White Shag Carpets

White Shag Carpets

By Marc Alley

Christmas 2007 (i.e. January ’08)

The good memories of that room, the majesty and pure unadulterated “let the good times roll” (thank you Ric Ocasek of The Cars) feeling . . . a je ne sais quois of childhood bliss.  It was truly a room from a not-so-long-forgotten decade, the wild sixties, and who knows how it survived to 1976, in prim-and-proper Salt Lake City on the East Bench.  It was a psychedelic trip just looking at the wallpaper, a combination of pinks, oranges, golds, browns . . . If you stared long enough at the swirls, dots and wavy lines it was like you could visualize a Buddha or interpret some secret code. It was kind of like staring at the album cover of Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  and trying to figure out the meaning of all the weird little things contained therein.  The sense of funkadelic didn’t stop there, as it was outfitted with the deepest ivory-white shag carpet that could easily swallow a small animal or snack.  Rounding out the combo was a couch that was a horrifically-close shade of the same colors in more of an august harvest palette. 

This room was very unlike the rest of our Mom-inspired “country Baron broadsides Euro 80s chic” décor that was the rest of our Sugarhouse bungalow.  But that was the beauty of it . . . Mom and Dad were too cheap to remodel any basement rooms, so it fit the logic that it was ours to destroy, by default.  Even so, we treated it with a fairly high degree of respect, even though it was only “unofficially” ours.  To vacuum the acres of carpet, though, was not for the faint of heart, a Friday chore I did even back then.  You had to really know your vacuum head height settings.  Only by setting it on the highest “Austin Powers” adjustment could you prevent the Farah Fawcet-long shag from sucking into the roller and burning out the rubber belt and motor assembly.

The stark white knobs on the closets and drawers looked so purposeful against the shockingly-bright colors, like touching one would unlock a space capsule from Space Odyssey 2001.  No, they just opened into closets full of well-used board games and “educational” toys.  By “educational” I mean “wooden”.  Mom thought that anything that you had to actually build or create from natural matter really broadened your horizons, thus she provided wooden blocks, Legos, indestructible puzzles and Lincoln Logs.  It’s pretty hard to build anything sinister out of Lincoln Logs, unless it was Lincoln’s wife Mary’s sanitorium.  And build and create we did. 

Sometimes the closet did reveal some amazing finds.  One time Mom found a pair of “mystery panties” in one of the drawers and accused us of procuring them. The great meaning or portent of this find was kind of lost on us as we had no clue as to why one would want them. We never did find out whose they were, but you’d think that from the motif of the room that Mom would’ve figured out that they probably belonged to the previous homeowner.

 It was a surprising long and deep room (almost the width of the front of the house), perfectly suited for quick rugby-like “Smear the Queer” sessions and a Nerf football.  You could really get good traction in bare feet and the deep shag provided quite a bit of padding for hard falls.  A little rug-burn on the face never hurt anyone and was totally unnoticed by the “injury cops” (Mom and Dad).  I can’t remember a whole lot of injuries, but I do remember Ben throwing a heavy steel Tonka truck at my head one time. The deep carpet absorbed sound well. Injuries and fights had a self-containment feature, as any revealed tradecraft or secrets to Parents would result in disciplinary measures by “the company”.

The room also had a great location.  It was far away from the much-frequented kitchen and parental bedroom areas, with a quick access stairway to an escape route front door and shielding alcoves on the side.  What the builders in 1930 were thinking for the purpose of these small hiding spaces I’ll never know, but Brandon was able to utilize them well during one of his special “missions” to run outside bare-ass naked, touch the Peugeot station wagon, and run back.  Alas, he was betrayed as we had locked the front door; although we eventually had to let him back in as he had completed his assignment well.

The room also had the advantage of excellent southward upper-ground placement & slope away from the dreaded “water bucket”.  The infamous water bucket was courtesy of Dad who decided that he really didn’t have the time/expertise to replace the air conditioning condensation pump, which pumped the collected water back up into the old cast iron plumbing.  Therefore, to demonstrate to us the frailty of mortality and importance of military schedules, an everlasting and hellish water clock was created.  It was a ticking time bomb, and failure to empty the bucket on your allotted hour meant a flooding of the grey commercial basement carpet, wet socks, mildew and chastisement from all “bucket crew” members.  We were like a doomed Sisyphus condemned by Zeus to roll the rock up the hill, only to escape our slippery hands and roll back again.  Sure, summer meant long, sweet outdoor nights, but it also meant the dreaded water bucket rotation and 7 pm bedtimes under a still blazing sun.

