CHAPTER 5
Floors and Walls
Cleaning a floor or wall creates a progression of triangles. One side of the triangle is the floor. The second side is you leaning over the surface to be cleaned and the third side is the broom, mop, or wall. Triangles that stretch and contract along the surfaces with the best geometry produce the best cleaning.
Murphy’s is a good soap to wash a wall with. Use a sponge and then wipe dry with a second cloth. You can use a harsher chemical like Spic & Span on hard enamel paint. The product Varnex is good for wood paneling. You wipe it on, let dry, and polish it off. It is a wax besides being a cleaner. I have used Scott’s Liquid Gold and found it objectionable to human lungs and skin.
Sweep a floor from one end to the other or sweep it outside to inside. Take broad strokes to avoid making dust fly. Centralize the dirt into one spot by circling around it and sweep it into a dustpan.
Sponge mops are best on an already clean linoleum floor. String mops are better on any floor. The best string mop I’ve ever used is a Fuller Brush mop that cost $6. I own one myself and am still content with it. I even enjoy not using it. The mop has tough strings made half out of string and half out of sponge. The stringiness is good for getting into cracks and pulling dirt out of corners while the sponginess is good for the flat, smooth surfaces. And, the handle is a bright, gay color! Mop the floor and remember to wring out the mop completely before the second sweep. It takes a second going over to really pick up the dirt that the first swab loosened. On linoleum or tiled floors, use a liquid cleaner of ammonia in water. Ammonia is equally effective and costs half as much as a liquid cleaner such as Mr. Clean or Top Job. Use Murphy’s on wood floors with a second mopping of clear water.
I really dislike acrylic floor waxes. They aren’t in any way beneficial to the flooring itself and their use as protection is limited by the amount of wear and difficulty of application. Since they are liquid, they tend to roll with the slope of the floor and build up in some spots as they thin out in others. It is very difficult to remove these built-up spots. One can buy a paste wax for linoleum floors, which is both good for the floor and pleasant to use. The idea of a time-saving cleaning product is usually to skip the essential reasons for using the process and instead rush to a finished but cosmetic look.
Vacuum cleaners are very useful and a powerful model can replace a broom entirely. The vacuum doesn’t cause the dirt and hair to fly up in your face. It pulls the dirt out of corners and cracks. It can dust high places for you. Sweep the vacuum across the floor or carpet with long slow strokes that allow suction time enough to pull up more dirt. Vacuum the upholstered furniture and sneeze less. If you do not have a vacuum cleaner and there is a very dusty floor to clean, wet a string mop and quickly run it along the floor so that the dust will become damp and rolled into balls. Sweep up the balls of dirt and then mop the floor with vigor. Floors are often the last thing to be done because they are at the bottom. When the floor is done the whole room snaps like a photograph into a sprightly shape.
Time is a pothole. Every business occasionally must fall and sprain an ankle. There are more cleaners now because of recessions in other job markets, and for the same reasons there are fewer cleanup jobs. I have to call Barbara every day and ask if any jobs came in until she gives me one. After a week of calling and waiting, there is still no work. I decide to advertise on my own. The likely candidate for my pitch is the Poetry Project Newsletter. This is a monthly mimeographed bulletin, which lists events and small-press book and magazine releases. The Newsletter goes out to a few hundred people, many of whom are artists and poets. I dream about washing Larry Rivers’s studio floor or cleaning out John Ashbery’s notebooks. I think the Newsletter of the arts could use an abject note. I submit for publication the following: Bob Rosenthal cleans house, cleans anything. Available for hire. The Newsletter prints: Poet Bob Rosenthal cleans house, makes everything immaculate.
After a week of circulation, I get my first response. A cheerful, girl’s voice says she’s going to get married and the party is at a friend’s loft. The loft has to be cleaned up before the party and then again the day after the party. The friend’s name is Pete Abelman; he lives on Broadway near the Strand Bookstore. However, the bride to be tells me that the loft is above the Strand. I ask her if the loft is as big as the Strand and she says it is. With trepidation I call Pete up. I throw him for a loop when I ask some roundabout questions concerning the size of his loft. To clear matters up, I tell him about his loft being the size of the Strand. Pete laughs and deflates my conception of his loft to its proper size. I come over on a Saturday to clean the loft for the wedding party that evening.
