It was Ennet House’s Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don Gately ‘sunlights on the side.’ Five A.M.S a week, whether he’s just getting off all-night Staff duty or not, he has to be on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two more trains to his other job at the Shat-tuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately has become, in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He scrubs toilets. The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck’s toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area, with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There’s human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance before Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.
Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine down tight. Gately’s partner is also the guy that owns the company that contracts with the Commonwealth for the Shattuck’s maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty, Stavros Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women’s-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4.
So at like 0800 usually they’re done and by vendor’s contract still get to bill for eight hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for three, but it’s sub-table), and Gately heads back to Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth to Ennet House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till!2OOh. and the afternoon shift. Stavros L. himself gets a couple hours off to footwear-browse (Gately very much needs to assume that’s all he does with the catalogues, is browse), then has to head over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston, where Stavros and two other broke and desperate yutzes from another of the halfway houses Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning and then bill the state for six.
The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic discharges and missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi’s Sarcoma and suppurating sores and all different levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit and damage. Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are industrial buckets for A.M. puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There’s one sort of blocked off and more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, that’s always got sperm moving slowly down the walls. And way too much sperm for just one or two guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses’s cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws right out of there at O8Olh. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged.
Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed with only three days to go on his month’s deadline to find some honest job, as a resident, and he’s kept it ever since.
The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by O5OOh. regardless of weather or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros L. clean. But some never screw out of there on time — and these’re always the worst guys, the ones you don’t want anyplace near you, these ones that won’t leave. They’ll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces off the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport and yelling encouragement and advice. They’ll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them to get out and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved patches on their arms. They’ll lie in the cots and hallucinate and thrash and scream in the cots and knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately’s trying to mop. They’ll skulk back over to the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately’s got done scrubbing the night’s sperm off and has backed away and started again to inhale.
Maybe the worst is that there’s almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who Gately knows personally, from his days of addiction and B&E, from before he got to the no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with. Gately’ll slip them a finski or a pack of Kools and maybe sometimes try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they’re ready to give up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression where he lets them know he’s ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance, but it’s a look that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will stare hard at a point just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask helps.
Stavros Lobokulas’s great ambition — which he goes on about regularly to Gately when they’re cleaning the same barracks — Stavros’s dream is to utilize his unique combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who’ll scrub shit for next to nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women’s shoe store in some mobilely upward part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding and not saying really much of anything. Because what is there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet? But Gately’ll be paying court-scheduled restitution well into his thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets easily aggravated at the Shattuck guys that can’t get up and out like they’re supposed to and clear out, and almost daily he’ll make a production of throwing down his mop in the middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: “Why don’t you sorry motherfucks just go home?” which so far for over thirteen months he hasn’t quit finding hilarious, his own witticism, Stavros.