I reminded him that I knew very well my station in life, and that I was not about to haul cat shit or anything of that nature. He looked at me through his thick-lensed glasses. He looked like a cat himself. “That’s right,” he said at last. “And if they still try to sneak it in the trash be sure to make the bastards pay. They can afford it.” He crushed his seventh butt on the floor and scattered the mess some more while he lit up another. “I never hauled out no cat shit in the thirty years I been here and you don’t do it either.”

“I’m going up to wash my hands,” I said.

“Remember,” he called after me, “don’t take no shit from any of them.”

I protested once more that, upon my life, I would never, never do it, not even for the prettiest girl in the building. Going up in the elevator, I felt comfortably resolved that I would never do it. There were no pretty girls in the building.

I never found out what he had done before he came there, but I do know that being a janitor in that building was as high as he ever got in life. He had watched two generations of the rich pass the building on their way to the Yard, and he had seen many governors ride white horses thirty times into that same Yard to send sons and daughters of the rich out into life to produce, to acquire, to procreate and to send back sons and daughters so that the cycle would continue. He had watched the cycle from when he had been able to haul the cans out for himself, and now he could not, and he was bitter.