My last job was as a night porter at a bowling alley. I bussed the tables, cleaned the floors, and took out the trash.
It was okay, until it wasn’t. Management instructed employees to throw full big gulp cups of soda into the trash, which I then had to manhandle into a dumpster out back. Instead of proper trash bags, we were supplied with thin, flimsy, translucent can liners, weak enough that I quickly developed an intuition of when they’d shear open and spill trails of leachate on the floor. Not being retarded, I started diverting liquids into the sinks within the first half hour of my first shift. Over the next few weeks, I started pulling full soda cups out of trash cans and running them to the nearest sinks for proper disposal. To management’s credit, I never got bothered for doing any of this. Nor did I get any flak for bringing a structurally failing shelf support bracket in the dish room to the attention of the manager on duty; he simply told me to be careful stacking pizza pans next to it, since “It’s been like that for a while.”
That is to say, we ain’t doing shit about that.
When I point out that I’m not retarded, I’m not trying to brag. Honest to God, I’m just trying to avoid a very real trap of false modesty. Nobody needs my smarts to hold down a job like that, and God knows intelligence is not an unqualified asset in the Janitorial Field, but the guy I was assigned to train really was borderline retarded. The kid was slow. I’ve never held a credential in special education, and IQ tests are classist trash, etc., but I’d estimate his IQ at around 80.
More pertinently, and way worse than being developmentally disabled, he was developmentally disinterested. I’m not referring to basic activities of daily living, like feeding himself or brushing his own teeth or wiping his own ass or whatever; when the threshold’s that low, it’s an inpatient furlough setup, and Bowlero isn’t community-minded enough to accept placements in Skill Development. Tom Shannon doesn’t want anyone on payroll who can’t bathe or recognize a trash can.
The problem with this kid was his attitude. It easily plunged his functional IQ into the fifties. Menial janitorial jobs are fine for actual retards who give a shit about best practices, and that’s very much a Type of Guy who can be counted on the stock the produce at Safeway.
This fucking kid, though.
Normally, I don’t like to pigeonhole people I don’t know well as socioeconomic or civic actors, just because I know I don’t know enough to make an assessment worth a damn, but this kid pigeonholed himself. He’d passively floated along with the rest of the logjam of the bottom quartile of his graduating class, allowing him to shave a good thirty points off the IQ he’d have gotten by not cheating on a GED. How could I tell that he’d done this at Elsie Allen and not Casa Grande? I can’t swear to it, but I can fucking tell. The kid has never voted and never will vote. He’ll keep taking out the trash at Mountain Mike’s, his other job, until some poor neglected part of his body blows out from overuse, maybe at forty, maybe at fifty, maybe even at sixty, or maybe he’ll wreck his Temple of the Holy Spirit at Jersey Mike’s, since I’m not saying I can always keep my Pineys straight from my Highlanders but I am saying I’m pretty sure at least one and probably both of these franchises on the Avenue have shitcanned my resumes, and I’ve met forty-year-old blue-collar tough guys who, not being smart enough for their jobs, keeping running warehouses when they can barely walk anymore.
Why do we use intelligent work practices instead of being hella stupid and wrecking our backs? Why do unions compel collective bargaining agreements requiring best practices and proper equipment? I don’t think this kid knows about unions. No, I’m not kidding. If I had to bet on it, I’d say he doesn’t know what a labor union is. He was a dork, and I can usually deal with dorks, since they usually have some kind of ambition not to be helplessly dorky, but this kid had no goddamned idea of how to start climbing out of his rut, or that it was a bad idea to stay in the rut, or probably even that he was in a rut. Supervising and theoretically training him was like gazing into a socioeconomic and civic void. Sure, the Tocquevillian order depended on characters like him, and God help us, it still does, but aren’t there ways to keep them behind the scenes? If I’m responsible for this asshole as a trainee, there’s a curtain between us that I need and do not have.
I may have made it sound like I was just inchoately convinced that this kid was useless, like I knew something was wrong but couldn’t put a finger on it. This was true for maybe half an hour.
This motherfucker walked up to a rolling trash can I was using with a pint glass and tried to pour it in. I told him to stop and put a hand in front of the glass. He stared at me, baffled. “No, I’m not trying to throw the glass out!”
