Under Pressure

To be a janitor or a janitress?

At the Parks and Recreation office the woman at the front desk says they never hire women for the pressure washer positions. When I ask why, she tells me that women are given the jobs of sweeping out park buildings or mopping stadium floors. “Hard, backbreaking work,” she whispers. Only men are chosen to drive the trucks loaded with the big pressure washer machines. 

“It never hurts to try,” I say. She hands over the application with a sly, conspiratorial wink.

Pressure washer operator. An impressive title. At the high end of the custodial ladder. But let’s face it: A janitor is a janitor. Once you’re through spraying and refilling the toilet paper dispenser and wiping out the sinks, you’re a janitor, pure and simple. It’s true, there are loftier titles: Cleaning technician. Maintenance worker. Custodial engineer. If you’re a woman, one of the feminine equivalents of janitor is “janitress.” I did a little research before I applied.

Still. If they’d give me a chance I’d be a restroom pioneer, a pressure washer operator paving the way for my fellow sisters to follow, to bust through the glass ceiling, or, in this case, a porcelain one. In an official city truck I’d drive into Seattle’s parks and with my powerful pressure washer hose spray out the inner sanctum of those restrooms, some of the foulest, nastiest, most unhygienic places on earth. From what I hear.

God. I know this isn’t what my mother wanted for me. I’m sure she would rather I had a white-collar job than a blue one. Though she labored long hours in the tuna canneries from eighth grade on—and later in hospital maintenance (a janitress!)—she wanted me to work less hard. Little did she know working hard was her most enduring legacy. 
If she’d given words to that legacy: Your body is your currency.

A week later I get a call. I’m hired! It’s for one of the seasonal positions but at least it’s a foot—or mop—in the door. Maybe the woman in the office put in a good word for me. Or maybe because my first name can be mistaken for a man’s name they didn’t check. To celebrate I buy a new outfit. Denim overalls, new Redwing work boots, a workingman’s lunch pail. With a red bandana tied around my neck—a pop of color—I plan to stride into the garage looking confident, ready for whatever those restrooms will throw at me. 

I will prove a woman can do the job, dammit. Pressure? I’ll just spray away the pressure along with the rest of the dirt.

On my first day to report I get up at the crotch of dawn, as my girlfriend calls it, and drive to the Parks and Rec yard to load up the truck. I want to head out and get to my sites before sunup. The early morning runners, the up and at ’em types, can greet the day knowing clean restrooms are available when or if nature calls.

When I get to the yard the lot is full of the dark green trucks I’ve always loved seeing in the parks, one of which will soon be mine. I head for the massive maintenance garage, more like a corrugated hangar, and just before I enter I can hear the other workers inside yelling at each other, that affectionate call-and-response. 

The Hey Joe, you have a few too many last night? Fuck off, asshole. You’re the one who looks shit-faced. I’m familiar with that form of bullshitting, heard it as a kid when I went with my fisherman father down to the docks. I know the lingo, the sparring, the Fuck this, yeah, fuck that, cadence of swearing. And I’m ready to join in. 

When I appear in the open garage door, everything stops. Whatever the men were doing, tossing supplies into a truck bed, standing around and having a last puff of a cigarette in front of the No Smoking sign, they freeze, as if thrown in the game of Statue, the game we played as kids, as if each man has to stay frozen wherever they’ve landed until they’re freed by a touch. Suddenly the place gets real quiet.

I smile, give a quick nod of my head. As I do I take in the place. Stacks of truck tires here and there like pilings on a go-kart course. Large cardboard containers of restroom supplies. A huge shelf full of plastic gallons of disinfectant. A wall of tools. Next to the tools I see a work schedule and next to that a poster on the wall. There are no words on the poster, just an image.

A woman’s face, her mouth in an open O. She looks either in shock or frightened. Then I notice something sticking through her head, going in one ear and out the other. 

A very long, very pink penis.

The men are watching me. Waiting. A snicker breaks the silence. A cough.

I pick up my work sheet with my truck’s number and the list of supplies I’ll need, walk over to the supply bins, grab a huge box of toilet rolls along with three gallons of disinfectant and toss them on a cart. Then I pile on a few packs of toilet seat covers and a sack of deodorizing disks for the urinals (don’t look up, don’t look up). After I have everything I need I head out to the yard, find my truck, jump into the cab and without a glance backward roar off. 

They don’t want me there.

It’s a rare sunny morning in the Northwest. Blue skies, shining on me, nothing but blue skies do I see. I remember my mother’s voice singing that song when she drove off to work. As the miles go by I begin to leave that little scene back at the yard. Fuck them. I’m alone, I’m on the road, no one’s looking over my shoulder. Soon I’m happily speeding along, whistling a tune, as if racing to the best job on earth. I can’t wait to get to the park and start so I give the truck some gas. Then I give it a little more.

