The story of my life.
The summer between 11th and 12th grade, I got a job in a trendy restaurant in Coconut Grove, Florida, called Kaleidoscope. I strolled around, table to table, playing guitar and singing, four hours a night, five nights a week, and went to high school during the day. The job brought me instant financial independence and allowed me to leave my mother's cushy Coral Gables home at the age of seventeen. I moved into a groovy, three-bedroom house in the Grove with two wonderful, worldly women, Kathy and Pam. (They were older women: twenty-six and thirty-one.) We had wild parties in this house where all kinds of things went on.
I had a big, airy bedroom that was cozy enough, but the walls were painted hospital-green. So I hired a professional painter, Mr. Furnell, from Brooklyn, to paint the room a nice shade of peach, top to bottom. It was a simple job that could easily be completed in a few hours' time.
On
the day of the paint job, I arrived home from school and found
my bedroom all peachy and bright! Mr. Furnell had just finished
the job and was now packing up his supplies. As I looked around
the room, I happened to notice a small spot in the upper right-hand
corner that was still hospital-green. “Excuse me, Mr. Furnell,”
I said, pointing towards the ceiling, “but it seems that you’ve
missed a spot.” “Oh, that?,” he replied in classic Brooklynese.
“That’s nothin’. Believe me, if you don’t look up there, you
don’t really notice.”
