The Bathroom of Horror

Possessed

Bathroom Reading, on the Wall

By DAVID COLMAN -New York Times

WHEN you’re single, it seems, you are pretty much free to decorate your place however you want. The fruits of your hunting and gathering may or may not further your interests with potential consorts, but it’s your house, right?

photos/Axel Koester for The New York Times

OH, THE HORROR Merrill Markoe’s guest bathroom in Malibu has become home to product packaging she simply must preserve.

A corollary to this observation is that if you inhabit a space with someone else, your idiosyncrasies have to take a back seat — i.e., closet, basement, attic or worse. (A ministorage center in Manhattan has even run ads suggesting that it is the best repository for the spoils of singledom.)

Merill Markoe

Three years ago when Merrill Markoe, the novelist and comedy writer, was trying to make room in her Malibu house for her boyfriend, Andy Prieboy, a musician, she feared that her beloved assortment of off-brand grocery packages and advertising ephemera — the box of Urkel-Os breakfast cereal, the Kirlian photograph of her sky-blue aura taken at a local fair, showing, she noted, “that I’m an incredibly spiritual person” — would have to go. Where to, she was not sure.

“You should put this stuff up someplace,” Mr. Prieboy said. So he took something — maybe the drawing Ms. Markoe made in eighth grade of her English teacher, whose image is surrounded by dozens of lines reading “I hate Mrs. Reid” — and hung it in the guest bathroom, above a strange vintage photograph of a naked little girl cheerily talking on a telephone.

Soon the lavatory was plastered with the stuff, and the room had a new name:

The Bathroom of Horror.

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