DIRT FREE

My therapist says “If you have a pencil in your eye, take it out.” which in my case translates to “Hire a maid.” My constantly sharpened yellow Number Two is the universal disdain for housekeeping. I’m not a messy person, everything has it’s place, but I have an aversion to cleaning house. “Who doesn’t?” you may ask yet some people, for whatever reason, love it. Perhaps their mothers used house cleaning as an opportunity for building confidence. Perhaps their fathers beat them if they didn’t serve as cleaning slave and their only source of satisfaction now is accomplishment in saying “Look Daddy, the whole place is spotless.” Perhaps they’re perfect, well adjusted people who believe a clean environment reflects an untroubled spirit and they religiously make sure their environment is immaculate. Imagine that.

I had a maid in NYC named Beverly. B. was a large Jamaican woman who had several children and lived in Brooklyn and was the toast of fashionable Manhattan. She cleaned the lofts of well-known designers, editors at Mademoiselle and my average sized studio. Her result was, quite simply, breathtaking. I’d come home from work and with the first whiff of ammonia, I knew I’d find my apartment in showroom condition. Her laundry folding was flawless and T-shirts would be stacked, Gap-like, in perfect squares. The one statement she would leave was in rearranging my knick-knacks. I’d cleverly arrange vases to find them lined up, from smallest to large, in a straight line on a shelf like a suspect line-up from a Pottery Barn fracas. Occasionally I’d come home and find condoms and assorted paraphernalia (that I’d lost behind the bed or under a rug in the heat of passion) in a neat row on my bedside. You had no secrets from Beverly and when someone knows all your dirt, you find there is actually little to hide. She brought an Earth Mother/Erykah Badu vide to your space that would center the frantic urban beat around you.

That’s a hard role to fill. I’ve been informed the Employment Demographic for this job in LA is mostly Hispanic. I speak barely passable Spanish but understand more since I speak French. So far my new vocabulary list includes the Spanish for “I’m so sorry” and “Yes, there is a lot of glass.” I have a reference and frankly I’m nervous about if she’ll accept me. She may flee from my place muttering Spanish phrases I haven’t anticipated. She may (as I suspect Beverly did) just explain me as the crazy white man with a lot of crap. She may walk into my life and pull the pencil from my eye like Excalibur from the Rock. I’m organized but not clean - in many ways - but I’ll always clear a space for a new experience, especially when it doesn’t involve getting dirty.

9:02:56 PM    sro home /