Dinner Party

I’m not feeling myself today, The Over-Educated Janitor tells himself in an attempt to explain away his foul temperament, positively sulphuric, his spleen, enough of it to put even Baudelaire to shame.

Yet he is mistaken.  He is more himself than at any other moment. This is his condition, specific to his station in life, his vocation, weighed down with words, the mess of them, caught in their web, the web of half-hearted texts, of half-resolved theories, of half-finished projects, of half-baked plans. They pull on him, pull him down by his ankles, the hem of his pantleg, the cuff of his beige coveralls. His thoughts sink lower, towards the deep dark bottom, the shadowy realm, where the kraken lives, in its hidden lair, an impenetrable cloud of black ink.

He pushes the Rubbermaid yellow-and-black janitorial supply pushcart down the corridor and, at the foot of the bathroom, presses the footbrake into the locked position with the tip his Sketcher’s slip-on, two-tone, gray-and-black, steel-toed, waterproof work shoe. When he opens the door, there is a delay of a second or so before the motion detector activates the overhead lights. Not all the 48-inch cold fluorescent light bulbs come on at the same time. One or two of them lag behind the rest, the bad-tempered ones, the maladjusted, the problematic ones, the late bloomers. They flick and flash and click and thrash and writhe and act out until, buzzzzzzz, they finally fall into line, until they catch up with the rest.

The stragglers have gotten their act together, problem children that they are, and the overhead lights now shine in unison, monochord, locked on the same note. Irradiating coldness, institutionality, they reveal a warzone. The floor is littered with paper towels. Not more than a few of them found their way to the trashcan underneath the paper towel dispenser. There is water on the counter, hair in the drains, handprints on the mirrors. It doesn’t take a forensic expert to reconstruct the scene of the crime, a relatively common one at that: someone shaved in the sink, clipped their fingernails, possibly toes as well. And, from the smell of it, there is a clogged toilet in the room, hopefully just one of them.

The Over-Educated Janitor has his work cut out for him. He knows what must be done but just can’t bring himself to do it. It is as if the cold gaze of the 48-inch tube fluorescent light bulbs, so institutional, so destitute, so eerie, has momentarily frozen him in his tracks.

The image returns, the one that has been hounding him all day, playing over and over in his thoughts. He sees it with the utmost clarity, down to the last detail, in his mind’s eye.  

There is a silhouette of a janitor on the horizon. Trash bag over his shoulder, as if it were a knapsack, as if he were about to hop a train, the janitor crosses the field, keys jangling defiantly, and deposits the trash bag in the dumpsters at the far curb. This is the point at which he usually turns back to face the building and embarks on his return trip down the footpath, through the park and its giant trees, towards The Community Center, in the clearing, from where he came.

But the janitor does not turn around, does not double back down the footpath towards the clearing and The Community Center, so well-lighted, inviting even. No, he just keeps going, the silhouette getting smaller as he goes, past the dumpsters, across the street, over the chain link fence, one foot over the other, along the railroad ties, the train tracks, now just a speck, until he gets lost in the thickets that grows on the far side of the tracks, where the landscape becomes unintelligible, pixelated.

Just like that, the janitor is gone, in mid-shift, in mid-sentence, in mid-air, never to return to the dirty toilets again, to the hair in the drains, to the heaps of dripping trash bags, to the smell of urine, so very tenacious, so loud, so corrosive. Weeks later, his name tag will wash up on shore, caught in the bushes along the fence, discarded, teeth mark on its edges. His beige coveralls, now tattered, will be found, bunched up and mud-stained, among the brambles that grow so unruly, so irreverently, so tenaciously along the tracks. It is the last they will hear of him, the last trace, a remnant, a souvenir of sorts, something to remember him by.

The Halfway House

The Over-Educated Janitor catches himself just in time, before his romantic anti-capitalist phantasy gets out of hand, the romantic anti-capitalist phantasy of Leaving It All Behind, before he takes it to that next step, the dangerous one, beyond emo, down the slippery slope, across the proverbial line in the sand, the one that separates the desire for escape, relatively innocent, adolescent even, from that other desire, bottomless, potentially very destructive, and equally seductive, that is, the revenge phantasy.

When he snaps out of it, becoming aware of his surroundings once again, the bathroom is every bit as grimy as before, every bit as malodorous. Removing the spray bottle from his belt loop and a rag from the front pocket of his beige coveralls, The Over-Educated Janitor takes a deep breath. He musters up the courage and then sets himself to the task at hand, the tasks, with blind abandonment, fury even, as if he has tapped into a hidden reserve of energy, pent-up somewhere inside of him, whose existence he had hitherto been unaware of.

His pulse quickens, his breathing changes, now more labored. Beads of sweat appear of his forehead, his face now flushed. The Over-Educated Janitor works with vigor, with care, with precision. But, try as he might, he just can’t focus of his work. Unable to scrub the bad thoughts away, they vie for his attention. They demand center stage. 

Susceptible to another bout of phantasy, he wants to get to the bottom of it, this mood of his, so sour. At what point did he set off the trip wire? Where, exactly, did the trap door open, the origin of this, his present freefall?

“Dinner party.” He pronounces the two words aloud, into the muggy air of the half-cleaned bathroom, yet he doesn’t hear them. He is unaware of even having pronounced them. The same thing happens with the next two words, “Yeah, right!”

