Synaesthesia I: A Life of Colors, The Early Years

From the time I could recognize letters, each had a color; numbers were an almost psychedelic experience, and 3-D graphs and spatial images just popped into my head. At age 7, the Age of Reason, I decided that the key to life was color-balanced ratios.

The Revelation

I never learned to read. At least I don’t remember learning. I do recall a few times when I was 4 or 5 sitting on the floor with my father while he read to me. I would drift off if a bear started acting too human; it just wasn’t possible, so why bother?

1 evening my father was reading to me and I had slipped off his lap and blocked his view of the book. He stopped reading, but I was still looking at the book. Then he asked, ‘Can you read this?’

I had never drawn a line between reading and not reading. I figured I was reading by sitting with him. He said, ‘Your lips were moving. Were you just copying me?’ I had the vague feeling I needed to be hiding something.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me the closed book. I looked at him, still not sure. ‘Go ahead, read,’ he insisted.

I took the book, found the spot where we had stopped, and read:

The children were frightened. It was dark and cold. They walked and walked. The forest made sounds. ‘What is that?’ his sister cried out, grabbing his arm. ‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘A little bit,’ the boy admitted.

‘What’s that word?’ my father asked. ‘The long one?’

‘This one?’ I asked, showing him. ‘Frightened?’

‘I thought you knew how to read,’ he challenged. ‘How could that be frightened? There’s no ‘g’ sound and there are two ‘e’s’ that I don’t hear at all.’

‘Dad,’ I said reasonably. ‘It’s frightened, trust me. It fits just right. And you read words to me all the time with extra green letters. That’s just how they do it. Can we get back to the story? But it better not be some animal huffing and puffing.’

‘Extra green letters?’ my father asked in a tone I had never heard from him before.

‘What color do you think they are?’ I asked.

Ratio Issues

‘He thinks too much,’ my mother said 1st thing when my father came home 1 evening when I was 7. Then to me: ‘Stop thinking all the time!’

‘I tried to stop,’ I told them. ‘I can’t. The words just come.’

‘In living color,’ she commented, holding back a smile. ‘Tell your father about dinner,’ she suggested.

‘I was trying to help mom make dinner faster. I turned up the oven to 485. The ratio was right. I added 50%, and was going to cut the time by 50%. It should have worked.’

‘Why didn’t it work?’ my father asked her.

‘Some things need to cook slow. And don’t start in on ratios,’ she admonished me. ‘He thinks ratios will solve everything.’ I was sitting at the kitchen table starting a calculation.

‘Wait a minute,’ my father realized. ‘What number increased by 50% gave you 485 degrees?’

‘It wasn’t 485 exactly,’ I explained. ‘325 increased by 50% is 487 and 1/2. I lowered it a bit.’ I could see the colors of 1–6–2 point 5 — add them to 3-2-5 to get 4-8-7 point 5. Not the best color combo, but pretty good.

‘Show me the calculations,’ my father demanded.

‘I did it in my head,’ I said. I was supposed to show the work, and he was about to remind me. ‘The red pen was missing,’ I offered.

‘All right,’ my mother gave in. ‘I won’t touch his precious pens!’

‘You can use the pens, mom. Just put them back.’ That lingered for an instant and I added: ‘Sorry about the roast. I’ll figure out a way to fix it. There’s a moisture ratio, maybe we can replace the moisture.’

The Age of Reason

I thought the Age of Reason gave me free reign to indulge every passing thought and made me right about everything.

For Catholics, when a child reaches 7 years old, their sense of right and wrong is considered sufficiently developed to understand things like free will and God’s expectations. It didn’t mean that an 8 year-old child, no matter how clever, could decide they had a better system of grammar and punctuation rules in school.

‘We can’t have children making up their own rules,’ the young teacher told my mother. ‘And we haven’t taught the semi-colon yet and he uses it like he invented it.’

‘I didn’t make anything up,’ I insisted. I stopped myself from telling them the semi-colon was an irresistible deep purple.

‘But you give answers that are not what we studied,’ the teacher said. ‘We do not spell behavior with a u. You’re not even British.’

