Hail Caesar

San Francisco

       I worked with Caesar Romero. Not the one who danced with Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable, not the Caesar Romero who acted with Tyrone Power, Burl Ives, Rod Serling, and Freddie Prinz, and not the fellow who played The Joker to Adam West’s Batman on television. 

     This Ceasar Romero 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 a seven-story building situated in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco. 

    The Tenderloin is a rasty part of Baghdad by the Bay. At the time we 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, flop houses, soup kitchens and sex toy shops to a home for Asian versions of the same. There was also a resident population of street people. On an average morning, panhandlers would hit me for half a pack of smokes on the way from the bus to the front doors of the building.

     The building held Glide Church, pastored by the Reverend Cecil Williams, a true community leader, whose down-in-the-trenches approach to racism, poverty, and gender were 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 hot times on any Sunday morn. 

    The church occupied half of the big old building. The remainder was leased to various service agencies like the Western See of the Methodists, the Gray Panthers, and the San Francisco Food Bank. The offices were the workspaces for about two hundred folks, nine to fivers who required a whole lot more janitorial attention than did church patrons. 

     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, only that Chef Juan has a bio in the menu.  So, too, an international banking firm takes credit for the perfect paint job or tile work in an industrial building, but the workers who daily polish the brass, wash the barf off the walls, and pumice the urinals remain un-named.

     Caesar 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, a matching mustache brushed and clipped precisely. 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. Caesar was a walking wind chime.

    Half an hour before quitting time one Thursday afternoon we got a panic call from the third floor. A mouse had been spotted in an office full of rodent phobic city folks. Caesar 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. That’s where the mouse had last been seen. Could we hurry and do something? They had deadlines. Nothing could be accomplished with a filthy mouse scurrying around the place. The creature had been last seen in the lower right-hand side of that desk, right there.

     Caesar held the screwdriver in his left hand and carefully pulled the red rag from his hind pocket as we approached the desk. Sure enough, inside the file cabinet portion there was a runty gray mouse kicked back on his haunches and nibbling on the corner of a Ritz Cracker mined from a month’s worth of leftover lunches, including two undisturbed York’s Peppermint Patties.  

    Caesar dropped to his knees and used the sharp end of the screwdriver to flip the cracker from the mouse’s fingers. The mouse 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 sliding drawers and hinge works of the desk.  Gone.

     Ceasar 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 until taking the red rag in his right hand 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. Head thrown back, Caesar marched triumphantly from the room with the trophy.

     In the elevator, he opened the rag and produced the two Peppermint Patties, handing one to me.  Fifteen minutes later we got another call from 319, saying that they had discovered a second mouse, but we needn’t bother coming up because, following Caesar’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.