Atoning

Since '06 has merely slithered on where '05 slimed off, I'm in no hurry to review Jack Abramoff's dirty table dance, since that'll keep dozens of lib bloggers busy climbing over each other in high indignation (while defending the reps of Beltway Dems, as Jane Hamsher, whose book on making "Natural Born Killers" I enjoyed, has done, hand over pure mule heart). There'll be plenty more crooked performances to come in the weeks & months ahead. Instead, I'm gonna post a piece I pubbed in the Ann Arbor Observer last May, since the majority of you have not seen it, and it dovetails somewhat with my post about Arthur Silber and the hardship of writing for whatever audience you can snag. That post generated a decent amount of mail, and some of you were concerned that I was hinting at hanging this up myself. Not a chance, not with the intelligent and supportive responses I'm getting.

The piece comes partly from a book I'm working on, and is a little revised from the pubbed version. It's a true story, ongoing. Enjoy.

ATONING AT NIGHT
A Janitor's Story

After five, we emerge. We enter your buildings, claw through your trash, glance at the photos of your family and friends. We scour your bathrooms and lunchrooms. We know your dietary habits, musical tastes, religious and political affiliations, if any. And yet you ignore us, dismiss us, talk down to us if you deign to talk at all. You think more highly of your pets.

Some of you are nice, if in a condescending way. Because, after all, you would never do what we do. No chance. You cannot imagine such indignity. What’s lower than what we do? We line the birdcage. That’s the way it is.

Office cleaning strips away pretension. It’s tough to wear a false face when bent over a clogged toilet, working the plunger as shit water spills on our boots and pants. Or removing dried vomit from a carpet with a handheld steam cleaner. Nasty spills and messes keep us honest. There’s nothing conceptual about our work.

I realized this after stumbling through a haze of personal mishaps, lousy judgments, and extreme arrogance. I never thought that, in my forties, I’d be dusting cubicles and scrubbing bathrooms for a living. But you never know where you’ll end up. I certainly didn’t.

I once lived in New York City, where I made a modest living writing, editing, and speaking at universities and on panels. For a time I co-hosted a morning radio show that had a nice following, and occasionally I’d appear on TV to argue that the corporate media aren’t really all that "liberal." Got to know several media pros. Went to highbrow cocktail parties. Then, after nearly a decade of freelancing, I snagged two book deals from a fairly prominent publisher and was represented by one of the top literary agents in the city. Made more money in two years than I had in my whole life. Was married to a woman I loved the moment I saw her. Had two creative, lively kids.

Then -- BLAMMO.

It began with meetings for my third book with an even larger publisher. Picture yourself sitting in a top editor’s office inside a large building in midtown Manhattan. Look at the numerous smiling faces around you. Listen to the flattery. Feel your back being slapped. You never went to college, and here are all these ambitious Princetons and Yales kissing your ass. You’re loose, funny. You can’t believe this is happening, but convince yourself that it’s your due.

Too perfect? Yes, yes.

Having swallowed the publisher’s hype, head swollen with praise, I told my wife to quit her job with a rising multimedia company. I then placed the family’s remaining eggs in a glittering basket and awaited my long deserved reward.

Well, ha ha, the glitter turned to crap overnight, eggs smashed, basket burned. All the flattery and promises meant zip. They usually do in publishing. But I was too ignorant to see it, too arrogant to admit I’d been wrong. Not only had I misread the big book deal (turned out, on second thought, that the publisher desired a different direction), I’d also bungled the taxes owed on the advances from my first two books, so we were in deep hock to the IRS. With no real income and no savings, we fell behind in our rent. My wife took a temp job in -- what else? -- publishing, and on weekends she worked for a French catering company spreading pâté on crackers in trendy delis.

I did nothing. Figured I was above working a day job. My elitism barely masked the obvious: I had fucked up in a major way, and was pulling three innocent people I loved down with me.