‘Both spellings are accepted,’ I informed her.

‘By who? And if they’re both accepted, you can spell it like we studied it.’

‘The word looks wrong without a red letter,’ I slipped.

‘This is not a coloring book,’ the teacher said, her finger stabbing the worksheets I had turned in. She was normally gentle and understanding, but I had worn her out. She tried to compromise: ‘I marked behaviour wrong, but instead of taking away four points, I’ll only take away two. Because you know the right way to spell it, and you had a reason.’

‘I wouldn’t mention reason,’ my mother warned. ‘That could be a problem.’

The following year our school was used as a pilot site for a new aptitude test. ‘This could mean a lot for your future,’ my father said. ‘High schools will look at it, and you can get a leg up right now. But you’ll have to answer the questions the traditional way. No variations, no colored pens.’

‘I even have to write like Harris’s or Davis’s?” I asked with some disgust. ‘Maybe I could write belongs to Davis and avoid the whole mess.’

‘See? You already know what they want. It will be a good exercise.’

‘For what?’ I demanded.

The test was 75 questions; I finished in under an hour. I checked my work and had to change “37” to “thirty-seven.” I mean, 98% of the stuff we wrote was letters. We needed some variation. And numbers were very bright and colorful. But they had their rules. The questions with “none of the above” were the hardest. There was always a reason to reject an answer, but I knew they wanted me to choose a “good enough” answer. It didn’t help that the whole phrase “none of the above” took on the color of its letter choice — yellow for “d” or dark green for “e”. It was almost begging me to select it, but I listened to my father and tried to think like them.

I turned in the exam wordlessly to my teacher and went to the office and asked the secretary to call my mother to pick me up. I was nauseous and dizzy. That evening my temperature registered 102 degrees. When my father got home he came into my bedroom, felt my forehead, looked at the thermometer.

‘Your test score was higher than that,’ he told me. ‘You did the extra credit too, got 110 points. Congratulations.’

Out in the Real World

The perception of colors and other secret associations with words and numbers could have marked me as an arrogant intellectual, or a weird nerd, but in my teenage years I was primarily seen as an incorrigible rebel, angry and defiant and to be harshly put in my place. The initial fascination with my learning modes, on my part and that of everyone else, took a backseat to the response to my increasingly oppositional behavior.

As I entered the work world, I would initiate changes from any position I held; my lack of a title was no barrier. I would streamline processes and zip from Step 1 to Step 10 without addressing Steps 3, 6 and 8, for example — those Steps had been blacked out, and the essential Steps glowed with their natural colors: burgundy for Step 2, green for Step 5, pink for 8. There would be initial amazement at the speed with which tasks were completed, but invariably someone in a Step 3 function would be looking for something, not find it, and create paranoia around its absence. No amount of logic or even data could penetrate these layers of fear; this would filter up to mid-level management who defaulted to a worst-case scenario mentality, and my innovations would be rolled back.

My first full-time job was at a factory that manufactured parts for RVs. I was 18. I worked on an assembly line about 1/2 the time, and worked under Bob Gordon, the elderly Shipping and Receiving Manager, the other 1/2. Bob was hobbled by a bad leg and some internal problems, and soon he went on medical leave.

After a week of the department floundering without leadership, I went to the crew chief, a 30 year-old hustler named Danny Ramos who I had enlisted as a Spanish tutor, and proposed that I take over the department in the leader’s absence. He pitched it to upper management, and the next day he told me they were willing to give it a try.

‘Speaking some Spanish was good. They won’t go any higher than $2.25 an hour,’ the crew chief said sadly. ‘I pushed for $2.50 but they said you had to prove yourself. And you don’t get a title.’

I had been making $1.85 an hour. ‘That’s a 22% raise,’ I said in amazement. I hadn’t even thought of that; I was more excited about charts and tables and time studies that I would be able to create as I explored efficiencies. I could already see the colors and the symmetrical ratios, a synaesthete’s Holy Grail.

‘Is that good?’ Danny Ramos asked.

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘I’m still your supervisor,’ he advised me.

‘El jefe,’ I acknowledged.

