My Time As A Night Watchman

Kit Noussis on a God-Awful Job

Dear Republic,

We have no particular hook for this piece, but The Republic of Letters is always on the lookout for people who can write honestly and passionately about their lived experiences, as Kit Noussis does in this harrowing piece.

-ROL

MY TIME AS A NIGHT WATCHMAN

One winter, I worked as a night watchman. More accurately, I was a security guard on a rotating continental shift. Here, ‘continental’ is deployed as in ‘continental breakfast’: old world classiness to cover up a shitty compromise. We worked in twelve hour shifts, eight to eight, switching every fortnight between night and day. Initially, it had been my goal to be a pure night guard. From film and TV, I had learned that you could get quite a bit of reading done that way. If a burglar should happen to knock over a length of rebar in my warehouse, I would peremptorily swing my flashlight around before deciding ‘must have been the wind,’ retreating to my Playboy Magazine and pot of coffee, except I would have the London Review of Books and a Monster Energy.

There are quite a few security gigs that really do allow quiet and solitude, but I sold myself in the interview too well. It seemed unwise to go in there and declare that I wanted a boring job where nothing ever happens. Thus, I was assigned to one of the more ‘challenging’ contracts: College Park in downtown Toronto, an old mall and office tower that sits on a major subway station. Due to harsh winters, the downtown core of Toronto has networks of tunnels that take you from office tower to food court to subway. These apparently public spaces are usually private property. Our rent-a-cop powers descended, by law, from the nameless owners of the buildings. Such commercial properties are what pass for the commons in our time.

For any one guard, four hours of each shift were devoted to projecting authority: visibly presenting yourself at the portals and in the food court to discourage disorder and give directions. Another four were devoted to patrolling every floor and hallway, according to a relay of white stickers that were scanned with a modified smartphone. No one ever checked that you hit every waypoint, which feels like when your dad can't be bothered to read to the end of your report card. Happily, I had access to a liminal rooftop to sneak cigarettes atop and observe the city streets. The other four hours were to be spent in the underground loading docks, where a huge array of keys was distributed to various tradesmen and contractors. We were meant to cross-reference the tradesman’s identity with the work orders, but in practice anyone who seemed vaguely carpenterial could get whatever key they asked for, because management never bothered to print any work orders.

Almost every working-class person in the building commuted over an hour, by train and bus, from adjoining cities. The city councillor or member of parliament for our territory surely would have referred to this as a ‘community.’ The cleaners were Filipino and Portuguese, the Tim Horton’s employees were Indian. Ah, the Canadian mosaic of diversity! White lawyers and bankers surrounded by tiles of every hue.

There were seldom opportunities to build connections, even with the non-transient members of our community. If I chatted with Danilo for a few minutes, as he maintained the stone Zamboni, it might be many days or weeks before our schedules would align. The exception was the loading dock attendant, who I would chat with between attendings. He said that, coming from his neighbourhood, he considered his full-time minimum wage job to be a mark that he had ‘made it.’ I told him that from my middle-class, degree-holding background, I was a failson. In any case, you can always compare yourself positively to the EDPs: the permanent transients of our beloved mall.

EDP stands for Emotionally Disturbed Person. It’s a bit of argot that we adopted from the cops. To avoid calling people bums, junkies, freaks, psychos, punks, you can refer to anyone who is upsetting to the order of things as an EDP. This way, normies who hear you radio for ‘assistance with an EDP by the north door’ will be none the wiser. More importantly, you can dehumanize the abandoned people who haunt the city.

The most perennial EDP was Francis, a grey-haired indigenous woman who would beg in vestibules. She could only utter moans and groans; she reeked more than anyone I have encountered before or since. The paperwork had been filed numerous times to ‘trespass’ her from the property. This converted her mere presence in the building to a criminal offence, which would permit us to perform a ‘citizen’s arrest’ on her. No one ever arrested her, because the police would only have released her again to her wanderings, and because no one wanted to touch her. If she passed the doors into the subway, our charms would fail. Beyond the property of our sorcerer-master, we had no special power, and our corner of the monopoly of violence was forfeited. Since the subway tolls have been automated, it was rare for a TTC guard to bounce her back our way. For the people travelling to and from the subway, it made little difference which side of the glass doors she was on. Almost everybody ignored her, but you could not fail to hear or smell her in that small tunnel. I wish I knew what the tens of thousands of people who passed her thought about her. A couple thousand white guilt, a couple thousand class guilt? Did anyone resolve to work harder that week, to weave a bigger safety net for their parents and children?