Had the nerve to act surprised, big dim grin on my face as my wife cursed my gamble, my eight-year-old daughter asked why we were losing our apartment, and my young son, mercifully oblivious, played with his wooden trains and watched "Snoopy, Come Home" over and over, its upbeat soundtrack sharpening the terror I was trying to suppress. In one destructive rush our home became a way station of ripped boxes and furniture shoved in corners as we dismantled our life and wondered where to go. My wife and kids looked to me, and I, hopeless, lost, self defeated, offered nothing but anguished expressions.

We were homeless. Just like that. Everything went into storage. My wife and kids took a train to Toledo and then a crowded bus to Ann Arbor, where her sister picked them up and took them to her home outside town.

Why didn’t I go? I still don’t know. I flopped at a friend’s studio uptown and stared at the walls while my marriage came apart. Determined to cling to New York at whatever cost, I held on for nearly two months, slipping, sliding, banging my head on the sidewalk. I tried freelancing, but there were few takers (and I turned down a nice-paying offer to write a necroporn piece about a murdered comedian for a big glossy mag). So I remained defiantly unemployed, as the clock on my marriage tick ticked down.

Tired of waiting, my wife rented a house in Ann Arbor. She raised the money by selling her beloved Steinway, which she was crushed to have to do. But unlike me, she was willing to sacrifice for the kids. She was moving on, and the only thing she wanted from me was our belongings out of storage and delivered to Michigan. After that, she really didn’t care where I went or what I did. So I shoved our possessions into a big rental truck (seven straight hours of lifting and pushing) and hit the road. Pushed the packed, dented U-Haul through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio, absorbing the robust fall colors under crisp blue skies, then a rusty fall dusk. Rolling into Ann Arbor just before midnight, I took more than half an hour to find the house. When I did, I felt relief, and then shame. I hadn’t seen my family in nearly eight weeks, and the sight and smell of them flooded my brain and yanked me violently into the present.

My wife, cool but glad to see me in one piece, allowed me to sleep on the couch. I spent the following day unloading the truck and dreading my departure. I didn’t want to stay in Michigan, but I wanted, needed, my family, and they were putting down roots. After a few days my wife and I warmed to each other for the first time in months. She suggested that we all go to the Wiard’s Orchards Halloween fair near Ypsilanti. The kids loved it. They fed a couple of horses, rode a train, ate candy apples. They found some hay and romped in it, screaming gleefully and chasing each other.

My wife smiled at me.

"Why don’t you stay?" she said, leaning on a gray fence post.

"Live here?" My head was still in the city. "Now? Today?"

"Yeah." She lightly squeezed my hands. "You belong here. There’s nothing left for us in New York. Get a job here and be with your family."

My wife’s overture seemed a miracle. She had every right to kick my sorry ass back to the hell that New York had become, a kick I fully expected and deserved. Instead, she offered forgiveness and love. I didn’t know what to say except, "Yeah, I’ll stay."

We kissed. She cried. Then me.

So I stayed. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that finding publishing work in southeastern Michigan would be difficult. I knocked on every available door, offered to proofread, copyedit, change copier toner, anything to get a foot in. But there was nothing. Even gave advertising a go, but apart from a few conversations with a local creative director for a small shop, that creek was dry too.

My wife suggested blue-collar work. I was appalled. Me, a published author who had spoken at Yale and Georgetown, who had debated American foreign policy at the Smithsonian and on CNN, get my hands dirty?

"Find something," she insisted.

I’d gotten my hands dirty before. When I graduated high school, my friends went to college while I jumped on the back of a garbage truck. Dumped overflowing, rotting cans from countless trailer parks in northern Indiana. Met my first adult who could not read or write (a driver who moonlighted slaughtering pigs), and saw, at an early age, what the lower classes endured. From there I mixed and carried concrete, tried carpentry and gutter installation, dug ditches, planted posts. All the while I read whatever I could grab, and began to write jokes and little essays. When I turned twenty-two I moved to New York and didn’t look back.

