Cleaning Toilets on Grave Yard Shift is a Trip, Man
As a freshman in college (way back in 1980), I knew living at home was not going to work for me. Part of it was that my stepfather (at the time) flat out told me he would pay for my way if I majored in criminal law and I wanted to major in music. I had a scholarship for the tuition but needed to make some bread to pay for a place to squat when not practicing my trumpet and studying music theory.
A friend of a friend recommended a gig working nights (midnight to 9:00a.m.) on a cleaning crew for a few of Wichita’s more prominent restaurant/bars. It paid well and it fit my schedule, so I bit.
I met the Boss at midnight at the local Chi-Chi’s. Having worked as a waiter there for exactly three hours, I knew the location. I walked in and he sized me up. Can’t remember his name but I recall that he looked hard. You know the guy — pot belly as hard as a rock, a permanent five o’clock shadow, a shock of wirey hair poking out of a weathered ball cap.
He handed me a pair of enormous hard rubber gloves and we walked back to the kitchen. “Turn it on and power wash the place.” He growled as he passed over a thick black hose with a nozzle.
“Power wash?”
“The water is frigging hot as hell so don’t get it on you if you can help it. Spray everything. There are drains on the floor so don’t worry about that. They’re supposed to put away the pans and cooking stuff but if they didn’t...” and he grabbed the hose back, took aim at a metal bowl half-filled with dried up refried beans and cockroaches, and blasted it across the room. “...target practice.” And he cackled like he’d told a dirty joke about a whore and a priest.
There was a checklist beyond target practice. The floors of the entire place. Carpets. Bathrooms. We didn’t do the windows but we did disinfect the surfaces and table tops.
He and I cleaned four bars that night. I was handed a weekly schedule. I never saw the Boss again.
On my next scheduled shift, after a day of classes, rehearsals, and four hours of sleep, I met the crew. This time we started at Joe Kelly’s Oyster Dock. It was a fish place (duh) with a huge circular bar in the middle and a hard wood floor made with huge planks of aged wood. The crew were two other guys, both about a decade my senior.
Duffy wore lots of black leather. He had a dark blue Mohawk and had a fifteen inch knife strapped to his left leg. He rode a motorcycle and wore mirrored sunglasses even in the dim recesses of the restaurant. He also was a frothing Born Again Pentecostal Christian.
Tim was a classic burnout. Think Jeff Bridges in The Big Lewbowski but without the charm. He’d done a lot of drugs in his younger years and it showed in his perpetually stoned demeanor and vacant stares. That night, he told me his favorite job he’d ever had was as the manager of The Circle Cinema, Wichita’s since closed down porn theater. He loved that gig but got fired for being caught getting a hand job by a sixteen year old girl.
Now, being eighteen years young, I can’t say I was the brightest bulb in the lamp but my wattage outshone these two retards like a lighthouse lamp eclipses a Christmas Tree strand.
Within a week, Tim handed me a note from the Boss. Scrawled in black pen and in all caps, it read: YOU ARE NOW THE CREW SUPERVISOR. EXTRA $3.00 HOUR. YOUR (sic) IN CHARGE. Neither Duffy nor Tim cared much. They weren’t big thinkers so having the college kid tell them what to clean and in what order wasn’t a problem.
Of the two, Duffy was the more focused. All I had to do was give him the order (“Do the floors, disinfect the bar, hit the kitchen.”) and aside from him jawing on and on about Jesus and Christian Rock all night, I never worried about him.
Tim, on the other hand, was like working with a child. Almost every night, I had to talk him through the order of cleaning the floors (“First sweep. Then vacuum. Then wet mop. Then dry mop. Then buff.”) The guy was just barely there on most nights and spent long smoke breaks at the bar in between each step. “Which one now?” he’d ask in between drags on his Winston Lights.
Neither of them would clean the bathrooms. Ever. That was the only area that my Supervisor authority ran dry. Any time I’d even suggest that Duffy do the bathrooms he’d go into a full-on rant/whine about it. Tim just ignored me when I’d task it to him. So, the bathrooms were almost always my domain.
Here’s a bit of knowledge to dole out. Drunk men are juvenile. They piss on stuff. They piss on the floor around the urinals. They piss on the toilet. They piss on full rolls of toilet paper. Like Storm Troopers in Star Wars, their aim is for shit.
