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Tormentedly Untainted, 2019 by Chloe Wise (detail) |
Back when I lived in Brooklyn and it was safe to go into other people’s homes, I spent a year working as a landscaper. It was good, hard work and I was very bad at it, although I tried. Most days my boss and coworker and I would stuff the company’s Toyota Echo with shovels and rakes and leaking bags of cement or mulch, or else we’d carefully fill the hatchback with moist containers of myrtle, creeping jenny, and clematis and be out in Ditmas or Park Slope, laying slate, trimming the perennials. Each day I’d get filthy and mis-gendered. I loved it.
But there was one reoccurring house-call that always got me out of sorts, and that was tending to the houseplants belonging to the heirs of the Purell fortune. It’s not that they were cruel or unfair clients, in fact, I hardly saw them. Together they made up three branches of the same family living in separate units on the tippity-top of a great glass shaft of Brooklyn condos. While their apartments were technically separate, they were all white and antiseptic, and in my memory the complex has grown together like the fleshy roots of the orchids we watered under the kitchen faucet to mimic a jungle downpour.
The house that Purell built was too clean for comfort. You couldn’t hear the New York traffic from that high in the air, and as added protection from the outside, or maybe just brand loyalty, the family kept Purell dispensers stationed by the doors. We had our instructions to maintain this antibacterial standard, even while performing the dirty work we were there to do. My coworker and I would muscle our sacks of potting mix and Perlite past the doorman and onto an ear-popping elevator ride, arriving at the front door of the penthouse to obediently lay our drop clothes and unlace and remove our work boots. Inside, there were usually other shoeless members of the help—the maid, the kids’ tutor, the piano teacher. We barely spoke to them, and whispered amongst ourselves. Silence felt like an unspecified rule, as if our conversation was another kind of contamination that could be tracked in from the street far below. It was nerve-racking work, to be a spick and span landscaper, to not brush up against the fine contemporary art on the walls while transporting shrubs and succulents through the apartment. And it certainly didn’t help that as clean as my feet were, my thoughts for my coworker were unconscionably filthy. “Didn’t you catch me staring at your forearms?” I asked him when the season ended, and I confessed my crush on a crowded G Train.
But back to the Purell and the penthouse. The most stressful part of these days was watering the hanging spider plants in the kids’ room. Spider plants are known for their thick dirty tubers, Seausian tufts of green and white leaves, and their miniature offsets — baby spider plants that burst forth from the mother, creating a sort of chaotic hydra effect. A couple of these arachnids floated above the daughters’ twin beds, and I was always terrified of spilling dirty water onto their sheets and pillows. Of course, I made this mistake constantly (I was bad at this job, remember) and it was times like these that I wished the family had a dog or cat I could pin the mess on.
Alas, as the incompetent gardener, I was probably the closest thing to an animal in that house. I tried to keep my head down and my hands clean, but there was so much to explore and this was the kind of home I'd never been in. Why was one of the bedrooms only accessible via key code, which I punched in every couple days to check on the bamboo? Was that a real Jeff Wall print hanging casually in the playroom? What was the story behind that canvas that read “Godless Universe” in glitter or the high-res photo of the couple posing with Obama? Next to the gray fiberglass planter overflowing with deep purple oxalis, there was an art book whose cover was a photo of the sculpture “Supermarket Lady” by Duane Hanson, which depicted a life-sized housewife pushing a shopping cart stuffed with frozen dinners and junk food. The woman is made to look unhealthy and low-class (hair curlers, cigarette, slippers, swollen knees), the kind of woman who certainly doesn’t nurture fiddle-leaf figs in her home, but let's not kid ourselves, would absolutely be filling that cart with jugs of Purell.
“Supermarket Lady” is from 1970, but Purell had it’s beginnings in 1946, after Goldie Lipman, a supervisor at an Akron rubber factory manufacturing life-rafts for the war, noticed her workers cleaning the graphite and carbon black off their hands with kerosene. Joining forces with a Kent State chemist, Goldie and her husband Jerry developed a hand sanitizer so popular that employees started sneaking it out of the workplace in their lunch pails. But Purell as we know it didn’t become popular until 1997, when the Cleveland firm Nottingham Spirk (a company that got their big break convincing a bedpan company to pivot to children’s toys) suggested Purell be packaged in clear plastic and include bubbles in the formula, to give it that “appealing, fresh and clean aesthetic.”
