One of the great, unexplained mysteries of my life is what causes some stains to bleed through fresh paint, as if the spot hadn’t been painted at all. If you’ve done any real amount of remodeling, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about, and the remedy for the problem is to use one of the many available stain blockers that are on the market. I know that there is a completely reasonable explanation for why this happens, and if I really cared, I could do a little digging and have the answer.
I have been doing some remodeling lately and was confronted with the phenomenon of bleed-through. The stain I was covering bled through the new paint so quickly I thought that my paint sprayer was empty and that I hadn’t painted the spot at all.
This event brought to mind something that had happened years ago, back when my good friend, Ezra Hammer, and I were the only two people who managed to sneak out of our high school during an assembly in the gym. In those days, the moment the school bell would ring to announce an assembly there would be a chaotic rush of students running for the doors to get outside to smoke cigarettes and a vastly outnumbered militia of teachers racing there to stop them.
This time the administration got the drop on us and had staff placed at the doors before the bell rang. Ez managed to sneak out using an unguarded band room exit. I was a student in the radio/television class, and that was like having an “access all areas” pass at a rock concert. My classmates were setting up equipment to videotape the assembly from up on the sports deck and I joined them. Since I wasn’t part of the production team, I slipped out a side door and no one was the wiser.
Since Ez and I were the only people to make it out of the building (usually there were dozens), it was rather boring outside, but it was better than the pep assembly or whatever was going on inside.
Our high school had a planetarium, with its own entrance, which was almost never used during school hours, and as a result it was a good place to hang out and smoke, so that’s where we went and that’s what we did.
Ez pulled out a Sharpie or some other form of permanent marker and proceeded to draw a nearly life-sized picture of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the ’60s band, the Doors, on one of the few areas of the school building that was painted white. Ez was a fairly capable artist and would often trade his drawings for coffee and meals at the local Big Boy restaurant. When he was done, his rendering was easily recognizable as Morrison to anyone who knew who the guy was. It looked great and we thought that it was a very good thing. Being young, we didn’t consider such works of art as vandalism. Apparently, the maintenance staff of the school didn’t see things the same way, and within a week the masterpiece was painted over.
At some point shortly after Mr. Morrison was covered over, we were hanging out at the planetarium entrance again, talking about the drawing and the fact that it was no longer there. I don’t recall who noticed it first, but we discovered that if we looked carefully, Morrison’s face would slowly appear from within the white over-coating of paint.
If we didn’t know the origins of the face behind the paint, the whole thing would have come off as kind of creepy, but since we knew all of the details, we used the mysterious face in the wall to creep other kids out. I don’t really recall how many people that we showed it to, but their reaction was always reward enough to encourage us to show it to someone else. I’m sure this continued until the end of the school year.
It really makes me wonder if it would still be possible to see the face after all of these years. I really doubt it; I’m sure that countless vandals have taken liberties with the tabula rasa that is the wall of the planetarium. I’m sure that it has been covered over many times with fresh white paint. I’m sure that stain-blocking technology has improved greatly in the 20-plus years since Ezra made his mark on that wall. But now that I think about it, the next time I visit home, I am going to be very tempted to go and look to see if it can still be seen, unlikely as it may be.
This whole scenario makes me think about the many things in this world that are categorized as unexplained: UFOs, ghosts, things that go bump in the night. My good friend, Wayne Genghis, thinks that he has the ability to make street lights turn off. I told him he was nuts and that street lights turn off all of the time, usually because of a bad sensor. He didn’t like my answer, and to this day he sticks with the idea that he has special powers.
Sometimes the unexplained is only unexplained because the reason why something happens hasn’t been explained to us personally, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t an explanation. I can’t explain a Criss Angel magic trick, but I know that there is an explanation, and it is a trick.
Sometimes mysterious phenomenon, isn’t. Sometimes it is just old graffiti.
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