Hail Cesar

     I worked with Cesar Romero…. not the one who acted with Tyrone Power, Burl Ives, or Rod Serling, and not the guy who played The Joker to Adam West’s Batman on television.

      The Cesar Romero with whom I worked was a janitor, a green card custodian two years out of Nicaragua. We buffed floors, cleaned toilets, fixed faucets, painted, filled water coolers, emptied the trash and washed the windows together in Glide Memorial Church, a seven-story building situated in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco. 

     The Tenderloin has always been a rasty part of Baghdad by the Bay. At the time Cesar and I performed our custodial magic, the district was becoming a landing spot for Vietnamese folks, ten city blocks in transition from a haven for street hookers, soup kitchens and sex toy shops to a home for Asian versions of the same. 

     Glide Church is still pastored by the Reverend Cecil Williams, a true community leader, whose down-in-the-trenches approach to racism, poverty, and gender are influenced by Glide’s proximity to the trenches. In those days, his service featured a gospel choir accompanied by a full rock and roll band, with a light show projected on the wall behind the pulpit where most sanctuaries feature a crucifix. He wasn’t a hell and brimstone preacher, but it was definitely hot times on any Sunday morn. 

     The church occupied only half of the big old building. The remainder was leased to various service agencies like the Gray Panthers, and the San Francisco Food Bank. The offices held about three hundred folks who required occasional janitorial attention.

     Janitors are invisible, like prep cooks. Nobody knows who chopped all the cilantro and ancho chiles, shredded the pork, built the sauce, or steamed the tortas in your designer sopitas at your favorite restaurant. So, too, a banking firm takes credit for the perfect paint job or tile work on its building, but the workers who daily polish the brass, wash the barf off the walls, and pumice the urinals remain un-named.

     Cesar bucked the trend of invisibility by adopting a matador’s approach to custodial work. He dressed in crisp forest green J.C. Penny’s gabardine uniforms, short sleeves pressed and cuffed to match his pants, squeaky black shoes fit for a general, wavy hair moussed into place, with a matching mustache. Hanging from his right rear pocket was a red utility rag, folded into thirds lengthwise. Clipped to his belt were twice the number of keys required to operate the building. Cesar was walking wind chimes.

     Half an hour before quitting time on one Thursday afternoon we got a panic call from the third floor. A mouse had been spotted.  Cesar said something to himself in Spanish, reached into a gray toolbox, pulled out a foot-long bladed screwdriver, and motioned for me to accompany him on the safari. In the elevator he stood tapping his foot to a silent tune.

    Room 319 was in a tizzy. Four women and two men were huddled against the windowed side of the room, pointing toward a desk that sat out in the middle. Could we hurry and do something? They had deadlines. Nothing could be done with a filthy mouse scurrying around the place. The creature had been last seen in the lower right-hand side of the desk. 

     Cesar held the screwdriver in his left hand and carefully pulled the red rag from his hind pocket as we approached the infestation. Sure enough, inside the file cabinet portion there was a little gray city 

mouse kicked back on his haunches and nibbling on the corner of a Ritz Cracker it had mined from a month’s worth of leftover lunches, including two undisturbed York’s Peppermint Patties. 

     Cesar dropped to his knees and gently employed the tip of the screwdriver to flip the cracker from the mouse’s paws. It eyed us for a moment like “Hey, Dudes, I’m on your side of this question,” then nimbly leapt up into the catacombs behind the drawers and hingeworks.  Gone.

      Cesar never missed a beat. He swapped ends with the screwdriver and proceeded to pound the handle on sandwich bags and paper cups and Kleenex boxes, drumming on the guts of the metal desk, setting up an unholy racket for half a minute before whipping out the red rag and diving almost entirely into the desk. When he emerged, he held the rag tightly at shoulder level with the screwdriver poised above it like a sword. The office workers thanked us, almost applauded as, head thrown back, Cesar marched triumphantly from the room with the trophy.

     In the elevator, he opened the rag and produced two Peppermint Patties, handing one to me.  Fifteen minutes later we got another call from 319, saying that they had discovered yet another mouse, but we needn’t bother coming up because, following Cesar’s example, they had squished it with the bottom of a metal wastebasket, wrapped the corpse in paper towels, and flushed it down the toilet.