Kinney Shoes

Akron, OH

Iam colorblind. As handicaps go, it’s not burdensome. In fact, the biggest annoyances have nothing to do with colors and more with how people react when learning you are colorblind. Say you are at a party and you’ve been asked to grab the red bottle but you only see brown bottles. So you share that you are colorblind: The people at the party will react like you just announced you competed in the last Olympics. Some won’t believe it; others demand proof; scads of questions are immediately thrown upon you:

“What color is this carpet to you?”

“How do you know what light is on at an intersection?!”

“Can you see the future?”

Several times, a party-goer has approached me and, in all seriousness, announced: “I have bad news. You can’t be an astronaut. It’s a rule. NASA won’t allow colorblind people to steer their shuttles.” On one occasion, someone said this—that I cannot be an astronaut—right after I had shot a champagne cork into my face. As though I could even reach a point in the interview process where NASA is testing my eyesight. I’ve run out of gas on the highway three times, in major cities; I simply don’t look at the gauge. My college won’t release my grades until I pay parking tickets. I don’t see NASA saying, “Action-wise, we like how this kid manages travel and learning; let’s just hope his eyes come in good”.

Color blindness is, in most cases, not as dramatic as the public believes. The world is not black-and-white to us. We see colors and pure shades. Things like sky blue or grass green are easy to identify, but mixed, in-between shades are tough to identify: a dark red may appear brown; light greens are difficult to separate from light reds or khaki. The point being: unless you are formally tested for it at school or the doctor’s office, you can live a long time—maybe your whole life—without knowing you are colorblind.

I learned I was colorblind the way most people do: Aged fourteen, working at a shoe store.

A group of women entered our store (Kinney Shoes) to collect the shoes and handbags they had specially ordered and customized for their wedding party. “Of course, ma’am,” I told the future bride then exited to the back, to fetch her shoes and handbags.

I started working at the store this same week and was mostly hired to dye shoes. My cousin managed the store and my father asked him to hire me. I was a talented artist; nothing prodigious, but a few of my paintings at both grade school and high school advanced to being on display at academic art workshops at the local college. My cousin told my dad that I was not old enough to sell shoes and their stockroom needs were light, but, if I could paint that great, they needed someone to dye shoes.

This wedding party was my first party.

I returned to the counter, placed boxes on the table, and removed a pair of shoes for her to approve the dye job they had requested: a bright pink.

“What the fuck is this?” asked the bride.

“Your party’s shoes, ma’am. Five pairs of pumps and five purses, correct?”

“Are you fucking with me?” she demanded.

I looked back, confused.

“Today is not the day to be fucking with me,” she asserted.

This is how I learned I was color-blind. When I ruined a bride’s wedding shoes, twenty-four hours before the ceremony.

The shoes I had presented were not pink; they were gray. They looked perfectly pink to me but I was later told by my manager that they looked “grayer than my fucking marble counter top!”

To this day, I have many problems with pink and gray, but that moment, I had a bigger issue: this bride’s shoes were not the correct color and the two people dealing with the problem were me—a teenager who doesn’t know he is colorblind—and her, an anxious bride who thought everyone is trying to fuck with her.

I attempted to defuse the tension by opening the other four shoe boxes, along with the packages containing the purses. Each was equally gray.

“You will notice how consistent everything is,” I affirmed to her.

I then took out her swatch. When a wedding party needs shoes dyed to match a dress, they provide a swatch of the material to the store to use as a reference. I put the bright pink scrap of fabric on top of the gray pumps and confidently declared: “You will notice how perfect the match is.”

At that point, the bride became so angry she had to walk away.

The assistant manager of the store walked to the counter and calmly asked, “Sean, do those shoes look pink to you?”

“Yeah, of course. They don’t to you?”

The bride walked back: “Bro! That shoe is grayer than a fucking dolphin!”

At this point, my manager (also my cousin) heard what was going on. He walked over and looked at the shoes.

“This looks pink to you?” he asked.

“Isn’t it?” I answered.

Initially he looked confused, staring at several hundred dollars of now-worthless, grey inventory. Then it hit him:

“Oh, FUCK! He can’t see colors!!” He hired me expressly for my artistic ability and I was asked to dye three other wedding parties that morning.

“What do you mean?” asked the bride.

“It means, we’re screwed!” he yelled as he ran back to the stockroom to see how badly I had dyed the other shoes for all the other wedding parties.

 

The following week, I asked the school nurse if I could be tested for colorblindness. The nurse administered what they call the Ishihara Test, where you are asked to identify numbers within circles of many-colored dots. As a man who has flunked thousands of tests (failing an eye test is no different than failing a history exam) you know it’s not going well as you are taking it.

The nurse would ask: “What number do you see inside the circle?”

“There’s a number in there?”

“Whoa, so you don’t see anything?”