No, asshole, that isn’t the problem. He was still baffled when I told him liquids are heavy. I made the mistake of using hydroelectricity as an analogy. He’d never heard of hydroelectricity. Once again, it’s something I can’t swear to but just know. Glen Campbell sang more about love, longing, and load management in three minutes than this kid will learn in a lifetime. Yeah, it’s probably a football team or something. Most offensive in the league. Most defensive, too. (And you thought Washington knew how to run a Football Team.) Put the kid in as a safety and there won’t be any.
This kid wasn’t why I quit. Neither were the layers of trash leachate and grime on the bottom of every can I serviced, or the sodden to dried-out to sodden roll of paper towels and other trash on the bottom of the rolling trash can I used. Neither was the exceptionally bad risk profile for airborne disease transmission in the alley, which had the lowest prevailing rate of mask use of any congregate setting where I’d spent significant time in over a year and customers who thought nothing of coughing and sneezing into plain air, or allowing their children to do so without criticism, or the alley’s location on the outskirts of Santa Rosa’s cryptosuburban outer south side, a hotbed of insane antivax paranoia, a community whose mama grizzlies know measles is better than autism because they saw it on Facebook.
The last straw was pettier than any of this. I’d staged a mop and a bucket of fresh floor solution in front of a bathroom I was cleaning. The manager on duty had the kitchen closer take it, then told me to clean urine off the floor around a toilet with a toilet brush, some bleach, and a cloth rag, then throw the rag in the trash (since it would be covered in piss).
The only reason I complied was because I was under unmistakable duress. I would have provoked an angry shouting match if I’d defied the MOD, and it would have been physically impossible for me to flee the premises without leaving my coat behind in the break room. The MOD’s demeanor was unnervingly like what I’d seen in drunk customers I’d reported to management for being on the verge of fistfights.
Overall, I still like the guy. But I cannot tolerate supervisors subjecting me to abuse under duress while they’re in states of severely compromised judgment. As a minor point, the dirty rags are exchanged every week for clean ones from an industrial laundry, one with washing machines powerful enough to wash out a little bit of piss. The MOD had lost it, treating me in a way that would have provoked many workers into punching him out on the spot.
****
I lasted two months. If you’ve been wondering how work’s going, now you know.
By work, I mean payroll work. In the month-plus since I composed most of this screed, I’ve landed several cash gigs with a casual girlfriend, fifteen an hour to help a half-crazed but smoking hot old hippie reorganize the bugout supplies in the pickup truck she thinks will get her to the travel trailer she’s buying for eleven grand and counting on being able to park indefinitely on the gravel pad her friend, rather (sic), has been emotionally extorting to bankroll for fifty a month instead of the agreed-upon twenty, with that friend, of whatever caliber she actually is, all the while blowing over a hundred grand in looming payments on home equity lines of credit to buy a high-end travel trailer brand new off the lot and also a high-end above-ground swimming pool like she’s living in the trashiest part of Long Island just as much as she’s living on that inexorably insolvent horse property off the Gravenstein Highway on the near westside of Cotati, my girlfriend’s involvement in this steaming pile of shit being inspired by the tenancy of one of her actual, honest-to-God friends being this spendthrift dipshit’s tenant. In fairness, the landlady, same one who’s squeezing my woman for thirty bucks a month, is also spending as much as nine grand a month to keep a severely disabled relative in a board and care home in Rohnert Park.
Equally in fairness, neither of these poor washed-up characters is living at 1895 Hammond Road in Santa Fe. In my mind, I’m going to Agua Fria, mercy me Sweet Baby James I’m going to Agua Fria in my mind, don’t mind if you beat a common-law spouse other than myself if I do say so myself. My woman, the one rolling over for that extra monthly thirty on an income limited by whatever energy she lacks to give men happy-ending massages in her walk-up apartment two doors down the walkway from my own, same side of the two-story tenement in a part of Santa Rosa she insists is spiritually and bodily killing her but I’m always trying to reassure her, because I believe it, is pleasant and safe enough as long as our landlords aren’t stalking my parents by telephone on a commercial flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Frankfurt to get back at me for something along the lines of being an uppity piece of shit under the protection of state rent control law.
This cutie has a reminder in her daily calendar for the foot massage trade she’s scheduled for us at four o’clock sharp enough this afternoon. It could be worse. For both of us it could be, and God knows for me it could. We must keep our minds always in hell, knowing that we must pray for all. As much as love bears with us all, love could not bear anything less.
Murica Derp 