“Dinner party.” he repeats, even more pejoratively than the first time and louder, loud enough to hear himself, his own words, to realize that he was talking to himself, involuntarily. It was as if the words had materialized on their own, from some deep wellspring, right there in the bathroom, like the bubbles on the countertops that appeared when he applied to cleaning products and started scrubbing and scouring.

Not a chance. There’s no way I’m going to a dinner party because what the hell is a dinner party is the first place? Who has dinner parties? Who thinks like that? Even if I were to have the bad taste, the pretentiousness, to stoop so low, as to attend something called a dinner party, there is no way I would do it with those people. Having picked up the train of thought, a high-speed train without brakes, The Over-Educated Janitor was more than happy to ride it out, to follow down the tracks towards its resolution, the end of the line, the ineluctable wreck, fast approaching.

He was equal parts relieved and irritated, relieved to have discovered what had been bothering him, irritated because the whole situation of The Dinner Party peaked his spleen.

Earlier in the day, when the morning matés were getting watery, when there were no longer any bubbles left on the surface of the yerba, huddled together at the base of the bombilla, The Over-Educated Janitor made the mistake of opening his email.

It had been over ten days since he did so. Pretty soon it would be more. He envisioned a day when he would no longer open his email, no longer respond to text messages, and limit his interpersonal interactions to work and whoever showed up on his doorstep at The Halfway House. He envisioned a day when he would be out of reach, out of touch, floating off past the breakers to where the sea is calm and the swells are wide as hillsides.

Old habits, they say, are hard to break. Preparing his desk for a few hours of work before work, that is, of writing before his shift at The Community Center, reference books piled high, index cards organized on the desktop before him, he set the thermos to one side and clicked the shortcut on his browser to his email account. That is when the trouble started.

There was an email from Jean Christophe, who, with his customary graciousness and elegance, invited him to a dinner party, the end-of-year dinner party of the department. All the professors would be there, all the grad students, all the non-teaching staff, like himself, Jean Christophe. He had spoken with the Organizing Committee and convinced them that it would be a good idea to invite The Over-Educated Janitor, given the context, that is, the non-tenure track teaching strike and the need to cover positions in several of the courses that, as it turns out, The Over-Educated Janitor had taught in the past.

At one point, Jean Christophe’s email took a turn, a change in register. It went from informing The Over-Educated Janitor of a situation, filling him in on the details of The Dinner Party, and extending an invitation to a more confidential tone, borderline conspiratorial. Moving in closer, at almost a whisper, Jay See wrote that The Dinner Party might be “a good opportunity” for The Over-Educated Janitor to get his “foot in the door,” his foot back in the door, the door to his former office, where his books once lined the shelves, a good opportunity to get in good with The Big Boss, The Chair, patch things up, to warm the relationship, precipitously cooled by The Great Debacle, the parting of ways, the schism over the war and the department’s zeal to prove to the university its willingness to fall into line, as dictated by its wealthy donors, unwaveringly prowar. The timing, Jay See wrote, couldn’t be better. Time was running out. Next semester was fast approaching, and there were courses to fill, by any means necessary, at the price of swallowing one’s pride even. The Over-Educated Janitor, then, represented a quick and easy solution for the department’s oversized problem. Nothing like a dinner party to smooth out the creases, to bury the hatchet, to put the past to rest, to reach an understanding, mutually beneficial. And what better way to do so than over cocktails, with a little color in the cheeks, cups overflowing, letting go of The Old, ushering in the The New, invigorated by the good will of the season?

The Over-Educated Janitor had no doubt about his co-conspirator’s sincerity and good intentions, his trademark graciousness. They were beyond question, as they always had been. Like none other, no one else on the inside, albeit from his liminal position, as non-teaching staff, or precisely because of it, because of his ability to look beneath the veil, because of his understanding of the inner workings of a sold-out institution, The Almost Ivy League University, Jean Christophe seemed to comprehend the situation of The Over-Educated Janitor, so delicate from the start, so volatile.

Nonetheless, the idea just didn’t sit well with The Over-Educated Janitor, not the idea that Jay See had thought of him and had the consideration to invite him to shindig but the thought of The Dinner Party itself. How was he supposed to react to The Department’s professors, who rake in six figure salaries, while he was making minimum wage? What was he to say while they talked about their exotic vacations to faraway destinations when he hadn’t left the city limits in over two years, when his idea of a trip is walking down to the riverfront to watch the lowboats line up at the port? What type of expression would he have on his face as he sipped extensive drinks in the halls of their mansions, knowing what awaited him, his single room at The Halfway House, with the mattress on the floor and stacks of books piled up against the wall? Would he be expected to make small talk? About what? Cleaning products? Janitoring? And who the hell uses the word ‘cocktail’ anyhow?

No, he just couldn’t do it. Shooting from the hip, the Over-Educated Janitor composed an off-the-cuff response to the email of his Ally on the Inside, his lifeline. In it, he said that, if The Chair wanted to speak with him, she knew how to reach him, confident, of course, that she would never do so. He had a few cold matés and stared blankly at the screen, pulling hard on the bombilla, producing the famous chirping sound of the air filtering through the wet yerba, but he just couldn’t press send. Unnerved, he stood up from his desk to pace the floors of The Halfway House, and he paced them all the way until it was time to go to work, work work, the other work, janitoring.

Burdened with words and the concepts that stick to them, afflicted with spleen, self-divided, pacing the floors of The Community Center, unable to focus on his shift, the muggy and malodorous bathroom, the work at hand, the dirty work, The Over-Educated Janitor is more himself than at any other moment, more at one with his condition, his station in life, a calling even.