“Here’s the deal,” he said, his eyes fixed on his clipboard, almost as if he were afraid of catching another glimpse of me. “First three months you’re on probation. You miss work, you’re late or don’t do a good enough job, you’ll be fired, no notice, no nothing. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, more to himself than to me. “I got paperwork for you to fill out. Afterwards I’ll show you where the supplies are kept and what you need to do. Okay?”
“Sure.” I hesitated for a moment, then asked him if he knew who I was. That caught him by surprise. He nodded, muttered uncomfortably that he did.
“Then why d’you hire me?”
Again, he was caught off guard. He showed a befuddled look while stumbling about for a moment, then asked me if I was planning to kill any more people.
“No.”
“Then if you can do the job, why shouldn’t I hire you?” He seemed relieved to have come up with that answer and he looked at me for a brief second, a thin smile having cracked his face. “I live by the rule that people deserve a second chance,” he muttered under his breath as if he were embarrassed by expressing these sentiments. With that, he turned from me expecting me to follow him, which I did. Instead of using the elevator, this time he took the stairs. I guess he figured he didn’t want to be confined in a small elevator with me.
After filling out the paperwork that he gave me, I followed him on a quick ten-minute tour of the building where he showed me the supply closet, the dumpster out behind the building, and each of the nine offices I’d be cleaning, as well as the shared bathrooms on each floor. At no time did he bother offering me his name, nor did I bother asking him for it. He seemed too uncomfortable with me for me to engage him in any conversation, and was clearly trying to rush things along and be done with an especially unpleasant task. When he was finished with the tour he told me that the tenants were usually out of their offices by six each evening so there was little chance I’d run into any of them.
“If they’re still working when you show up, skip their office and try again later,” he added gruffly. He handed me a set of keys, each one marked to indicate which door it was for. “When you’re done each night, check the keys in with the night guard. When you report to work pick up the keys from him also.”
He hesitated for a moment before telling me that he usually left by seven each night so I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again, at least not unless he needed to fire me. His stare drifted past me, as if he were looking for an escape route. He asked if I had any additional questions in a way which indicated that he hoped I didn’t, so I told him I didn’t, and he wasted no time in leaving. I gave him a head start so it wouldn’t look like I was following him, then I headed back to the first floor and the supply closet located there.
I took the cart out and loaded it with a bucket, mop and cleaners, figuring I’d do the bathrooms first while I still had the energy for it. I had a second wind after conking out earlier, but there was no telling how long that would last, especially given all the recent changes in the routine that I’d settled into over the last fourteen years.
I worked methodically; first cleaning the sinks, then toilets, then mopping the floors. While I did this I couldn’t help noticing how quiet it was. In prison I’d kept to myself and seldom talked with anyone, but there was always a buzz around me, always other inmates nearby, and I always had to be conscious of the threat that they posed. In a way that was good – it kept my mind occupied. It was only during those early morning hours when I’d be stuck alone with my thoughts. Early on when I had my reading light I could escape those hours with books, and later after I had to sell my light there’d still be enough noises coming from the cellblock to distract me – an inmate crying out in his sleep, threats being made, other sounds caused by God knows what. This was different. The only two people in the building were me and the kid playing security guard by the front door. The only noise breaking the quiet was what I made while I worked. I was going to have to buy a radio or portable compact disc player or something, because otherwise I didn’t think I’d be able to bear the quiet.
I needed to distract myself from the memories that were pushing through the silence, and I forced myself instead to think of my pop, to remember what he was like and how he would react if he were alive now to see me cleaning bathrooms. It had been a long time since I’d thought of him, but I knew he’d be happy to see me at a real job and I knew what he’d tell me: “Nothing wrong with an honest day’s work, son.”
My pop was only forty-three when he died of a heart attack. I was fifteen at the time. From what I could remember he was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and later my mom and others would tell me how he’d worked hard every day of his life. Honest work, too. Him and my Uncle Lou built houses all up and down Blue Hill Avenue. Neither of them ever made much money from it, several times getting ripped off enough by contractors to keep them buried in a financial hole, but I couldn’t remember either of them ever complaining about it. My Uncle Lou died young also. I think he was only forty-six when he bought it, and it was only a couple of years after my pop. Something about his lungs.
The last couple of years of my pop’s life there would be such an overwhelming sadness in his eyes when he’d look at me. By the time I was thirteen I was all he and my mom had left with my brother Tony being killed in Vietnam and my brother Jim dying only a few months afterwards in a stupid accident during a summer job – being pushed out a window while moving furniture. I knew I was a disappointment to him with the little interest I showed in school and all the fights I kept getting into and the petty thefts and other little crimes. As far as the fights went, what the fuck did he expect? We were living in a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, and my mom was Jewish, which as far as the other neighborhood kids were concerned meant I was Jewish, even if I was going to church every Sunday. Ever since I was five I was having kids lining up to challenge me to fights, claiming that I killed our Lord. I wasn’t going to take that shit.
I don’t know how Tony and Jim ignored that crap when they were kids, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to. Although I was small for my age, I was ruthless when I fought and went at it like a tornado being released. By the time I was fourteen I had enough strength where I could do some serious damage, as Tommy McClaughlin found out. It was brutal what I did to him – knocked unconscious, his jaw, cheekbones and skull all fractured, his face not much better than raw hamburger meat. I almost went into the juvenile system for that, probably would’ve except Tommy McClaughlin’s old man refused to press charges. He wanted his kid to be able to have another go at me when he recovered. After all, it was embarrassing for him with his kid forty pounds heavier than me, and me being practically a Jew. We never did have that rematch. When Tommy healed up, he kept away from me. He knew what I was capable of, as did the other kids in the neighborhood. The last few months my pop was still alive I rarely got into fights, and when I did it was only with kids outside the neighborhood who didn’t know any better, and none of them ever fared much better than Tommy did. By this time I was more careful to make sure there weren’t any witnesses. I didn’t want to see that horror in my pop’s eyes again like I did that time when he was brought to the police station after Tommy.
I remember it was a week before he died when my pop took me out to dinner alone at a fancy steak house. He wanted to have a heart-to-heart with me, to impress on me the importance of an education and living a clean, honest life. I never much saw the point of being a wise ass, and tried to act as if I was buying what he was telling me. Maybe I convinced him, but more likely he knew it was going in one ear and out the other. After all, he and my Uncle Lou turned out to be examples of what you got from that type of hard work and honest lifestyle – you were taken advantage of your whole life and then you dropped dead before fifty. And it wasn’t just them – my pop’s father also died young, as did all my pop’s uncles. I don’t think any of them made it into their fifties, but they all worked hard each day of their life as laborers up until the moment they died. Fuck, my brothers who followed the rules and tried to live cleanly didn’t even make it into their twenties.