Gatsby's Maid

I don’t know who they think is cleaning up all this, but I’ll tell you right now, it’s not going to be me. No sir, no thank you. I worked in the city for a good over twenty years, and I ain’t never seen the kind of mess that these Long Island folks make when they got their masks on and they’re cavorting and they think nobody’s looking. I’ll be up in my maid’s chambers, minding my own business, waiting for them all to leave so I can get down there and scrub up a storm, and wouldn’t you know, they never leave. Oh, some of them get taken off, half-conscious, mumbling about some other man’s wife they snogged down by the pool, and we’re all supposed to think they’re so glamorous. Do you know how many pairs of women’s undergarments I have to fish out of that pool in the mid-morning? Nothing glamorous about that. My last job was for a lovely gentleman who poisoned his wife and got thrown in jail for it, and I ain’t making excuses for him, but I’ll tell you, he was a lot cleaner than the Gatsby gang. I keep saying, any day now, somebody’s going to wind up dead, but so far, no luck. All these rooms and all these bathrooms, and every night, I put on a disguise, because I’m the help, and I know my place, but if somebody kicks the bucket in one of the bathrooms, I have to find them, don’t I? I can’t just wait until they start to stink, and then throw a blanket over them. One night, I found no less than what I thought were fourteen corpses all piled up, no clothing, in the East Ballroom. Wouldn’t you know it was nothing of the sort? It was one of those knickerbocker do-me-up’s where you touches him and he touches you, and everybody’s acting like the polar bears when the snow melts, if you get my drift. Once I understood that I was never going to get a moment’s rest to do my job, I went to Mr. Gatsby, which ain’t easy to do, because nobody can tell you what the bloke looks like. When I was hired, I was told, “Under no circumstances do you look at or speak to Mr. Gatsby.” But the woman who hired me? She had a nervous breakdown two hours after my interview and then it was just me on my own, and I didn’t know what to do. Oh, I knew how to clean. I’ve been cleaning since I was a lass, but I ain’t never cleaned a place this big, and if you think I even knew as much as where to find the mop and bucket, you are strongly off course. So I go looking for Mr. Gatsby, and I find him in the garden, talking to somebody about something that looked rather important, so I waited my turn, and as soon as he was done, I said to him, I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Gatsby,” and he said “Why don’t you call me Jay?” and I said “Because that’s not your name. Your name is Mr. Gatsby. As far as I’m concerned, that’s your name, because I’m a professional” and he laughed at that, like I was making a joke. Because rich people find everything that the working class says funny, and he’s lucky he didn’t laugh at my grandfather that way, because my grandfather once took an axe to his employer when he wouldn’t give him Good Friday off. I’m not saying what’s right or what’s wrong, but imagine not giving a nice, respectable Protestant Good Friday off from work? Now, I don’t know if Protestants celebrate Good Friday or not, but that’s nobody business, is it? Besides that, my grandfather didn’t kill the man, because anybody from town would tell you that he couldn’t swing an axe anymore than he could skin a tiger, but they threw him in jail all the same, because you can’t go around making yourself look dangerous to rich people. So I wasn’t going to get too familiar with Mr. Jay Gatsby, but I did need to know where and how he wanted me to clean up the mess that was going to be left over from his party. I told him that I ain’t never cleaned up a party that size, and he told me to wait until the party was over, and I asked him, very professional-like, how long his parties usually go for, and he tells me they go on for weeks at a time, and I thought my jaw was going to go clean through the earth and back up into Australia that’s how shocked I was. Then he excuses himself because he needs to go be mysterious on a balcony somewhere, and I’m left in the garden next to two married people snogging people who are not their spouses, and who do you think is in charge of cleaning up the geraniums when that’s all over? It won’t be me, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t garden in the best of times, but once you’ve committed adultery in the rosebush, you can forgive me for not feeling like I want to fire up my green thumb to make it alright. We finally got a reprieve this morning, because somebody showed up and there was some kind of scuffle and a gun went off, and now there’s blood all by the pool, and I don’t know if you’ve ever cleaned up blood before, but it’s worse than wine when it comes to getting it up and out, and I’m half-tempted to leave it by the pool and tell Mr. Gatsby it’ll add character to the place, because with all the manner of liquids that fly around during these parties, you might as well add some plasma to the list, don’t you think? I’m sure he won’t agree with me, so I’m sitting here in my bed just dreading having to go down there and set things right. I just hope the party’s finally over. These things do go on and on, and one way or another, the clock strikes and the music stops, and somebody’s got to clean up the mess. And never a thought for those people, am I right? I don’t know who did the shooting earlier, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another staff member from the cleaning crew. You can only make so much of a mess is what I always say. You can only muck things up so far and then you’ll see you’ve got nobody left to take care of it for you. Especially when you haven’t told them where to find a mop and bucket. Debauchery everywhere, and not a mop or a bucket in sight.