Cleaning Up New York (6 page)

I start in to clean and get to know Olivia. She was once an opera singer but her voice is ruined by laryngitis. She is a little overweight and is pale and slack as a person is who has been ill. Medicine bottles abound on the shelves. As I clean, Olivia practices her stenotyping exercises. She types as a tape recorder repeats a paragraph from court records. “How many times did you see the patient outside of your office? I saw Mrs. Burger once in her home following the second visit to my office. And how did …?” The same testimony repeats itself until I learn the questions and answers by heart. The bathroom is transformed into a courtroom. The judge on the toilet seat and jury sitting in the bathtub listen as I fire questions at the sink. The verdict is hard work. Olivia is worried about the time because she can only afford to hire me for four hours. I work on, in the dismal forest; sometimes I discover a roach nest that I madly trounce with my feet. I notice rust and roaches in the icebox.

I meet Olivia Bee at Gerard Malanga's poetry reading at St. Mark's Church. I feel embarrassed, as one did meeting a schoolteacher at the movies. I am reserved and polite to Olivia until I can ditch her. A few days later, Olivia calls me up, asks me to work, and wants my opinion of Gerard Malanga's poetry. Oops trapped, Olivia's job is not worth as much as my opinions so I dodge all her questions with “I don't know,” or “I never thought about it.” Olivia has been awakened to poetry anew and talks all about it as I back off the phone. Back at her place, I find the roaches have multiplied treble-fold. I am killing them everywhere and everywhere I clean I rouse them up. I finally feel compelled to comment on the situation. Olivia takes up the battle charge against the roaches, at least in her head. She hates to use roach spray, so I musingly suggest she get a lizard I once saw on TV that loves to eat roaches. Olivia calls up her boyfriend and says, “Bob says I have to do something about the roaches, so we are going to get the lizard.…” I wonder who I am to that guy. Then, I wonder who that guy is. I want to call him back and say I was only joking about the lizard. I feel Olivia threw me like a dishrag into her boyfriend's face and I want to make amends. I think it out to rinse any bad feelings out of my system.

The next time I come, the roaches are gone because the landlord painted the apartment. Olivia is in an up mood and the radio is playing young opera singers. She fills me in on who is good and who is not. I ask her who her favorites are. She tells me, but thinks that I don't really care. I assure her that I care and I forget them. Olivia becomes inspired to sing herself. She starts warming up on some scales and the noise is terrific. It
almost rattles my teeth. Olivia starts an aria but her voice breaks apart. She starts again and again her voice slips out of key. The loudness is incredible. She tells me that friends could hear her singing all the way to the corner. Olivia also says how bad this is for her throat and how it is starting to hurt. I suggest that maybe she should.… She forges ahead and completes the aria and I bend over the mop. I say that I enjoyed the singing very much. I certainly am not lying since the echoes between my ears are becoming fainter. Olivia switches back to the stenotape courtroom drama. It is the same story over and over; every job is a picked flower.

Jobs start to come back and not through the agency. Old customers call me again and new ones come along through friends and satisfied customers. Advertising once in the
Newsletter
separates me from the agency and places me on my own. I realize that I am self-employed and the ball starts a roll of its own. Jobs come in and fill my days; I keep my rates and minimum hours the same as with the agency. I start to plot a cost-of-living pay raise to start next fall. I am professional all the way, and self-pride even furthers my cleaning abilities and dampens my desire or need to pick something off my customers' shelves. I plan to have a business card someday: Cleaningman / does the rough stuff.

As its name implies, the bathroom or washroom or lavatory is a room that already has something to do with cleaning. The concept of cleaning the washroom translates itself into the word “doing.” You are cleaning the place where you clean yourself. Here you “do” instead of “clean” to avoid redundancy. There is a quality about cleaning which remains unnamed. It is the doing, not the cleaning, that meets your own spirit, which is also unnamable.

The bathroom is a hard room. The light is often bright and hard. Enamel tiles reflect brightness off the walls and the porcelain fixtures gleam as you clean. The floor is hard tiles. There are the precise shapes of drains, valves, and faucets. Sound echoes slightly. The size is small and confined, which brings small details into focus and forces the muscles to work hard in short concentrated movements. In a jazz band, the bathroom plays saxophone. Its timbre is tough and clear, with a gush.

Use ammonia in hot water to clean tiled walls, then wipe dry. Powdered cleanser does almost everything else. The sink, the bathtub, and the toilet can be done with cleansing powder. It is gritty and can be lightly rubbed along the surface. Rinse very well and then buff dry with a clean cloth. Porcelain comes clean and bright with little effort. I personally find Comet cleanser to
contain some green particles that react harmfully with my nose and breathing. Bon Ami is the purest cleanser and turns into a pasty material when wet. It is not as strong as Ajax, Dutch Boy, or BAB-O, but it is a terrific product for the bathtub. Its only drawback is that it is twice as expensive as other cleansers. I suggest keeping it around just for the tub. If you have a fine mirror and want to treat it well, do it with vinegar and water, buff dry. Mop the floor with a liquid cleaner or ammonia.

“And when they don't realize it really doesn't matter who washes the dishes, you see, and they don't realize it enough not to care whether they wind up washing them every night. I think just a lack of consciousness of that is fine.” This is an excerpt from an interview with the poet and editor Larry Fagin. Larry is talking about who does the dishes when two people are living together. Larry is separated from his wife and does not cook. Larry wants to transfer his will into a living body other than his own. Larry lives one flight up and across the tenement courtyard from me. At $3.50 an hour, I give Larry my services.

