The Marquis’ Intimate Diary

TUESDAY, 11 JANUARY, 2000, PHILADELPHIA
Having made a 180° turnaround in lifestyle within the span of one calendar year, going from unstoppable, improbable party-boy in New Orleans in my 20’s to someone who actually works for a living in Philadelphia, and jumping into the 30’s, I found I was a prime candidate for one of those Identity Crisis’s I’ve heard about.

Honestly, I was in a panicked state, wondering if I was losing my touch. So what did I do?

No, I did not go out and spend as much money as it would take to buy a house on a dolled up automobile, cherry-red, and fraught with form-over-function. I’ve got some time before the mid-life shit, I reckon.

No, I painted my stairs. Summoned all my fading rock-n-rollhood together for one moment and channeled it. I felt it a mandatory task for me to create a physical link to the past that seemed to have been inadvertently slipping from my fingers.

The stairs were yellow. A ‘soothing’ colour, I suppose, but I have no need to be soothed. Two quick coats of bordello-of-blood-red livened the stairwell up tremendously. When the paint dried, I ‘wallpapered’ over the red by nailing up hundreds of CD’s. (iMac install CD’s, if you must pry.) The silver on red lent to the stairs a glam-over-sluttiness vibe that was working well, but I felt the job was not finished.

I found little bottles of phosphorescent paint, mixed it with a non-pigmented acrylic, and painted each riser, finally affixing a 4 foot florescent black-light tube above the stairs. In normal light, there seems to be nothing but the basic white paint on the risers, but when the black light is turned on, a seductive, bizarre alien-green glow floods the downstairs.

The result is ridiculous and alarming and absolutely stunning. I feel quite 20 years younger for it.

Disco Stairs