The Beige Horror

On September 11, 2001, I was leading a crew of Ratmo painters in the remodeling of the 6th floor of The Ridgeway Hotel, in Memphis Tn. It was Tuesday and we were in good shape, having until that Friday to finish the job. The powers that be were debating whether to remodel all six floors or tear it down and rebuild from scratch. 

I think it was heading up on breaktime when one of my guys told me to look at the TV because a plane had hit a building in New York City. I remember assuming that it was probably a small plane, likely tragic pilot error. How else could that happen? 

With televisions on in every room, we watched the drama unfold in real-time while we went about our work. We soon learned it was an airliner that hit the World Trade Center; The Twin Towers. How the fuck does that happen? Who makes a mistake like that? What a tragic accident! 

Then the second plane hit the second tower. This was no accident. We were watching a nightmare unfold.

Soon the bosses came in to make decisions. The Memphis Airport was shut down because of the attack, as were airports all across the country. Suddenly, in someone's estimation, every hotel room in town would be needed. We had to finish the entire floor that night. No one asked if we could do that. We were told to do it. Alright. All we could do is our best. 

As I recall, the color chosen was some shade of beige and the dilemma was now that Sherwin Williams had sent us the wrong tint of the beige to supplement what we had already been using. That store didn't usually mess up, but it was a bad day for everybody. My boss, 162 IQ Lou, wanted us to use up all the correct beige on one side of the hall and then the mis tint on the other. The very-prissy hotel manager was horrified at the possibility that a tourist from Toledo might one day look across the hall and see a different shade of beige in another room. Might ruin his whole trip. You think beige is beige, but to some people the shade they want is the shade they want and it's the hill they will die on no matter the circumstances. Whatever we did was going to be wrong to the prissy gentleman, so in the interest of some degree of continuity and expediency, I suggested we box all the paint we had, creating one wrong beige for the rest of the rooms. Who but the prissy manager would ever know? Who the fuck would care in the year it would be while they figured out whether they wanted to demolish the building or repaint again? Well, that prissy bitch. 

I honestly don't recall what we did. Twenty-five years later, so many similar paint dilemmas of utmost importance that meant nothing at the time- mean less in my memory now. It was (possibly) wartime. Get out of my way. We had work to do.

But it possibly being wartime, I asked 162 IQ Lou if I could shoot deserters- anyone who left the job early? Him being 162 IQ Lou, he pondered that as if it were a real question. No, he said. OK, I replied. 

Some guys left. Others came. No one got executed. We worked deep into the evening and got the job done before midnight. I don't know if they rented out any of the freshly painted rooms on the sixth floor that night. I didn't much care. I had rode in that day with my parttime friend, Harvey Haircut. We stopped at a gas station (beer store in Memphis talk) and got some beer. Gas, we noticed, had shot up to $5 a gallon from what had probably been the $1.50 range in 2001? Beer was the same price, but it certainly wasn't too soon for some to gouge on gas. 

That was it. Went to another job the next day. Life went on. The Ridgeway Hotel was flattened within the year, the beige horror was no more.