The cop who pulls me over, does a quick double take, can’t quite mask the look of surprise when he sees me behind the wheel. I smile, do my best to look official. “Hello, officer. Is there a problem?” Then I tell him I’m anxious to get to my new job cleaning park restrooms. “Please sir, I just want to make a good impression.”

He shakes his head, then lets me go with a warning. I pull slowly into traffic, chastised but still excited. Who knows what I’ll find on what feels like my first day of school?

A couple of miles later suburban houses give way to a long line of evergreen trees on my right, the trees so thick, so close together they create one continual dense green screen. Lincoln Park, in West Seattle, is a heavily wooded gem on the edge of the Puget Sound. I drive to the designated park entrance for service people, pull up the stake that bars cars from entering and head down the narrow access road taking in the beauty of it all, the tall ferns and bushes, the dark tunnel of tree branches overhead—the local birds Tunnel of Love—blocking any light from filtering down from the sky above. A little further along the road leads out into the open, directly to the edge of the Sound. What a view! The sun is performing some kind of lightshow on the water, bright golden sparks that flash, short out, flash again. I can see Vashon Island in the distance, a white ferry leaving that shore, a slow easy float on its way across the Sound. Damn. How lucky am I to be here and not inside some office or a stadium, sweeping and moping and breathing that stale air. No one’s around, just me, the birds and the trees, greeting this stunner of a day.

The only thing we may share are our normal bodily functions.

I pull up to the first set of restrooms across from the shore’s edge and back the truck up to the men’s restroom door. 

Holding the spray nozzle of the hose in front of me I approach the doorway. With my beefiest voice I yell, “Clean up!” No way someone inside couldn’t hear that shout. But then again who would be in there this early anyway? When no one replies from within I turn on the pressure washer machine. A loud roar shatters the park’s quiet and I enter. Finger on the trigger of the nozzle I spray out the first stall. Wow. This machine is one powerful tool. The hose sprays with such force the vibration shoots up my arm, will shake any loose tendons into tight bands. These guns are going to be toned by summer’s end. I hit the walls, the floor, the toilet, then move on to the second stall. This is easier than I thought.

One more stall to go. Before I turn the corner to the third stall, I stop when I hear a sound. Maybe a racoon or a rat? Slowly I peek around the partition. Standing there, a scruffy, bearded fiftyish guy, his pants down at his ankles, no underwear, big smile on his face.

He had to have heard my earlier shout out. At the very least the roar of the machine. 

“Oops! Sorry. Guess I forgot to pull my pants up, ha ha. Hey, you’re new. What’s your name?” he asks with a leer, as if he’d been lying in wait for just this moment, for a woman with a mighty hose to come along. I point the nozzle at him, backing up as I do, praying I have enough water pressure to blow him away if he makes a move.

“Hey wait! Can you give me a hand?”

I run outside, throw the hose into the truck bed, jump in the cab, and race out of there. I floor it, speeding past trees, water, everything a green blue blur. Where’s that cop now? 

Slow down. Breathe. Nothing happened. Didn’t they finally catch that serial killer, Ted Bundy earlier this year? The authorities said one of his ploys was asking young women to lend him a helping hand with something, his arm in a sling, his boyish charm and friendly face winning them over. 

God. That was only my first site. Quick. Wipe his image away. Wipe away the dirt.

At the next set of restrooms, I find a toilet busted up, shards of the white plastic toilet seat scattered across the floor. That must have taken some doing. The stainless-steel mirror is scratched with crude graffiti. A vagina that looks like a canoe viewed from above. A penis that looks like a primitive rocket ship. Less clinical terms for the drawn body parts go with. A torn page from Playboy lies on the ground by the urinal. With my pressure washer on high I blow the page to smithereens. I wish I could do the same to that poster I saw this morning at the maintenance garage.

As the morning goes by I’m more and more unsettled by what I find. Why do people feel the need to toss wet toilet paper wads skyward to stick on the ceiling? Don’t they realize that later, much later, those wads will dry, disintegrate, and drift down like dirty snowflakes? What’s behind the need to place a cherry bomb in a toilet and explode all the toilet contains? These are premeditated acts. You have to buy the cherry bombs, decide which restroom, which toilet, look to see that the coast is clear, set the fuse ablaze and then run like hell. Why do people carve their initials of true love or hate onto every surface? Why do boys sneak in when no one is looking, take out their johnny-jump-ups and pee directly onto the toilet paper rolls?

As I’m swabbing a toilet I think that someone should do an investigative report on what happens in restrooms. Or at least pen an exposé to shed light on the dirty dealings.

