I began this project as a freshman at the University of Michigan. I became fascinated by the wealth I saw around me coupled with the disregard many students showed for the custodial staff who they encountered daily in their dorms and classroom buildings. I wanted to profile a custodian to show the absolute wealth and depth of life that exists all around us, whether we choose to see it or not.
“ I love when I go in that reading room and it’s just tore up, things, everywhere, and then when I’m done it’s just absolutely beautiful and it sparkles. It just makes me feel good. It makes my pride feel good. Because even when a bathroom is all nasty, when I get done with it, it looks good.” Angie works as a night custodian in the University of Michigan's Law School. Her shift: 4am to 12pm.
Angie cleans a professor's office after hours. Angie wakes up at about 2am to leave her house in Pinckney, Michigan--a 45 minute drive from her job at the University of Michigan’s campus in Ann Arbor. She gets out of work early enough to see her three children once they get home from school, help them with their homework, eat dinner with her family and put the kids to bed with her husband, Johnny.
Angie waits in an elevator down to the library stacks beneath the building.
Angie makes her rounds through the library and offices in the Law Scool.
Angie takes a break in a janitor's closet refilling her supplies. “I get about four hours of sleep a night, four and a half. When I don’t get a nap that’s when it’s hard—around seven o clock at night I notice my eyes are hurting, I feel like I need to hold them open, and then I try to do homework with my son and it’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard with no sleep but you just do what you have to do.”
Angie mops the steps of the lobby. Angie makes $15.60 an hour as the custodian supervisor, which combined with her husband's disability benefits, is enough to support her husband and three sons, 4, 6, and 13. Angie is the sole bread winner of her household.
Angie says, “His left leg was crushed all the way from the hip all the way down to the ankle by a three-thousand pound dock leveler. And when he fell, he had a decompressed scull fracture in the back of his head. He cracked the hardest part of his skull, and believe it or not, adrenaline will do wonders, because that was a 3,000-pound dock leveler and my husband was still awake after he got hit. That did not knock him out. Carlo, his partner, took a crowbar and just raised it just probably an inch.”
Because of his head injury, Johnny suffers from short-term memory loss and looses his sense of direction. Possibly the worst symptom is that he can only read at a sixth grade level. Angie is afraid of his symptoms becoming worse as he ages. The whole family is on her health insurance, and Johnny has not worked since the accident in 2004. Johnny was in a wheelchair for two years, and in surgery for seven, with a total of twelve major surgeries after his hospital release.
Angie sits with her youngest son Jacob in their living room
Jayden, 6, reclines in his bedroom
Speaking of the Law School students and staff, Angie remarks, “They’ve have never disrespected me to my face,” said Angie, “but they’ve done certain things. I come into the bathroom and they had filled the toilet all the way up to the toilet seat with toilet paper and they had used the bathroom on top of it; pooped, peed, whatever, and then had taken a couple one dollar bills and stuck it on top of that.; here’s a tip for ya.”
“I don’t try to make it too personal, because I know that my job is the reason why I have the life that I have. I wouldn’t have the life that I have if I didn’t go to work and do it.”
Angie waits for the elevator late night with her cart
Jacob strains for a pool ball just out of his reach in the family's basement. His older brother, Johnny Jr looks on.
Jacob looks in a distorted mirror in their play room in the basement
Johnny Jr. is the oldest. He is fifteen. His blonde eyelashes and moustache fuzz make his red hair seem extra bold, combed down his forehead in a line straight across. His eyes are the same pastel green as Angie’s and his braces are the same color too. He wants to be a demolition expert.
Jaydon, 7, and Jacob, 3, in their living room
They bought their house after the market crash, and thus were able to get a good price. Johnny said he installed the garage doors in the neighborhood when it was just being built. He remembers hoping one day he would be able to live in a home like that, and now lives in one of those very homes he helped build. Angie hopes to show her three sons the value of a job, and the value of their education.
During conversation, Johnny lifts his leg above his head to help the blood flow. He looks like a ballet dancer; a grizzly, tattooed ballet dancer.
Johnny and Angie’s love for each other is palpable in their home. “He writes me letters, he makes me things, he leaves me notes. I’ve taken pictures of leaving notes on the door when I come home from work ‘Love you Angie’ and then I’ll open up the refrigerator and in there, there will be a note, ‘Love you Angie, you’re so beautiful’. I’ll open up my lunch box and there’ll be a note in there ‘Have a wonderful day, beautiful’.”
Johnny Jr, 13, and Jaydon, 7, wrestle in their family basement
Angie helps Jaydon with his homework
“I only planned on having one but you know, stuff happens And believe it or not we were kind of shocked because we were going through all that stuff with his accident when I got pregnant with Jaydon.” Angie says.
“I was working at Lorch and the school of social work. Them were the two buildings that I worked at on midnights. Twelve pm to eight thirty. That was real hard. Having an infant and having to work all night, and then them waking up every two hours wanting something to eat. My husband wasn’t perfect. He had a surgery two months before I had the baby so it was kind of hard. I would get no sleep. One week I had nine hours of sleep the whole week—that was it—nine hours. I was like a zombie”
Angie and Johnny ten years before
Johnny Jr. quit playing baseball after his dad’s accident. “He was an all-star player,” says Angie. He decided not to play anymore after his dad, who was also the coach, couldn’t play with him. Angie smiles down at the Wheaties box she’s holding with Johnny Jr.’s baseball photo pasted to the front. She has kept the box in their room since Johnny was five.
Angie wanted to be a private investigator and photographer when she was in high school.
“When I got 18 I didn’t really have any money to go to college so I just got a job where I could. And then when I did get to where I was getting ready to start taking my classes for photography and investigating I ended up getting pregnant. So with the new baby and then work all the time I didn’t really have time for school.”
Both Johnny and Angie are worried about their oldest son not wanting to go to school. He doesn’t want to be called a nerd. “I wish that I worked so I could make more money. And then teach them you need to work to make money. You have to do something,” said Johnny, massaging his leg brace.