Designer Instincts

I met my childhood best friend, Mike, shortly after my parents purchased their first home in a nondescript suburb of Minneapolis in 1984. I was two years old and can’t remember our first interaction, but the story of our meeting is one of those tales that takes on mythic proportions for small, interested audiences. The story goes like this. Mike's mother, Pam, wandered across the street to welcome my mom and me to the neighborhood, hopeful that I might become a playmate for her youngest son. I was riding a tricycle and immediately offered Mike my Big Wheel with the words, "Here. You can have this one." And then, we were inseparable.

Most of my early memories include Mike and his family. Our homes often merged in my childhood dreams: his upstairs and my basement, his bedroom with my living room. Prone to sleepwalking, I once left my bedroom, walked down the hall and through the kitchen, unlocked the door, opened our garage door, crossed the road, climbed the front steps of Mike's home, and rang his doorbell at 3 AM, fully asleep. Mike’s parents are even my godparents.

Mike and I often spent hours exploring the woods that bordered our homes, eagerly building immaculate forts from old sheets draped over fledgling spruce, bravely scaling the treacherous branches of what the neighborhood kids called "Monkey Tree," and crafting tall tales of local kids getting kidnapped by a murderous clown.

It was in those woods where, one day, we discovered buried treasure.

We were scoping a new location to build a fort when I heard Mike yelling my name. The excitement in his voice sparked a surge of delightful anticipation down my 5-year-old spine, and I searched for his distinctive red hair through the thick brush, eager to share in his discovery. I found him hunched over a large bag he'd unearthed near the edge of the woods. The bag was bursting with magazines filled with bright images and beautiful people. We looked around, worried that the owner of this prized collection might pop out suddenly, angry and demanding it back. When no such owner appeared, we exchanged excited looks and began combing through each magazine, thoroughly engrossed with the glossy feel of the paper, the vivacious colors, the beauty of the models.

While excitedly flipping the pages, an idea sprouted between us. Mike and I had numerous great ideas and tended to take them to the point of excess. Like the time we stole dozens of bouquets of what we deemed gorgeous yellow flowers from a neighbor's yard and proudly presented them to our mothers. When the owner of the home we deflowered showed up at our front door later that day, I was terrified. But she merely wanted to thank us for pulling most of the weeds from her lawn.

Energized by our plan for the treasure, Mike and I packed the magazines back into the sack we found them in, lugged them to his bedroom, and gathered the tools necessary to bring our vision to life: scissors and scotch tape. We spent the subsequent hour cutting and taping our prized images to every free inch of wall space in Mike's bedroom. To us, the room looked glorious.

Giddy and excited to share our work, we hollered to Mike's mother that we had a surprise for her. When she arrived in the hallway, we made her close her eyes. Mike led her by the hand into his room and said, "OK! Open them!"

We watched her face closely, waiting for her to shower us with usual praise for our hard work and creativity. But her reaction startled us. There was no praise. She looked unhappy, angry even. She told me that playtime was over, and I was to head straight home. Later that evening, I eavesdropped as my mom spoke to Mike's parents on the phone in our kitchen, desperate for clues to what had gone wrong. I heard my mom gasp and then giggle. "NO. They didn't!" she exclaimed, hand covering her mouth. Unable to figure out what we had done wrong and too scared to ask directly, I spent the evening lying low, plagued with questions, alone in my room.

The following day I rang Mike's doorbell trepidatiously but desperate for information. When he answered, we nodded to one another solemnly, ran downstairs to the playroom, and closed the door softly so as not to attract any attention. I told Mike that my mom had laughed, had gasped, but that I had not been punished. Mike told me his mother immediately removed all of the magazine photos from his walls, threw them away, and told him they were not appropriate for a five-year-old boy's room. Still confused, we wondered if we should decorate my room instead. Perhaps because the magazine included pictures of women, it was only suitable for little girls. The adults seemed to have forgotten the event ever happened. It took a few days, but we eventually grew bored trying to solve the mystery and moved on to new adventures.

Years later, after a lot of begging, our parents finally relented and gave us a critical piece of data. The beautiful images we papered five-year-old Mike's bedroom walls with had been pulled from the pages of Playboy.