Until now.

I hated those jobs, looked down at the people who did them, with one or two exceptions. I climbed out of that pit and worked my way up to where the intelligent and talented resided. I was now used to political and philosophical discussions, to trading quips with extremely bright people. Very few knew my past. Oh, I met some nasty, vile, petty figures in the white-collar world too. The smarter people are, the more vicious they allow themselves to be. I wasn’t blind to it, but I figured it beat falling back into the pit of manual labor.

Perhaps it was fate that brought me full circle. Or karmic justice. God knows I had more than my share coming. I realized that if I wanted to reconnect with my family and make a go of it in Michigan, blue-collar work was pretty much my only route.

I searched the job openings, grinding my teeth over each ad. Spotted one that promised "fun work" with "delightful people." How charming, I thought. May as well take the dive. Phoned the number and heard a British voice answer, "Kerrytown Mall. May I help you?"

The voice belonged to Lesley, who ran Kerrytown, and the "fun work" was janitorial. Lesley invited me in for an interview and introduced me to Richard, Kerrytown’s head of maintenance. They asked me a number of questions. I confessed that I’d never done anything like what they needed done. Richard cocked his large head, smiled, and said, "I got a feelin’ ’bout you. I think you’ll work out fine." I left, and a few hours later Lesley called and gave me the job.

The night before I started I tried to convince myself that being a mall janitor was noble. But the truth was that I took the gig out of desperation -- partly for money, but also to punish myself for all the bad thingsI’d done, all the wrong choices and dead end turns. Later, a darker mood possessed me. What had I become? Everything I had worked for was gone. In all my fevered dreams I’d never thought it would come to this. The emptiness I felt was so complete that it made me smile. Had I looked in the mirror, I would’ve seen a lunatic’s face.

The next day my mood lightened somewhat, and I got to my new job a half hour early. I parked several blocks away, and as Kerrytown’s brick bell tower came into sight, the Stars and Stripes above it whipping in a chilly wind, the reality hit me. I entered the red brick courtyard and found Richard messing with some tangled wires in his work-gloved hands. After a brief pep talk ("I know you’re gonna do good"), Richard gave me a tour and introduced me to the tenants. Many didn’t even bother to look my way. Another cleaner, another day.

You are no one -- that was the first lesson.

I was the "closer." I was to keep Kerrytown clean and static-free for the better part of the afternoon, till around 4:30 or 5, when the slow shutdown commenced. Richard quickly took me through the paces. I needed to digest his instructions instantly. No grace period. Learn it, do it. This was what he expected.

I followed him through the mall, his fluid motion reminding me of the great Lion back Barry Sanders, running low to the ground, balanced, finding and exploiting tiny openings, swirling past frozen defenders. The mall conformed to Richard’s movement. It was his domain. It bent to his whims, his moods, his sense of purpose. And though he occasionally sighed and shook his head at the latest mess, he never lost momentum.

I tried to keep pace and internalize everything Richard threw at me while straining to match his graceful stride. The pressures of the place kept Richard moving, dashing through its halls and bowels. Each task had its own logic, its own set of rules that one could interpret subjectively but in the end had to honor completely. Cleaning, maintaining, is always bottom line.

Richard showed how he closed the mall, bolting the entrances shut while keeping a few exit doors open to drain the building of remaining customers (who passively complied). Twenty minutes after that, all doors were locked, and Richard and I went upstairs to clean the restrooms. I went straight to the men’s room.

"Naw," said Richard. "Do women’s first."

"Really?" I assumed that men were much filthier than women.

"Man, you been in a women’s room after a day? You ain’t seen nothin’!"

He was right. Wet toilet paper covering red tile. Black hair stuck to the sinks. Phlegm on the mirror. Piss on the seats. Tampon bags stuffed with candy wrappers, used toilet paper, store receipts, and buried under it all, humid, soiled tampons.

