I was the new janitor at Pima Community College. One morning I was cleaning the offices in the east wing of the English building. I stopped in front of office CC126 and put the key in the lock. Taped to the door was a newspaper article. “Jefferson Carter will read from his new poetry chapbook Gentling The Horses, on Saturday, May 10th at 8:00 p.m. at The Reader's Oasis.” The gold name plate on the door said Dr. Jefferson Carter. The article was written by a local female arts critic for the Tucson Citizen. She had orgasm after orgasm, right there on the page. Mr. Carter's chapbook was a “must read for anyone even remotely serious about literature." There was a photograph of the bard cradling his book, with beard and dark sunglasses. A white guy, he looked to be about 50. “Well crafted,” the writer said. “A master.”
I entered his vacant office and emptied the trash. A secretary walked down the hall chewing her gum. The office staff didn't like the janitors to linger in the offices. A week before, my co-worker Albert was accused of stealing Jello from a history professor's private refrigerator. They canned him.
Later that day I was in the south bathroom of the Roosevelt building because some kid had used a whole roll of toilet paper to wipe his ass. When I turned to wring out the mop, someone was standing at a urinal. It was Jefferson Carter.
He finished pissing and turned around. “Hi,” I said, “I hear you're reading your poetry at the Reader's Oasis?”
“Huh?” he said.
“Aren't you Jefferson Carter?” I said.
“I am Doctor Carter,” he said. He wasn't going to return my smile any more than he was going to dance on the toilet.
“You're going to read your poetry at Reader's Oasis on the tenth, right?” I said.
“And you are?” he said.
“Mather,” I said, “Mather Schneider, strange name I realize, kind of a tongue twister. I write poetry too.”
He looked at me like I'd told him McDonald's just sold another hamburger.
“I'm the new janitor,” I said. “I was cleaning and I read the newspaper review on your window, and uh, I thought--”
“That review is from last year,” he said, while giving me a look that said: “Just as I thought, another illiterate plebian.”
Then he walked out. I was left with the feeling that I had intruded upon the ablutions of a swami.
I found four of his books in the college library. They were all staple-bound, including Gentling the Horses. I opened one at random and read:
... I don't whine
about my latest chore, cleaning
the litter box four or five times
a day...
And a little further down:
I love that old cat, most nights
he snuggles under a comforter
buzzing between me and my wife...
I picked up another:
...but I know how
to visualize myself as a body
of water. It's raining, the surface
of the lake steaming.”
It was like drinking a glass of slobber. Every poem was an exercise in domestic martyrdom. If this snob ever had trouble in his life, his poetry didn't show it. There seemed to be this idea that wisdom arrived by avoiding conflict at all costs, and that the android-like recording of this avoidance equaled interesting literature. Two terrible things had happened to Jefferson Carter in his life. The first was when he realized he was simply more intelligent than his fellow humans. The second was the time his eighteen-year-old son expressed the desire to use a condom.
I almost felt sorry for him, until the next time I saw him. He was attired in his Friday “casuals,” with a smug look on his face. He was riding an old, fixed-up three-speed bicycle, to show he cared about Mother Earth. It was the kind of bicycle with a bell on the front and high handle bars that give the rider a straight, Norman Rockwell posture, like a teenage girl sitting on a love seat.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2010, 128pp/$15).
Permanent: http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/columns/35-columns/213-0510-ms-drs11
Short: http://frsh.in/b5
