it was an ugly wall

There are certain things about a house that make it a home, but which to everyone else it just looks like depreciation.  The stain on a wall-to-wall carpet where you once spilled soda or a hole in the bedroom where you once tried to do a somersault but instead found your foot through the dry wall.  The markings of life that are inevitable, but to all other eyes make a house despicable.


You get to know a house the way you get to know a the fine contours of your hand.  You get to know the heaviness of all the doors in the house to the point where you know the exact amount of force to put behind it to get it to slam exactly the way you want.  You learn which windows stick and which screens have holes.  You learn how to properly jig the bathroom door in a split second in case you ever lock yourself out or someone locks themselves in-- or if you ever, for whatever reason, want to intrude on the person within.  You learn the placement of the furniture so well that you become able to maneuver all of it so that you can race from one end of the house and back so fast that everything in your peripheral becomes a blur-- all without disturbing a single item.


There was this wall at the staircase leading from the basement to the ground floor of my old house that was riddled with markings.  They weren't special markings, just scribbles from the kids in the house.  It was just this one wall at that staircase that was marked all over the place.  All the other walls in the place were relatively clean.  You see, it wasn't a house house, it was actually an apartment building.  A normal cozy Brooklyn apartment building.  The kind you find all over the place where it looks like a regular two floor semi-detached but then you walk inside and find out it's actually 5 apartments hiding behind the facade of twin homes.  The wall was outside any of the apartments, and so it seemed nobody ever thought to paint over it.  It was like that for as long as I remember and the only reason it isn't there anymore is because the whole place got renovated and they tore the thing down.  It was like all the adults were too tired to do anything about it or even yell at us about it.  They might have just thought, "Oh, to hell with it.  If the kids are gonna scribble all over a goddamn wall, at least it's not my wall."


It really wasn't anybody's wall, it was just the house wall that all the kids wrote all over.  It wasn't a particularly important wall, if you get what I mean.  It's not like it was the entrance door wall, or the main hallway wall.  Nobody ever really stopped at that wall and leaned against it, the kids didn't loiter too much by this wall.  I know the only time I, or any of my brothers or cousins, ever took any pause at that staircase was to stop and see if it was safe to visit our cousins in the basement in case they were being yelled at.  It was just a wall that you passed by if you were passing between the basement and the ground floor.  There seemed to be no reason why this wall should have been the one that got marked up all over the place.  Now, I don't know who marked it up first, I just know that's how I remember it being for as long as I can recall and I lived in that place from the day I was born in 1987 and until the day it was renovated in 2005.


Well, what I'm trying to say is that this wall was remarkably ugly.  It wasn't even scribbled in such a way that could have made it possible for it to be passed off as aesthetically pleasing in a child-like whimsical sort of way, but it just looked like maniac children drew all over the thing.  Here's the thing-- every time I passed that ugly wall I knew I was in my house, because only in this house does such a wall as this one exist.