I stared at the room and then at Richard.

"Welcome to Kerrytown," he chuckled.

I didn’t know where to start or what tools to use. Amateur time. Richard sensed my embarrassment and patiently showed me the proper way to clean a toilet, scrub a sink, and make the faucet chrome shine. He revealed a few tricks when it came to wiping the mirrors, telling me that most spots cannot be seen while someone’s standing.

"You gotta get down on it, man. Spray the whole thing and dig into it."

His technique, solid. In a few minutes, those sinks and mirrors were spotless. The chrome gleamed.

"Like that, every night."

Richard took pride in his work. There was nothing demeaning about it. Cleaning the mall and keeping it running was a necessary task, and Richard did it better than anyone else. Whatever residual elitism I had coming into this job fell away in the face of Richard’s steady labors. Nothing I did back east mattered now. This was a fresh slate, an opening to redemption and much-needed humility. And there are few things more humbling than mopping up a mess while well-to-do customers buzz by you. They’re spending more money than you earn while you clear their path and make it smooth. They think nothing of you, and you think of nothing but the task.

My first real test came when a sewage backup flooded the mall’s basement -- a small river of human waste, the stench unspeakably thick. I ran upstairs to tell Lesley and found one of the shopkeepers yelling and waving his arms.

"Are you aware of the situation? What are you going to do?"

"Gonna tell Lesley about--"

"Well, you better get moving, son! I’ve got to get to my freezer down there! These are new shoes!"

The guy kept squawking while I flew past him and up to Lesley’s office on the third floor. She looked exasperated as she phoned the plumbing company. Then she told me to pull out the wet-dry vac and begin sucking up the sewage. Now, I had no idea what the wet-dry vac was or what it looked like, but Lesley waved me off, so I searched the basement, sloshing through the rising brown tide.

I finally found the thing in the corner of a closet -- not in the best of shape, a wheel missing, cracked hose. But I got the pump going and began drawing sewage my way. Extreme sputtering sound. The pump choked on the filth and spat some of it back out. The vac’s belly filled quickly, and I lugged the machine to the slop sink and dumped the rancid load into the peeling basin. My nostrils burned. Some of the filth splashed on my arm and chest.

Lovely. Simply lovely.

I kept it up for about ninety minutes, getting nowhere, performing a Zen exercise more than anything else. As I crouched over the noxious stream, hose held under the surface, I noticed that a cook from one of the market’s eateries was in his basement kitchen, frying up sliced potatoes. His shoes were covered in crap, but he blithely cooked on, seemingly unconcerned that he was preparing food in a virtual toilet. I wanted to run upstairs to warn his customers, but I was in no real position to do so. Ratting out a tenant a few days into the job didn’t seem like a smart move.

The plumbers finally arrived, clad in serious waders and heavy, worn waterproof gloves. Compared to these pros, I was a boy playing grown-up. They surgically handled the problem, snaking the drains, finding large plastic trash bags lodged in the pipes. This seemed odd to me, but they thought nothing of it, doubtless having pulled stranger things from underground. After they left, I used a large squeegee to scrape the beached carnage into a big floor drain, and poured bleach water across the entire basement till the chemical smell burned through and destroyed the lingering odor.

When Richard heard the story the next day, he told me, "Now you one of us."

Richard’s endorsement heartened me. Over the next few months, with Richard correcting me here and there, I developed into a pretty decent cleaner and maintainer. Before long, Richard and I had Kerrytown running smoothly, our shifts blending without a noticeable gap. The tenants were, for the most part, happy with our efforts, but many expected us to cater to them as servants serve their masters, especially Richard. He endured dismissive and patronizing attitudes and remarks. There were times when I thought a few tenants would rub his head for good luck. He clearly noticed this, but it didn’t faze him. He drew his strength and self-purpose from a deeper well. No matter how dirty his clothes or soiled his hands, Richard remained dignified. He simply didn’t care what others thought of him.

