Douglas Jemal, Hotel Mogul, Union Buster¹

Doug Jemal is on his knees scrubbing a toilet spattered with the soggy shredded lettuce of city dollars Doug Jemal puked after chugging millions in subsidies at the Scanlon-Brown firesale/ kegger, puked that gold-gilt cash out on the seventh floor of the dilapidated downtown Hyatt—scrub, Doug, scrub—Doug scrubs that toilet over a knee- aching decade while Doug stuffs the politicians’ pockets so they’ll stuff his gob with hotels where Doug makes $16/an hour & gets called a lazy cracker by his manager & doesn’t even have a friend to complain to because management fired him during the union drive, Doug Jemal loosens his tie, tucks it into his shirt pocket so its tip doesn’t slip into the toilet bowl or catch droplets flying from the brush’s bristles, Doug scrubs and scrubs without a raise, which means a pay cut, inflation and all, each finger tightens, aches with arthritis that doesn’t know how to stop—shift after shift, floor after floor, year after year Doug Jemal bends to the porcelain, applies his brush—bend, bleach brush, repeat, in the 30 white mouths of the fifteen floors of the crumbling Hyatt with a union getting busted, every day on repeat, Doug Jemal gets richer, Buffalo gets chop-shopped to this highest bidder, Doug Jemal’s wrists burn and splinter—After another shift Doug Jemal’s feet hurt so bad he can’t feel the brake of his sports car in his carpet-bagging wannabe cowboy boots, what a white knight, what a savior of the City, according to the Buffalo News—after another shift, Doug Jemal waits for the bus, half asleep before he’s even home, hauled East down Genesee St., that slice of life he lives mostly in his dreams until Doug Jemal gets flushed down the crapper.