  I had no reason to doubt her.

  It wasn’t until after Muriel and I had parted company that it occurred to me that I should’ve questioned a lot of her stories, a lot of her reasoning.

  Muriel told a lot of stories.

  Muriel’s stories weren’t about “A list” people, places or things.  Nope, her stories had more “B-list or “C list” subject matter.

  For instance, Muriel said she should’ve gotten credit, gotten paid for the Sara Lee cakes slogan, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”

  “I was on a flight from Atlanta to Dallas back in the 80’s and I was sitting beside this woman who was trying to come up with a slogan for a bakery company, that’s all she told me,” said Muriel.  “So I said, ‘Most people don’t like something, but everyone likes our cakes.’”

  “Next thing I know I’m watching TV some months later and this Sara Lee ad comes on with people singing, ‘Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.’”

  I mean why would I doubt Muriel?  So what if her daddy was a Southern teller of tall tales.  It would be a few years in the future before I’d fully understand the old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  Muriel said she was in a car wreck in Denver in the mid-80’s.

  “I was bedridden for a year,” she told me.  “I wasn’t supposed to walk ever again.  I willed myself to walk again.  Then a couple of years later I developed arthritis in my back.”

  The arthritis was why Muriel had me walk up and down her back from time to time.

  Yes, walk up and down her back…me and my size 12 feet and 180 pound frame.  I’d walk up her back a couple of steps, turn and walk the other way…each step brought a weird crunching sound and vibration through the soles of my feet.

  “You sure this is okay?” I asked her during one of our first “sessions.”

  “If it bothered me you wouldn’t be doing it,” said Muriel.

  So after being exposed to Muriel’s taste in art, her own art, her own projects like saving dog fur to make a dog hair sweater or broken mirrors and glass to make mosaics and stuff like that I didn’t find it odd to have her paint skeletons on the walls of our newly acquired house in Bisbee.

  This after she painted the walls all different colors.

  After she painted the metal furniture black and white striped.

  After she was done she painted individual bricks on the outside walls of the cinderblock house…one by one.

  I never knew why Muriel was always painting.  When we lived in Roswell she painted the walls of her dad’s house blue…thing was she hadn’t consulted her dad, he was not amused.  She painted the paneling emerald green in the house we rented, much to the surprise of the landlord.  The walls of the condo in Phoenix got painted bright orange...when we moved we finally sold the place when we agreed to knock off a thousand bucks for an interior repainting.

  Muriel and I hung around with each other for seven years.

  Then one day the energy ran out of our little arrangement.

  It was time for me to go and leave Muriel to do things her way in the little Arizona town.

  One afternoon my buddy Ernesto came over to help me move out.  Muriel had excused herself to her business a few blocks away while I took care of getting my stuff out of what was to become her house.

  “Dios mio!,” said Ernesto as he walked into the house.  He crossed himself in that old school way that some religious folks do.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You live in a house of death,” he said.

  The two of us stood in the living room.  We were both looking around.  I was looking at the place now with I reckon what you could call “new eyes.”

  “Well damn,” I said.  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “How could you live here with all this death around you?” 

  “I never saw it as death,” I said.  “I saw it as Muriel’s creativity.  I saw it as art.”

  “Oh, you didn’t paint this shit?  She did?” asked Ernesto, “Bro…I want you to imagine a realtor coming in here to show this place.”

  I laughed.

  “Well,” I said, “That sort of happened in Phoenix with orange walls.”

  “Orange?  Dude.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Orange like road construction orange barrel orange.”

  Ernesto laughed.

  “Damn, bro.  This chick has issues.”

  “I didn’t see it before,” I said. 

  I looked around and smiled.

  “I see it now.”

 

*Name changed