Toilets, Twenty of Them, Probably More

1.

“You’re not going to like this,” Mendi said, slowing down the words towards the end of the phrase.

 “If you know I’m not going to like it,” I snipped, “then wouldn’t it be easier to simply not say anything?”

Mendi wasn’t about to give up at my first facetious remark. “What I meant, Smarticus, is that you won’t like the idea at first. By the end, if you hear me out, you’ll see that it isn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact, you might even agree that I am on to something here.”

“Well, can’t you just start with the good parts, you know, skip the parts I’m not going to like?”

“Do you really need me to sugarcoat it? I didn’t take you to be the type,” Mendi countered.   

He was right. I wasn’t. “Okay, out with it,” I blurted. “Let’s hear it. All the dirty details.”

“Toilets, and not just one of them. A lot, twenty, probably more.” The phrase came to an abrupt end. Mendi’s face went deadpan. He had my attention.

2.

I can’t imagine the look on my face as he went on to describe the job cleaning toilets. It took considerable restraint not to interrupt him and pull the whole hairbrained scheme out from the roots, clumps of coagulated dirt and all.

Mendi was swimming straight into shark-infested waters. His words were the blood that darkened the waves and sent the whole swarm of cartilaginous predators into a frenzy. I had long been sore about my professional situation. After a decade and a half of university education, I had come to see myself as a professional in my field. Unfortunately, however, I had not yet succeeded in convincing other people of the same thing. Throughout my doctorate, I had taught undergraduate classes, which at least offered some semblance of professional realization. The spell was broken, however, when I walked across that stage. Turning in my cap and gown, I was a superhero turning in the superhero costume, obliged to return my plainclothes life, the one where I worked as an unskilled laborer, the one where I wore a nametag and stood behind a cash register with a pricing gun in the front pocket of my apron, the one where I was overworked and underpaid. The situation had escalated precipitously after graduation. Each new job paid less. Each new job was a rung lower on a ladder that disappeared into the murky mists of the abyss. This apparently irreversible marathon of downward mobility unleashed a wave of spleen that has overtaken my spirits like a dense fog, as sulphurous as it is tenacious.

The point of departure of Mendi’s argumentation, the touchstone, was so solid, so incontrovertible, that it was difficult to dismiss. “Your situation is dire, and all your attempts to improve it have only made it worse.”

Despite myself, I was all ears. One word after another, one argument after another, Mendi’s line of thought was a tightrope over hot lava that belched and spurted venomous sulphur. He treaded lightly to avoid setting off any of the trip wires and trap doors and bear traps. 

“Your strategy of scrambling for ‘hire-and-fire’ freelance teaching gigs each semester simply isn’t cutting it,” Mendi argued. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but they don’t pay you for preparing the classes, grading assignments, and doing administrative work, do they? Besides, you still have to look for retail work in the summers, since none of these jobs pay for vacations, if I remember correctly.” I could tell by the tone of his voice, its crescendo, that Mendi was reaching the end of his speech. Leaving behind all rhetorical flourish, he drove straight to the bottom line: “Imagine not being a freelancer or a contractor but an actual employee, benefits and all.” “Besides,” he said dryly, conclusively, “unless you’re a tenure-track professor, which is no longer a realistic profession goal, for you or almost anyone else, cleaning pays more than teaching. Tell me. Given this panorama, what do you have to lose?”

Mendi paused for dramatic effect. His question was intended to be rhetorical, but I decided to venture a response. It took only two words. “My dignity.”

Propagandhi / I - Spy split album, "I'd Rather Be Flag Burning" (1994)

3.

Mendi shifted strategies and transitioned from signalling the deficiencies of the present to anticipating the promises of a fuller future.

“Think of Tamara,” Mendi implored.

Tamara is a mutual friend, from back in the day. She has a double life: three nights a week she works as a toll taker and the rest of the time she writes.

While the rest of us went to university and anguished over every one of the thirty-two gruelling final exams of the philosophy and letters program, Tamara was plugging away, burning the midnight oil, staying up until daybreak, filling up page after page, notebook after notebook, until she had a collection of stories. By the time we had reached the end of the second of the five years of the program, the five years on paper which actually take seven to eight years to complete, Tamara had shifted gears, switched lanes, moved on to new genres, longer forms. Putting the finishing touches on her first novel, she had the wind in her hair, color in her cheeks, eyes ablaze. Meanwhile, demoralized, dark circles under our eyes, cowering in fear from the constant exposure, consumed and consuming, we paced the drafty hallways and took frantic notes in the dank lecture halls of the old humanities building on 48th and 7th.

“Toilets,” Mendi stated authoritatively, “are the answer.”

I’m not sure how he wanted me to respond. We stared at each other in silence, which Mendi seemed to think was meaningful but was making me increasingly uncomfortable.  

“Cleaning doesn’t take you farther from your intellectual work,” Mendi picked up where he had left off and raised his voice a notch. “It brings you closer. They are two sides of the same coin. All the scrubbing and scouring burns off the nervous energy. You’ll sleep like a rock. Honestly, when was the last time you slept like a rock?”

“I swear to God, if you say ‘sleep like a rock’ one more time, I’m walking out that door,” I interrupted, confident that Mendi was aware of my standards when it comes to idiomatic expressions.

“It allows the ideas to settle and the well to fill up again,” Mendi continued. “Then, when you step out of those coveralls and punch that clock, you leave it all behind. It doesn’t trail you around, mudding up the carpets, into the rest of your life. No grading, no late-night emails, no classes to prepare, no finishing touches on your PowerPoints, no Zoom meetings. There’s no static on the airways, jamming up the channels. Your time off is yours, wide open, like a new page of your notebook, waiting for you to ink it up.”

Involuntarily, I let out a sigh. This pleased Mendi, who must have interpreted it as a sign that I was letting my guard down.

4.

Mendi’s reaction, his relief, however, made me doubt. Was this all a ruse? By accepting this job, wouldn’t I be taking a problem off his shoulders?

The fact of the matter is that the renewal of Mendi’s work visa was recently rejected, effectively immediately, which compelled him, from one day to another, to renounce his job as the janitor of the Community Center. Invariably, this put his former employers in a bind, which Mendi was in a position to remedy to by passing the baton to me.

Such duplicity, on the other hand, was entirely out of character. In the two decades that I have known him, Mendi has categorically proven to be incapable of guile, resistant to cynicism, adverse to mendacity. Besides, his employers adored him and, given the urgency and severity of the situation, no one expected him to find a replacement.

5.

I needed some time to think it over.

“Take some time to think it over,” Mendi said.

His co-workers were planning a little party in the breakroom on Monday to send him off. It would be a good opportunity, Mendi proposed, for me to meet the crew and get a feel for the place. If I had a good feeling about it, he would talk to the big bosses for me. Otherwise, I could just have a slice of cake and hang out in the breakroom with crumbs on my face, as a close friend of the guest of honor.

“Sound like a plan?”

Even though it was a yes or no question, I just couldn’t get the word out. I assented with half-smile and a nod.