Through it all, Richard smiled. But it wasn’t a smile of resignation or subordination, as I first suspected. It was a carnivore smile that cut through toughest hide and bone. When Richard smiled it meant that he understood perfectly what you wanted, and that there was no need for further discussion. And if you had any brains, you left it at that.

I caught my first true glimpse of Richard in his smile. It betrayed a raw, rough past. As Richard later told me, this was why he was at Kerrytown, atoning, keeping busy, helping to build a decent life for his wife and kids.

Yet I found I could explain none of this to the professional scribes I knew in New York and D.C. When I told a few of my old acquaintances what I was doing, they expressed disbelief, laughed, thought I was putting them on. One columnist I knew asked whether this was participatory journalism. No, I answered -- I’m doing this because I need the work. I then told him that he should take six months off and do the same thing, that it would be good for him. "Uh, I don’t think so. Thanks anyway," he replied. He never spoke to me again.

Richard and I kept it going for the better part of a year. Then, after being in the publishing pipeline for months, my second book, which dealt with the mania of American sports fans, finally appeared. I’d known it would eventually be published, but at this point it seemed incongruous to my new life. I won’t pretend that I didn’t want it to sell. Naturally I did. But the book, my writing, was no longer the end-all, be-all of my existence, nor was the pose of Writer. And the book’s arrival, along with the modest publicity gigs that came with it, illuminated the differences between Then and Now.

Got a call from MSNBC asking that I appear on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" to discuss fan riots. I accepted and then phoned Lesley to tell her that I wouldn’t be working that night since I was being picked up and taken to Southfield to tape my segment. I hadn’t been on national TV in years, and was a little nervous, but it made me laugh to think that I was taking time off from cleaning toilets to mix with the pointy-heads. After a garbled start, I quickly hit cruising speed and was back in the old groove, bantering and making points that caused the host to question my sanity. Like old times. Soon the segment was over, and I was driven back to Ann Arbor to watch myself on the small screen.

Next day I was sweeping the market floor when I noticed one of the cashiers staring at me. After five or so minutes of this I went up to her and asked if there was a problem.

"You . . . you were on TV last night." She thrust her index finger at me. "That was you, right? What were you doing on TV?"

"You’re confusing me with someone else."

"No-- it was you, all right." Now several customers were staring at me. "Talking about sports or something."

I nodded. "Yeah. And tonight I’ll be on Letterman." I quickly finished sweeping and went to the basement to hide.

Word spread through the mall. Richard thought the whole thing was funny. "Mister Writer Man," he called me. I continued my daily labor, only now I was seen as some East Coast intellectual expat who, for some mysterious reason, cleaned a mall in the Midwest. Some of the people who’d looked down on me suddenly became friendly, outgoing. A few showed me their poetry and attempts at short stories.

I tried to hold a steady course and stay in line with Richard, but my cover was blown, and it was clear that my time at Kerrytown was growing short. Then I was offered a sports column for an online magazine where I would make more than I did mopping floors. Taking that as a sign, I gave my two weeks’ notice.

Richard didn’t want me to leave. He said I was the best worker he’d had at Kerrytown. This genuinely touched me, and I asked if we could remain friends. "You better!" he said with a direct smile.

I re-entered the writing game feeling better about everything. I tried not to take myself too seriously and composed my pieces with, I hoped, the same focus and diligence I employed when cleaning Kerrytown. After five columns, however, the company that owned the website went broke and ran off, still owing me two grand. I dawdled about for a time, trying to think of a creative next step. But economic reality forced me back into the world I’d recently left-- only this time I wasn’t tortured about what lay ahead.