Walking into a loft as a cleaner expands my mind. I usually feel like a small carp as I swim in to clean the typical New York City goldfish bowl, but here I feel like a dolphin dumped into a large marina. Here is Pete, a freelance journalist with a background in radical magazines. He is slightly balding, in his thirties, divorced, lives with a big white lady dog. Pete is very genial and we sit down to have a cup of instant coffee. I start to feel the inertia that sits around this dirty loft. Everything seems too big, corners and spaces under huge worktables are wholly forgotten about because of their remoteness. Pete isn’t too sure what has to be done, so I take charge and tell him that I have a routine and I’ll just do it. I get a giant bucket and fill it with hot water, some Mr. Clean, stuff a rag in my pocket, grab a sponge, pick a corner, and start dusting-washing everything I see. Pete is dumbfounded. I feel like a maniac but know that it is the only way to be. The floor is covered thickly with white dog hairs and a warehouse variety of dust. I clean, sweep, vacuum, do the kitchen and washroom. I’m happy everything is turning out so well for a wedding. Pete tells me his ex-wife would love me, cleaning being something that helped break them apart. He says the place has never looked better. High and deserved praise, I think to myself as I pinch a bit of Pete’s dope.
I come back the next day to sweep up the plastic cups, gather the paper plates with multicolored stains, shuffle the plastic forks, and dump the ashtrays along with everything else into green plastic garbage bags. I sweep up the floor and sample the leftovers in the refrigerator. I get a nice tip from the newlyweds and Pete takes my number. He calls me up a month later. I start to clean the loft with the same thoroughness as I had for the party but Pete soon stops me. “This is a loft, not an apartment. Little things are unimportant here. Just clean the big areas.” Pete’s speech breaks my pace and I gather that he is scared that I’ll be there all day. Being thrown out of my pace really slows me down. I can’t see what is big or little. I don’t know what to do next and I end up walking back and forth pondering what to do. I decide to sneak in my former thoroughness just so I can work fast and easy again.
Soon after my first Newsletter job, the phone rings in my second job. Olivia Bee has a repairman in her house and I get the cleanup. She lives a half a block from Needle Park, 72nd and Broadway. I travel up by subway and pop my head into the gray atmosphere of exhaust fumes. The subway exit is on an island. I peer around and spy Papaya King, MacDonald’s, and cheap trinket shops. I try to find a donut shop that appears in the movie Panic in Needle Park. I saw the movie on TV and paid strict attention to the donut shop scenes because I knew someone who played a hustler ordering some donuts. I find the same shop (same scene) and coffee-up with a donut. Not even a chocolate-covered donut lifts off the oppressive feelings generated in this bloodless area.
I climb up the old staircase, each step sunken with wear, and am beckoned inside by Olivia, a short red-headed woman. She says, “Please, excuse me but I have a private call. Could you wait in here.” She ushers me through a door into a little bedroom and leaves me. There is a sad rumpled single bed with another forlorn bed that stows below it. There is a little dust-covered bookcase. The books are either plays or music scores. The walls are a drab beige and the single window is filthy, almost black. I sit and wait, reading Ionesco. Olivia liberates me and acquaints me w
ith the work. The apartment is filled with old, depressing, and broken furniture. Tables can’t be moved because their legs are not fully attached. The space is cramped and the vacuum cleaner doesn’t work.
I start in to clean and get to know Olivia. She was once an opera singer but her voice is ruined by laryngitis. She is a little overweight and is pale and slack as a person is who has been ill. Medicine bottles abound on the shelves. As I clean, Olivia practices her stenotyping exercises. She types as a tape recorder repeats a paragraph from court records. “How many times did you see the patient outside of your office? I saw Mrs. Burger once in her home following the second visit to my office. And how did …?” The same testimony repeats itself until I learn the questions and answers by heart. The bathroom is transformed into a courtroom. The judge on the toilet seat and jury sitting in the bathtub listen as I fire questions at the sink. The verdict is hard work. Olivia is worried about the time because she can only afford to hire me for four hours. I work on, in the dismal forest; sometimes I discover a roach nest that I madly trounce with my feet. I notice rust and roaches in the icebox.
