PENNIES
When I was 23 or 24 I worked as a janitor at the U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. My boss was an elderly African-American named Mr. Keyes. He was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Muhammad Ali’s birthplace, and he spoke with a sort of singsong cadence that resembled Ali’s. He had none of Ali’s outward swagger. He was a quiet and introspective man. But in some ways he resembled another Mr. Keyes – i.e., Barton Keyes, the insurance investigator portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in the film Double Indemnity. Barton Keyes, who doggedly investigates suspicious insurance claims with honor and integrity, is the moral center of Double Indemnity, the only character not motivated by greed, lust, or any other human weakness. All he wants is to perform his job conscientiously and see justice done. My Mr. Keyes (I never knew his first name) also doggedly pursued perfection in his profession. He was in charge of the late-night janitorial team of which I was a member. Every day he drew up a schedule that determined which area of the hospital each janitor would clean that night. Some of the old-timers on the janitorial staff had regular assignments. But most of us were floaters. Mr. Keyes liked every janitor to be familiar with every part of the hospital. That way, if one janitor should call in sick, another could be brought in to cover for him and not need any additional training or instruction.
Mr. Keyes tended to leave us janitors alone while we worked. He didn’t stand over your shoulder and watch while you scrubbed a toilet or mopped a floor. Personally I appreciated the independence he granted us. But just because he didn’t hover over us, doesn’t mean he didn’t check up on us. He had a clever little method of determining how thoroughly newcomers like me were doing their jobs. Well before the beginning of each shift, he would walk through each newcomer’s assigned territory and hide pennies in various out of the way places – behind toilets, under beds and desks and chairs, inside shower stalls, and so forth. If a janitor took a shortcut some night and didn’t find all the pennies hidden in an assigned work area, Mr. Keyes would know he or she hadn’t done a thorough job of cleaning the area. This happened to me early on in my janitorial career. Without any overt supervision, it seemed to me that it might be easy to slack off at work. Naturally, if I were assigned to some area of the hospital that was open for business during the overnight shift – the maternity ward, say, or the emergency room – it would be difficult to slack off. But it occurred to me that if I were assigned to some lonely deserted outpost that was unoccupied between the hours of eleven p.m. and eight a.m., I might be able to get away with doing a cursory job of mopping and scrubbing and buffing and vacuuming and then find a quiet little spot to read a paperback thriller or catch up on my sleep. But the very first time I tested this theory, it failed miserably. At seven thirty in the morning, when I returned to the housekeeping department, Mr. Keyes confronted me and, in his slow southern drawl, asked if I had found any pennies while cleaning my assigned area that night. I told him truthfully that I had found some pennies.
“Did you pick them up and save them?”
At first I feared that by answering in the affirmative I might be accused of stealing. But I overcame this fear and answered, “Yes.”
“How many did you find?” Mr. Keyes asked me.
I reached into my pocket and withdrew the pennies. There were five of them. I reported this to Mr. Keyes.
“That’s odd, Mr. Mims,” he said to me. “Because I hid nine pennies in your area tonight. Why didn’t you find the other four?”
I shrugged my shoulders, not sure what he was getting at. “I dunno,” I said. “I guess you must have hid them too well.”
But he shook his head no. “I hid them in places where you would have found them very easily if you had done your job correctly. Did you mop behind all the toilets?”
“I think so,” I said, losing courage rapidly.
“You think so?” repeated Mr. Keyes. “Why don’t we go check.” It wasn’t a question.
Mr. Keyes led me on a tour of my assigned work area. He looked behind all of the toilets I was supposed to have cleaned and, sure enough, he found pennies behind four of them. If I had even bothered to drag a mop briefly behind any of these toilets, the pennies would have been pulled from their hiding places. The fact that they were still lying directly behind the toilets was evidence that I hadn’t done my job properly that night.
Caught red-handed, I tried to joke my way out of the situation. I told Mr. Keyes, “Ah, yes, now I remember. I did discover those four pennies when I was cleaning, but I decided to put them back where I found them. I hear it’s bad luck to pick up spare change in a bathroom.”
But Mr. Keyes couldn’t be charmed out of his commitment to keeping the hospital clean. He told me to go get my mop and clean each of the four bathrooms in which he had found pennies.
