The Maniacs Who Clean the Payphones

At the Broadway-Houston intersection, two men were using the phone kiosks when a white van screeched to a halt at the curbside in front of them. Two other men jumped out of the vehicle and came storming up carrying steel poles and buckets. A strange little scene followed. The two guys using the phones nervously eyed the men who were rushing up, apparently to attack them with the poles and beat them with the buckets. Then they hung up their phones and backed away.

Meanwhile, the guys with the poles and the buckets, paying them no mind, hit the phone booths in a frenzy of scraping, scrubbing, cleaning.

I walked away, amused by the scene but ready to forget all about it until I realized that, in all my decades in New York, I've never seen an outdoor phone booth get cleaned.

I headed west across Houston. People were still wading out into the street to hail phantom cabs. As I came upon the bank of payphones near the NYU building with the Picasso statue, the white van caught up with me, the doors slid open and again the same two guys spilled out with buckets, brushes and rags, and began cleaning the phone kiosks within inches of their lives. I stopped to watch as the men scoured, scrubbed and scraped with the fury of the hardworking immigrants they were. No band decal, no advertisement, no solicitation was safe from these two. They conversed with clipped Slavic accents as they worked, and didn't stop until the booths sparkled. That took all of two minutes. I watched in awe at the efficiency, and even joy, with which they approached their mindless jobs. I wanted to talk to them, but as I approached, they jogged off into the van and pulled out. I walked west, got on the IRT and went home.

But I'd been so impressed with the work ethic of these guys that I called the company whose name was on the side of the van. It's called Dyna Serve, and operates out of North Bergen. A stuttering receptionist didn't know what to do with my call. She finally put me through to the company's president, Ron Atkinson.

I told Atkinson I was interested in what his company was up to. In a voice that might have been computer-generated, he asked for my name, the name of my editor and my phone numbers before he'd be queried. With that out of the way, I asked Atkinson how many New York City phone kiosks his company cleans.

"We are contracted to clean over 12,000 phones in the five boroughs."

Then dead silence.

I asked how many booths each team was required to clean per day.

"I wouldn't share that with you because that is information that our competition could use."

I hadn't realized the phone-cleaning business was so cutthroat. I pushed the question further and Atkinson blurted, "Look, they are given a certain amount of units which they are expected to clean in an eight-hour shift."

I asked what else Dyna Serve cleaned.

"We basically service commercial buildings in the Tri-State area. We have janitorial services and groundskeeping, and we are involved in snow removal."

I told him how good the cleaners had been on Houston St. on Thursday at 11 p.m. Maybe those poor bastards will be able to milk a raise out of Dyna Serve. Or maybe, as Atkinson might fear will happen, the competition will swoop down and offer them a better deal.

I had no idea what else to ask Atkinson other than whether his battery pack was charged. I'm sure that made his day.

I hung up.