One of my first jobs was working as a janitor at an university. I’m from the rural midwest. Outside of agriculture, there were not a lot of opportunities in my hometown. At the time, it was one of the best jobs available. It was only a 30 minute commute, and it also afforded me some education opportunities.
I was assigned a wing of one of educational buildings. It was an easy job. I’d listen to music and podcasts all shift while pushing a broom or trashcan around. Most of my fellow coworkers were really cool and laid back. A lot of them were my parent’s age and worked there to either get a tuition waver for their kids, or they just wanted some extra income before retirement. They were all fairly normal, except one of my coworkers was different. His name was George. George had previously worked in insurance, and had been a very successful agent for decades. He made a lot of bad investments before the ‘08 crash, and had been struggling since to make payments on a house he couldn’t afford.
George was in his mid fifties and had recently been diagnosed with the beginning stages of Alzheimers and dementia. Due to his weakened mental state, George was let go from his firm for making too many errors when processing policies. He always claimed they let him go because he didn’t have a college degree, but we all put the pieces together of what actually happened. George had been with the college for a of couple years. He was hired on in the maintenance department, but, due to poor job performance because of his condition, he was quickly reassigned a custodial role. George worked two other side jobs with his wife after work and on the weekends. She worked him like a dog, because she didn’t want to downsize from the lavish home they bought before the crash. He was always tired and had big dark circles under his eyes, and he always seemed somewhat disoriented.
George continued to deteriorate during the years we worked together. He would forget his keys in an office or classroom, or leave his mop or trash can lying random places. We all tried to help him out the best we could. Things took an even more tragic turn when his wife began cheating on him. On our lunch breaks George began to tell us how his wife was spending weekends with her sister a couple hours away. We all knew what was really going on. At first she would leave George microwavable dinners to heat up while she away. A couple months later, she was only leaving him a couple sandwiches. Eventually, she stopped preparing him any meals at all before she’d leave. One time, George almost caught his kitchen on fire trying to cook. Luckily, his son happened to stop by that day and caught it before things got out of hand.
George never said anything about his wife visiting her sister—other than complaining about the food, or lack thereof—but we could tell in his eyes that he knew there was another man. One day, he just broke down during lunch and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was around this time we all noticed some odd behaviors. George became obsessed with emptying the trash cans. He would go around the halls—even in parts of the building he wasn’t responsible for—and would empty trash. At first we thought he was just being nice, or was bored, or even confused. After a couple weeks, it became apparent this was something else.
You see, George wouldn’t wait until the trash cans were full to empty them. He would take out the individual pieces of trash when there wasn’t but a couple pieces of litter in them. He would stand around watching the cans and collect the trash as soon as the students dropped it in. He did this all day long, compulsively. It was odd, but it wasn’t hurting anything. We figured that he was probably forgetting that he had previously collected the trash due to his Alzheimer’s and dementia diagnosis. But then he began talking about it obsessively. Everyday during break, the trash is all he would talk about. He would go on complaining and complaining about the students putting trash in his cans.
One day building supervisor pulled me aside. She told me, “I’m worried about George. He’s been acting much more erratically since his wife began cheating on him. Plus, she’s working him to death and I know he can’t be sleeping much. I think he is using the trash as means to control something in his life. But, it’s unhealthy. The man has a trash fetish.” TRASH FETISH. Honestly, I thought that was a bit extreme, but the phrase stuck with me. George’s behavior became more erratic in the following weeks, he began confronting students about putting trash in the trash cans. George had a hot temper, because he would get confused and frustrated easily due to the early onset dementia. There were a couple of heated incidents where he yelled at some students, and he was almost nearly fired. But, the building supervisor went to bat for him and explained his medical conditions to HR. He was put on a week’s leave without pay.
When George came back to work, he seemed like a human husk. There was no light in his eyes. He would walk the halls mumbling to himself about the trash and his wife. We noticed a huge drop in his hygiene. He began to smell and his clothes were never clean. Around this time, he became obsessed with a particular female student. When we clocked in, he would he speculate about what she was going to put in the trash. Every day during break he would talk about what she threw in the trash that morning. However, the true nature of his obsession was even sicker. One time, in between classes, I saw her throw a used tissue in the trash. George commenced to pick it up, smell it, rub it all over his face and eat it. It made me want to throw up! Anytime she threw away a bottle, George would open the container and finish whatever liquid was inside. It was sickening.
During this time, when George was obsessing over the student, we were also receiving a lot of reports about strong smelling odor’s wafting into the classrooms and professors’ office. We were even given some strongly scented floor cleaner to use to try and tamp down the smell. We were emptying trash like crazy and mopping constantly, but nothing was getting rid of smell. There was a group of us that liked to smoke during our breaks. When HR told us we could no longer smoke outside, we had to get creative. One of janitors got a key to the mechanical room in the attic from a maintenance worker. We were shocked when we opened that door. There were piles and piles of trash bags. Some of them had been there probably for a couple months. In the middle of the piles was a shrine of sorts, it was all the female student’s trash, or at least that’s what we think. Next to the shrine was a pillow and blanket. George had been living in the attic, feeding himself from the trash, and sleeping next to the female student’s trash. We were absolutely shocked. We had to tell the building supervisor, and I remember she just sighed and shook her head and said, “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
The next morning after clocking in, we all went to the break room and put our lunches away, per usual. The department manager, HR director, and a couple of police officers came in and told us all to leave except for George and the building supervisor. We thought George was being arrested for trespassing or something, because of the trash hole in the attic. However, the real reason was much darker. George had been following the female student around campus after work hours. The night before, he followed her to her dorm and broke in. The write-up in the campus newspaper recalled that when he broke in, he was yelling, “Take me back Diane! Take me back!” (Diane was his wife’s name). Apparently he lunged towards her and tried to take her, but she kicked him in the face, and was able to escape. That morning the police took George away and I have never seen him since.