Food Building

In the late 90s I worked for a carpet cleaning company.  We would occasionally get sent to a town called Bessemer, which was generally the only time I ever went to Bessemer.  It was unfamiliar terrain to me, and I got lost a lot.

One day my partner and I were trying to find a house that was lost down one of the squirrelly little roads that capillary their way off the main streets through the town, and it wasn't going well.  Understand that GPS was not on the map, so to speak.  All we had was a big dusty map book, and Bessemer was shell-gaming us, sneaking that little road past us at each turn.

Eventually we'd stop at a gas station, buy some Corn Nuts (my staple diet at the time) and beg for directions.

"Just go on up that way till you pass the Piggly Wiggly..."

"All you gotta do is hang left when you see the Piggly Wiggly..."

"When you see the Piggly Wiggly, take a right..."

 Everybody's directions (And we asked a representative sampling of Bessemer residents) hinged on the Piggly Wiggly.

After about an hour of this we finally accepted that the big not-Piggly Wiggly grocery we kept passing as we zigzagged along the grain of peoples' directions must have once been a Piggly Wiggly before leaving the franchise and renaming itself Food Building or We Got Groceries or whatever.  Everyone's directions made perfect sense from there and we found the client's house instantly.  At this time Bessemer was not a flourishing economic center, and I find myself wondering if that stagnation was cause or effect of the locked-in folkways that prevented the Good People of Bessemer from informing us of the "Piggly Wiggly's" binary identity.

A few months later I was in Bessemer again.  This time I was alone, tooling around the back roads, searching for an even more obscure address.  It was night.  I got lost in the woods, and something went awry.  What was it?  Did I just veer off the road into a ditch?  Or was there a more robust mechanical failure?  You tell me.  Those vans broke down all the time; the cleaning gear was in fine shape, but the vehicles were old and strained, and at least one got towed to the repair shop every day.  Anyway, I try to remember the details of what went wrong and it's a smear.

But the van was in a syrupy ditch, and the wheels would cut no traction into that mess.  The road was virtually dirt.  It was dark outside my headlights.  Surrounded by woods, with little desperate dwellings here and there.

We had CBs that we used to communicate with base, but in that dead zone I couldn't get a signal through.  I had, as it were, no bars.  My only option was to walk till I found a phone.  I'd passed a little gas station some ways back, so I hoofed it.

At one point I passed a little watering hole.  Rough customers stood outside talking loud, then went silent as I passed.  There was a pay phone out front, but the scowls of the locals inspired me to press on.

I got to the (well lit) gas station and placed my call.  Home base told me to go back to the van and wait for the tow truck.  A handsome young man was waiting by the phone.  "Don't go back there," he told me.  "This is a BAD neighborhood at night.  I'm waiting on some friends to get me out of here.  You tell them to come here and pick you up."  (Let me point out that he was of the same race as the locals, and I was not).

Why didn't I take his advice?  Or why didn't I beg him to get his friends to drive me to my truck?  Look, if I'd been a problem solver, I wouldn't have been working where I was.  Marry a problem solver like I did (a decade later), folks, so you can learn like I have.

So the guy's friends arrived and took him away, leaving me alone outside a closed gas station.  His uneasy company had been some comfort, but the florescent light was bleak now.

A dutiful dope of a drudge, I walked back, through the dark, skirting around the watering hole.  Then I sat in the van, worried and frustrated.  Like a schmuck, I ran the engine, grinding it, the tires shrilling and spewing mud; loud, loud, worthless effort.

A tense-looking middle-aged man came out a door, glowered at me in silence for several minutes.  It was pretty late.  I prayed he'd offer me some help, but he just stood in the porch light like an icon of justifiably angry poverty.  Then he went back inside and the light went out.

Somehow I got the truck on the road.  Did I push it?  Did I rock it?  I dunno.    Was the trip complicated by a flat tire, a wobbly wheel, a twist of some snarled mechanism or other?  I got no clue.  I was frantic.  I got to a different gas station, an open one near the highway.  I contacted base (with the CB this time) and they rerouted the tow guy, who fussed at me for not staying put.

Next week I did something I'd been yearning to do for the entire year I'd worked there.  I quit.

You know why I worked there as long as I did?  Because at my interview they laid a guilt trip on me about how they didn't want to hire people only to have them quit after a month.  They expected me to work there at least a year or two.  That's why I stayed.

Suffice it to say I don't sell my own happiness so short now.

Another story about carpet cleaning

Back around 1999, when I was cleaning carpet, I was told to go, solo, to Sylacauga, a town about an hour from our home base. I wasn't thrilled, but I never was. So okay, off I went, the sun going down as I drove to this area I'd never seen before. The customer was a mild woman with an interesting house. Most of it was one large open room with furniture groupings and screens creating a sense of discrete locations. A bedroom, kitchen and bathroom were behind doors. I was impressed by the way it combined openness with intimacy in the little clusters of furnishing. It seemed she lived alone but was accustomed to company. The whole area was carpeted, and with the customer helping I moved every single bit of furniture in order to clean every bit of floor. It went pretty smoothly. Then it was time to put the furniture back, with plastic under to prevent any residue from the chair legs and such staining the wet carpet.