Larry's apartment is the basic four rooms like my own apartment, but comparisons end at the blueprint. Topographically, Larry's apartment is light-years different from mine. No cracks in the ceiling, no falling plaster, no mice holes; there are built-in closets and cabinets and bookshelves, there are sanded floors, there is bright white paint on the walls. Furniture is sparse here and what there is, is select and of natural wood. Cleaning Larry's apartment resembles polishing a gem or tuning a piano.

Larry Fagin publishes many Adventures in Poetry books every year. He is either busy or suffering from asthma. He is a perfectionist and a collector. Larry can be thrown off track by blemishes. When I clean for him, I take over his concerns and add initiative and know-how. I clean Larry's five windows inside and outside. I plug in Larry's powerful Electrolux and vacuum the high moldings around the rooms. I vacuum everything I can, then I bring out my own jar of Murphy's and wash the front, sides, back, and top of the furniture, dry and then polish off. I wash the low moldings; I scrub the floor with a brush and mop up the dark liquid. The natural wood swells up before me, clean and fresh. Here is the renaissance of cleaning! The cleanliness of Larry's abode is hardly human. Like cleaning a bank vault, the cleaner is rewarded by his immediate prospects.

Larry could write a book on a subject like buying a suit. I find this a gentlemanly and fatherly concern and am thusly gratified by Larry's approval of my work. After I clean, Larry tells me how his apartment
sounds
better and how much better he can hear now.

Sanford, my friend who paints houses, calls me up with a possible job. He is finishing up a huge painting job for a guy he calls “Herr Brumbough” or just “The Herr” for short. The Herr sounds like a pain in the ass, but he also has the ring of a rich man with a lot of cleaning work that must be done. I call Brumbough and make a date to clean his new apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. I have to get to work at 7:00
AM
before Brumbough leaves for work, which is a contrast to Sanford, who can't find his way out of his apartment until the clock throws up its hands at noon.

The Herr's building is a huge and venerable complex staffed by an army of employees. There are at least three doormen to check me out and ring Brumbough awake at 7:00. The dew rising off the grass in Central Park gives the air a thick, sweet quality and contrasts heartily with the heavy flow of traffic down Fifth Avenue. Brumbough opens the door and shows me the walk-in closet for coats. The closet is about the size of my bedroom. There is a little table with a marble top and a mirror. I take off my shirt and pull on my headband; I come out ready to clean.

The Herr ushers me into a large octagonal public hall. The floor is black linoleum with a white octagon in the center and a white border running along the sides. Off the lobby is the giant living room, which overlooks Central Park. Opposite the living room is the dining room that connects to the butler's pantry with its own sink that further connects to the kitchen and maid's quarters. Straight ahead through the lobby is a hallway that ends in a T junction. There is a washroom before me, a study on the right and the master bedroom on the left. The master bedroom has its own park view and private bath. The place is enormous! I have to wash the windows besides cleaning everything that isn't painted. Brumbough leaves me after a thousand injunctions not to break anything and a little speech about how this is really a tryout for a regular job. I know I wouldn't ever want to come back again as I set about to wash the windows. Most of the morning hours are taken up by this pursuit. I am consoled somewhat by the fact that I had raised my rate on him to $3.75/hour and at the same moment terribly saddened that I hadn't said $4.

Sanford comes to work in the early afternoon. He has
a lot of little jobs to do and some touch-up work. Sanford has the gossip! Brumbough and his wife have been separated and now Brumbough has this new apartment and is fixing it up for her return. Sanford and I launch into our work. We each have a radio. He listens to
FM
rock and I listen to
AM
country. Our paths cross and recross; working with similar levels of enthusiasm and skill, we inspire each other to become silly. We discuss the Herr from head to toe and agree on how disagreeable he is. Brumbough is out and we are in. We can't understand why the Herr had his study painted dark brown. It is already a dark room but painted brown creates the atmosphere inside a chocolate cake. The Herr's father comes by and hangs around. The father is very sweet and speaks German with Sanford. The Herr's father starts putting the Herr down. We all express our feelings about the stupid brown paint. Sanford and I work through the afternoon, then I duck out for some sandwiches. I go down the back elevator and through the service entrance. The basement is huge and clean. There is a locker room for the employees and various corridors that twist and curve, finally leading to a secret staircase and through an ironwork gate; there is the street.

Sanford is a beautiful worker. He is careful about each drop of paint. He reconditions every surface before he paints it and seems to have a myriad of skills unknown to me. He works slowly and patiently. His head, like my head, is above his work. As we work on together, we find it possible to completely communicate and have a good time and still work on our different projects. Sanford is exhausted from working every day for three
weeks inside this vacuous apartment and I am dizzy from working since 7:00
AM
. Sanford and I stumble around in heavy professional manners and continue into the night. The Herr returns and works hard to get in both of our ways or to get one of us in the other's way. Brumbough gives out conflicting orders, which slow down the pace of the work. The Herr complains about how slow we are. I finally finish up at 9:00
PM
. I am faint and robot-like as I change a light bulb in the ceiling before I go. I receive a $45 check and more baloney about how he will see if his wife likes my work, etc. He tells me to call him for their decision. I tell the Herr if he wants me, he can call me.

Leaving Sanford to work alone in the doomed apartment is one of the toughest tasks I've ever had to perform. It is plain cruelty that Sanford must labor on with the hideous Herr. Sanford looks at me as one who is standing on the deck of a sinking ship, watching the last lifeboat heave away. We shake hands and agree, “Work is hell!” Physical brothers, we'll meet again in the next world. The joy I feel at my release onto Fifth Avenue buoys me up above the street and Central Park, into the cloudy subway. I wonder how to find my way home again.