Working

by Studs Terkel

  They want you to get in a uniform. You take me and my mother, she work in what she wear. She tells you, “If that place so dirty where I can’t wear my dress, I won’t do the job.” You can’t go to work dressed like they do, ‘cause they think you’re not working—like you should get dirty, at least. They don’t say what kind of uniform, just say uniform. This is in case anybody come in, the black be workin’. They don’t want you walkin’ around dressed up, lookin’ like them. They asks you sometimes, “Don’t you have somethin’ else to put on?” I say, “No, ’cause I’m not gettin’ on my knees.”

  They move with caution now, believe me. They want to know, “What should I call you?” I say, “Don’t call me a Negro, I’m black.” So they say, “Okay, I don’t want to make you angry with me.” (Laughs.) The old-timers, a lot of ‘em was real religious. “Lord’ll make a way.” I say, “I’m makin’ my own way.” I’m not anti-Bible or anti-God, but I just let’em know I don’t think thataway.

  The younger women, they don’t pay you too much attention. Most of ‘em work. The older women, they behind you, wiping. I don’t like nobody checkin’ behind me. When you go to work, they want to show you how to clean. That really gets me, somebody showin’ me how to clean. I been doin’ it all my life. They come and get the rag and show you how to do it. (Laughs.) I stand there, look at ’em. Lotta times I ask her, “You finished?” I say, “If there’s anything you gotta go and do, I wish you’d go.” I don’t need nobody to show me how to clean.

  I had them put money down and pretend they can’t find it and have me look for it. I worked for one, she had dropped ten dollars on the floor, and I was sweepin’ and I’m glad I seen it, because if I had put that sweeper on it, she coulda said I got it. I had to push the couch back and the ten dollars was there. Oh, I had ’em, when you go to dust, they put something . . . to test you.

  I worked at a hotel. A hotel’s the same thing. You makin’ beds, scrubbin’ toilets, and things. You gotta put in linens and towels. You still cleanin’. When people come in the room—that’s what bugs me—they give you that look: You just a maid. It do somethin’ to me. It really gets into me.

  Some of the guests are nice. The only thing you try to do is to hurry up and get this bed made and get outa here, ‘cause they’ll get you to do somethin’ else. If they take that room, they want everything they paid for. (Laughs.) They get so many towels, they can’t use ‘em all. But you gotta put up all those towels. They want that pillow, they want that blanket. You gotta be trottin’ back and forth and gettin’ all those things.

  In the meantime, when they have the hotel full, we put in extra beds—the little foldin’ things. They say they didn’t order the bed. They stand and look at you like you crazy. Now you gotta take this bed back all the way from the twelfth floor to the second. The guy at the desk, he got the wrong room. He don’t say, “I made a mistake.” You take the blame.

  And you get some guys . . . you can’t work with afightin’ ’em. He’ll call down and say he wants some towels. When you knock, he says, “Come in.” He’s standing there without a stitch of clothes on, buck naked. You’re not goin’ in there. You only throw those towels and go back. Most of the time you wait till he got out of there.

  When somethin’s missin’, it’s always the maid took it. If we find one of those type people, we tell the house lady, “You have to go in there and clean it yourself.” If I crack that door, and nobody’s in, I wouldn’t go in there. If a girl had been in there, they would call and tell you, “Did you see something?” They won’t say you got it. It’s the same thing. You say no. They say, “It musta been in there.”

  Last summer I worked at a place and she missed a purse. I didn’t work on that floor that day. She called the office. “Did you see that lady’s purse?” I said, “No, I haven’t been in the room.” He asked me again, Did I . . . ? I had to stay till twelve o‘clock. She found it. It was under some papers. I quit, ’cause they end up sayin’ you stole somethin’.

  You know what I wanted to do all my life? I wanted to play piano. And I’d want to write songs and things, that’s what I really wanted to do. If I could just get myself enough to buy a piano . . . And I’d like to write about my life, if I could sit long enough: How I growed up in the South and my grandparents and my father—I’d like to do that. I would like to dig up more of black history, too. I would love to for my kids.

