30 June 2025
A song came together this weekend and so did its cover art: a pink dinosaur in a motion-blurred field of green and blue caught between destruction and desperation, its arms reaching toward a shape broken in half. Yena said the song flows like a river, and I think attaching this image to it is related to what I have been feeling from that CAConrad piece I mentioned in my last post here. A simultaneous lament and battle cry emerging from a current. Which could also describe the text I read in the second half of the song: an excerpt from an interview with a Chicago janitor named Eric Hoellen that appears in Working (1974) by Studs Terkel:
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, and 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...
You gotta watch. We have a business agent in the area and, oh man, there's too many guys lookin' for work. These people coming from Europe, Yugoslavs and Croatians. We're talking about young guys, thirty years old, twenty-five. They're nice guys. They talk broken, but you get to know 'em. They bowl with us and learn as quick as they can. A lot less young native-born are in it now. They'll take a job like a helper until they can find something better. A helper makes $640 a month, five-day week.
Back in the forties a janitor was a sort of low-class job. Nobody wanted it. But during the Depression, janitors were working. They had a place to live and they had food on the table. It was steady work. They had a few clothes on their back. Other people didn't.