The track and field were as hot as a pancake on a griddle. It was a bright Monday morning. The neon construction men were walking slowly across the bleachers, bogged down with tools and sweat. The morning shifts were too, only we carried heavy bags of trash we found littering the athletic grounds. There had been a game over the weekend, and it had been hot.
When we finished, we met Linda, the full-time custodian, in front of the bathrooms. She wondered out loud if any of the custodians had cleaned them over the weekend. When she unlocked the door to the men’s room, heat swelled out in a big sigh, and we smelled it before we saw it. Toilet paper and human feces stood in a pile above the rim of the toilet. Linda must have pursed her lips, stared at it for a second, and backed us up out of the bathroom.
“Those are some big boys!” She laughed it off. She would have told us to finish cleaning, but pulling the furniture out of the rooms was on the to-do list. “I’ll get this,” she said.
I was glad to get back to cleaning furniture, as long as I didn’t have to clean that.
For five summers, I worked as a custodian in my old high school. To get ready for the students’ return in the fall, we cleaned everything. Every sink. Every toilet. Every foot of every desk and every chair. Dirt. Boogers. Gum. Glue — paste, cement and roll-on. Curdled milk. Dried ketchup. Grease. Glitter. Stickers. You name it, we’ve cleaned it. None of it had ever been so bad as the prospect of cleaning up that toilet — not even the time I had to clean urine off the wall of the high school stage.
Teachers and secretaries smiled at us. Sometimes they even stopped to chat with us, their hair nicely curled and painted toenails peeking out of nice sandals. Summer custodians weren’t that much to look at. Makeup was applied and a second set of clothes were brought in if someone had to leave early. But most days, we wore grass-greened sneakers, and shorts with stains on the butt from all the scooting around on the floor we did. Shirts were several years old, and hair was gray from dusting or pulled back in a messy braid or bun.
The first summer working at my old high school was a teaching experience. The first time I had to clean toilets, I was revolted. I believed it was below me. I believed it was below a college-educated adult to crawl around on the floor simply to scrape fallen staples from beneath the cove. I believed it was below me to clean and sterilize the phones caked with teachers’ makeup.
I’m not sure when it happened, but it did. I came to understood that nothing makes me better than anyone else — especially no better than those who accepted their job for what it was and performed it without question. As terrible as the job could be, Linda and the other full-time custodians accepted it and worked year after year.
