American Jobs—Cleaning Up Bars on a Graveyard Shift

by Don Hall

Waiting tables didn't take and, given I had a full class schedule on top of rehearsals for the multiple bands I was in, I needed to find either a well paying part-time gig or something on the graveyard shift.

A friend of a friend recommended a job working nights (midnight to 9:00a.m.) on a cleaning crew for a few of Wichita’s more prominent restaurant/bars. It paid well and it fit my schedule, so I bit.

I met Chase at midnight at the same Chi-Chi's I had injured a child in. I walked in and he sized me up. He looked hard. You know the guy—pot belly as hard as a rock, a permanent five o’clock shadow, a shock of wiry hair poking out of a weathered ball cap.

He handed me a pair of enormous hard rubber gloves and we walked back to the kitchen. “Turn it on and power wash the place,” he growled as he passed over a thick black hose with a nozzle.

“Power wash?”

“The water is frigging hot as hell so don’t get it on you if you can help it. Spray everything. There are drains on the floor so don’t worry about that. They’re supposed to put away the pans and cooking stuff but if they didn’t...” and he grabbed the hose back, took aim at a metal bowl half-filled with dried up refried beans and cockroaches, and blasted it across the room. “...target practice.” And he cackled like he’d told a dirty joke about a whore and a priest.

It was then I noticed the cockroaches everywhere in this kitchen. Like bigger, dirtier ants in regiments marching from discarded chips and glops of guacamole, conquering these islands of food and streaming on to the next.

Target Practice.

There was a checklist hung up on the wall. The floors of the entire place. Carpets. Bathrooms. We didn’t do the windows but we did disinfect the surfaces and table tops.

He and I cleaned four bars that night. Chi-Chi's. Joe Kelly's Oyster Dock. Willie C's Cafe. Savute's Italian and Steaks. Each took us approximately two hours and it seemed like the places weren't that clean but Chase was in charge so I just did my best and moved through it. He handed me a weekly schedule on a greasy legal pad page. I never saw Chase again.

On my next scheduled shift, after a day of classes, rehearsals, and four hours of sleep, I met the crew. This time we started at Joe Kelly’s Oyster Dock. It was a fish place with a huge circular bar in the middle and a hard wood floor made with planks of aged wood. The crew was comprised of Duffy and Tim, both about a decade my senior. 

Duffy wore lots of black camouflage. He had a dark blue Mohawk and had a fifteen inch knife strapped to his left leg. He rode a Japanese motorcycle and wore mirrored sunglasses even in the dim recesses of the restaurant. He also was a frothing Born Again Pentecostal Christian.

Tim was a classic burnout. Think Jeff Bridges in The Big Lewbowski but without the charm. He’d done a lot of drugs in his younger years and it showed in his perpetually stoned demeanor and vacant stares. That night, he told me his favorite job he’d ever had was as the manager of The Circle Cinema, Wichita’s since closed porn theater. He loved that gig but got fired for being caught getting a hand job by a sixteen year old girl.

Now, being eighteen years young, I can’t say I was the brightest bulb in the lamp, but my wattage outshone these two retards like a lighthouse eclipses a Christmas Tree strand.

On the third week, Tim handed me a note from Chase. Scrawled in black pen and in all caps, it read: YOU ARE NOW THE CREW SUPERVISOR. EXTRA $3.00 HOUR. YOUR (sic) IN CHARGE. Neither Duffy nor Tim cared much. They weren’t big thinkers so having the college kid tell them what to clean and in what order wasn’t a problem.

Of the two, Duffy was the more focused. All I had to do was give him the order (“Do the floors, disinfect the bar, hit the kitchen.”) and aside from him jawing on and on about Jesus and Christian Rock all night, I never worried about him.

Tim, on the other hand, was like working with a child. Almost every night, I had to talk him through the order of cleaning the floors (“First sweep. Then vacuum. Then wet mop. Then dry mop. Then buff.”) The guy was just barely there on most nights and spent long smoke breaks at the bar in between each step. “Which one now?” he’d ask in between drags on his Winston Lights.

Neither of them would clean the bathrooms. Ever. That was the only area that my Supervisor authority ran dry. Any time I’d even suggest that Duffy do the bathrooms he’d go into a full-on rant/whine about it. Tim just ignored me when I’d task it to him. So, the bathrooms were almost always my domain.

Here’s a bit of knowledge to dole out. Drunk men are juvenile. They piss on stuff. They piss on the floor around the urinals. They piss on the toilet. They piss on full rolls of toilet paper. Like Storm Troopers in Star Wars, their aim is for shit.

Drunk women on the other side are monsters. Filthy and almost angry in the bathroom. Shit smeared on the walls. Used tampons stuck to the floor. Half-empty glasses left in the corners covered in lipstick. Half-eaten food on the sinks. 

I don’t know if when half-cocked on Long Island Ice Teas, the longstanding rage at being paid less and treated like a pair of tits on legs seeps out like a poisonous sweat, but going into any women’s restroom after a Friday or Saturday night of business was like entering the threshold to hell.

