Work and shit

Being unemployed has caused a lot of my conversations and thoughts lately to be about work and working.   Whether or not work is inherent to being human or if it’s been an advent of society in an effort for people with the means to not have to work.  On a far more base level, I got into a conversation about when we each started working and my knee jerk answer has always been that I started working at 16 setting up an archive file room for an environmental company.  That’s not completely accurate though.  Thinking back on it a little bit more I remembered that I had done some entry-level office work for a few days at 13 or 14 but even before that I was a super of sorts. At 12 or so the building we were living in was sold and the new owner didn’t feel like making the trip over twice a week to pick up the garbage cans so he offered me something like $20 a week.   On top of picking up garbage cans I had sweep out the four floors and keep the front of the connected building swept and clean. The building also had a backyard, which wasn’t so much a back yard as it was concrete blocks and a wild overgrown assortment of weeds.  They might not have all been weeds but being a city kid I have no idea what the difference is between weeds and non-weeds.  Now what’s relevant to the story isn’t the back yard but rather how you got to the back yard. 

I’ll do my best to describe the building.  If you were facing the entrance-way you’d see two stone steps which led to a double door to a foyer where the mail boxes were. To the left of the entrance way was an iron gate that rounded to the doorway.  To the right there were the same iron gates except that at the end there was a swinging gate, which lead down to a tunnel, which brought you to a shared space with the connected building next door and then up five or six steps which then led to the backyard. 

To go off topic for a minute, we lived on the first floor and right by those 5 or 6 steps, which led to the backyard was the small window of our bathroom.  The apartment was a two bedroom laid out in a straight line.  As you walked in you’d be in a hallway with the bathroom greeting you.  If you headed left you’d hit the kitchen and then my room, which faced the backyard.  If you headed right you’d hit the living room and then through a set of French doors my mom’s room, which faced the street.  The bathroom had only a small window and up until this one night we would keep it open to vent out the steam that would build up after using the shower.  The shower wasn’t very big and my mom would put the hair products on the shelf directly in front of the window.  From the ground the window had to be a good 6 feet high.  Well, one night we were all woken up to a series of tapping.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap. I don’t remember if I woke up from the tapping or from my mom screaming but in either case the situation became clear.  Someone had jumped and hung off the ledge of the bathroom window and while holding themselves up they started to move the various shampoo and conditions bottles away from the 24” window in an effort to climb in.  Thankfully mom’s screaming scared or startled them enough to jump down and run away. 

I think you get a sense of how secluded the area back there was.  To get back to the work part of the story, I’m sweeping up outside and making my way to the tunnel to finish up and earn that sweet $20 and then I smell it and see it.  I don’t remember if there was a no pets policy in the building or if people just didn’t have pets and at the same time the neighborhood didn’t really have dogs around.  I make my way down the stairs and there it is, shit.  Human shit.  How my 12 year old mind was so convinced that it was human I’m not sure.  Maybe because of the lack of dogs, maybe the size, I’m not sure.  I am sure that I was horrified and disgusted that someone could do that.  I might have stopped being the super in training after that incident because I was so horrified.  Now this memory came flooding back during this conversation and my adult brain definitely saw it very differently than my kid brain.  I relived a small portion of the disgust but then my thoughts were of what kind o situation that person must have been in.  Were they homeless?  Were they on drugs?  Was this alley a godsend?  A place of hidden from the street where they could have some privacy as they tended to a base need in a time of need. 

Drugs were around the neighborhood.  We used to play in a parking lot, which was in front of a small annex of classrooms for the elementary school a block away.  The school and the lot was called “the mini-school.”  The back of the mini-school was a little scarier since it was darker and there was significantly less space than there was in the front area.  I remember finding small vials and condoms when a ball would inevitably make its way around to the back and the older kids would make me go and get it.  I like to think I was a street savvy kid but I’m pretty sure I was still fairly ignorant about these things.  Even if I had a base level understanding that they fell into the categories of drugs and sex, I definitely didn’t have a handle on the logistics or details of them.  On some level all of these things probably factored into my knee jerk reaction of thinking the shit was a person’s, but now I’m thinking of the neighborhood as a whole and how during the 80’s and early 90’s where else would do you do things but not out in the streets in the most secluded of areas.