which is to say, janitor of a large apartment building in the middle of the city. He had had this job since as long as he could remember, and he hated it, and the tenants he served, more every year. He spent most of his days sitting in an old overstuffed chair, down in his rent-free one-room ground-floor apartment that the management used as an excuse to pay him very little in wages, and what he did when he sat there, though a working television set was just across the room, was to nurse his hatred of the people who lived in the building that rose above him. He was fond of pointing out to himself—he had never had many friends—that you didn’t know the human race until you served them as a menial and were called to unclog their drains and unlock their brats from the bathroom and clean up after their wives committed suicide (which happened once in his building) and shuffle your feet while they fumbled for a stingy tip and go to the door of every apartment at the appropriate time and wish the occupant thereof a Merry Xmas and take the niggardly envelope offered in response.
