Celebrity Janitor

It’s the next big thing. Any day now. Just around the next corner. Brace yourself for celebrity janitors. Like celebrity chefs, but cleaning instead of cooking.

An Anthony Bourdain of the beige coveralls and belt-hoop keyring, hitherto undiscovered, will write an exposé. It will have to be in the off hours, on the thin margins of the quotidian exigencies of life behind the broom, the long hours, the dirty fingernails, the elbow grease, the body weariness of it all. It won’t take long for the book, hot off the presses, to make a dent, to upturn the industry and expose its unsavory underbelly.

It isn’t hard to imagine what comes next. Janitor influencers. Entire channels on television dedicated to the minutiae of custodial arts. Contestants on reality shows standing at attention will sheepishly offer the magic words, “yes, jan” or “right away, jan!”

Aspiring janitors, training day and night, will wonder if they have what it takes. Naturally, not everyone does. Some will fall to the wayside, many. There will be no shortage of those who imitate the externalities of the trade, and no shortage of those who seek to profit off the trend. Sales will soar of the most recognizable indicators, the Sketcher waterproof steel toe slip-on work shoes, yellow-and-black Rubbermaid supply carts, beige coveralls, beltloop keyrings. But few will hear the calling, deep down, the voice, on the fringes of the day, when all the other noises die down. Few will realize that, if it is artistry that we are talking about here, they have got the order wrong: with the custodial arts, it isn’t the person who chooses the trade but the trade that chooses the person.

The future has arrived, I couldn’t help but think as I walked through the front doors of The Community Center, the other community center, the one on The Other Side of the Tracks, my side.

I had been sent there on a Special Mission by none other than The Big Boss, in the wake of The Incident, the unthinkable incident, the fight between janitors, a fist fight, punches throw, coveralls torn, little drops of blood on the floor, the yellow and black Rubbermaid supply cart tipped on its side, a falling out between brothers of the broom, in grave violation of The Custodial Code, so immutable, so binding that it doesn’t need to be written.

The Big Boss wanted to buy time. There was security camera footage to scrutinize. There were incident reports of file. There were many angles to consider and many lawyers to consult. This is where I came in. I was the placeholder, the spigot wedged into the damn to prevent it from bursting. I was the guest janitor, a celebrity of sorts, as it turned out.

News of my arrival had preceded me. I stepped in from the cold, tilted my head forward, and brushed the snowflakes from my flat cap. When I lifted my head, there they were, the welcoming committee, smiling wide, hands extending, just one step short of confetti, balloons, kazoos.

Incredulous, I turned around to check, but there was nobody behind me. I raised the pointer finger of my right hand and touched the breast pocket of my jacket on the left side, raising my eyebrows as I did so. The welcoming committee, with active-listening expressions on their faces, smiled even harder than they already were smiling, moving their heads up and down eagerly. Yes, I was the one that they were waiting for.

In my custodial career, nothing like that had ever happened before. It was as if the general rule of janitorial invisibility had been lifted, momentarily suspended, as if my status as a person of flesh and bone had been restored, as if I had materialized out of thin air spontaneously, right there in the doorway, before an unexpected audience. Unprepared, I felt naked and wanted to cover myself.

What is a janitor to say when greeted by a welcoming committee? What is the right response? What is the protocol? Last time I checked, this wasn’t on the script. In fact, on the train ride over, I had played it out in my head, how it was supposed to go. I was to slip in the building unnoticed and find my way, unassisted, to the supply closet. From there I would take to the floors, try my keys on all the doors, and make a mental map of the trash cans and bathrooms. Then I would awaken the Zamboni Walk-Behind Floor Scrubber from its slumber at the charging station and get to rambling. In other words, I would figure it out as I went. Like a jazz musician, I would improvise, venture out onto the fretboard of the guitar, one note at a time until they formed a melody, cascading, picking up speed, taking on a life of its own, until the floors were cleaned, the trash was emptied, and the last note of the solo rang in the half-stacks, its logical conclusion, the end of the shift. It was The Way of the Broom, and I hadn’t expected it to be otherwise.

Yet, there I was, in the entrance of the building, this other community center, on the other side of the tracks, my side, going off script. I removed my backpack, heavy with books and notebooks, and set it down at my feet. My greeters held the line as tightly as they held their smiles. In an odd reversal of events, what was intended as a gesture of goodwill on their part became a standoff, a moment of tension as I searched for the words that didn’t come. The best I could come up with was a question, one word, disguised as something else, a salutation with the intonation of an interrogative. “Hi?”

From deep within the folds of The Welcoming Committee, its core, an individual with a clipboard stepped forth and introduced herself as Megan, The Shift Manager. I took a step forward to shake her hand, now extended. The tension immediately dissipated, as the rest of The Welcoming Committee moved to encircle me.

Still uncertain what I had done to merit this treatment, I had the distinct impression that the future had arrived, that they were going to hoist me on their shoulders and parade me around the building boisterously, singing sailor songs and passing foamy bottles of ale from hand to hand and mouth to mouth. Was I the new captain, signalled out by omens, by the hairy forefinger of the gods, unbeknownst to me, to sail the ship to safer waters and serener shores? Was I a dignitary from a foreign power, an upside-down empire where custodians were running the show?