After the final page in the test, the nurse consulted a chart and summated: “You are color-blind. Red/green to be exact. Normally, this is where I tell the student they can’t be an astronaut but, well Mr. Flannery, I’m assuming you don’t see yourself in outer space, given your grades.”

Over the years, I have been fired from multiple jobs due to my color blindness; which I consider to be unfair and a potential violation of the American With Disabilities Act. Of course, my previous employers might counter that my only real disability is that I was a jackass; the mix-ups on color merely served as reminders that they had been meaning to fire me.

I worked at a restaurant in college that required us to wear a white shirt with black pants. My manager hated me; I constantly arrived late, joked around, bungled orders and, in addition to those frustrations, owned so few white shirts that I frequently had to substitute a light blue or pale beige one.

One day, on which I was late, mis-entered several orders, and broke a chair laughing with other employees—all while wearing a blue shirt—my manager laid down the law: “If you come in next shift either late or without a white shirt, don’t even bother clocking in because you don’t have a job.” I drove to an Old Navy that night to get white dress shirts and, fortuitously, they were on sale for the incredible price of $2 a shirt. I bought every large in stock: fifteen shirts. The next day, I was late again by about twenty minutes, but I hoped my crisp white shirt might be enough to quell my boss’s anger. I entered, said “Hi” to the hostess as I passed down the main hall, at which point I noticed my manager staring at me hotly. I raised my arms defensively, “I know I’m late! I know I’m late. But”—I pointed at my shirt—“this ought to make you happy.”

What I didn’t know is that the reason Old Navy had these dress shirts on sale for only $2 is that they were all hot pink. I was wearing a shirt that looked white to me but to everyone else looked like something a bullfighter would wear. Which means, not only was I arriving late again, but my manager believed I purposefully dressed myself in a flamingo blouse purely to taunt him.
 

The most recent time I was fired for color blindness, my boss felt even more disrespected. I was working for a consulting company who flew me out to Dallas each week to develop software for a telecommunications firm. I drank with coworkers until last call on most nights and, when I am hungover or sleep-deprived, I get these large, dark bags around my eyes. Because of how pale I am, it can sometimes be confused for a black eye. This was one of many things that my manager hated about me: That I would go before clients, who were paying a lot of money for what they thought were the best software developers in America, looking like I had lost a bar fight about three hours earlier.

One morning, after I had strolled in late, he confronted me:

“Sean, if you come in tomorrow with those damn black eyes, it will be your last day. We are meeting with their head of new business and I can’t have you looking like you just arrived from the emergency room.”

I think he expected me to acquiesce, but, back then, I never missed an opportunity to disagree with management.

“Legally,” I responded, “you cannot fire me because my eye sockets are flawed.”

“Damnit, I know you look like shit because you’re out drinking every night. I approve the damn expense receipts each morning, so I see what you are doing. Don’t act like you have some facial deformity for Christ’s sake!”

I doubled down: “The way I behave—what I do outside of company time—it’s part culture, part religion, and all my choice.”

I walked away, leaving him to chew on that rather confusing evasion. About two hours later my manager approached me.

“I think I have a solution,” he began, apprehensively. I’m not positive who he consulted to help devise this proposal—a woman in Human Resources; his wife; a mob fixer; somebody—but he continued: “I don’t want you to have black eyes, but you want to stay out all night, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Well, what do you think of makeup?”

“What do you mean?”

“Makeup can hide a black eye. What if you buy makeup for tomorrow’s meeting? I’ll let you expense it.”

“I think that’s a fair request.”

We shook hands, feeling this was a great business compromise and perhaps the start of a new, more-agreeable relationship between us.

The next morning, I arrived late and barged straight into this important meeting. Per request, I had used make-up to cover my dark, sunken eye sockets. Make-up that was bright green, but which I thought matched my skin-tone perfectly. As my coworker would put it later: “You looked like Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie opening the wrong office door.”

I sat down and introduced myself, having no idea that I have two giant, green ovals around my eyes. I then turn to my manager, delivered a big grin, and proudly pointed to my face.

I was fired.
 

Ionce read that colorblindness occurs at such a high rate—almost one in ten males—that it most likely had some evolutionary benefit. The theory is that tribes with a few colorblind members hunted better since those people, the colorblind people, could identify quarry that appeared camouflaged to everyone else. There is even some modern evidence of this effect: During World War Two, the Allies specifically stationed colorblind soldiers amongst their spotters because the colorblind guards often detected threats that appeared hidden to people with normal vision.

Maybe my people—color-blind jackasses—peaked in the Stone Age. We could wake up late, hungover on fermented prunes, roll out of our burrow, spot some grouse that’s hiding in a tree that no one else can see, point it out and let the athletes of the tribe go kill it, then return to bed, a hero.

Which is why, when someone at a party announces that I am colorblind and people begin telling me that I cannot be an astronaut, I now respond:

“Well, you better hope we don’t have to hunt up there, amigo.”