Final Performance

A zoo. During the celebration after, I stationed myself in the center of the main gallery, to prevent young kids from caroming off the walls. Too many sweets. One stopped toilet upstairs (a wad of toilet paper the size of my head) and a case of projectile vomiting in the Ladies Room on the ground floor. I was, early in my career, used to cleaning vomit. My first job, after Janitor College, was at the medical school, Long Island University, and when the students started their first dissections there was a lot of vomiting. I had a one year contract, to fill in for the long time janitor, Thorvald Isaacson, who had taken a sabbatical to study Organic Chemistry in Uppsala, Sweden. He was a wonderful fellow, a mentor of sorts, that I had met at a Janitor Conference where he had delivered a paper on protein binders. He had a taste for strong liquor. The lurid reports of his death as a terrorist bombing were finally put to rest when it came to light that he had built a still in the basement of the Chemistry Lab and the fumes from his triple-run apple brandy had ignited from the propane burner he was using to fire the operation. He was a smart guy, so I figure there was a ventilation failure, he was often drunk, and probably wouldn't notice, three sheets to the wind, a simple electrical outage. How do they generate electricity in Sweden anyway? Raindeer farts? At any rate, I kept the job for four years, and would have been tenured, but I couldn't stand dealing with hacked apart cadavers. Fucking students would leave body parts everywhere; and besides, I had my own interests by then, my first major paper, "Gender Differences In Treatment Of Public Bathrooms", and a grant that would send me to Japan. The ephemeral nature of things. In hindsight I probably should have just stayed on as an adjunct mopping instructor. But I had aspirations. Aspirations are the kiss of death. History isn't memory, it's a complete fiction, I can't even remember yesterday.