Bill Parreault owes his life, or at least his current livelihood, to Big Tobacco. Of course, at his current rate of smoking two packs a day, the 62 year old may eventually also owe them his death. But he can’t quit. And judging from the number of cigarette butts he sweeps up during his daily rounds as Uptown’s custodian, neither can you.
It’s been 15 years since Parreault took the part-time, $8-an-hour job sweeping the streets and picking up trash. He works for a private contractor hired by the Uptown Association. When he started, they would power-wash the sidewalks every night, the most efficacious way to remove all the chewing gum that ends up there. He took a pay cut—and a cut in respectability—when the Association decided they no longer wanted to shell out so much cash for those clean-as-a-whistle sidewalks. Now, Parreault sets out in his pick-up truck six days a week, stopping every few blocks to get out and hand-sweep the bus transfers, removing the soda bottles and cigarette butts that frequently lay just a few feet from one of the area’s numerous trash cans. Parreault doesn’t really mind the public’s laziness, he says. It’s not really in his demeanor to get angry, not since he quit drinking about ten years ago, anyway. But people who throw butts at his feet are another story. “It’s as if they don’t even see me,” he said, his ever-present accent not a wholesome Minnesota twang but rather a gentle Maine roll.
It’s possible that people don’t see him, although anyone who has ever stopped at Lagoon and Hennepin for a morning coffee (or a pack of smokes) has most likely crossed paths with the short, gray-haired man in the blue coveralls and the baseball cap emblazoned “Sturgis 2002.” He’s slight, almost gaunt, and his face is a cartographer’s dream, with endless rivers and tributaries of wrinkles, running every which way across his tan, impossibly soft skin. He’s quiet, polite, and looking forward to retirement at the end of the month, which will bring great things: a respite from his afternoon job fixing motors, work he enjoys but would rather be doing on his own. But Uptown will continue to owe its clean sidewalks and empty trashcans to him.
Parreault owes his relative poverty to hourly jobs, an affinity for the lottery, his appetite for smokes, and two of his grandkids, who took a liking to their grandparents when they fell out with their next-of-kin. He wasn’t always a custodian. Over the years he’s been a farmhand, a Marine, a lobster and crab fisherman, and, most often, a truck driver. To trucking he owes his bad back and his residence in Minnesota; it was a cross-country-trip-gone-bad that found Parreault prudently unloading here, with $25 in his pocket and nothing else, while his beer-drinking, pill-popping partner carried on westward. Parreault found a place to crash, and pretty soon it was back to work as usual.
He hopes retirement will mean more than free afternoons. He’d like to start his own business, a sort of motorman-on-wheels who makes house calls to fix small engines in lawnmowers and maybe even cars, a craft in which he earned a degree from the Dunwoody Institute. Five clients have already signed up for the service. What he’s lacking is a van to haul all the necessary tools and the generator. Unfortunately, no one owes Parreault any money.
There are a few people who notice Parreault’s hard work, like the retired military man who sips coffee at Starbucks and the waitress at Lucia’s who greets him with a sunny “Good Morning!” One woman gives him a hug every morning before she gets on the bus and heads downtown for work. She doesn’t owe him anything—but he collects it anyway.
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