My first couple of months at the Med Center were a battle of wits between me and Mr. Keyes. Sadly, I was outgunned in this battle. Once or twice a week, Mr. Keyes would play the penny trick on me. And if the pennies didn’t add up correctly, he would lead me back to the oncology department, or the outpatient clinic, or the ophthalmology ward and point out those parts of it that had been neglected that night. Somehow Mr. Keyes could always remember the placement of every penny he had hidden in a given work zone. And when he found a penny lying behind a bed or a toilet or a desk, he’d make me re-clean the entire room. Some nights, I had to thoroughly redo three or four rooms before I was allowed to punch out – all because of a few damn pennies.
Early in my tenure at the hospital, I tried to trick Mr. Keyes by keeping some extra pennies in my pocket. One night, when he told me, “You missed three pennies, Mr. Mims,” I reached into my pocket and said, “Oh, here they are,” and added three more coins to the total. But this didn’t fool Mr. Keyes. He led me back into the ophthalmology ward and pointed out the areas that I had failed to clean. He had been checking up on my work throughout the night without my knowing it. By the time he asked me how many pennies I had discovered, he already knew the answer.
As noted earlier, I worked the graveyard shift, although they never called it that at the hospital (the shifts were referred to as “the daytime,” “the swing,” and “the overnight,” as if my onerous eleven p.m. to eight a.m. tour of duty were somehow akin to a children’s slumber party). Whenever I arrived home from work late, Julie would look at me and say, “Miss a few pennies?” If I got home exceptionally late, Julie would say, “Boy, you must have missed an entire roll of pennies.” Somehow, it never occurred to me to that, if I was arriving home late, Mr. Keyes must have also been arriving home late, even though he hadn’t been the one loafing around on the job.
Eventually, I saw that my attempts to outfox Mr. Keyes were nothing but a waste of time and effort. Occasionally I managed to find all of his pennies and still slack off a bit on my workload. But most of the time, my efforts only ended up increasing the length of my shift. After about two months, I gave up my bad habits, conceded defeat in my battle of wits with Mr. Keyes, and became, in my humble opinion, one of the best janitors on the overnight shift. When that happened, Mr. Keyes began to reward me in small ways, like letting me choose my assignments on occasion, or letting me leave a few minutes earlier than some of the other janitors. Mr. Keyes understood that a good supervisor, like a good parent, should be as quick to reward good behavior as he is to correct the bad.
In those days (nearly 30 years ago), as in these, I was an aspiring writer. During my lunch breaks, I would often sit in my car and write short stories and poems in a spiral notebook by the light of a parking lot security lamp. (I felt a strong kinship with Raymond Carver who, in the mid 1960s, worked at a Sacramento hospital as a janitor and used to write short stories in his car during his lunch breaks). About a year after I left my job at the Med Center, I tried to write up a fictional account of the experience. The result was a short story called “Pennies,” which was heavily influenced by all the Raymond Carver I was reading at the time. The primary focus of the story was the relationship between the main character (whom I called “Doug”) and his boss (whom, in a flash of originality, I called “Mr. Keyes”). I thought the story was quite good. Over the course of a year or so I mailed it off to dozens of places – small literary journals, short-story contests, slick national magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic. Every one of these venues rejected the story without comment. When the last copy came back to me in a self-addressed, stamped envelope accompanied only by a generic rejection slip, I reflected bitterly that the time I had spent working under Mr. Keyes’ supervision had been a waste, because I had failed to spin literary gold from it.
Nowadays, I know better. Mr. Keyes taught me the importance of doing the right thing even when nobody is watching. He instilled in me a belief that even the most menial work can be something to take pride in so long as it is done well. After leaving my job at the Med Center, I never saw Mr. Keyes again. I have no idea how old he was, but he always seemed ancient to me. It’s entirely possible that he is dead now. But every time I see a penny lying on a sidewalk, or in an aisle of a grocery store, or on the floor of a public restroom, I always think of him. And I always pick up the penny and pocket it. Although those pennies haven’t made me rich, they serve to remind me of a man whose influence on my work habits was priceless.
In at least one respect, my Mr. Keyes was a much more successful mentor than the one portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity. Barton Keyes’ young protégé Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray) didn’t learn much from Keyes’ examples of probity and integrity. Walter Neff gets double-crossed by his partner-in-crime and shoots her dead, but not before she inflicts a fatal gunshot wound on him. I haven’t exactly been a paragon of success in my chosen field (literature), but at least I am still plugging away at it, and my hopes and dreams don’t yet have pennies on their eyes.