u/DaveMC12

“Look around, you’re in a giant fish bowl,” said the head janitor. My friend and I, standing there outside in cutoff jeans and sweaty T-shirts, looked up at the school building. I imagined G-men in dark suits staring down upon us from the large classroom windows. But no. There was nobody up there.

“Yeah,” we both said sheepishly.

We’d better get back to work, anyway, I thought. Let’s get this guy off our ass. So back into the classroom we went, the head janitor shuffling along in the other direction of who knows where.

“What was that guy talkin’ about?” I later asked my friend.

“I don’t know, man,” he said, and accidentally jammed himself in the foot with his gum scraper. “Fuck!”

“You shouldn’t be squatting down at that angle,” I said. “That gum is pretty hard and you’ll hurt yourself.”

“Fuck!” He accidentally jabbed himself again, this time in the ankle.

I grabbed my broom and laid it down beside me. Then, with my hand tool, I began picking at the gum that was stuck to the floor while my friend prepped the floor buffer behind me.

Ian was a hardo who did cycles of steroids for vanity purposes. He was the kind of guy who donned the latest fashionable gold chain and spent an hour in the mirror feathering his hair. An unlikely duo, I was a thinking kid with a skinny frame but good natural triceps. I favored green tea and marijuana, Ian liked the band “The Offspring.”

Day after day, we were stuck in the same stuffy classrooms washing walls and desks and scraping old gum stuck under the desks and on the floor. Always the veritable highlight of our day, we mopped and buffed the floors, too.

Control Freak Ian insisted on doing most of the buffing with the janitor-issued floor buffer. It made him feel strong and in control to operate such an apparatus, as I slaved away with the shitty mop, shining brightly as an emasculated girl.

One time, Ian and I were carrying a large mat into one of the classrooms. I was pretty fast on my end, like the late Rick James in his dance shoes after a coke binge, and Ian got pissed. “Slow the fuck down,” he yelled, losing his grip on the mat.

Crouching down now, like Crouching Douchebag Hidden Jerk, his face beet-red, he threw out a barrage of insults. He called me a fucking asshole, among other things. What a jerk, I thought. I wanted to stab him with the cool pen I’d found in the gymnasium earlier that day.

Most of the time, though, Ian and I got along. We smoked weed at lunch, laughed at each other’s farts, and performed our janitorial tasks at a quarter of the pace of a normal worker.

And we certainly didn’t give a crap about the real world.

Outside of work, we drank Busch Lights with our other friends and sang songs of idiocy and unabashed immaturity.

It was the summer of ’96.

Two ersatz janitors, just trying to salvage our jobs before returning back to college in the fall, we were pretty big simpletons back then.

Tales of an Unserious Truthteller