The shag carpet room offered a respite from these various tasks and served as our headquarters for many ventures and purposes.   Ben often would set up shop in the western area of the room on Fast Sunday, where he could ply his tempting wares at escalating and lucrative drug dealer-like margins.  Nacho cheese Doritos and bite-size Butterfingers started out at only a nickel, but as supply diminished and demand increased, that same Dorito might fetch as much as twenty-five cents.  We would curse his name, and then sadly pay out more of our hard-earned change, whilst Ben would lovingly pet his large collections of erasers, rocks and rolls of pennies.  Somehow I never had the gumption or brains to plan ahead and buy supplies from Emigration Market and transport them home via bike BEFORE the lean times occurred.  I somehow suspect that Ben had stolen his master plan from a certain Great Brain book in which Tom sells candy to all of the beleaguered boys at the Catholic Jesuit School and makes a fortune, hiding the booty and loot in a statue of a Saint. Although, Ben was quite an entrepreneurial capitalist at such a young age, and you had to admit that he had great strategy and commitment to his malevolent principles.

During the winters, we were generally in a calmer mood and we’d read or play games together. Monopoly was one of our favorite board games.  In terms of Monopoly, we never did follow the correct rules.  Somehow we misinterpreted the entire point of the game, and allowed any player to buy houses for any card that they had without owning all cards of that color.  It was a brutal way to play, and we actually went out to a game supply store and bought extra houses, hotels and money.  We didn’t limit how many hotels you could have either, and when you landed on Broadway with 10 hotels, the game was definitely over.

When bored with that, we even created our own games.  I remember starting a massive, months-long game of pencil war, although maybe it was a combined effort . . . I don’t exactly remember.  The game was a popular offshoot of a popular “church” game. We taped a large, circular piece of paper (about 2’x2’) to a small, round pine table.  Then, we used our plastic stencil sets to draw a “home base” on each side of the paper with “tanks” of various sizes and abilities. We also drew rocks and other marks to symbolize parts of the battlefield and terrain.  The rules of the game were pretty basic: You would pick a tank and announce your intention to either move or shoot.  You would then place the tip of the pencil near the front of the representative tank symbol and with one hand, place the pointer finger on the top of the eraser.  With the right pressure and skill, you’d gently push the top of the pencil and it would fall away, drawing a straight line, symbolizing the “shoot” or “move” turn.  If any of the line passed through an opponent during a “shoot” turn, your enemy would blow up, represented by scribbled lines, and be erased forever with one of Ben’s massive erasers.

With the masses of tanks we each possessed, and difficulty to navigate such a large area, rates of attrition were low. So to combat this, we devised an ingenious “smart bomb” limited to a few per player, per game. This meant you could drop the pencil from the air at a height of about a foot, holding the end, and if you did it just right a small mark from the end of the #2 would make a small dot.  From the center of this dot the stencil would be used to create a massive explosion, destroying anyone in the radius. The greatest faux pas was to push too hard and tear the paper, resulting in total destruction of an area of the battlefield.  But that was the genius of the taped-down, thick poster paper.  I don’t think we ever tore the paper or finished the game . . . it was such a large “tank world”.  It was really fun to play with such simple objects, and I can still perform a “pencil shot” to this day, and I’m sure Ben and Brandon can too.

Our modus operandi eventually became more sophisticated as the world entered the VCR/Betamax age.  Mom and Dad had a pretty strict policy on any non-Sunday, non-Disney TV watching.  Any requisitions for TV usage had to be submitted for approval.  Mom had ensured Dad had installed a hardened steel coaxial lock to prevent any unauthorized watching in our shag carpet room.  We devised a clever bypass that ran through a hidden cortex, while still displaying a dummy cable that passed through the lock.  All the Love Boat, Chips and Brady Bunch we could handle was full access, baby!  Provided Mom and Dad weren’t at home, that is.

We fought hard and played hard and we had a great room to do it in. Much has been made of our fighting, but I think it’s pretty typical for any family with three boys, now that I’m older and a bit wiser.  And I also think we all loved each other a lot and felt like we had a little slice of real estate to do it in.

It was our room, the White Shag Carpet room, and sometimes I wish we still had it. Smear the Queer or Pencil Tank, anyone?!