I have a cleaning lady.  Her name is Zoila.  She is wonderful.

When I think about it, I really don’t need a cleaning lady.  For a 28 year old man, I’m pretty neat; for a 28 year old man covered in hair, I’m so extraordinarily neat that I should probably see a therapist.  I keep my apartment in order because of my slight OCD – I feel genuinely more relaxed when my dishes are clean, when my coffee table is neat, when my clothes are put away, and when all my electronic devices (iPod, cell phone, blackberry, beard/back hair/pube trimmer) are fully charged.  This honestly helps me sleep better at night.

(Well, that and the Xanax, which I unfortunately think my body is growing immune to.  Next stop on the "I’ll Suck Dick for Sleep" Train: Vicodin Junction.)

But while my apartment is neat, it’s not especially clean.  I’m good at maintaining the appearance of order in my home, but I don’t like the nitty gritty.  I’m not into, say, dusting.  I’ll never say to myself, "You know what?  I’m gonna drink a couple of vodka red bulls, grab a bottle of Fantastik and a roll of paper towels, and just go fucking nuts in my kitchen."  Though I like the appearance of a made bed, I hate and have always hated making the bed, a useless exercise considering the bed’s just going to get messed up in a few hours (also, it’s a pain in the ass to make a bed).  The first time I used a mop in my apartment was a few months back when my toilet exploded, spewing feces and toilet water all over my floor.  Prior to that, my floor looked nice because there were no splotches of spaghetti sauce or empty beer cans on it.  But in reality it wasn’t clean, as it was covered in a fine, nearly invisible layer of film composed of sweat, Zima, a little bit of semen, and not a small amount of glaze.

This is where Zoila comes in.  For $75 every two weeks, Zoila takes care of the nitty gritty.  She cleans my kitchen sink and stove, removing the burners and washing them down.  She pours Comet all over the bathtub and scrubs until it’s immaculate.  She dusts off the lamp and night table in my bedroom and makes the surface of my desk clean enough to eat off of.  She does not fuck around. 

Like me, Zoila also has a touch of OCD.  Whenever I know she’s coming, I’ll sort of let things go a bit and my place will fall into a (very) mild state of disarray.  But then I’ll come home on Monday evening and find my coffee table, hours before covered with a scattering of mail, books, magazines and other junk, completely organized.  On the left side of the coffee table, she’ll stack my magazines, largest on the bottom in ascending order.  To the right is the books, and to the right of the books is the mail, all stacked in order with the largest book/piece of mail on the bottom, the smallest on top.  If I have loose change laying around, she’ll stack the coins left to right in order of value: one stack of quarters, another of dimes, and so on.  She even does this with guitar picks: a stack of brown picks, a stack of red, a stack of blue.    

Zoila is also adorable.  When she calls to say she’s coming, even though we have a set schedule of every other Monday, she leaves me long voicemails calling me "Mr. Jason" and wishing me a good weekend.  When she’s finished cleaning my apartment, she leaves me little notes saying that she hopes she did a good job and she looks forward to coming again, wishing me a happy week.  She’s also about 4’8" tall and I have no idea if she’s 22 or 42. 

For these and other reasons, I love Zoila.  It is not a sexual love, even though my little Panamanian princess is actually kinda cute.  It’s…I don’t know what it is, really.  In part, she’s kind of motherly, since she cleans up after me.  So there’s that.  In another way, there is (or was) an element of pity.  Since I’m a horrible racist, I used to have an elitist attitude, like, "Look at me! I have a cleaning lady! What a success I am! My cleaning lady is from a Mexico-type country! I’m awesome!"  So I felt this bit of pity for her, having to clean up after this fat white guy who burns through all the money that he makes.  But the more I thought about it, I realized that she has a pretty good thing going on.  She originally told me it would take her 3 hours to clean my apartment each day, so we settled on $75.  In actuality, it takes her about an hour to clean my place (I know this because one day I was off work, let her in, left the apartment, came back a little over an hour later and my apartment was clean and she was gone).  $75 – cash – for an hour’s work is not bad, and I was referred to her by a lawyer at my firm, so I’m sure she has more than a few well-to-do clients.  Maybe I’m the one who should be pitied.