Señor Compasión

It was me and a crew of three: Servando Medina and his younger cousin Carlos, both from Michoacan, and a friend of mine from high school, Garry Stalk, a 6'2" whacked-out hippie who was strong as an ox and would burst out with a bizarre laugh a few times an hour for no reason that anyone could figure. Servando ran the factory betting pool: World Cup soccer, American basketball, baseball, boxing matches at weights below 130 lbs, mostly Latinos vs. Filipinos, a fierce rivalry.

With Garry off on Sugar Mountain, Servando taking a stroll every 20 minutes or so to check on some bet he needed to finalize, and me lost in time studies and color-coded space utilization charts, the bulk of the physical work fell to Carlos, a good-natured kid who tried to follow my directions but would sneak off to ask Servando what I meant by cuatro filas de cinco cajas or una orden mixta, which Servando would figure out, but — eavesdropping — two middle-aged men from Argentina would stop by to see me at the end of each day to correct my butchered Spanish. I did marginally better with Carlos, but Servando wanted nothing to do with snooty Argentine Spanish, and he was constantly arguing with Martín, the older man, about language and soccer.

One evening at a local bar that attracted South Americans and served me without questioning my age, we were continuing a discussion about cultural differences. Antonio — the other Argentine, very dashing and the strong silent type — asked me why I cared about the poor, and a few beers in and loose, I fabricated an answer: Porque tengo compasión, having no idea if compasión was a word or not. After a second of stunned disbelief, Antonio and Martin became hysterical, almost falling over in drunken laughter. Soon the whole bar was in on the merriment, and I emerged from the evening with a new nickname, Señor Compasión, the “ñ” joining the semi-colon in glorious purple.

The temporary gig as the Shipping and Receiving leader stretched on, as Bob Gordon was taking a long time to recover from surgery. Within a month I had changed almost everything, and was pushing on other departments to respect my new rules. There had been a tradition of tearing apart incoming orders in our area and just leaving the trash around. The rationale was that we had access to the roll-up door and the trash bins. I was trying to run a tight ship, but was continually arguing with a few of the old-timers. In retaliation, someone went to the Vice President about my procedure of fork-lifting strapped orders out into the pick-up area instead of leaving them inside. The V.P., a nervous dude named Fred who seemed wary of me, watched at closing time one evening as I fork-lifted a strapped order back into the warehouse.

‘That’s a waste of time,’ Fred informed me. ‘Don’t put orders outside. You just have to drive them back in if the pick-up is delayed.’

I tried to explain that less than 10% of orders weren’t picked up, and that we worked so much more efficiently in the warehouse if we weren’t dodging large pallets of boxes as we moved about. Fred was having none of it, and ordered me to keep the prepared pallets inside. Two days of that proved impossible, we were slowed considerably, and Carlos had tripped over a badly positioned pallet and hurt his hip, so I asked for a meeting with the President to make my case.

My First Meeting

I arrived at 10:00 AM as scheduled for the meeting, carrying the folders that held my various charts and tables to bolster my case.

Fred had gathered a large team, maybe 6 or 7 mid-level leaders from various departments, and they were already in place around the conference table, chatting, ignoring my entrance. I took a seat, waited as the group finished the conversation, endured an awkward minute until Jerry, the President, showed up. He was an amiable guy, smart but distant from the factory floor, and he gave Fred a wide berth to run the place as the V.P. saw fit. Danny Ramos was there, looking a bit nervous, and Bob Gordon, the Shipping and Receiving Manager, apparently able to get out of bed now, was sitting right next to Fred, who was wearing the sly grin of the cat who had just eaten the canary.

‘Well, Fred,’ Jerry said, settling in. ‘What’s going on?’

‘He called the meeting,’ Fred said, indicating me. ‘Let him begin.’

I began with the efficiency and safety of clearing the work space, but Bob Gordon said the orders had never hampered work in his time. I passed around the charts and time studies. No one was interested except Jerry, who thumbed through them while Fred orchestrated the group’s critical commentary on every change I had tried to implement. The New Projects Engineer defended tearing apart orders and leaving the trash by the roll-up door as key to his efficiency.