The customer was very particular about putting it all back in order. She couldn't remember how it all went, though. She wanted to put every bit of furniture back just so, but how was just so? Every chair, every sofa, every pole lamp, every screen, we had to agonize about just exactly where to place it. With few walls, corners or other fixed landmarks, she was unsure exactly how to line everything back up on the original floor plan. I didn't have the gumption to suggest we simply put the furniture any which way, and she could fix it at her leisure after the carpet was dry and I was home showering off the work day. And so putting the furniture back took far, far longer than the cleaning.

Once it was done she offered to lead me to the main highway, she in her car, me in my truck. Since it was dark and we didn't have GPSs (only a big mapbook) I eagerly accepted. I had found my way there but didn't relish trying to get back alone in the dark. That far from base my radio wouldn't reach the base, and I didn't have anything remotely resembling a cel phone, so I felt totally alone out there aside from my infuriating but genial customer.

Following the red of her taillights, I saw another reddish light flickering through the trees. Soon, despite the darkness all around, it seemed as if some small localized sun was still above some small localized horizon.

A house was on fire. Not just a bit of smoke or flame out a window, but the whole building, a residential bonfire. I'd never been so close to such a conflagration before. not far past it was the main highway. The customer turned back and drove homeward. I had a peculiar desire to discuss the fire with her, but of course our involvement with one another was over.

So cute

Today I saw a mom and dad leading a pair of identical twin girls, and don't you know those cute little girls were dressed exactly alike? They made me smile, but my smile melted into a frown, because everything I've ever heard from grown twins on the subject is that you should dress twins differently and encourage them to be their own persons. I have twin cousins who grew up with complementary but different wardrobes; their dresses might have the same pattern, but one girl's color scheme would be different from the other. That seems like a good way to balance it out. Today my cousins are as connected as any pair of sisters, but are very aware of themselves as distinct individuals.

Still, I totally understand the urge to turn twins into a perfect pair. It reminds me of the urge to have white carpet. When I was a carpet cleaner I discovered that every conventionally-minded newlywed bride wants white carpet in her first house. She soon discovers, though, that there is no such thing as white carpet. There is only mottled gray carpet with brown and black streaks. Any "white" carpet you see is simply a preliminary to the inevitable.

Everybody Burns

Carpet Cleaning in Alabama, Part 2:

Z and I went on another cleaning trip out in... I believe it was Helena, but don't quote me. Anyway, it was a house as full of junky clutter as my apartment. The clutter extended out into the yard. There was a little girl standing in the bed of a truck, roughly five years old, pretty as a postcard, but wearing nothing but a saggy diaper. Big bonfire in the front yard; they were burning trash. Cleaning carpet involved carrying a bunch of equipment into the house and hooking it up to our truck, so we had to go in and out of the house making the connections, walking back and forth past the fire, inhaling plenty of smoke. The man of the house threw huge sheets of plastic on the fire, and the poisonous reek of burning plastic filled the air, clogging our lungs, filling the air around this trashy Dogpatch domicile. The actual cleaning went pretty quick because they didn't want us to move anything; just clean the carpet we could see. Since almost no floor was visible it was a quick job. Afterward we presented the receipt and the little old pink-eyed lady of the house explained (no one had asked) that it may be illegal to burn trash, but it costs too much to afford trash service. "Everybody around here burns," she said. "Everybody burns."

Cleaning

I spent a year working for a well-known carpet cleaning company, a job for which I was completely unsuited. I'm glad I did it because it broke me out of my comfy suburban boy bubble. Anyway, many odd things happened. Here's one of them.

My coworker for the day (let's call him Z.) and I were called to a house in Ensley. The customer was a big friendly guy who answered the door in a T-Shirt advertising a gang ministry. He offered to share his dinner with us ("I'm not weird or anything, I'm just offering you dinner") which we declined. Then he led us to his bedroom, which we were to clean. By his bed was a pile of magazines; Christian magazines. Z., the customer and I started moving stuff out of the room, starting with the mags. We soon found that beneath the Christian mags were porno mags, though. Really creepy ones; the cheezy kind that look like they were shot in a garage. And the pinup girl is the editor's Mom. Special bonus: swinger newsletters, the kind with classified ads for "Polyamourous activity partners" that turned me off the human body when I was in grade school and found an issue in the road on my walk home from school. Ewww. Z. and I instantly fled from the mags and started moving the furniture. We figured we'd let the customer move his own strokebooks, but no dice. He hung back and let us move his mags. Then we cleaned, collected payment, and left.

Was the guy hoping we'd confront him on the contrast between the Christian stuff and the smutty stuff? Was he genuinely unaware of the incongruity? I've always wondered. People balancing faith and filth is no surprise, but the fact that he'd let us discover what looked like a guilty little secret seems like a cry for help that we didn't want to answer.

Speaking of which, there's a lot of lonely people out there. Some of them turn to carpet cleaners for human contact. We had women answer the door in nothing but towels, obviously considering a seduction, then changing their minds when they got a load of the fat smelly goofballs the company sent. We've had people dish all their grandkids' drug problems as we cleaned the grandkids' rooms. I suspect I'll do a few posts on my carpet cleaning misadventures.