But one weekend Boysie held the party he had been dreaming of for years: a party at which his wife would be absent, and not thought of, at which he would have all his friends, Henry (without Agatha), and Freeness, and all the men he knew and all their outside-women.
The party began one Friday, about two hours after Dr. Glimmermann left, and when the last guest left, it was seven o’clock Monday morning. It was then, in a stupor of drunkenness and sexual satiety, that Boysie remembered the fifteen offices to be cleaned. The church house opened at eight o’clock. He had often timed himself cleaning the offices: the first night he did them in two hours, the second night in one and a half hours: he had not cleaned all the toilets. “I am no blasted shit-cleaner, man!” And as time passed, it was done in progressively less time. He had it down now to a clean eighty minutes, but he felt all the time it could be done in twenty-five minutes. And it was this morning of anxiety and a bit of terror that the test had to be made.
He found the solution easily enough. He would clean the offices by using the vacuum cleaner only. No time for sweeping and picking up dust and bits of paper and paper tissues and chewing gum stuck under the hidden desks. He would empty the vacuum cleaner in the toilet bowls, and send them swirling to thy-kingdom-come, to the accompaniment of Drano.
He was shocked to find how fast he had cleaned the offices on the third floor: all five of them in five minutes! He went through the second floor like a tornado. And the last office on that floor, apparently the office of one of the important gentlemen or ladies that Jonesy talked so much about (it had a broadloom rug on the floor, and glass on the top of the desk), he thought he should give this office some extra time. He wiped the glass with the wet rag which he had soaked in the toilet bowl (“Heh-heh-heh-hahh! shit!”); he was laughing and working, singing and working, giggling at his wisdom and cleverness and dusting; and Brigitte might still be upstairs, panting and yearning and tingling like a she-dog for him (she had to reach her job in Forest Hill at eight-fifteen, at the latest). There was a lot of Friday afternoon wastepaper in this last office. Boysie went through the office like a madman. He emptied the vacuum cleaner into the toilet which served the entire floor, flushed the toilet, and went down into the “sanctum santimonium,” as he called the first-floor office where Dr. Glimmermann spent his rimless, glassed time. He was whistling “Brown Skin Gal, Stay Home and Mind Baby” as he walked down the carpeted stairway and as he plugged in the vacuum cleaner. He did the three secretaries’ offices first, then the boss-man’s office, being careful to let the grain of the rug flow in one direction only, as Old Man Jonesy had taught him, and after this “sanctum” was sanctified by his cleansing, he started to go into the board room. But at that moment, the first stages and signs of diarrhea erupted in his bowels, and he fled upstairs to the second-floor toilet. Time was now released against him. So he emptied the dustpan into the bowl when he was finished, flushed it, and ran back downstairs. The diarrhea had done something to his spirits.
In the board room were mahogany chairs, and a large mahogany table large enough for a first and last supper, given even by Baptists. There were large technicolour pictures of Christ, with Christ dressed as a shepherd, on the wall; and a Bible in front of each man, in front of each chair. There were twelve chairs. Boysie had amazingly adopted a possessive, a family-or-cousin-like air of propriety over this table. It was his table. He gauged his efficiency in cleaning the offices by the amount of brilliance, the degree of cleanliness he could see coming forth from this table, with its sun-shining top of glass. This morning, now weakened by the weekend and the diarrhea, he had not strength left to be efficient. Nor was he observant.
He had just pushed the door of the board room open when he heard something that almost made him drop the vacuum cleaner. Voices were in the room. He listened and found out that the voices were voices of worry, of questioning, of wonder and doubt.
“But where could it be coming from?” one voice was saying. No voice answered this voice. Boysie pushed the door farther open. The board members were unexpectedly early. Five of them were standing round the table, which for some reason did not have its glass top on, looking up. Boysie looked down and saw the water dripping down, brown: not plain clear water, but water with a brownish colour, dripping, dropping. The toilet had overflowed.
“A plunger! A plunger! A plunger!” Boysie was saying, imitating Dr. Glimmermann’s anger. “The man lost his bloody temper, and all the time he was shouting all he was shouting was ‘Plunger! plunger! plunger!’ ”
“And you didn’ know what the hell a plunger is?”
“It is a serious thing, man. A big hard-back man like me, walking ’bout that Baptist church house like if I own the blasted missionaries working there, I playing all kinds o’ music on Jonesy’s high-fi, all day, godblummuh! and I didn’t know what a plunger is!”
“And nobody won’t even believe you never laid eyes on one o’ them things in all your born days! They sure as hell won’t believe it!”
“Be-Christ, I thought old Glimmermann was going to change into
