My short stint as a sweeper in Jack London Square wasn’t my first foray into the janitorial field. For Christmas money in 1964, I took a temporary evening job at a downtown five-and-dime store in Newport, ten miles north of Orleans, at the south end of Lake Memphremagog.
Every day after school I parked our station wagon in the lot beside the frozen lake and made a dash for the store with the north wind howling at my back, blasting right out of Canada and producing a chill factor that would make International Falls in January seem tropical. My part-time night job consisted of general clerking, stocking shelves, unloading trucks, sweeping the old hardwood floor, and cleaning the restrooms, all for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. The store was failing and slated to close right after the holidays. My aging boss was testy and didn’t like schoolteachers.
It’s Christmas Eve. There’s a raging blizzard outside, what in the Kingdom is called a Canadian thaw—four feet of snow and a hell of a blow—with hordes of last-minute shoppers tracking in mud, slush, and snow. I’d swab out the restrooms, and half an hour later they’d look as if Attila the Hun and his outfit had just availed themselves of the facilities. Every hour on the hour I repaired to the janitor’s closet to fetch the store’s single push broom. An even more feckless predecessor of mine had managed to snap off so much of the handle that it now measured slightly under two feet long. To shove it along in front of me, I had to bend way over at the waist, which delighted my boss. He began to call me Igor of the North. Over the years the horsehair bristles had curled back like gnarled fingers. If, at the end of an aisle, I turned to survey my handiwork, I’d see a diagonal line of dust, lint, sidewalk salt, and indeterminable debris that the ancient, crippled push broom simply would not pick up. My sadistic employer would chuckle. “Mr. Teacher Man,” he’d say, “you’re leaving a trail. Do it again. Then get onto those restrooms. They look like hell.”
What would Philip Marlowe do? What would Jesus do? What in the name of heaven would I do if one of my students happened in and saw me, like Roger Miller’s King of the Road, pushing broom at this dump? On Christmas Eve, no less. No sooner had that unsettling thought come to me than Prof himself stumbled through the door, three sheets to the wind and tacking down the aisle toward me like a derelict freighter headed for the breakers. “Mosher,” he shouted, “you’ve got to lend me five dollars so I can get my wife a box of Christly candy. I forgot it was Christmas.”
“I can’t, Prof,” I said. “Not until I get paid. Can you come back in a hour?”
“No, I can’t come back in an hour,” Prof roared. “In an hour I’ll be passed out. You’ve got to help me.”
I looked beseechingly at the store manager. He smiled and held up his index finger: one more hour to go. No advance.
“Prof, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Goddamn you, Mosher,” he shouted. “I thought you were my friend. You should clean shithouses for a living. It would do you a world of good.”
With that he headed back out the door—but for once in my life, I thought of the perfect rejoinder right on the spot.
“Prof,” I called after him, just before he plunged into the raging blizzard like Lear himself, “I already do!”