‘It has always been our job,’ Bob Gordon offered.

‘If he wasn’t pushing those orders out into the parking lot,’ the Engineer reasoned, ‘the trash wouldn’t be a problem.’

‘If you read the charts,’ I insisted, ‘you’d see how much more was getting done.’

‘These are good,’ Jerry commented. ‘We should take some time to study these. And maybe there’s a simple solution. Can you spare storage space that can be left empty and all the trash can go there? It will be contained, wouldn’t that work for everyone?’

‘Bob?’ Fred asked before I could respond.

‘I don’t see that it’s necessary,’ the man said, beginning to fade. He grew pale and his eyes seemed cloudy and unfocused.

‘I see places in this space chart — ‘ Jerry pointed out.

‘He spends work time on those,’ the Business Manager chimed in. ‘I see him all the time measuring the floor and writing at the shipping desk with a calculator.’

‘That’s going to stop,’ Fred assured everyone. ‘Bob will be back in a month, and he should find things as he left them. No one authorized any changes.’

‘I guess we’re done then,’ Danny Ramos suggested, eager to go.

‘Sure,’ Fred agreed. ‘Danny, keep an eye on things over there. Get them back to how they were.’

It ended up that Fred supervised the roll-back to how things were. He assigned a few extra workers to position the inventory according to Bob Gordon’s vague preferences, and he used me to translate his orders to the Spanish-speaking workers.

Out of Jerry’s sphere of awareness, Fred had no interest in the CEO’s very workable solution to create a tear-down area and contain the desastre. The torn-apart incoming shipments seemed to be purposely flung about, pallets and ripped up boxes and long strips of plastic strapping blocking walkways and obscuring packaged orders, and when pick-ups were delayed as orders were not visible with all the tumult, Fred would bark at me to find them, once asking loudly, ‘What am I paying you the 40 cents an hour for?’ I didn’t have an answer, but one came from an unexpected source: Garry Stalk, who broke off from one of his cackles to move next to Fred, sort of hovering over him.

‘This isn’t working,’ he told Fred directly. ‘It’s a mess. And he was doing the work of three people,’ he said, indicating me.

Fred looked uncomfortable, shot a dagger of a glance at me, then turned to Danny Ramos, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. ‘We need to make some changes,’ Fred mumbled, and wandered off.

Act of God

This continued for a few weeks, and if Fred wasn’t around no one touched the trash, and pallets that had been partially broken apart would have nails and shards protruding. A worker had to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot after stepping on a nail that pierced his shoe and broke the skin of his sole; the man was undocumented, and Workers Comp refused to cover him. The Business Mgr. found a creative way to pay for the ER visit, but Fred wasn’t putting 2+2 together.

Carlos did the clean-up when he could, but the fork-lifting was time consuming as he maneuvered around all the obstacles; Fred would watch him as the whole department stopped, unable to do anything until the large fork lift was out of our way. I studied Fred as he observed Carlos, our best driver, waste triple the time I would have driving the orders out and back, the few times it was even necessary. Data showed that 5% of the orders would have needed to be brought back in. Fred showed no sign that the decisions he made caused distress or hurt the work flow.

Since I had been told to put away the procedures manual and the statistics, I carried a small pad in my back pocket and kept stats in shorthand. Even with the 2 extra workers, the work output was abysmal, and more and more trucks would show up and have to wait as in a panic 8 assembly line workers would be pulled to put a pallet together. We started seeing wait time charges on trucking invoices, as much as $100 per hour.

One October morning we arrived to find the roof of the factory had caved in overnight and a fire had caught and because there was so much wood fuel from the pallets, a lot of damage was done. After the fire was out, a steady rain began to fall, and inventory was deteriorating by the hour. Fred had been at the site since 2am, trying to cover the inventory with tarps, but his efforts were futile. Hardly coherent, Fred laid everyone off on the spot, just yelled to the group assembled on Olympic Boulevard: ‘Factory is closed. Go home indefinitely,’ but the majority of us just stood there, looking at the smoldering rubble.

