Music School: Part One

I wrote up a piece for the DJ blog, about a percussionist auditioning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it started me down a road I haven’t traveled in ages. To those in a Proustian mood, every snack is a madeleine, I guess.

I had a job for a while when I was in college working as part of the custodial staff at the school music building. I did this for about six months, taking just a couple of classes, which were paid for as a benefit of the job. So I was still marginally in school, which was important in the age of the draft and the Vietnam War, but I wasn’t all that much in school. It wasn’t exactly a break year, but it was close enough. I needed it at the time, and there it was.

Our building staff comprised three people. The boss was a middle-eastern immigrant named Jamiel, who seemed to have exactly one sentence of English, which sounded like, “Up orla down.” Remarkably, he was able to wring a lot of meaning out of those words. By his throwing in a bit of body language, I would understand him to mean that I should do the third floor, or that he would be in the basement, or it was time for a break, or it was time to stop breaking; the nature of the work being less than rocket science caliber—we swept and/or mopped the rooms—a lot of specific jargon wasn’t required. We’d start at one end of the building, sweeping and mopping, and by the time we got to the other end, it was time to go home. Occasionally we threw in the little law building next door. This was not generally open to the public, even the law student public. It was very pipe smoke and leathery, lined with books no one seemed to read, dotted with comfy chairs, a place where one imagined the law professors gathered with their martinis to sort out the upcoming graduates into the appropriate firms on Wall Street. "Young Jones looks like a Fleecum and Suem man" and all that. I never saw a soul in the place, so anything I knew about it I made up. Joe Biden was a Syracuse law student at the time; maybe he was one of the people who hung out in this special little place. The souls I never saw in it never included him, so I really can’t say one way or the other.

The other member of our little custodial team was a large round woman named Berenice. (I’m guessing at the spellings of both her and Jamiel’s name, since I never had call to see them written down. This was long before the age of wearing visible i.d. tags.) Unlike Jamiel, with whom I never spoke, aside from agreeing up orla down, Berenice and I, when we were together, never stopped talking. Or more specifically, Berenice never stopped talking. She was powerfully cheerful, and incredibly foul-mouthed and, better still, incredibly foul-minded. Berenice and Jamiel were about the same age—he had two daughters attending the college, for free, as a result of his custodial job, while Berenice had a husband at home who she described as everything from a bum to a god, depending on the whims of her conversation at the moment. To Berenice, I was her “little white boy,” which she got a great kick out of repeating at any possible opportunity. And as soon as she discovered that her earthiness often, to put it mildly, caused me to blush at least metaphorically, especially when there were others around, as there often were (the school was far from empty when we cleaned it; it was just that classes were over for the day), she let out all the stops.

Once in a while the supervisor would drop in. I don’t remember much about him, except that he never wore a coat. He would drive or walk around the campus with only a sports jacket to protect him from the elements. And this was Syracuse, where there really were Capital E Elements. Snow would be piled up as high as an elephant’s eye starting around October, and whenever the temperature rose up over ten degrees Fahrenheit people who normally dressed in more layers than your average Aleut in a windstorm would pull down their hoods and shake their heads in the glowing warmth. Yet this supervisor guy lived in a climate all his own, and more to the point, bragged about it. All these years later I still remember this guy talking about how he wasn’t affected by the cold and how tough he was, yadda yadda yadda. If he ever talked about anything else, I don’t remember it. Then again, we didn’t see him that often, not even on a daily basis. When he did show up, he mostly talked to Jamiel, in their roles as supervisor to supervisor. In addition to his weather heartiness, he was also apparently fluent in up orla down.

(to be continued)