Hee Hee Hee Haw Haw Concept!

I was a mildly retarded janitor roaming the halls of the economics department at North Texas State University. * My name was Charlie. I swept and mopped the floors, kept the place clean in every other way , smiled wanly under the fluorescent lights, and greeted Dick Armey as warmly as I could each time he passed me in the halls.

He passed an infinite number of times, and even though our contact was minimal, the wager of our contact was not.

I swept up a bunch of dust. I called that pile of dust, “The garden of Gethsemane.”

I swept up another bunch of dust. I called that pile of dust, “Golgotha.”

I swept the two piles together and I watched the dust of the separate piles begin to commingle. I saw dust chards turn chartreuse and fold back into each other…. I was not sure what was happening…. Some of the dust chards began to turn terra cotta.

I didn’t generally like the dust I swept up in the halls.

I didn’t like the way that the finer dust in the piles I swept up would begin to spread out over the floor, no matter how carefully I pushed the piles together. Any little puff of wind might cause a dust pile to begin dispersing…. It’s more than mildly exasperating when that happens.

I’d sometimes sprinkle the piles with a little water to keep them together, but other than that, the only other thing that I could do would be to sweep it into a dust pan as soon as I could.

I don’t know whether Dick Armey was aware of my dust problems or not. I think that he wasn’t. Sometimes he would walk right through one of my piles, perhaps without even having seen that it was there. That would, I was terrified to see, cause the pile to spread all over the place. It’d go onto the walls, and sometimes, even up to the ceiling. I had to attach a feather duster to a broom handle in order to get it down from there.

The pile of dust which had resulted from sweeping together the garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha I decided to leave where it was. It was dispersing and changing and swirling and transforming and transcending and blending. I didn’t sprinkle it with water or quickly scoop it up into my dust pan. I just stared at it. I didn’t get scared by it and I didn’t get fascinated by it. I didn’t call any of the economics professors, and I didn’t call the chemistry department. I didn’t call Hazmat. I didn’t call my supervisor.

I wondered what other kind of dust pile I could sweep up to combine with this dust pile, and just what kind of dust pile I’d get then. Then I realized that I didn’t want what was happening to stop.

Dick Armey was coming out of his office. He had kind of a chalky complexion at that time, and he was sweating profusely. You know, sometimes I had the idea that he was the mildly retarded one and that I was the guy who was going to go places in the Republican party, in the Christian Coalition, and in national politics.

He was the one who talked about cleaning things up, but I was the one who handled a broom. I wasn’t the one who had people complaining about my work or catching me telling a self-serving lie. I was a janitor, not an economics professor, but maybe a janitor who remains mute knows more than an economics professor who uses a mute janitor to make a complex economic argument.

I could see that Armey was going to tromp right through my Golgotha pile.

He was giving me a weak grin, and I knew that he was expecting me to give him my usual life-affirming, brave wave which meant so much to him, but I was too horrified.

Man, there was so much pain in that Gethsemane pile… so much silent struggle!

And in that other pile – bleached bones and skulls!

I’m not sure, but maybe Armey did see the pile… I couldn’t believe it… he was going to walk through them intentionally. He was drawn, attracted by it …he appeared to be delighted… he was going to kick at it.

I saw the souls of his feet come down as he jumped on top.

Poof! I was gone.

* This is a true lie, or maybe just a lie which is being repeated in the interests of the truth. To get the real lie story, google up using “Armey janitor Charlie minimum wage.”