“Off the floor by 40.”
—BACHELOR ALAN WELLIKOFF on the subject of his mattress
Left completely to his own devices, the bachelor’s idea of interior decorating is a pyramid of empty beer cans on a window sill.
Bachelors don’t live in furnished apartments. We just live in apartments that are furnished like furnished apartments. Whatever was there or was left there or somehow got there, stays there. Forever. A bachelor apartment has more footstools than chairs, a Barcalounger in the kitchen, and a dining-room suite consisting of one stepladder and a card table. The only concessions to art and beauty are nude pictures of Natassia Kinski taped to the bathroom door. If there’s a guest room, it has a jet ski and two hundred pounds of fishing tackle in it. And somewhere, probably right where you’re going to step in it, is a disassembled motorcycle carburetor in a bucket of gasoline.
1. Start with an empty room and take a big drink.
2. See, it looks better already. Take another drink.
3. Drink a bunch more.
4. Hey, this place looks great, dammit! Know what I mean? This is a great-looking damn place. Looks great.
There are a lot of inexplicables about a bachelor apartment. Why do I have thirty steak knives and only one teaspoon? What’s a dead ficus tree doing in the hall closet? How did the animal tracks get on the ceiling? I don’t know. And I don’t care. I’ve got better things to do with my weekends than spend them shopping for wallpaper.
There are just four rules to bachelor decorating:
1.Don’t buy anything nice. You’re going to wreck it.
2.Don’t have wall-to-wall carpet. It’s difficult to pick up and take outside to shake. And it’s hard to bring along on a picnic.
3.Don’t own a waterbed. Lying down drunk on a waterbed is, except for impotence and jail, the worst thing that can happen to a bachelor after midnight.
4.Don’t allow yourself to be influenced in any way by mothers, sisters, dates, or women friends. Paint the whole place flat black if you want. Put easy chairs on the roof. Hook up the toilet in the middle of the living room. It’s your home and you can do what you want to do.
And what you probably want to do is move.
