Six Feet Under

There’s a porter at my work named Rolando, and every time I feel overworked and cranky I think of him. Rolando works seven days a week. What’s more, he works a double shift every day. Imagine: that's sixteen hours of hard labor every single day, with no days off and no vacations. Month by interminable month, year stacked upon endless year. Just thinking about it completely exhausts me. And this is thankless janitorial work we’re talking about: plunging toilets congested with strangers’ shit; vacuuming vomit and scrubbing the resultant carpet stain with a toothbrush; cleaning the foul public restroom; schlepping countless rancid bags of trash from the buildings; lifting the occasional blood stain, etc., etc. Factoring his commutes, the amount time that Rolando gets to be away from vile filth each day of his life works out to roughly six hours, time he must use for eating, sleeping, and sucking back the occasional Corona.

But what is perhaps crazier than Rolando’s mindboggling workload is the fact that he appears to actually enjoy it. Rolando loves everybody and everybody loves Rolando. He is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, never complaining or even allowing himself a disgruntled sigh; to the contrary, he happily fields my complaints, always offering a sympathetic nod when I tell him I’m bushed after my eight-hour shift (on the precipice of my weekend). He tells me that people such as us work hard at our jobs, and I’ll agree, thinking about how I just woke up from my two-hour slumber, and how this conversation is eating into my web surfing time. His English is a work in progress (while my Spanish is downright pathetic), so our dialogue is usually halting and awkward. For this reason I always try to avoid friendly Rolando.

This past Sunday morning I ran into the porter as he was shoveling out the plaza between the two buildings, a light snowfall tumbling from the sky.

“Mucho trabajo,” I told him, apropos of the snow. “Donde esta tu amigos?”

“No friends,” he proudly announced. “Only me!”

“Too much trabajo,” I said of his task, which was apparently to shovel the entire grounds by himself.

“No, it’s okay! ¿Amigo, cuánto nevará?”

I paused, the way you do upon encountering a phrase you cannot comprehend but understand a question is being asked. This was exactly what I hated, these situations. “I-I don’t know… No se…”

“Nevará… how do you say… ah, snow,” he repeated. “Cuánto?”

“Oh, how much snow?” I said, tremendously relieved. “Well, I heard on the news between five and seven – cinco a siete.”

“¿Pies?” he asked with a jovial smile.

“Si. Yes, about six. Seis pies.”

Rolando’s smile abruptly faded. “No… No realmente? No seis pies…” He appeared borderline panicked.

“Yes, yes, I am sure of it,” I repeated. “Six. Seis pies of nieve!” What was so hard to believe about six inches of snow?

Rolando gaped at me, his carefree demeanor gone. It was a look with which I am intimately familiar; the hopeless, desperate countenance of a man suddenly realizing the cosmic weight of what he now understands to be an overwhelming task before him. But I was puzzled as to why he found this so incredulous. Maybe he was hoping for two inches of snow rather than a half dozen, but it wasn’t like a few extra inches should make the difference between doable and insurmountable.

“Seis pies… Dios mio,” he whispered balefully, surveying the quietly falling snow about the premises. “Yo me moriré…”

“Well, good luck!” I chirped, giving Rolando an encouraging slap on the shoulder before continuing on my way, leaving the porter staring into space with a forlorn hopelessness.

It wasn’t until later that I learned my mistake: what I had told Rolando, in all seriousness, was that he would be digging out the entire complex not from under 6 inches but from under 6 feet of snow.

No wonder he looked so distraught.

While he had to have been positively ecstatic when the snowfall finally petered out that afternoon – leaving behind merely those predicted six inches – I couldn’t help but imagine the bleak thoughts that trafficked through poor Rolando’s head during the preceding hours when he was charged with work that, even for him, must have seemed downright backbreaking.