Shaffer: Some one cleans up restrooms at fair

RALEIGH -- Omar Cruz scrubs down a bank of toilets until they're hospital-clean, leaving no trace of the sausage-chomping, Pepsi-swigging State Fair patrons who waddled inside during his shift.

He cleans a men's room for tips, and he explains that the money can be decent. But at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, his bowl held a single dollar. By 1 p.m., it held two.

But Cruz doesn't grumble - not about the constant roar of flushing plumbing or the tight-fisted fairgoers zipping up around him.

"I help people feel more comfortable," said Cruz, 21, a long-haired, cool-looking janitor who traveled from Pennsylvania for the work.

With attendance topping 100,000 people on some days, no job at the fair is harder, or more thankless.

The restrooms are hung with signs inviting tippers to imagine the mess without the attendants' labor, but for most people faced with handing over five tickets for a Ferris wheel ride, or shelling out $2 for a Pepsi out of a vending machine, going to the bathroom ought to be free.

Near Dorton Arena, a patron stops to comb his hair in a restroom mirror hung directly over an attendant's tip bowl - a mirror cleaned by the retiree sitting a few feet away.

The hair-comber stood close enough to that man's livelihood to see and touch every dollar he'd earned that day. He chose not to add to the total.

Cruz works in the Gov. James G. Martin Building, which is commodious by fairground standards, if you'll excuse the pun.

Inside the Gov. Kerr Scott Building, the men's room is so cramped that attendant stands wedged in a corner, close enough to read the label on a urinal-user's shirt collar. Every patron gets a greeting and a 'sir,' and the floor gets a fresh mopping after every few set of feet.

By midday Tuesday, that attendant had collected roughly ten bucks.

'Old School' knows ropes

Near Dorton Arena, a 56-year-old fair restroom veteran known to everyone as "Old School" boasts that he can size up a nontipper by his body language.

Head down. No eye contact. "And they run like Forrest Gump," said Old School, a handful of $1 bills and a pocket's worth of change in his bowl.

Among all the restroom cleaners, "Old School" is the most animated, working for tips at fairs all over the country.

Once you get south of Virginia, he says, the tip bowls get emptier.

"If they don't start tippin', I'll start trippin,' " he says, jokingly.

"This is the relief station, not the police station. Tell them Old School said it."

To demonstrate this, he steps outside his men's room and motions to a pair of fair workers resting outside the door.

"Ask them my name!" he insists. "Ask them who I am. The only name that gets called more than mine is Jesus Christ."

The workers look up and answer. "Old School," they say.

Old School laughs and points at the small sum in his bowl. "You know how I got that? I don't let them get away. I'll follow them out the door."

Most of the people who tidy restrooms in the Fairgrounds aren't keen to talk about it, explaining that a minute's conversation with a columnist takes away the chance to greet a customer who might drop a dime.

One offers a phone number for a coordinator, who doesn't call back.

This work is relentless. Tuesday is a slow day by fair standards. But by my count, the men's rooms see about 15 patrons every five minutes even on a slow weekday morning. That's 180 flushes an hour.

It's dreary in a men's room on a sunny October day, hearing the constant roar of plumbing, in the fog of smoke and worse, knowing everyone else is having fun.

If a machine charged you a dime to pee, you'd pay.