My Childhood Bedroom

Had four walls. Two built in beds with comforters left over from the previous owners. They were turquoise and pink. Actually, they were two sheets sewn together which provided me with no warmth.The room had wood panels, but real ones, not the fake ones. There was a hole over my bed for years where some kind of bug lived and threw out little rocks all over my bed. I showed him to my friends, not the bug, but the shower of rocks and we all scratched our heads in wonderment. I didn't tell my parents about the little bug, because they never did much about anything. I love them, but I just think everything made them panic, so I stopped telling them things, so they wouldn't worry. In my room I pinned photos of the Guess Girl, my sister called it a Guess Shrine. I pinned beautiful models all over my room, because I wanted to be like that. I just didn't know how. In my room there was a bag hanging on the back of my closet door. It was filled with notes that my friends and I wrote back and forth. In those secret notes we had codes for different drugs we wanted to try. My sister and my mother broke into my room one day and read every single note. Determining that yellow M&M's meant one drug and the green ones meant something else. Of course, they got the drugs wrong and I'm embarrassed to say that I think the green ones meant something sexual. I can't remember. You'd have to ask my friend, who I am not naming on this thread, because she exists as a living breathing person who may in fact read this. Anyway, back to the room. It had cold hard linoleum floors that has little grooves that I ran my fingers over whenever I was sitting on them. It was always freezing there. It had two windows, one for crawling out of and one for looking out the backyard at my rabbit and the doves kept in our giant chicken coop. There were chickens in there too at times, but they didn't seem to last, I think they got out. My room was painted white, at least the built in furniture was. It flooded in my room, up to three feet when we had bad rains. The built in drawers smelled like mildew, so matter how much I washed my clothing, I would take it out of the dryer and put it into the drawers, so the next time I pulled something out, it smelled like mildew. There was nothing to be done about it. My parents weren't going to give me a five piece bedroom set, it would just get destroyed in the next rain. My room was the first place I did cocaine. I was with my friend and I think we were on the floor, but we might have used the desk. I can't remember. Maybe the stereo top? It was glorious. I remember we felt like grown ups. Like we had truly come into our own. I remember it was hard to get. We had to work to get it. We were too embarrassed to ask the local drug dealer's daughter to get it and way too embarrassed to ask him ourselves. In the end, I can't remember how we got it. I think my other friend was there too, but he's a guy, not able to be named, as a way to protect someone innocent. Oh, my stereo. It played the Clash, and KROQ mostly. Endlessly on. Me and my friends danced in there. My friend, the one I tried cocaine with, and I used to sneak out at night and drive into Westwood to buy Marilyn Monroe and James Dean Posters. I remember the adrenaline rush of backing silently out my driveway and then driving from Malibu Lake to Ahhs in Westwood in the pouring rain and running back to the car without umbrellas. It was like that. There are other things I remember too. There was a pink shoe box on the upper shelf in my closet. I opened it and there was a giant lizard inside. I remember screaming and running for my life. The lizard was eight or nine inches long. To this day, my parents still think I'm making that up. That was the other thing. No matter what happened, how it happened, what it looked like, my parents didn't believe me. My father may have, but my mother just rolled her eyes and said I had such an imagination. I didn't lie though. I still don't. I tell it like it is. My memory frozen to the parts that were memorable and melted over the places that were not.