The Purell penthouse I worked in had an inarguably fresh and clean aesthetic, and it was certainly someone’s version of appealing. When the Meyer lemon tree I tended to blossomed, the home filled with a soft, sweet fragrance like Southern California spring, and if the cross breeze was right the scent would block out the sting of disinfectant wafting off the kitchen counter. In the master bedroom where I watered the jade, there was a film projector over the bed and a white screen that unfurled with the touch of a remote—a level of indulgence at the time I could barely fathom. There was art in that room as well, including a playful Lego sculpture hanging from the ceiling, made by the man of the house, a fine artist turned real estate developer.
As the summer dragged on, we spent more time on the roof where we were planting a shrubby arboretum to shield the family from the wind. This necessitated laying on our stomachs on the hot wood deck to install an irrigation network under the floorboards, hauling up trees wrapped in damp burlap and hundreds of bags of sand, sliding through the house with our boots in our hands so we could put them on outside and get back to work. One August day we looked up to see that the men rolling shiny black tar onto the roof of the library across the street were scrambling around to collect their tools; there was a storm blowing in from beyond Coney Island, and from our height we could see those black, electrified clouds barreling through Bensonhurst and Flatbush, right towards us. Of course, all the little figures down in Prospect Park didn’t have our perspective, and had no idea what was bearing down on the them.
I think back on that storm and can understand what life might be like now to live in a glass tower paid for by a company that only makes you richer and safer the worse things become at street level. Purell is of course sold out everywhere you look, online boxes that are normally 10 dollars are going for 400, and finding a bottle in the wild would be a dystopian sequel to Jingle All the Way. I’m starting to regret not smuggling out all that free antimicrobial gold in my lunchbox when I had the chance. At the time though, the last thing I wanted was to be that kind of clean. My favorite part of the Purell penthouse workdays was when we could leave, usually around lunch, and pile into the Echo onto the next job site, one where I could curse, drink from the garden hose and double-knot my boots. When weeding some overgrown postage stamp of a backyard, I’d push my hands into the ground until I was up to my elbow in Brooklyn soil, and for lunch I’d eat my bodega turkey club with dirty hands. I wanted to prove that not only did our rich Purell clients not own us, but I didn’t need a thing they were selling. I wish that was still the case. It will be again, one day.
The house that Purell built was too clean for comfort. You couldn’t hear the New York traffic from that high in the air, and as added protection from the outside, or maybe just brand loyalty, the family kept Purell dispensers stationed by the doors. We had our instructions to maintain this antibacterial standard, even while performing the dirty work we were there to do. My coworker and I would muscle our sacks of potting mix and Perlite past the doorman and onto an ear-popping elevator ride, arriving at the front door of the penthouse to obediently lay our drop clothes and unlace and remove our work boots. Inside, there were usually other shoeless members of the help—the maid, the kids’ tutor, the piano teacher. We barely spoke to them, and whispered amongst ourselves. Silence felt like an unspecified rule, as if our conversation was another kind of contamination that could be tracked in from the street far below. It was nerve-racking work, to be a spick and span landscaper, to not brush up against the fine contemporary art on the walls while transporting shrubs and succulents through the apartment. And it certainly didn’t help that as clean as my feet were, my thoughts for my coworker were unconscionably filthy. “Didn’t you catch me staring at your forearms?” I asked him when the season ended, and I confessed my crush on a crowded G Train.
But back to the Purell and the penthouse. The most stressful part of these days was watering the hanging spider plants in the kids’ room. Spider plants are known for their thick dirty tubers, Seausian tufts of green and white leaves, and their miniature offsets — baby spider plants that burst forth from the mother, creating a sort of chaotic hydra effect. A couple of these arachnids floated above the daughters’ twin beds, and I was always terrified of spilling dirty water onto their sheets and pillows. Of course, I made this mistake constantly (I was bad at this job, remember) and it was times like these that I wished the family had a dog or cat I could pin the mess on.