I meet Olivia Bee at Gerard Malanga’s poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church. I feel embarrassed, as one did meeting a schoolteacher at the movies. I am reserved and polite to Olivia until I can ditch her. A few days later, Olivia calls me up, asks me to work, and wants my opinion of Gerard Malanga’s poetry. Oops trapped, Olivia’s job is not worth as much as my opinions so I dodge all her questions with “I don’t know,” or “I never thought about it.” Olivia has been awakened to poetry anew and talks all about it as I back off the phone. Back at her place, I find the roaches have multiplied treble-fold. I am killing them everywhere and everywhere I clean I rouse them up. I finally feel compelled to comment on the situation. Olivia takes up the battle charge against the roaches, at least in her head. She hates to use roach spray, so I musingly suggest she get a lizard I once saw on TV that loves to eat roaches. Olivia calls up her boyfriend and says, “Bob says I have to do something about the roaches, so we are going to get the lizard.…” I wonder who I am to that guy. Then, I wonder who that guy is. I want to call him back and say I was only joking about the lizard. I feel Olivia threw me like a dishrag into her boyfriend’s face and I want to make amends. I think it out to rinse any bad feelings out of my system.
The next time I come, the roaches are gone because the landlord painted the apartment. Olivia is in an up mood and the radio is playing young opera singers. She fills me in on who is good and who is not. I ask her who her favorites are. She tells me, but thinks that I don’t really care. I assure her that I care and I forget them. Olivia becomes inspired to sing herself. She starts warming up on some scales and the noise is terrific. It almost rattles my teeth. Olivia starts an aria but her voice breaks apart. She starts again and again her voice slips out of key. The loudness is incredible. She tells me that friends could hear her singing all the way to the corner. Olivia also says how bad this is for her throat and how it is starting to hurt. I suggest that maybe she should.… She forges ahead and completes the aria and I bend over the mop. I say that I enjoyed the singing very much. I certainly am not lying since the echoes between my ears are becoming fainter. Olivia switches back to the stenotape courtroom drama. It is the same story over and over; every job is a picked flower.
Jobs start to come back and not through the agency. Old customers call me again and new ones come along through friends and satisfied customers. Advertising once in the Newsletter separates me from the agency and places me on my own. I realize that I am self-employed and the ball starts a roll of its own. Jobs come in and fill my days; I keep my rates and minimum hours the same as with the agency. I start to plot a cost-of-living pay raise to start next fall. I am professional all the way, and self-pride even furthers my cleaning abilities and dampens my desire or need to pick something off my customers’ shelves. I plan to have a business card someday: Cleaningman / does the rough stuff.
CHAPTER 6
The Bathroom
As its name implies, the bathroom or washroom or lavatory is a room that already has something to do with cleaning. The concept of cleaning the washroom translates itself into the word “doing.” You are cleaning the place where you clean yourself. Here you “do” instead of “clean” to avoid redundancy. There is a quality about cleaning which remains unnamed. It is the doing, not the cleaning, that meets your own spirit, which is also unnamable.
The bathroom is a hard room. The light is often bright and hard. Enamel tiles reflect brightness off the walls and the porcelain fixtures gleam as you clean. The floor is hard tiles. There are the precise shapes of drains, valves, and faucets. Sound echoes slightly. The size is small and confined, which brings small details into focus and forces the muscles to work hard in short concentrated movements. In a jazz band, the bathroom plays saxophone. Its timbre is tough and clear, with a gush.
Use ammonia in hot water to clean tiled walls, then wipe dry. Powdered cleanser does almost everything else. The sink, the bathtub, and the toilet can be done with cleansing powder. It is gritty and can be lightly rubbed along the surface. Rinse very well and then buff dry with a clean cloth. Porcelain comes clean and bright with little effort. I personally find Comet cleanser to contain some green particles that react harmfully with my nose and breathing. Bon Ami is the purest cleanser and turns into a pasty material when wet. It is not as strong as Ajax, Dutch Boy, or BAB-O, but it is a terrific product for the bathtub. Its only drawback is that it is twice as expensive as other cleansers. I suggest keeping it around just for the tub. If you have a fine mirror and want to treat it well, do it with vinegar and water, buff dry. Mop the floor with a liquid cleaner or ammonia.
