The Paint With No Name

It’s not infrequent for something very small to get on my nerves. Such was the case in our bathroom. I was taking a shower one day when I noticed the paint in the upper corner had blistered and flaked just a little and that there were a few mold stains along the ceiling where it met the wall. It wasn’t a big deal. I tried to dismiss it but I couldn’t. Once something gets on my nerves, it grinds down and stays there. It would have to be painted.

And why had that corner flaked and blistered? What was going on there? I worried about a leak. Were there any pipes in that spot? I hoped not. I got a small stepladder out of the hallway closet of our building and got up there and poked softly and felt around with my fingers for moisture or gumminess. It didn’t feel like anything was leaking. Maybe it had been the old showerhead that I replaced, a huge bulbous thing with little nodes and holes all over it that sprayed water everywhere. I hope that’s the explanation. So, no plumber (knock on wood) would be required, but it definitely would need to be painted. How was I going to find a match for this paint? It was an off-white with a soupçon of yellow. I didn’t have a name for it. It had been fifteen years at least since I had painted the bathroom. It was probably called something like eggshell white or water lily blonde or coronation champagne. Who knows. I had not been prudent and kept the can. Or written it down.

Finding a match turned out to be embarrassingly simple, albeit a tad pricey. After I scraped some paint away in the corner I was able to collect the flakes that had fallen into the tub in an envelope, which I took to a paint store on Stone Way called Daly’s. A pleasant young man at the counter explained that I could get a mix, but the smallest they could sell me for doing that would be a quart. A quart would be way too much, but if they could find a good match, it would be worth the price, which was around thirty bucks. I picked the paint up a few days later. The match was perfect.

I asked the clerk (this time a young woman) what the name of the paint was. She said it didn’t have a name. It had a number. I looked at the number. It was big, a formidable number. The tint had been calculated with such perfection that it had entered the realm of science, astronomy and quantum mechanics. This wasn’t just paint, it was a Schrödinger equation.

I got the paint home and got everything ready to paint, newspaper and stepladder in the tub, can of paint on the floor also on a sheet of newspaper. I had a critical decision to make. Should I find a small container that I can hold in my hand, or should I dip the brush in the paint and hold it so that the paint does not drip on the tub or floor?

I decided on the latter. It was riskier, but simpler. If I was careful, I would make less of a mess than if I tried to pour the paint into another container. I donned a pair of surgical gloves, opened the can with a screwdriver, and dipped the paintbrush into the smooth white surface of the paint.  There is something very sensual about paint. The gooeyness, the viscosity, the weight of the brush, the richness of color in liquid form, slowly turning the brush in my hand while the excess paint drooled back into the can, then slowly and gracefully raising the brush while positioning myself simultaneously on the stepladder in the tub, all these actions performed with great concentration were a form of meditation, an immersion in a medium of sumptuous stickiness.

Mistakes were made. Mistakes are inevitable. I forgot about our cat, Athena. Athena came wondering in and was naturally curious about what I was doing. She’s fascinated by the shower to begin with. She loves to get her front paws on the edge of the tub after I shower and gaze with great fascination at whatever it was that just took place. She licks herself. She doesn’t see us licking ourselves, but we do get into a shiny place and make water fall on us. In her world, that’s phenomenal.

Roberta had been outside raking leaves. When she came in I hollered to her to remove Athena from the bathroom as I had paint on my hands. Unfortunately, I forgot to warn her about the wet paint on the corner of the wall by the door. She scraped past and got paint on her fleecy blue bed jacket. I told her the paint was not water soluble. She would have to toss the jacket. I would buy her a new one.

And, inevitably, I spotted a few places that I missed, went to reopen the can, got paint on my hands and realized that I’d forgotten to put surgical gloves on. Getting the paint off with rubbing alcohol and soap was the most difficult part of the job. 
       Whether it was the tension of doing the job or the smell and fumes of the paint in an unventilated room I don’t know, but I got a terrible headache later in the evening. My brain felt like it had swelled in overall size by about an inch and was pressing against my skull which was beginning to crack. If headaches  -  like hurricanes  -  had names, I would name this one Vercingetorix after the Celtic warrior king who proved to be such a headache for Julius Caesar during the Gallic Wars. It was tough and stubborn and shaggy and unruly. Celtic to the core. A mean headache. The kind of headache that brings down empires. I could name it that, or I could name it Jon Brower Minnoch, the heaviest man in medical history, who weighed over 1,400 pounds when he was admitted to Seattle’s University Hospital in March, 1978. Two beds were lashed together and it took thirteen people to roll him over for linen changes.

I took some ibuprofen, and the headache dissipated some minutes later. That’s always such a good feeling. It’s as if Jon Brower Minnoch lost 1,211 pounds and strolled out of the hospital at a trim 189 with a smile on his face.

The next day I removed the painter’s tape from the upper wall by the ceiling where I’d painted. It was riddled with paint, which hadn’t yet dried. I tossed the tape, got out the rubbing alcohol, and went to work on my hands again. Paint has a genius for getting and going everywhere. There was even some paint under the tip of my thumbnail. I solved that with a pair of clippers.

I was happy with the result. The bathroom looks great. That yellow tint, the indefinable hue that put the off in off-white, that required calculations as formidable as those assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena or the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, brightens things up, makes it seem like a fun place to be. Showering and shaving and brushing my teeth and other ceremonies performed to maintain my hygiene are not activities I generally choose to celebrate, or characterize as fun (I would choose very different words), but it’s nice to perform them in a space that’s been augmented by a nameless color of paint, a paint whose hue is so specific in its charm that it eludes the syllables of the mortal realm and hovers somewhere between transcendence and dream.