Alas, as the incompetent gardener, I was probably the closest thing to an animal in that house. I tried to keep my head down and my hands clean, but there was so much to explore and this was the kind of home I'd never been in. Why was one of the bedrooms only accessible via key code, which I punched in every couple days to check on the bamboo? Was that a real Jeff Wall print hanging casually in the playroom? What was the story behind that canvas that read “Godless Universe” in glitter or the high-res photo of the couple posing with Obama? Next to the gray fiberglass planter overflowing with deep purple oxalis, there was an art book whose cover was a photo of the sculpture “Supermarket Lady” by Duane Hanson, which depicted a life-sized housewife pushing a shopping cart stuffed with frozen dinners and junk food. The woman is made to look unhealthy and low-class (hair curlers, cigarette, slippers, swollen knees), the kind of woman who certainly doesn’t nurture fiddle-leaf figs in her home, but let's not kid ourselves, would absolutely be filling that cart with jugs of Purell.
“Supermarket Lady” is from 1970, but Purell had it’s beginnings in 1946, after Goldie Lipman, a supervisor at an Akron rubber factory manufacturing life-rafts for the war, noticed her workers cleaning the graphite and carbon black off their hands with kerosene. Joining forces with a Kent State chemist, Goldie and her husband Jerry developed a hand sanitizer so popular that employees started sneaking it out of the workplace in their lunch pails. But Purell as we know it didn’t become popular until 1997, when the Cleveland firm Nottingham Spirk (a company that got their big break convincing a bedpan company to pivot to children’s toys) suggested Purell be packaged in clear plastic and include bubbles in the formula, to give it that “appealing, fresh and clean aesthetic.”
The Purell penthouse I worked in had an inarguably fresh and clean aesthetic, and it was certainly someone’s version of appealing. When the Meyer lemon tree I tended to blossomed, the home filled with a soft, sweet fragrance like Southern California spring, and if the cross breeze was right the scent would block out the sting of disinfectant wafting off the kitchen counter. In the master bedroom where I watered the jade, there was a film projector over the bed and a white screen that unfurled with the touch of a remote—a level of indulgence at the time I could barely fathom. There was art in that room as well, including a playful Lego sculpture hanging from the ceiling, made by the man of the house, a fine artist turned real estate developer.
As the summer dragged on, we spent more time on the roof where we were planting a shrubby arboretum to shield the family from the wind. This necessitated laying on our stomachs on the hot wood deck to install an irrigation network under the floorboards, hauling up trees wrapped in damp burlap and hundreds of bags of sand, sliding through the house with our boots in our hands so we could put them on outside and get back to work. One August day we looked up to see that the men rolling shiny black tar onto the roof of the library across the street were scrambling around to collect their tools; there was a storm blowing in from beyond Coney Island, and from our height we could see those black, electrified clouds barreling through Bensonhurst and Flatbush, right towards us. Of course, all the little figures down in Prospect Park didn’t have our perspective, and had no idea what was bearing down on the them.
I think back on that storm and can understand what life might be like now to live in a glass tower paid for by a company that only makes you richer and safer the worse things become at street level. Purell is of course sold out everywhere you look, online boxes that are normally 10 dollars are going for 400, and finding a bottle in the wild would be a dystopian sequel to Jingle All the Way. I’m starting to regret not smuggling out all that free antimicrobial gold in my lunchbox when I had the chance. At the time though, the last thing I wanted was to be that kind of clean. My favorite part of the Purell penthouse workdays was when we could leave, usually around lunch, and pile into the Echo onto the next job site, one where I could curse, drink from the garden hose and double-knot my boots. When weeding some overgrown postage stamp of a backyard, I’d push my hands into the ground until I was up to my elbow in Brooklyn soil, and for lunch I’d eat my bodega turkey club with dirty hands. I wanted to prove that not only did our rich Purell clients not own us, but I didn’t need a thing they were selling. I wish that was still the case. It will be again, one day.
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