I found my rhythm, working the grave yard shift and going classes during the day. I didn’t sleep much but I was eighteen and imbued with more energy than a weasel on crack so that never seemed a problem. Duffy and Tim were both odd founts of random knowledge and they’d tell me stories of women they’d been with, of other jobs they had, and conspiracy theories about Iran and Russia and mind control via the television.

There was the time Duffy spent an entire shift on target practice and grabbing crock ware bowls filled with roaches and microwaving them. There was the night Tim forgot about his cigarette and caught a vintage Coke sign on fire in Willy C’s Cafe.

It felt like I was living two lives. Each day surrounded by hopeful, enthusiastic, and highly dramatic college students. Lots of chatter, lots of noise. Each night it was as if I had transported to a movie about the dystopian end of mankind. In places reserved for social gatherings but deserted. No rules because there was no one to enforce them. Two guys working with me who seemed completely out of step with the rest of humanity yet still showing up and half-assing their way through life just the same.

The work became routine and, for some reason, the rote labor was a comfort. I didn't have to think about what I was doing so I had plenty of mental space to wander in my thoughts.

I recall one night both Duffy and Tim called out and I cleaned all four restaurants alone. It was work, for certain, but it was kind of bliss, too. I'd come in, turn on all the lights, crank the sound system to the local radio, and jam out in solitude.

After a few months, even the women's restrooms felt benign and expected. I was becoming accustomed to the disgusting nature of the job.

Then there was Walter.

Walter was a skinny-as-a-matchstick kid (actually he was five years older than me) with a pompadour haircut and out of his tiny body came the voice of James Earl Jones. It was a dissonance to hear him talk with this booming gravitas and then see the pipsqueak dude uttering the sound. He was also a fantastic actor. I knew Walter from my regular casting in Wichita’s Shakespeare in the Parks and, when he was looking for work, I hooked him up.

Now there were four of us and we could hit two bars at the same time. I always paired up Duffy and Tim because regardless of the work, Walter and I had grand, sweeping conversations about theater, art, movies, and music. We also both really like to prank each other.

Walter’s pranks came in the form of phone calls and plastic vomit. It was if he spent a lot of time at a Spencer’s Gifts and just couldn’t get enough. My pranks were mean. I was gifted my sense of humor from my grandfather who was known for tricking his son into believing he was deaf by talking to him for hours without making a sound and taught his grandson (me) to try to catch rocks with his head.

One night as I’m buffing the floor in one of the restaurants and Walter is on bathrooms, Walter came out from the women’s. His face was as pale as a sheet of paper and he looked mortified. I shut down the buffer.

“D-Don. I can’t. I mean, I just can’t...”

“What is it, dude? What’s going on?”

“There’s a...it’s in the toilet...there’s a fetus in the toilet...”

“A fetus? Like an aborted fetus?”

“Yeah...”

"You sure?"

"Pretty sure. I. I can't go back in there. I know I'm supposed to do the restrooms but...I can't, you know?"

“Oh, fuck. OK. Why don’t you buff and I’ll go check it out.”

The relief on his face was visceral.

Sure enough, when I took a look in the third stall, there was what appeared to be a curled up, pink fetus floating in the bowl. I was a bit horrified until I notice the tail. A long thin tail one might see on a... oh. Apparently, this rat had been in the sewer system and the water had gradually peeled off every strand of fur, leaving nothing less than a curled up, pink dead rat in the toilet.

And, yes. I’m a horrible asshole.

I’m a bastard because I put on my rubber gloves, picked the rat up by it’s tail, put it behind my back, and walked out to Walter. I feigned horror. I made my lower lip tremble. He shut off the buffer.

“Was it...?”

“Yeah. A fetus. A dead baby in the toilet.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

“I think it’s a boy fetus. How about you CHECK!” and I hurled the rat at Walter. It hit him square on his skinny chest and he let out a high-pitched scream so alien to his deep vocal stylings that it created another sort of disconnect. He squealed a second time, like a tea kettle or an actress in a Jason Voorhees movie. His eyes rolled back into his skull and he dropped like a sack of flour onto the floor.

I laughed so hard I felt like I might go blind or have a stroke.

Walter quit that night. I cleaned the rest of the place myself. A week or so later, I caught up with him at Shakespeare rehearsal. I offered my apologies but a few others wanted to know why. And, in his booming voice, he told the tale of the fetus with epic flair and managed to recreate his screech to boot. When he was finished, we all applauded him and he took a bow.

I worked this crew for a full year before transferring schools to another state (better scholarship with a good high school friend in the marching band).

When I clocked out the final time, Tim and Duffy pulled me over to the Joe Kelly's bar. Tim reached over and grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam. At 9:00a.m. the three of us drank to my future and their hope that the next supervisor was as easy as I was.

Like Chase, I never saw them again. I also never ate at a Chi-Chi's ever again in my life.