But it’s a strange dynamic, and I can say that I’m definitely not myself when it comes to Zoila.  I have a friend whose family had a cleaning lady growing up and each time before the maid came, her mother told her and her brother, "Alright kids, let’s clean up for the maid!"  While it’s not quite like that in my case, I certainly straighten up a little bit before Zoila comes.  And I also try to protect her from my more deviant tendencies and the mess that results from them.  For example, I masturbate into my boxers with the tenacity of a mental patient.  There is so much semen in my boxers in my laundry bag that I would not be surprised if one day I came home and there was a half-Jason/half-boxers baby in my closet, crying out about fantasy sports, PBR and titties.  When I first met her, Zoila offered to do my laundry, which I vehemently declined.  I can’t have Zoila touching my semen boxers.  Shit ain’t right.  This is also the reason I take great pains to hide my any pornography and discard any used condoms for Zoila.  I would never let her virgin eyes see such depravity.       

The point is that the relationship I have with Zoila is unique, like nothing else in my life.  On the one hand, she takes care of me, which engenders my trust.  On the other, she’s a complete stranger in my home when I’m not there, something I tend to forget when I see her cute little notes.  But either way, she makes me want to be a better man – a cleaner man, a more respectful man, a man less obsessed with inseminating his apartment. 

************

I was thinking about Zoila as I walked home from work yesterday.  It was Monday, so I knew she had been in my apartment earlier that morning, cleaning it for me.  As I walked along, I thought about how happy it made me to come home to a sparkling apartment and how that $75 every two weeks was worth it.  I decided that come Christmas time, I would definitely give her a bonus or something.  I may have even fallen in love with her a little bit, looking forward as I did to the note that she surely left me.

When I got home, I turned on the lights in my place, looked onto my neat-as-ever coffee table, but couldn’t see her friendly little note.  This made me frown a little bit, but I figured that maybe Zoila was busy and didn’t have time to write me a note.  Not a big deal.

I went into the room that serves as my office and got changed and ready for some serious feeding.  As I walked into the living room, I passed my bedroom to admire my freshly-made bed.  And that’s when I  saw it.

Neatly piled on my nicely made bed were four condoms (unused, in their wrappers).  On top of the wrappers was a tube of KY jelly.

So, ok.

I stopped in my tracks and stared at the pile of sex paraphernalia on my bed.  The condoms, I recognized.  They were the purple Durex ones that I’ve been rocking for some time on the advice of a buddy and condom guru who suggested I switched from the light blue Trojans.  The KY was another matter.  I did not own a bottle of KY jelly.  So why was it on my bed?  More specifically, why did my cleaning lady put condoms and KY in the middle of my neatly made bed?  Was this some sort of cryptic message?  Some old Panamanian curse?

After a few deep breaths and a glass of water, I calmed down enough and started to put it all together.

Many moons ago, I brought home a lady to my apartment in the hopes of getting her to make love to me – or at least in the hopes of getting her hand to make love to my penis.  As you might imagine, any lady willing to come back to my apartment, even under the influence of a serious amount of hard alcohol, has questionable morals.  But following the axiom about beggars unable to be choosers, morals aren’t a necessity for me.  Breath, hole.  That’s about all I need to make something work.  And the former…eh.

(God, that last part kinda grosses me out a bit.  Just for the record.)

But the morals of this lady were especially questionable, I think.  It was apparent that in the course of our fooling around (read: me coughing, apologizing, then asking her to describe all of her childhood Halloween costumes – slowly and in detail) that I was incapable of arousing her very much.  For this, I don’t blame her.  Not at all.  And I’m used to it, since it happens fairly frequently.  But what doesn’t happen often is the unaroused lady reaching into her purse and pulling out…a tube of KY jelly.