  Lotta times I’m tellin’ ’em about things, they’ll be sayin’, “Mom, that’s olden days.” (Laughs.) They don’t understand, because it’s so far from what’s happening now. Mighty few young black women are doin’ domestic work. And I’m glad. That’s why I want my kids to go to school. This one lady told me, “All you people are gettin’ like that.” I said, “I’m glad.” There’s no more gettin’ on their knees.

  ERIC HOELLEN

  I never heard a newsman, when we had severe winter weather, mention a janitor’s name. He’ll talk about a guy working out on a line, he’ll talk about a guy doing outside work. But do you realize when it snows in the city of Chicago, the janitor’s the man who gotta get there and keep the sidewalks clean? The weatherman on TV, that big bum, he don’t say nothin’.

  It’s a low blow. They talk about heart attacks shoveling snow. In one of my buildings alone, I almost had a block of snow to shovel—plus the entrances, plus back porches. There’s a lot of janitors that keel over in this cold weather. I get a big charge out of these TV weathermen. They’ll talk about everybody in the world, “Take it easy. Don’t work too hard.” And this and that. But there’s no mention of the guy that really has to get out there and remove the snow—by hand. And that’s the janitor.

  At Christmas time they always talk about janitors getting gifts. I have buildings. They have a mailman, right? I’m not knocking the mailman. He gets everything he deserves. He does a lot of walking in cold weather. But we live with these people. I’ve stayed in the hallway where I’ve worked every day and I’ve done these people favors. They’ll hand the mailman a Christmas envelope and they won’t even hand you a boo. This makes you feel like: What the hell is this? Did I offend this party? Didn’t I do my work or something?

  He’s forty-three and has been a janitor for twenty-two years. “I got married in ’50, got a janitor’s job, and went to work the next day. My dad was with it when I was with it. For no college education you can’t get a better job as far as paying is concerned. It’s interesting. You got everything from electrical work to mechanical work—plus plumbing. You’ve got cleaning. The most is heat, though. You got the boiler room.

  “Before the union was in, we had to paint, we had to do everything. They didn’t get a half-decent wage at all. Now we get a decent wage, we have health benefits, we started a pension plan.

  “When you’re on call it’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” He services five buildings, “about a hundred families I have to satisfy. I’m the good will ambassador between the owner and the tenants. I can either make a building or break it, depending on how you take care of it. Our main concern is to save the owner money.”

  When I first started out, we had hand fires. You gotta take a shovel and you open the door and you throw the coal in it. You put about ten, twelve shovels of coal. That would hold maybe, in good zero weather, two hours. To make a decent living, if you had three, four, five hand fires in your buildings, you just made one continuous circle from five thirty in the morning until banking time, about ten thirty at night. As soon as they pulled down, you had to heat ‘em up, clean the fire and heat ’em up again. And hit ’em again. So I couldn’t go nowhere. You had phone calls, man, that rang off the wall. They wanted heat, they wanted heat. I used to shovel two ton of coal a day.

  A lot of people say, “What do you want to be a janitor for?” I say, “I haven’t got no investment. I come and go as I please.” I never got a fifteen-day notice yet—which means it’s public relations. If the owner decides he wants to fire you, he has to give you a fifteen-day notice. And the union wi
ll replace you with somebody else.

  There’s two kinds of janitor work—high rise and walkup. High rise, your head man, he’s more like an engineer. He carries the same union card I carry. Their job is mostly responsibility. They have helpers: cleaning men, repairmen. He makes contact with the tenants and he’s responsible. He’s got a clean job.

  I carry on my jacket, it says: Hoellen, Building Engineer. But I’m a janitor. An engineer is just a word that people more or less respect. I don’t care. You can call me a janitor. There’s nothing wrong with a janitor. A lotta guys that work in high rises, he’ll carry the same card as me but, man, he don’t want to hear the word janitor. He’s an engineer. He’ even got “building engineer” written on his mailbox and his bells.

