In the summer and fall of 1971, I drove out there nearly every night to the Kona Kai, a combination restaurant/nightclub where the hip would congregate after eight to drink and grind. I wasn't hip. Not even close. Dressed in t-shirt and jeans, I came at midnight through the service entrance, part of the three-person crew who had until seven AM to make the place over for the breakfast rush.
Janitoring was how I worked my way through college, and the stint at the Kona Kai was my entry into the profession. In addition to picking up basic janitoring skills, I learned there two things about myself. First: that I didn't want to be cleaning up after people who danced the Funky Chicken on stomachs full of alcohol and masticated buffalo wings. Second: that there were things even worse than cleaning up after people who danced the Funky Chicken -- one of which was working for Phelps.
If he had a first name, I never learned it. I do know that he attended church on Sundays and had two teenaged daughters who, like him, bore a scary resemblance to Danny Kaye. And this, too, I knew: that he was a crazy, mean son-of-a-bitch. It was Phelps who hired me on to his janitoring business, fired me four months later, hired me back thirty minutes after that, and tried to stiff me for my last week's pay when I finally quit on good terms after working for him for about six months.
At the time I quit, I'd worked for him longer than any other employee. By far. He went though staff quicker than he went through vac bags. One reason I lasted as long as I did was because two months after I started work he underwent hip surgery, which kept him off the job for several weeks. Up until then, he'd worked along with us. And several times a night he'd appear at your side to breath hot efficiency tips into your face or to cinch the leash by insisting that you do a task just so. His attention to detail and intolerance for deviation wore most workers down in no time. But Phelps didn't fancy people quitting on him, so he gunned them down at the first sign of trouble, often on night one.
The only guy I saw beat Phelps to the draw was Virgil, a swarthy sort with an ill-nourished mustache. Virgil had been janitoring for years -- many of them, I presumed, spent in penitentiaries. One night as I was walking towards him, I noticed him stiffen as I neared and slowly ball his right hand into a fist. "Never," he calmly warned me after turning around, "never come up behind me like that."
Phelps strolled up behind Virgil one night as he was vacuuming. Virgil, who hadn't heard him coming, startled at the sudden appearance of Phelps, whipping his head around like a piqued cobra. Phelps just reached over and flipped off the machine and then grabbed the vacuum cord out of Virgil's hand and tossed it onto the floor.
"Just leave it be," Phelps demanded. "All the time you spend WINDING that damn cord up in your hand, then FEEDING it out, is just wasted motion."
Virgil didn't budge or blink for several seconds. Finally, he turned and headed towards the kitchen. Phelps stayed planted where he was until Virgil turned just shy of the door and said, "Fuck this, man. I quit."
Now Phelps ran after him. "No, you're FIRED!" he shot back, red-faced, shouting it more loudly each time Virgil contested, "No, I QUIT."
Phelps wasn't the only thing that made the job a ball-breaker. The Kona Kai looked enchanting enough dimly lit and filled with pretty people. But at midnight, when we'd emerge from the kitchen and turn up the lights, we'd see it through the lingering smoke for what it was: a fucking sty.
From the tables, whose glass tops only minutes earlier had reflected the red glow of the band's amps, we'd drag the captain's chairs to reveal what was under them -- garbage. Stray meat, dropped forks, soiled napkins, frayed silk stockings. The carpet we inherited, which during hours appeared regal, was festooned with gum and spilt booze, puddles we couldn't see but would discover by the squeak of our shoes.
And then there were the restrooms.
Restroom duty rotated among the crew, so your turn came around only two or three nights a week. You'd wheel a bucket under a hot water tap in the kitchen, mix in TSP and disinfectant, stick in the wringer and a mop, and push the lot ahead of you across the dining room and dance floor into the valley of death. Most of my colleagues, on their nights, would dash first-thing into the restrooms before gearing up, to see what they were up against. But I preferred to arm myself first and go in blind. Gearing up for me was foremost a mental preparation -- a girding of confidence that with my rubber gloves and mop, I could conquer anything. It was an approach I evolved during the first couple weeks at the Kona Kai as I was forced to recalibrate what I took to be unbearable. The few scenes I still vividly recall are those that managed somehow to puncture my defenses.
Episode 1: I Scream, You Scream
One night Sheila demanded that we accompany her to the men's restroom. At five feet tall, with dark black hair, she was put together like a cast-iron stove. As she marched ahead of us, her no-nonsense ponytail flew to one side and then the other, a counterbalance to her waddle. She'd been complaining for a couple weeks that the worst messes were somehow landing on her restroom nights. And she didn't think we were taking her seriously (we weren't), so she insisted this night on showing us what she was talking about.
Sheila walked up to the first stall and then pirouetted, like she was a guide signaling the next stop on the tour. Growing tired of her dramatics, I lagged a little behind. When I was finally in position, she stiff-armed the door open, pinning it against the stall wall. It hadn't occurred to me that I would see anything I hadn't already seen, so that by the time I was face-to-face with this, this thing, it was too late to get the defense on the field. My stomach heaved and forced from my lungs an involuntary scream.
