Wipe Out

During the end of senior year in high school, we were told to dedicate our last few weeks engaged in an activity that would broaden our experience and give us an idea of what the real world would hold. Students were tasked with finding their own projects and creating a proposal for what they might do and what goals they hoped to achieve. It's the kind of thing rich or exclusive schools do, to prove that they are preparing their students above and beyond. Most of my classmates had interesting jobs and opportunities lined up. Somehow I ended up painting bathrooms at the Jewish Community Center.

Located across the street from our high school, the JCC often served as an auxiliary sporting venue for practices and their pool hosted our swim team. Having not been very proactive toward finding a senior project, I signed up for volunteer duty at the JCC without any idea of what my tasks would include. On the first day I was directed toward the maintenance shed, where my "bosses" were just as surprised as I was. After a few days of following them around fixing tennis court nets, resetting lighting fixtures, unplugging drains, and repairing lawn divots, they finally found a solid task to assign me. For two weeks I dipped my roller into buckets of white paint and slathered the bathroom walls with it, each stroke erasing unsightly teal underneath.

My only company was a boom box, which was tuned to the local sports station, and the occasional visit by Richard, who would compliment my work and say, "Good job, keep it up." It was during the tail end of my volunteer sentence that I found out I was just laying the base coat for a future painting. All those hours spent breathing in fumes and having specks of paint in my hair amounted to laying the foundation for bathroom art. The next time I touched a paint roller was to help a friend white over his bedroom. I never would have agreed to it except a girl I was interested in was scheduled to be there. That experience didn't turn out that well either.

The lesson here is: don't paint for ulterior motives.