“And when they don’t realize it really doesn’t matter who washes the dishes, you see, and they don’t realize it enough not to care whether they wind up washing them every night. I think just a lack of consciousness of that is fine.” This is an excerpt from an interview with the poet and editor Larry Fagin. Larry is talking about who does the dishes when two people are living together. Larry is separated from his wife and does not cook. Larry wants to transfer his will into a living body other than his own. Larry lives one flight up and across the tenement courtyard from me. At $3.50 an hour, I give Larry my services.
Larry’s apartment is the basic four rooms like my own apartment, but comparisons end at the blueprint. Topographically, Larry’s apartment is light-years different from mine. No cracks in the ceiling, no falling plaster, no mice holes; there are built-in closets and cabinets and bookshelves, there are sanded floors, there is bright white paint on the walls. Furniture is sparse here and what there is, is select and of natural wood. Cleaning Larry’s apartment resembles polishing a gem or tuning a piano.
Larry Fagin publishes many Adventures in Poetry books every year. He is either busy or suffering from asthma. He is a perfectionist and a collector. Larry can be thrown off track by blemishes. When I clean for him, I take over his concerns and add initiative and know-how. I clean Larry’s five windows inside and outside. I plug in Larry’s powerful Electrolux and vacuum the high moldings around the rooms. I vacuum everything I can, then I bring out my own jar of Murphy’s and wash the front, sides, back, and top of the furniture, dry and then polish off. I wash the low moldings; I scrub the floor with a brush and mop up the dark liquid. The natural wood swells up before me, clean and fresh. Here is the renaissance of cleaning! The cleanliness of Larry’s abode is hardly human. Like cleaning a bank vault, the cleaner is rewarded by his immediate prospects.
Larry could write a book on a subject like buying a suit. I find this a gentlemanly and fatherly concern and am thusly gratified by Larry’s approval of my work. After I clean, Larry tells me how his apartment sounds better and how much better he can hear now.
Sanford, my friend who paints houses, calls me up with a possible job. He is finishing up a huge painting job for a guy he calls “Herr Brumbough” or just “The Herr” for short. The Herr sounds like a pain in
the ass, but he also has the ring of a rich man with a lot of cleaning work that must be done. I call Brumbough and make a date to clean his new apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. I have to get to work at 7:00 AM before Brumbough leaves for work, which is a contrast to Sanford, who can’t find his way out of his apartment until the clock throws up its hands at noon.
The Herr’s building is a huge and venerable complex staffed by an army of employees. There are at least three doormen to check me out and ring Brumbough awake at 7:00. The dew rising off the grass in Central Park gives the air a thick, sweet quality and contrasts heartily with the heavy flow of traffic down Fifth Avenue. Brumbough opens the door and shows me the walk-in closet for coats. The closet is about the size of my bedroom. There is a little table with a marble top and a mirror. I take off my shirt and pull on my headband; I come out ready to clean.
The Herr ushers me into a large octagonal public hall. The floor is black linoleum with a white octagon in the center and a white border running along the sides. Off the lobby is the giant living room, which overlooks Central Park. Opposite the living room is the dining room that connects to the butler’s pantry with its own sink that further connects to the kitchen and maid’s quarters. Straight ahead through the lobby is a hallway that ends in a T junction. There is a washroom before me, a study on the right and the master bedroom on the left. The master bedroom has its own park view and private bath. The place is enormous! I have to wash the windows besides cleaning everything that isn’t painted. Brumbough leaves me after a thousand injunctions not to break anything and a little speech about how this is really a tryout for a regular job. I know I wouldn’t ever want to come back again as I set about to wash the windows. Most of the morning hours are taken up by this pursuit. I am consoled somewhat by the fact that I had raised my rate on him to $3.75/hour and at the same moment terribly saddened that I hadn’t said $4.
Cleaning Up New York Page 4