The only thing I will further say about this whole incident is that guys, if a lady you bring home whips a tube of KY out of her purse, well, you probably don’t want to go asking for her ring size right away.  There are a few sexual dealbreakers for me, meaning a few things that a woman can do to make sure that we may do it (and do it more than once) but we will never date.  Carrying a bottle of KY in your purse is one of these dealbreakers, as is having had the hair lasered off your coochie (if you’re taking a laser to your coochie, it probably means that a lot of people are seeing that coochie on a frequent basis), asking for a high-five after sex (only cute when I do it, horrifying when you do), or going anywhere near the heinie (I barely even wash back there, I’m so afraid of it).

Anyway, this incident went down on a weeknight, so there was a rush for her to wake up and clear out of my apartment in the morning, just as there was a rush for me to wake up and get my hungover ass in the shower.  I didn’t notice that she had left the tube of KY as a souvenir for me until after I got out of the shower and returned to my bedroom and saw the tube laying on the floor.  At that point, I did what any dude who was hungover and in a rush to get to work would do – I kicked the KY under my bed.  It’s not like since that time I forget the KY, but what was I gonna do with it?  I figured no one would see it there (it was kicked pretty far under), so it was fine.  

So I knew that at least Zoila did not plant the tube of KY in my apartment and on my bed.  As I said, the condoms I recognized.  I keep condoms in strategic locations all throughout my apartment in case a random bout of love-making breaks out.  Feeling randy while brushing our teeth?  Condoms behind my extra deodorant under the sink.  Making pasta and feeling like a little gabba goul?  Condoms in the kitchen cabinet next to the sugar.  Laying on the couch when a relaxing moment turns into the right moment?  Check the drawer of the coffee table under the mail.

(And no, these have never come in handy.  I was really hoping you wouldn’t ask.)

I also keep a few condoms just under my bed.  While under my bed, they are just so, making it easy for me to grab them as soon as the lady is ready or just when she’s finally (finally!) fallen asleep.  You always have to be ready.  

So that explains the existence of the condoms and the KY.  But why were they on my bed?  I can answer this one, too.

On Monday morning, I woke up wanting to change the sheets on my bed.  By "change the sheets" I mean that I wanted to take my dirty sheet off, throw it in my hamper, and leave a new clean sheet on the bed for Zoila to put on.  I said that I hate making the bed, but I also hate making my bed.  It’s in a corner and up against the wall and on wheels, which means there is a significant amount of agility, patience and upper body strength needed to take off the old sheet and put on a new one as it careens around the room.  Agility, patience and upper body strength are not my finest qualities. 

Neither is remembering, apparently.  I didn’t remember my plan until I had closed my apartment door behind in the morning.  I was running late for work but I still wanted Zoila to put on the new sheet, so I quickly ripped the old sheet of the bed, put it in the hamper, grabbed a new sheet from the closet, and threw it on the bed, figuring Zoila would put it on.  Which she did.

But what I had done in this process was turn my bed askew in my bedroom.  As I said, the bedframe is on wheels on a hardwood floor.  Ripping the sheet off moved the bed, and I assume this brought both my condoms and the tube of KY, normally hidden by the bed, into view.  Zoila, in the course of putting the sheet on and cleaning my bedroom, must have seen the KY and the condoms simply laying on the floor.  And, keeping with her good cleaning lady self, she picked them up and placed them neatly on my bed after she had made it.

Ladies and gentleman, I rest my case.  Zoila was not sending me a cryptic message or putting some ancient Mayan curse on me.  She was just being a great cleaning lady.

Still, this doesn’t make me any less embarrassed that Zoila had to see this stuff.  I would have preferred she not get this glimpse into my world of sexual deviancy and unsatisfaction.  All I can hope is that next time, she won’t be too embarrassed to write me one her notes.  If not, I will miss those notes.

(If not, I have a tube of KY jelly.  Which is pretty sweet.)