  I have walkups mostly. I have buildings from forty years old to a four-plus-one building.26 This to me is a pain in the ear. They’re hard to keep straight. It’s open, there’s parking underneath. They go hang something on the wall, it falls off. Cabinets come off the wall. Zero weather came, pumps all froze out. Whoever designed this building—! Pump split wide open. Man, it flooded us out. A lady came down the elevator, it didn’t stop. When she hits bottom, water is in the elevator. It’s lucky she didn’t get electrocuted.

  Older buildings are less trouble than new ones—easier to keep straight. In the new building, they’re paying much higher rent for less space. They want better service and you can’t blame ‘em. These old cast-iron boilers they put in long ago, they’re repairable. You can’t beat ’em. They’ll last a lot longer than these new ones.

  My dad did the same kind of work, but he worked harder than I do. Because of gas heat, I can sleep an hour, maybe two hours later in the morning. He had to be at that building opening doors at that boiler at five thirty to get that heat up at six. If those radiators weren’t clanging at six in the morning, people were raising all kinds of hay.

  When I first started out, I had twenty-five porches of garbage. Every morning I had to carry it. This building was a six-story walkup. It was the only building I had. When it came noon, by the time I got to the top, I was so all-in and soaking wet from sweat that I had to sit there and look out at the lake for a while and get my breath before I started on my way down.

  You talk about heart condition. The janitor’s got one of the worst. He’s gotta walk every day up and down stairs carrying garbage. You carry a hundred, two hundred pounds of garbage down. Going up, it’s bad enough carrying something on your back. Coming down with two hundred pounds on your back, it gets heavier. It has never bothered me. I have a real bad back, by the way. I’ve been in the hospital last year with a bad back. Shoveling coal and mopping is bad. If you have a lot of mopping, you’re throwing your hips around. I tire out very easy because of my back. But I’m better in my job now.

  A janitor on zero days, when the wind is blowin’ and he has to go up those stairs in ice cold weather—a lot of janitors are up in age. You’re talking about men fifty years old, fifty-five, up into there. He has to clean those porches off, he has to shovel the snow, and the ticker only takes so much.

  Now I have a jeep. I plow the whole sidewalk. Instead of shoveling, I just push it off now. Almost all the janitors . . . There’s an ordinance that say’s you’re not allowed. A lot of rookies, especially, ’ll give you trouble. You try to explain, “Man, I’m not hurting anybody. I’m going slow.” “Get off the sidewalk.” You’ll get a ticket if you don’t get off.

  Today I can walk in the boiler room with clean trousers and go home with clean trousers. You check the glass, you’re all set. That’s the first thing you do. I check my fires and bring my garbage down right away. I take one of those big barrels on my back and I bring it up the flight of stairs and back down. I do this on three buildings and two have chutes.

  Before air pollution we used to burn this. We burned it in the same boiler every morning. There was a city ordinance that it wasn’t allowed, but yet they did that for years. Now we put it in the hallway. We bring it down and put it in drums and the scavenger hauls it out. We don’t burn garbage any more. It helped you get the heat up in the morning, but it’s a good thing they stopped. It’s a little more work now, ’cause it was easier to throw it in the boiler than come out and stuff it in the barrel.

  These cry babies we got, they’re always hollering about something. I had a call one night about eleven o’clock. She said, “My pussy’s caught in the door.” (Laughs.) So I jumped up out of bed and said to my wife, “Someone’s crazy or drunk or somebody’s pulling a trick on me.” I get my clothes all on and I’m ready to go out the door and my phone rings. She says, “Never mind, I got my pussy loose.” She’s talking about her damn cat. The next day I told her, “You know the way that sounded?” She says, “I thought about that afterwards.” She got a big laugh out of it.

  Ah, there’s a lot of stuff. I’m not mentioning names, but this buddy of mine, I told him I got a couple of hot numbers on the third floor, students. And I says, “You can make out.” (Laughs.) I says, “I’ll go up first. When you see the blink at the window, come and knock, ‘cause I’ll have ’em all lined up.” You know you can control electricity from the fuse, right? So I go down the boiler room and fuse box and turn the fuse, and the light in the window blinks off and on up there. Christ! he come runnin’ up those stairs. He’s bangin’ at the door, “I know you’re in there! I know you’re in there!” I said, “Hey, I pulled a joke.” He almost killed me; he chased me all the way down the steps.