Megan interrupted my musings before they could get too decadent. “So, I’ll be showing you around today.” She turned around to face her entourage. “But, before we start, I wanted to introduce you to our crew.” By crew, she didn’t mean the whole crew, rather just a select group, the inner circle, the supervisors, ambassadors of their respective sections. There was Luca, the pool manager; Olivier from the cafeteria; Gabriel from the weight room; Madeleine, the coordinator of the kids’ classes; Khadija, the supervisor of the popular education section; and Ilse, assistant to the acting manager. By the time I could make my way around the circle, I had shaken more hands than I had since my arrival on these shores four years prior.

In yet another unexpected manoeuvre, Megan switched tones abruptly, changing the register of our conversation from formal to conversational.  “So, The Big Boss sent you,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning slightly toward me. Eager to hear my response, the rest of the entourage inched towards me as well. I felt suddenly smaller, just a pebble, smooth on all sides, surrounded by rocks, all coarseness and jagged edges.

“It’s a shame what happened,” Megan mused. This was my big break. She served me the perfect pitch, right down the middle. All I had to do was swing. More than anything, I wanted to talk about The Code, the foundation of our lifestyle as custodians. The problem, though, was that there is also a code about talking about The Code. The conditions have to be right. Not every time is the right time. Not everyone is receptive to our message. A false step can open to the door to ridicule, which is to say further ridicule, considering the social standing of janitors, our unsure footing.

“Sure is,” I said, biting my lip. My little dilemma about whether to mention the custodial code went unnoticed by my interlocutors, who, as it turns out, were more interrogators than anything else. Megan’s comment, having put us squarely in the territory of small talk, opened the floodgates. A barrage of questions ensued, all of which revolved around The Incident, which, from the looks of it, had become a burning issue at this other community center. Who threw the first punch? Did they take them away in the paddy wagon? How long behind bars? What disciplinary actions are being discussed? Suspension? Expulsion? Banishment? Expiation? Termination? When? Who? How long? Guard up, face covered by my forearms, I was dodging questions like punches.

The whole misunderstanding hinged on the assumption, an erroneous one, that I knew something that they didn’t, that I had inside information, some juicy nugget of knowledge from the secret society of janitors, the custodial underground, ears to the tracks. Or perhaps my conversation with The Big Boss, normally so distant and inaccessible, out of the reach of us mortals, had imbued me with an aura of importance, mystery, immortality.  

The truth, however, was unglamorous, as it usually is: I knew nothing about The Incident that they didn’t know. In her dealings with me, The Big Boss had been aloof, austere, sparse, Spartan. She obtained my commitment to cover the necessary shifts without trafficking in details, without throwing me more than a few meager crumbs, the same ones that everyone else had been nibbling at.

I considered the possibility of withholding my banal truth, of answering their questions coyly, of making myself desirable for a change, of reveling in the power of knowing something that they didn’t, even if what I knew wasn’t what they wanted to know but, rather, the fact that I indeed didn’t know what they wanted me to know. At the very least I would save myself the unpleasantry of yet again being a disappointment. I imagined myself twisting the tips of my moustache, a sinister grin emerging from the edges of my mouth, as I indulged, as I basked in the glow of their attention.

But I just didn’t have it in me. I’ve never been good at gossip. Besides, such behavior would be an unpardonable breach of The Custodial Categorical Imperative.

I felt hot all of a sudden in the area of the cheeks and face. I felt smaller than before, smaller than even for a pebble, sinking to the bottom, leaving a tenuous trail of bubbles. Their words became scrambled, a language that I was unable to decipher. It was if the sounds reached me from far away, from the end of a long tunnel, dark with just a pinprick of light at the other end. Something was coming loose, the moorings, and I started to spin, slow at first but then picking up speed, until I blurted it out.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you.” Once I got started, the words came easy, irreflexively. “The Big Boss called me into her office and asked me to cover some shifts. Her lips were sealed. She didn’t say at word. The days and times of the shifts to be covered. That’s it. Not a word more. When if I asked her if everything was alright, she basically said that it was none of my business and that I should stick to cleaning the floors, which is what I know about, and leave the managing to her, which was her job after all.” I paused and felt the future, in its fullness, recede from the present, scant as always. “Hell,” I continued, “you guys know more than I do.”

“What?” I couldn’t identify the source of the expletive. It seemed to come from all their mouths at the same time.

There wasn’t an active-listener smile in sight. The faces of my interlocutors went blank until, little by little, their features reassembled under a new sign, a different register, a divergent tone, less consternated than irritated, less puzzled than angry. My refusal to play by the rules of the game, it seems, came as a betrayal. “So, it’s going be like that?” The comment seemed to come from the pool supervisor, or maybe it was the assistant to the acting manager.

The circle was broken, and the congregants disbanded. “Whatever, dude,” one of them whispered under their breath upon walking off to their respective sector of The Community Center.  

Perfunctorily, Megan escorted me to the supply closet, just a few steps away, under the main staircase. The tour ended there. “You’ll find everything you need here.” For better or worse, they were the last words spoken to me for the remainder of the shift.