All the familiar urban legends were told, cited without sources: Francis has a free apartment and stipend from the gov, but she squanders them; actually she is more than capable of talking and bathing, but she gets more alms this way; she has all the help she needs to get better, but she prefers to live like this. Once, a middle-aged woman in artsy clothing witnessed me haranguing Francis to leave the building. “This is her land! She was here first, you know.” I gave her verbal shrugs. Any individual security guard who decides to be lax with the EDPs will quickly alienate himself from his team and his boss. If the building decides to be lax, then the people who are kicked out by the tougher companies will concentrate in the buildings that show leniency. The adjoining mall was handled by one such tough company, called Paragon or Securitas. They always wore their black gloves, and it was said they studied Krav Maga.

Ironically, that same year I would dodge security guards to paste up posters decrying Canada’s national holiday as a celebration of indigenous genocide. I still believe that’s one of its meanings. But did my posters make a difference? I know that they infuriated some good Canadians into tearing or scraping them. More recently, I saw a woman scraping posters that decried Israeli genocide off boojie lampposts in Yorkville. At first, I assumed she was a vigilante, and I came to calmly discuss politics with her. I discovered she was a paid contractor with the city who could barely speak English. I never learned what she thought of the contents of the poster, but just as when I worked as a security guard, her paycheque depended on her indifference.

Another figure I remember, since he shared my Christian name, was Chris. He was a skinny white guy who would come through our building high as hell on Lord knows what. Once, I overheard him addressing a glowing ATM machine at 3 A.M. He was rambling incoherently about his mother and about God. On that occasion, I let him be; gave him some ‘privacy’ by continuing my patrol. A few weeks later I would learn that his drug addiction had taken his life, and that he was survived by his mother.

Michel Foucault relays that Paris once had 30,000 beggars, out of a population of 100,000. As bourgeois society and morality emerged, idleness needed to be villainized, and the commons enclosed. He says that the walls were manned with regiments of archers; crackdowns were initiated simultaneously in the city and the countryside. The concept of unemployment and of mental illness emerge at the same time from the same circumstances.

Even on nights where blizzards raged and the temperature dropped to twenty below, we would barely relax our rules: “okay, a few minutes more inside, but then you have to rotate on to another building.” Hopefully the next building you shelter in does not practice Krav Maga. We never kicked out the clean people who would take an hour to buy a bottle of shampoo at the 24-hour grocery store, but would instead visually profile people as vagrants or drug-users: the clothes were too dirty, the carts they trundled too large, beards too scraggly. The company line is that we need to make sure ‘people feel safe’ in this public/private space. “Certainly, we cannot have a flock of homeless people sleeping in the warm, clean food court when morning rush hour begins. People would be too terrified to enter the subway!” Well, the P in EDP still stands for person. I don’t think the people we kicked out felt very safe in those blizzards. Indeed, dozens of people die from exposure every winter in Toronto, despite the map being studded with 24/7 stores and lobbies, warm and dry.

The cops no longer man any ramparts. In wintertime, they pass their nightshifts watching Netflix in their squad cars. They don’t need to banish or confine the idle and profligate workers like the king’s archers once did. Nowadays, the workers strike fear into each other. When you pass the forlorn figure standing still in the vestibule on a Monday morning rush-hour, it’s supposed to make you feel unsafe: you feel that if you don’t cling to your job, you will be next.

The last night I worked the job I was reading JR by William Gaddis in the basement hut. It’s about a little boy who takes a field trip to Wall Street and becomes a titan of finance before finishing middle-school. In his naivete, he intuitively grasps the double-talk and sleight of hand that are necessary to circulate and accumulate value; the lust for infinity. No one ever notices that he is a small child, because he conducts his business through letters and spoofed phone-calls. I thought that, for all I knew, the owner of the building I worked for might have been a child. Yet it was from that owner I derived my privilege and obligation to kick people out the door. The cheque I was getting barely covered rent in a windowless basement; it ruined my sleep and drove me to smoking a pack a day. I had neither solitude nor conviviality. It steadily eroded my ability to see the EDPs as persons, and made me detach completely from the normies who would mechanically inquire about directions to the courthouse.

I put my Kindle to sleep and abandoned the precious rack of keys. In the supervisor’s office at 3 A.M., I quietly returned my radio and my cut-proof vest to their places. “I quit.” The supervisor was more incredulous than mad. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. My change of heart was irreversible. I felt it was impossible for me to even finish my shift. I needed to get busy finding another solution to my precarity and belittlement, a place I could read Gaddis in peace.

Days later, the head office would call me with surprising patience and understanding. I told them I hated kicking innocent people into the cold. “Okay, I get that. You’re a good employee. Do you want to transfer to a night schedule somewhere quiet? Like a construction site where nothing ever happens?”

No, no I don’t. Not for you.

Kit Noussis is a Canadian malingerer who hides out in southern China. He graduated from now-defunct Quest University in Squamish B.C. His interests include translation, sonic environments, and the philosophy of mental illness.