Drunk women on the other side are monsters. Filthy and almost angry in the bathroom. Shit smeared on the walls. Used tampons stuck to the floor. Half-empty glasses left in the corners covered in lipstick. Half-eaten food on the sinks.
I don’t know if when half-cocked on Long Island Ice Teas the longstanding rage at being paid less and treated like a pair of tits on legs seeps out like a poisonous sweat, but going into any women’s restroom after a Friday or Saturday night of business was like entering the threshold to hell.
I found my rhythm, working the grave yard shift and going to classes during the day. I didn’t sleep much but I was eighteen and had more energy than a weasel on crack so that never seemed a problem. Duffy and Tim were both odd founts of random knowledge and they’d tell me stories of women they’d been with, of other jobs they had, and conspiracy theories about Iran and Russia and mind control via the television.
There was the time Duffy spent an entire shift on target practice and grabbing crock ware bowls filled with roaches and microwaving them. There was the night Tim forgot about his cigarette and caught a vintage Coke sign on fire in Willy C’s Cafe.
And then there was Walter.
Walter was a skinny-as-a-matchstick kid (actually he was five years older than me) with a pompadour haircut and out of his tiny body came the voice of James Earl Jones. It was a dissonance to hear him talk with this booming gravitas and then see the pipsqueak dude uttering the sound. He was also a fantastic actor. I knew Walter from my regular casting in Wichita’s Shakespeare in the Parks and, when he was looking for work, I hooked him up.
Now there were four of us and we could hit two bars at the same time. I always paired up Duffy and Tim because regardless of the work, Walter and I had grand, sweeping conversations about theater, art, movies, and music. We also both really like to prank each other.
Walter’s pranks came in the form of phone calls and plastic vomit. It was as if he spent a lot of time at a Spencer’s Gifts and just couldn’t get enough. My pranks were mean. I was gifted my sense of humor from my grandfather who was known for tricking his son into believing he was deaf by talking to him for hours without making a sound and taught his grandson to try to catch rocks with his head.
One night as I’m buffing the floor in one of the restaurants and Walter is on bathrooms, Walter comes out from the women’s. His face is as pale as a sheet of paper and he looks mortified. I shut down the buffer.
“D-Don. I can’t. I mean, I just can’t...”
“What is it, dude? What’s going on?”
“There’s a...it’s in the toilet...there’s a fetus in the toilet...”
“A fetus? Like an aborted fetus?”
“Yeah...”
“Oh, fuck. OK. Why don’t you buff and I’ll go check it out.”
The relief on his face was visceral.
Sure enough, when I take a look in the third stall, there is what appears to be a curled up, pink fetus floating in the bowl. I’m a bit horrified until I notice the tail. A long thin tail one might see on a...oh. Apparently, this rat has been in the sewer system and the water has gradually peeled off every strand of fur, leaving nothing less than a curled up, pink dead rat in the toilet.
And, yes. I’m a a horrible asshole.
I’m a bastard because I put on my rubber gloves, picked the rat up by it’s tail, put it behind my back, and walk out to Walter. I feign horror. I make my lower lip tremble. He shuts off the buffer.
“Was it...?”
“Yeah. A fetus. A dead baby in the toilet.”
“Oh my god. Oh my god.”
“I think it’s a boy fetus. How about you CHECK!” and I hurl the rat at Walter. It hits him square on his skinny chest and he lets out a high-pitched scream so alien to his deep vocal stylings that it creates another sort of disconnect. He squeals a second time, like a tea kettle or an actress in a Jason Voorhees movie. His eyes roll back into his skull and he drops like a sack of flour onto the floor.
I laugh so hard I feel like I might go blind or have a stroke.
Walter quit that night. I cleaned the rest of the place myself. A week or so later, I caught up with him at Shakespeare rehearsal. I offer my apologies but a few others want to know why. And, in his booming voice, he tells the tale of the fetus with epic flair and manages to recreate his screech to boot. When he was finished, we all applauded him and he took a bow.
I worked this crew for a full year before transferring schools to another state (better scholarship with a good high school friend in the marching band). It’s funny how my memories of this graveyard shift gig eclipses my memories of my first two years of college but isn’t that the fun thing about the narrative of our lives?
