Adam Levin - Hot Pink

The brief moment the man’s ebullience faltered occurred on the steps of the church, following the baptism of the couple’s first child (named after the dog). The man saw the painter going to his German sedan and realized that although he’d greeted him earlier, they hadn’t had the chance to have a conversation. The man felt terrible, not just for having missed a perfect opportunity to be fraternally warmed, but also because the receding painter’s posture was slumpy and defeated, which suggested to the man that fraternal warmth was something the painter direly needed, and the man had failed to provide him with it. What a crummy feeling the man had on those church steps! But he made a decision to call out to the painter, and he followed through, and the moment passed, the crummy feeling died, and his ebullience resumed.

No sooner had the man yelled the painter’s name than the painter turned from his car and waved. “Don’t leave!” the man shouted. “Wait!” he shouted. He walked down the steps and went to the painter. “I wasn’t leaving,” said the painter. “Just getting one of these.” The painter opened the door of his car and, from a cooler on the floor, removed a narrow orange can containing an energy beverage called ZOINKS!!!. “For bravery,” said the painter. The man told the painter, “I know just what you mean! I could’ve used a can of bravery the last time I went to a baptism, also. It was my wife’s brother’s kid’s baptism, and a funny thing — well, not really funny, not funny at all really, but maybe just kind of interesting or strange , or, I guess, coincidental , which I’ll get to why in a second — the thing was my wife had just miscarried a few weeks earlier, and we were really upset, especially she was, and then we’re at this baptism, her nephew’s getting baptized, and holy moly was I not feeling brave. I mean, I was just kind of waiting for her to completely break down, and I was so scared because I had no idea what I’d say. We’d been over it so many times, you know? There’s no way to — there’s nothing you can say when something like that happens. All you can do is kind of throw your hands up and hug her and tell here it’ll be alright, that you’ll try again, that as hard as it is — as impossible as it is — to make sense of what’s happened, you just have to accept it, the way you accept, I don’t know, math. Death. The weather. Your metabolism. See? It’s not comforting at all, but your role, as the husband, is to hug her every time, and not try to explain it, but I’m saying this in retrospect — at the time, at that baptism, I still thought I could somehow explain it to her, show her the bright side, but I couldn’t even explain it to myself and I wasn’t able to admit that. Anyway, I could’ve used some of that energy drink, I think. To keep the spirits up. To be brave for my wife. Though I heard it rots your kidneys or your liver or something. But oh! So the weird coincidence, I was saying — what I’ve wanted to tell you, ever since you came over to paint the crack and we had that amazing conversation on the driveway, was how I almost bought the exact same car you drive, but last minute decided to buy the Swedish one I drive because the Swedish one’s the safest there is — not that yours isn’t safe, but the Swedish is the safest —and the reason I bought the Swedish one instead of yours is that we had a baby on the way, the baby you just saw baptized thirty minutes ago, and because of the miscarriage during her first pregnancy, my wife — and, look, I’ll admit to it too — my wife and myself the both , we were superstitious about telling people she was pregnant because we thought it would jinx us somehow. Counting our chicken before it hatched, as it were, huh-ha! I mean, you like to think of yourself as a sane, scientifically minded person, but the truth is you’re not. And by you , I mean me , you know what I mean? But so how’s the car? Is it still an exciting car to own?” The car, the painter told the man, was fine. More than fine, actually. Maintenance was easy and, unless his calculations were off, he got even better mileage than promised, especially on the highway. “What I want to talk to you about, though,” he said, “is something I feel really bad about — it’s why I needed to get all this bravery in me.” The painter turned the narrow orange can upside down, and a single, hot pink drop of ZOINKS!!! splashed onto the concrete surrounding the sewer grate. The painter went on: “That crack in your wall that you called me about? You know how it came back even after I painted it? The paint was bad. Now, I didn’t know that when I painted the wall, or even when I repainted the wall. I mean, I knew it wasn’t great paint like in the rest of the house, and I felt a little guilty, but I didn’t know just how bad it was. But that’s not even an excuse, because by the time you had that second wall put up, I did know how bad it was, and I didn’t say anything about it to you, not even when you called me, and you’re such a nice guy, with such a nice family, so I just want to come clean with you, and that’s what I’m gonna do if you’ll let me. Your builder, who pays me — and I’m implicated, too, don’t get me wrong — but the builder is a shyster, and a serious cheapskate, and there’s this guy who works for him, a foreign guy, Polyp, you might have met him — he wears his pants funny, makes weird faces — this Polyp’s a jerk, even worse than the builder, and just a couple days before I finished painting your house, Polyp says to the builder, who’s building like twenty other houses in your development alone, he says to the builder he wants a raise, an unheard-of-type raise, like fifty percent. And not just for him. Polyp tells the builder his whole crew wants a raise, and if the builder, Polyp says, refuses to give them this raise, they’re gonna walk away, just like that, leave the builder in the lurch, and not only that, but there’s this veiled threat that’s in there, because if you want to know how a fresh-off-the-boatsky chucklehead like Polyp, who, by the way, is also a degenerate gambler and a part-time pimp — if you want to know how a guy like Polyp gets such a plum job building houses for nice couples in the suburbs, I’ll tell you this much: it’s not because he doesn’t have crooked uncles in the unions who know how to set structure fires that look like acts of God. So what can the builder do? Take a personal loss to pay Polyp’s crew? Well, yes, he could do that, he could make less money, but like I said he’s a shyster, so instead of cutting into his profits, what he cuts is corners. All kinds of corners. Luckily, like I said, this all happened just a couple days before we finished your house, so the only corner left to cut there was the paint, and not even all the paint, just the paint in the master bedroom. The paint we used for the rest of your house was good, but the brand that we used in your bedroom was this recently banned Indonesian brand of paint. The builder got hold of hundreds and hundreds of cans of it for cheap from I don’t know where — probably Polyp’s uncles. The thing about this paint, though, was some of it was tainted with mold or bacteria or something — I never got it straight — but some of it was tainted with something weird and Indonesian that, first of all, cracks sometimes, to varying degrees, and second of all, sometimes, especially in the dark, it attracts some other kind of mold or bacteria that causes that paste stuff to form. Thus: banned. Now, I’d never seen this paint before I painted your bedroom, but the builder, who supplies me with my materials, he brought me two cans of it with the labels stripped off, which should have told me something, but I refused to imagine what that something could be. The first can must not have been tainted, though, right? Because the rest of your bedroom walls didn’t crack, right? But the second one, which I barely used — the one I left in your basement closet — that was the one that your cracked wall got painted with. Anyway, after I painted over the crack in your wall, I saw the builder the next day, and I told him about your pasty crack because I figured he owed me money for going over to your house like that on a Sunday, especially considering how that jerk Polyp was getting such a big raise and I was getting nothing. And that’s when he came clean about how it wasn’t just cheap stuff in those label-stripped cans, but tainted Indonesian stuff. And he told me that if you ever called me again, I had to call him , and he’d go out there himself to smooth things over with you and replace the wall, because some of those other houses we used the tainted paint on? The newer houses that we used only the tainted paint on? Some of them had wall-cracks oozing pastes and gels like your one wall did, but then a couple of them — the walls were actually, like, crumbling . And so the builder, he was scared that if he didn’t replace the tainted-painted walls, something terrible would happen — some kid would eat the pasty stuff and die, or a wall behind a crib would crumble violently and a pointy chunk would fall and spear a fontanel or something, and then the jig would be up. Not just for him, but for me, too — I’d painted a lot of those walls myself. Lucky for us, the one thing you can always count on the owner of a newly built home to do is complain. So every time there’s been a complaint about a crack, the wall gets replaced and I paint it using good stuff. If it’s any comfort, you probably got hit by the taint less badly than anyone else. I want you to know, though, that I’m sorry for using cheap paint in your bedroom to begin with, but what I’m even much sorrier for than that is that I didn’t say anything to you about the paint being tainted that night you called me, after you’d painted the wall yourself, especially because I assumed, at the time, that you’d used the tainted paint I’d left in your basement, which obviously you didn’t because the crack didn’t come back, right? But please accept my apology, man. I am humble before you, and I’m telling you the truth now. I was just really afraid that I’d ruin my reputation or even go to jail is why I kept quiet, and I consider you a friend, even though we don’t know each other that well — that conversation we had on your driveway about cars, and that killer Rwandan coffee we drank together… I feel like we bonded, and, above all, I just hope you appreciate the risk I’m putting myself at here, in telling you all this stuff that could really, if the wrong person found out — it could really ruin my entire life — and I hope you can forgive me… Why are you looking at me like that? What’s that look mean, man? What is that? You laughing? Are we okay? Are you laughing because we’re okay or because…?”