The toilet was full of shit. Shit was all over the seat and streaking down the sides like ice cream melting down a cone and over the hand of the child holding it. The floor was splattered with shit and similar splatters covered the walls. We refused to go inside the stall to see for ourselves, but Sheila later assured us that there was shit all over the back of the door. It wasn't that there was some shit on these surfaces -- the place looked like it had been sprayed with a pressurized insulation gun full of shit-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
Sheila had made her point. I expressed my deepest sympathies and got the fuck out of there. But several times during the night we huddled to talk about what we'd seen and try to explain it. In the end, our best guess was that a well-pickled guy had rushed in to find only one stall available, but its toilet already clogged with shit. To avoid getting close to the steaming pile, he climbed up on the tank, turned around, and let her rip, hoping -- but not succeeding -- to hit the bowl.
But there was too much shit for just two guys, and this account didn't explain how shit got on the wall behind the toilet. So we toyed with the idea that yet a third guy came in, also desperate and very drunk, and when he saw the god-awful mess, just turned around, bent over, and fired his load at the back wall.
Sheila finished that night and two more. The day before she was scheduled for her next restroom detail, she quit. Phelps was still recuperating and, as crew boss, I had no qualms about letting people leave with honorable discharges.
Episode 2: Heart of Darkness
To help fill the ranks of the retired, I started to recruit friends. I'd known Ron since elementary school, and he thought it would be cool to work at the Kona Kai. A week after starting he walked zombie-like out of the men's restroom and said -- without slowing as he went past me to the door -- "I can't take anymore. Tell Phelps to mail me my check."
As was our custom when losing a worker on restroom duty, we flipped a coin to determine who would take over that night's gravy-yard shift. I lost. So I took a little time to steel myself for what I had to assume was something special, then snapped on a pair of gloves and headed in.
On entry, I did a quick visual. Things looked fine. Ron had already cleaned the urinals. The bucket was in the middle of the floor, and the water seemed clear enough. So I rinsed the mop and punched it in the wringer, and then held it at the ready as I approached the first stall door, opening it with my foot. Spotless. Same with number two. Number three needed work, but it wasn't in bad shape. What the fuck?
While I had the mop in my hand, I swabbed the floors in the first two stalls, then entered stall three to do the toilet. After finishing that, I took a sponge to the walls and then closed the door to swipe the back of it. Staring me in the face was what had sent Ron down I-5 at 80 mph.
Boogers. Six of them. Stuck to the back of the door. Not haphazardly. Evenly spaced in roughly a circle, the biggest one reserved for the center. They'd been first rolled into spheres, pressed into place, and then carefully pinched to the shape of Hershey's Kisses. Finally, into the center of each booger had been inserted -- I guessed with the point of a pencil -- a pubic hair.
The ritualistic quality of the display was transcendent. It spoke to my spine -- a primitive language warning of a coming apocalypse: "No humans beyond this point." I still have dreams.
Episode 3: Shock and Awe
Later in the summer, Phelps came back to work. Not that he could do much -- he was on crutches. He did demonstrate to us one night that he hadn't gone soft by using a crutch to pound flat the head of a mouse that had been caught by its tail in a trap. Typically he'd make an appearance sometime during the night, do the rounds to satisfy himself that he was still in charge, and then head back home to bed. But these random drop-ins were enough to put us on edge again.
On one of these summer nights I was working the restrooms in the marina downstairs. Cleaning these was the one upside of restroom duty. Most club patrons didn't know the restrooms were there, so they stayed pretty clean. Plus they had doors on both the street and marina side, and by propping them open you could coax a nice breeze through.
Working my way down the line of stalls, I came to a toilet that appeared clogged, so I stepped on the flush lever. The water rose, then dropped to reveal a wonder as majestic as the Grand Canyon and the pyramids. I've since read of people birthing humongous turds. But at that young and innocent age, I would never have imagined that anything of this girth could have come out of an anus without surgery.
As the bowl refilled, the incoming water had no effect on the leviathan. It didn't budge. And I swear it had an attitude. Positioned in the bowl as it was -- with both ends comfortably above the high-water line -- it looked like a tanned yuppie relaxing in a hot tub, hands locked behind head, ankles crossed, toes keeping time to a jaunty tune, puffing on a big cigar. "What's happening, guv?" it said, trying to sound British. Needing witnesses, I ran upstairs to fetch the crew.
The three of us were standing in silence around the bowl when we heard the telltale creaking of Phelps' crutches. We instinctively broke ranks, but managed in the process only to make ourselves appear even more the goof-offs. Seeing the caught look in our eyes, Phelps catapulted himself at us in his fire-your-ass mode, demanding to know what the hell we were doing "lollygagging around down here." His glare landed finally on me -- his lieutenant, supposedly in charge. I just pointed towards the bowl.
Phelps hobbled towards the stall. And as he got closer, his approach got slower and slower -- his velocity in direct proportion to the amount of the thing he could see -- until finally he stopped.
Propped up on his crutches and motionless, Phelps had forgotten himself. We fell in behind him. It was three in the morning, and all you could hear, drifting through the open marina door, was the faint sound of the sea slapping against the docked sailboats. The four of us were gathered around a toilet, united in worship, in awe of creation.
-- Logjam [1]