  As for making out with tenants, it’s not like they say. Good-looking broads, if they’re playing they ain’t gonna monkey around with a janitor.’Cause they know you’re around the building and they’re afraid you might say something. I’m not saying it’s not done, but ninety-nine percent of the time you’re not gonna make out in your own building.

  I had a couple of girls, man, nearly crazy. One’s a bunny. But she said, “I have to face you every day and I don’t hold with making out in the building.” I betcha I could go back and I’d make out. She’s a very nice girl and everything.

  Some people look down on us. A ditchdigger’s a respectable man. A gravedigger’s a respectable man. A garbage hauler, he’s a respectable man —if he does his job. Now they’re saying we’re making money. They read in the papers the janitors got a raise. Thank God for the Janitor’s Union.

  We’re making a lot more money than in my dad’s time. Then they were living in basement apartments, where maybe a catch basin was in your kitchen. You live in a basement apartment, you start out when you’re a young fella, you live in the apartment twenty years and when you get older, you’re gonna feel it. Oh man, it’s just damp.

  I live in a townhouse now. I’ve been at this since ’50, so I worked my bones around with the owners and got the okay for it, to live off the job. Actually, I live outside Chicago. I drive in in the morning.

  I make a pretty good buck. I figure if I do my work and do it honestly I should be entitled to whatever I make. For high-rise buildings, head man makes a thousand dollars a month and his apartment. You never heard of that stuff before. I’ve turned down high rises by the dozens. I can make more money on the side on walkup buildings.

  Most tenants, I get along with ‘em. The bad part about a tenant, they have no respect for your hours. Maybe my day starts when their day starts, but they want something done when they come home. My day is ending too. They’ll call up and some will be sarcastic about it. “You have to come here when I’m home.” That’s not true. They can leave me the key, so I can do it on my own time. Some people don’t trust you. If I’m gonna steal something, I’m not gonna steal from somebody I know, especially when they know I’m in there. If they can’t trust me, I don’t want to be around’em.

  They come home maybe around seven and you’re sitting down to supper and they’ll call. “I got a stopped up toilet. It was stopped up yesterday.” I’ll say, “Why didn’t you call me? I could have had it fixed today while you were at work.” “Well, I didn’t have my key.�
�� Sometimes you get in a mood and you say, “Suffer then.” (Laughs.) If I’m eating, I finish eating, then I go. But if it’s a broken pipe and it’s running into somebody else’s apartment, you get on your high horse and you’re over there right away.

  Phone calls always go to your wife, and a lot of people are very rude. They figure your wife works. My wife is not on the payroll. They call her up and chew her out about something, “When will he get here?” She’s just there, she’s being nice enough to take my calls for me. A lot of the janitors now are getting machines to take their calls. They’ll call you up and the machine says, “Leave your message.” They’ll say something silly and hang up. They’ll see you on the street and tell you about it. They don’t like an answering service. They want to make contact right there.

  My wife gets tired of the calls. It’s a pain in the neck. My mother lives with us since my dad passed away. She takes my calls for me. She’s used to it. She’s been doing it so long. She lets ‘em talk if they have a complaint. She just lets ’em talk. (Laughs.) Some of ‘em will demand. I just tell ’em, “I think you’re very unreasonable. I’ll see you in the morning.” If they keep arguing, I just politely say, “That’s it.” And I hang up on ’em.

  You just don’t let it get the best of you. We’ve had janitors hang themselves. Since I’ve been out here, three hung themselves. They let it get the best of ’em. I asked this one guy, “Eddie, what on earth is wrong?”

  He’s up there fixing lights in this high rise and he’s shaking all over. “These people are driving me crazy,” he says. I read about this guy, Red, he blowed his brains out. People drive ’em batty. They want this, they want that. You let it build up inside—the heck with it. You do the best you can. If they don’t like it . . .