Drunkorating
I CAN SELL this to a Burning Man hippie, I told myself about my RV, every 15 seconds, as I painted it three years ago.
I had painted many rooms in the 19 living places I rented (actual number) between the ages of 18 and 42. I knew I’d have to paint them back to the terrible white that landlords inevitably choose. But I painted anyway—often yellow; I do better in yellow—never questioning the decision.
Then I bought Bessie, the first abode I ever owned.
This will be worth so much to some Burner, I reassured myself as I painted the living room. I fixated on Burners because when I’d been in the market for a motor home, Craigslist was flooded with RVs they’d bought and/or decorated for the festival and in the aftermath were selling back to people who actually needed them. When I found mine—not previously Burner-owned—I donned reading glasses for long hours, painting extremely fine lines between the walls and cabinets, in unforgiving bold colors, contorting my body into corners both tight and weirdly shaped. I upturned mattresses and dinette cushions, displacing them into the middle of my 24-foot long, 99-inch wide home, squeezing past them for weeks as I lived in and renovated it at the same time. I couldn’t accept that I could be worth all the effort.
I’ve said it before: I’ve never believed that I deserve nice things. This edition is, Any home improvements were too good for me, even when my home was an old truck.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
I lived in lots of under-decorated spaces as an adult, but I told people—myself included—that I was scared. When I was 22, my dreadful father got caught embezzling lots of money, and the home my family “owned” was repossessed by the bank. When I was 25, I fled Hurricane Katrina with my first husband and my best friend, spending months not knowing if any of my things survived. My best friend went back first, and found that all of her belongings had flooded and molded, ruined. On the phone with me, on her knees on the sidewalk in front of her apartment, she sobbed and gasped for air in a way I’d never heard before, and haven’t since.
We lived in the same neighborhood. My apartment, mere blocks away, sat on a ridge just elevated enough to be utterly untouched.
But I also used to work for moving companies. How many other excuses could I have! As a mover and packer, every day I had gone into people’s homes and seen how much unnecessary and unwanted shit everyone had at any given time. So when I brought my now-ex Isaac into my rented San Francisco room for the first time, illuminating a left-behind junk dresser and a mattress on the floor when I switched on the lights, I had plenty of ways to explain it away when I saw the alarm on his face.
“JEsus,” he said. “I thought I lived monastically.”
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