Here are dirty dealings alright. If I were a writer I’d pen The Restroom Papers, exposing the connection between the destructive acts in public rest rooms and how people truly feel about their bodies. Here, where an intimate act occurs, a normal bodily function, there is such apparent self-hatred. Why else would individuals destroy places built specifically for those normal functions? I test out a possible theory: Is it because when we are children we’re paddled if we boom-boom in our diapers or pee in the bed and, as a result, suffer long lasting bodily shame? 

I’m still trying to understand the acts. I mean, really. Why pee on a toilet paper roll? 
The summer stretches out before me. Unending rows of toilets, sinks and urinals. Fields of stainless steel. Artwork Duchamp never imagined.

At the next to last site I yell my usual “Clean up,” rap the head of the nozzle on the men’s restroom door, hear a voice within so I wait outside until whoever is in there finishes his business. I step back when the door opens. Out comes a young man, twenty-something, fiddling with his fly, sporting a sheepish grin. He doesn’t glance my way. Shy I guess. A moment later another young man walks out.

I smile, offer apologies, “God, I’m sorry. I’ve just got a job to do.”
“Thanks sweetie,” the second guy says.

It’s how he says that, it’s his grin that lets me know this is one of the “tea rooms,” the gay meeting spots I’ve heard about from my queer brethren. Once inside I blast away any vestige of normal bodily fluids, fill the soap dispensers, and I am wiping the mirror down when I hear someone knocking on the restroom door and shouting out, “Hey, fella! I can’t wait forever!” I give the place a quick once over, decide to leave the phone numbers up another day, what the hell, small victories of intimacy. As I leave I toss a couple of extra deodorizing discs in the urinal. Why not make it nice? My mother always said it was nice to be nice.

I open the restroom door. Standing there is an older balding gent who sees me and his mouth falls open, but not like the woman on the poster. I sweep my open hand to the side in a wide flourish of welcome as if inviting him into a golden palace.

“It’s all yours, my friend.”

He stares down at his shoes, mumbles a quick, “Thanks,” and hurries in.

Three p.m. I’m finally almost at the end of my shift. One last site. Driving up to a little wooden structure it looks like the smallest restroom in the park. There can’t be more than one stall on each side. As I park I notice an outside corner of the building is charred black, as if someone tried to set fire to the place.

I head to the women’s side first. Opening the door I’m startled to find someone inside.  An older woman – maybe in her seventies?—bent over a sink full of water, who jumps when she sees me and tries to hide her face, her gray hair falling into her eyes. She’s wearing a tattered brown overcoat, old boots, down in the heels. Down in the heels, describes more than her boots.

“Hey, I’m so sorry. No worries,” I say. “I’ve just come to spray out the stalls. Really, take your time.”

That’s when I notice. There, on the floor next to her, are two plastic grocery bags that look to be full of clothes or rags. Quickly, she lifts a graying T-shirt and a pair of old sweatpants out of the sink and stuffs them still stopping wet into one of the plastic bags. 

“Sorry, sorry,” she murmurs as she grabs her bags and races out the door. 

“Wait! Wait!” I yell as she scurries away. I drop my hose, run to try and catch her, but once outside I see she’s already made tracks towards a dirt path heading into the woods. Her eyes are cast down as if looking for something she’s lost? 

Maybe I’m looking for something I’ve lost too. I just don’t know what it is. Is it something other than proving I can work as hard as any man, that a woman can handle this gig? 

I think back on the morning, the boys show at the garage, the weird dude at the first restroom, the look the cop gave me, the toilet demolition crew’s acts of destruction. I didn’t understand any of them. They are unfathomable to me. Am I to them?

The only thing we may share are our normal bodily functions.

I go back and finish up cleaning the restroom. The old woman was so furtive. That’s the best word to describe her; furtive, not wanting to be noticed. Like me. I just want to do my fucking job. Maybe this woman can teach me a thing for two about how to be furtive.

I try to imagine seeing her somewhere else in the world. If I was walking along on a sidewalk in town and she was coming my way my guess is she’d spot me and cross the street, as if I was to be avoided. But I don’t want to be avoided. I want to meet her eye. I want to send a smile her way or in some way to let her know it’s OK. That I understand that this unholy restroom may be the one place she can wash up. 

Will she be here tomorrow? Is this her spot? Her one safe private space? I take extra time shining the sink, swabbing the toilets, making this restroom as spotless as possible. It’s my job. Then it hits me. I’m here to clean for all of them. For the man who can’t pull up his pants, for the tea room boys, for the cherry bomb gang, graffiti artists, the smash ’em up set. And I clean for her. 

Our bodies are our common currency.

If I see her tomorrow, if she’s here I’ll say, “Listen. This is a restroom. Rest a while. As long as you like. You can rest awhile. No pressure.”