A few days later Jerry called me in for a debrief and to counsel me on unemployment benefits. Only a small storage hut at the back of the property was accessible, and all the administrators were there, two men for each small folding table, boxes and old equipment shoved into corners. He took a few phone calls while I was with him. He was trying to convince the insurance people that an Act of God had caused the roof to cave, not a structural flaw. ‘Acts of God pay a lot better,’ he explained to me, ‘although they’re doubtful it was a meteor.’ He was holding my charts and tables as we spoke, and he looked them over after we finished with the unemployment information. He did not mention a reopening date or anything about the future of the company.

‘These are really good,’ he told me, ‘and I have no doubt you were more productive with all the things you did. But can I give you a little advice?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t do much good,’ he offered, ‘to live in blazing color in a black and white world. People get overwhelmed. You could slow down a bit and advance in smaller steps.’ He tapped the folder on his knee, looked at me to gauge if I had understood his message. ‘I’m going to keep these,’ he said, ‘since you produced them on my dime. And also our pay-out on the fire will be higher because we have instruction manuals and data. They figure they’ll pay out less on the back end if everyone is trained and we have it together.’

‘Those are pretty rough,’ I said. ‘Not sure they’ll be helpful. And they were never implemented.’

‘They’ll be worth almost $2,000 in premium reductions,’ Jerry told me. “On top of the pay-out benefits, which I think I can get $4 or 5K more based on these. You took the initiative, I know you worked on these at home after you were told not to use work time. I want to thank you for that. You put a lot into your work here. I appreciate that, really.’

I almost offered to polish the documents into a final product, make them substantial and long-lasting. They could pay me for the work while the factory underwent restoration. I could see the cover page, a table of contents, section headings — and the elegant charts, graphs and tables, and a new visual I called “Directionals,” using arrows and symbols and shading that defined various strands of company work in a flow like a river, up to 6 strands, and how they were trending, where they were headed, how they were intersecting or didn’t with other strands …… but that was too much blazing color for an operation that may never get going again. Jerry had what he needed. We said goodbye, shook hands, and my time as an Interim Factory Shipping and Receiving Department Head was complete. I was nineteen years old.

I took a trip to Oregon to see the Grateful Dead in Eugene, and when I returned the Unemployment Office refused to pay me for the two weeks I was gone. ‘You went to Eugene to look for work as a dishwasher?’ the clerk asked me, squinting at the form I had filled out.

‘I don’t have the right to explore moves to new locations?’ I pushed back. ‘They need dishwashers everywhere.’

‘I’m not approving this,’ she said with finality. ‘Next time talk to an employment counselor before you go and we’ll see if it gets the green light.’

I appealed and actually won the case six weeks later, partially because the woman had resigned and there was no one there to counter my statements.

That’s the way it goes sometimes, I was learning. Hard work and innovation gets a whole organization to come down on your head, but someone doesn’t show up and you win a sketchy case of a few hundred dollars by default.

I took community college classes in the evening and started working on a book I was calling The Synaesthete’s Guide to Survival in a Grayscale World. Even fellow synaesthetes had trouble with my spelling of the word, the ae being the British spelling. ‘It’s from the original Latin,’ I would offer, but no one was interested in the beautiful pink-grey of the ae, a unique and aesthetically pleasing combination. It was an official letter in some Scandinavian languages, which impressed no one.

During that year I began to note that the national aesthetic changed from a florid, colorful blend of psychedelic swirls and East Indian intricacies to scaled-back, primary-color presentations. I first saw the transition in TV commercials, which were also using asymmetrical angles and all sorts of techniques that were leaning more toward irony than the bright hues and color-rich contrast that was so much a part of the way I saw the world. Clothing styles became monochromatic as The Gap set the new standards with its khaki and button-down look.

I was 20 years old and had become obsolete. Lacking direction and out of ideas — a rarity for me — I joined the Air Force. Of the jobs they had available at the time I wanted to enlist, I chose Aerospace Radar Operator.

Something about the ae in “aerospace” held a special attraction. I figured life choices had been made for worse reasons, and I went off to basic training.