Took a job with a small local cleaning company. They started me part time, but soon my experience earned me more hours, then a raise, then a promotion to supervisor. It’s a far more complex cleaning world than I experienced at Kerrytown. We work for corporate clients in some of Ann Arbor’s more expensive buildings, cleaning endless cubicles, the open-air prisons of our time. Like convicts, the cubes’ inhabitants post photos of family, calendars with the days checked off, and religious imagery. Judging from what I’ve seen, many who inhabit these little boxes love George W. Bush -- for every John Kerry photo or sticker I saw during the 2004 election, there were easily a dozen pro-Bush displays, some done up like shrines.

There’s sadness in those cubes. And when you pull trash from those human veal crates, you see the sadness manifested in the workers’ daily diet: McDonald’s Wendy’s Taco Bell Payday Reese’s Lay’s Fritos Doritos wrappers crammed under Coke Pepsi Mountain Dew cans. Eight-plus hours staring at a screen, grazing on junk food, gazing up at family photos and clipped Dilbert comic strips for temporary relief. In one building the workers were under constant phone and video surveillance, and forced to give urine unannounced to make sure they were drug-free enough to help the managers increase market share. But all through the hallways hung framed posters telling the workers that they were part of the Company Family, posters showing people smiling and leaping for joy. Most of the workers I saw there were too heavy to leap, too beaten to smile.

Yet a fair number of them treated my cleaners and me as barely human, somehow beneath them. My theory was that if a worker in cube 6798 identifies with George Bush, he must believe that he’s someone he’s not-- so it’s easier to dump on the Honduran woman who empties his garbage and dusts his computer. I’ve had insurance company receptionists and bank tellers speak to me as if I were a twelve-year-old. Clearly, they needed to feel superior to someone, and these people laid it on thick. Sometimes I’d get so mad that I wanted to flash my media and creative experience, to out-elite them. But I realized that would have made me no better, and in many ways would have made me worse. Instead, I’d let their contempt flow past me, knowing in my heart their desperation.

Perhaps the cube dwellers take their cues from their bosses, who can be incredibly condescending. And the more educated the boss, the messier and more aloof he or she is. If you think that blue-collar guys are filthy, try cleaning an office of medical Ph.D.’s or corporate lawyers. Oh, the nastiness I’ve seen. It’s as if their professional status allows them to eat, piss, and shit like common barnyard animals. Trust me, you don’t want to enter a restroom that’s been used by doctors for the better part of ten hours. Some of them eat while taking a crap: I’ve cleaned stalls littered with popcorn and french fries. And the smell? Well, let’s just say that having an advanced degree gives you permission not to flush.

Most of my cleaners are used to this. They smile when I vent, wondering why I curse the obvious. To many of them, this is how life works. When you polish the social ladder’s lower rungs, getting shat on is fully expected.

"Ah, man, that’s just the way some people are," says Richard when I visit Kerrytown and we compare notes. "They have to think they somebody else, somebody better. I wanna take ’em and make ’em clean for a week, and then have ’em tell me they better!" He laughs. And he’s right. Hell, I’ve seen hardened working class guys give up after a week or two of bending, scrubbing, wiping, and dusting, then lugging leaking bags of trash across frozen parking lots to cat and raccoon infested Dumpsters. Not everyone can clean, much less consistently and correctly. It’s a tough, thankless gig. But you can find something worthwhile in all that grime and ache. I did. In many ways, failing and having to clean was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

For too long arrogance and denial defined me. In New York I was insulated from a blue collar world I openly despised but secretly feared. My failure in the city forced me to shed this rancid skin, to tap into the hard reality of who I am. Husband. Father. New Yorker with a Midwest address. And writer.

Cleaning helped me to find redemption, a solid place with my family, a better understanding of what love and sacrifice mean. But under it all, cleaning’s just a job, not my identity. I find that when I leave work for our tree-lined neighborhood, where on weekends I sit on the porch with my wife and watch our kids romp in the yard. This is what I missed and now embrace. The sun begins to set, and a lawn mower starts up behind a nearby fence.