On the phone, Bobby Horton sings about how “away from Mississippi’s vale / With my ol’ hat there for a sail / I crossed upon a cotton bale / To Rose of Alabama.” Oleksandr Ostapenko, who is also away from the Mississippi, but wears a stylish top hat, is dancing to this music. The day is breaking. Instead of roosters, we have crows cawing, it is raining, but the mood is surprisingly festive.
THE MISSION IS TO TRACK THE HERO
My search for Ostapenko was like something out of a detective story. It turned out to be a daunting task, though he is quite famous. The first story about Ostapenko was aired by the UT-1 TV channel back in 1994, when he worked as a minibus driver. He also became a character of the book by Halyna Iv Take Me Back to Japan and appeared in movies and commercials.
At first, me and my photographer used a picture from Facebook to determine where the famous janitor works, and it turned out to be Lesi Ukrainky Boulevard. One morning, when, as it seemed to us, janitors were still at work, we came there. However, Ostapenko had already left, as he comes to work really early. Still, every local knows him, so we had no problem getting his home address. We brazenly called the intercom, but nobody answered. Then we found out what housing cooperative he worked for, and looked for his contacts. We monitored reports about the janitor on the Internet, wrote to many people, and finally got Ostapenko’s phone number. He answered immediately and invited us to visit him at 6:30 a.m. We arrived.
We came to keep watch at the entrance when it was still dark, waiting for the hero. He came with a bouquet of roses, jokes, poems and, of course, in a tailcoat.
“I TOOK A JOB AS JANITOR BECAUSE I WAS TIRED OF DISORDER”
Having presented flowers to us, Ostapenko went to fetch a broom to finish cleaning fallen leaves. The broom is also special, twice as big as usual. “They say that it is for show. It is not, I need it because with it, it is twice as quick to clean,” the man asserted. “Also, such a broom is needed in order not to splash mud on my trousers. Besides, it is more fun since it gives more muscle load. I do a work-out through labor therapy, and then do pull-ups. As they say, the broom has transformed me into man [a pun on Friedrich Engels’s thesis that labor had transformed ape into man. – Ed.].”
Ostapenko worked for 12 years as a minibus driver previously. People waited specifically for his bus No. 45 + 22 to do the trip with a driver in a butterfly tie, who joked and treated them to candies. This unusual image was not just for entertainment. “I put on a white tailcoat and walked around the garage at night in that attire, because there was no lighting there. People called me ‘the doctor,’ but I did not care, let it be so,” the man recalled.
“GET UP AT DAWN AND TIDY UP YOUR PLANET.” AT HALF PAST SIX OLEKSANDR OSTAPENKO CLEANS THE YARD OF THE HOUSE HE LIVES IN, POURS COLD WATER OVER HIMSELF, AND IMMEDIATELY GOES TO ANOTHER PLACE TO WORK
Before driving a minibus, he held jobs as a firefighter, a frogman, a turner, and an actor. When asked what profession was his favorite, Ostapenko replied: “To serve people! The main thing is to do people good.”
The man became a janitor because he was tired of injustice and bureaucratism. “It happened once that five apartments were robbed, and two locks broken in this section. The police only collected evidence,” Ostapenko told us. “I was going to fetch water once and saw two people exiting through a first storey window. One ran with a backpack, I gave chase to another and raised hue and cry. We caught them. It occurred at 5:30 p.m. on December 13. The police arrived in 40 minutes. The apartment owner gave me 200 hryvnias as remuneration, everything stolen was delivered back to the apartment, but she had to compile the list of stolen property herself at the police station. Also, bureaucratism. That is why I became a janitor, as I was tired of disorder.”
THE WARDROBE
When the courtyard was cleaned up, Ostapenko suggested we look at his “arsenal” of butterfly ties. He took out a box containing about two dozen such accessories, including butterfly ties made of polyester, brocade, and lurex. “You will not find a fabric with lurex in Ukraine. They sent me it in a bag,” the janitor explained. He sews butterfly ties himself.
However, he had to order his first tailcoat, and then received a few more as gifts. Recently, Ostapenko became the hero of the show Surprise, Surprise! on the STB TV channel, and was presented with a yellow tailcoat there. Also, the janitor owns blue, green, and red jackets, trousers with stripes of different colors, and a cowboy suit. Ostapenko said he owned about 40 suits all told. The man approaches his attire seriously, searches for special buttons for the tailcoats, while the waistcoat which he wore during our conversation is a copy of the French model.
Ostapenko cares for his clothes collection himself. “I wash shirt cuffs and collar first with soap and then with the Avtomaster paste. Then I put them in water mixed with detergent so that they soak there for about two hours. Then, it is necessary to rinse them well in water and hang them out to dry. It gets drained, dries, and then I do ironing. I have two ironing boards and two irons, a regular and a vertical one,” he described his care of clothes.
“THIS IS NOT FOR SHOW. I JUST WORK TO MAKE KYIV BEAUTIFUL”
Having finished cleaning the yard, Ostapenko replaced his tailcoat with a white robe and went to the next courtyard with a large plastic barrel for an outdoor shower. The man has been doing cold conditioning for many years, as evidenced by a video of him bathing in the Dnipro in winter. But for the moment, he limited it to an artesian well. He fetched water from there and immediately poured it on himself.
“It is 5 degrees Celsius now, and it is warm! When I served in the Air Force in Uzyn, we had to work when it was 40 degrees below zero. And still, one got used to it,” Ostapenko shared with us. “The main thing is to show a good example. For instance, I neither drink nor smoke. I get cold showers and swing my broom.”
We went with the janitor to the well and back, he was greeted by other janitors and residents of adjacent buildings. He knows everyone here, including cats and dogs.
“Ostapenko is our neighbor. We have known him for a very, very long time. He is a unique person! A very smart man! He knows a thing about working. When he worked as a driver, people waited specifically for his minibus, because his work makes people rejoice. And he performs his work very well. Meanwhile, housing cooperatives do nothing,” we heard from a local resident as she was passing by with a coffee in hand.
Doctor Natalia was hurrying to work, but still stopped to tell us a few words about Ostapenko: “I have known him for a long time. He is a hard-working man. Tidy and polite. Very positive. I am already used to his image. Everyone has their own hobby. The main thing is what kind of man he is, and not what his image is.”
However, not everyone is so positive about him. Sometimes Ostapenko is accused of being a showman. “I do not look like a trickster. It is just that I stick to thinking positively. Artists put on acts, do it for money, but I do it to benefit people,” the janitor reflected. “This is not for show. I just make Kyiv beautiful.”
“WE SHOULD WORK ON ATTRACTING TOURISTS DAILY”
Ostapenko put a garland of butterfly ties on the street once, which stretched from one intersection to another. It got removed. “I think they took it away for dry-cleaning,” the janitor smiles. “We need to decorate the streets. See, Prague has 6 million tourists arriving every year, and Tokyo has 24 million. We must attract tourists somehow, show them something every day. At my workplace, I clean and attract attention with my appearance. Right now, I am cleaning while wearing a tailcoat. Maybe I will endure like that until the winter sets in – 5 or 10 degrees below zero can still be tolerated.”
Journalists like Ostapenko and regularly come to him on pilgrimages of sorts. We, too, talked to him together with our TV colleagues. The man is used to such attention, the media do not distract him from important everyday matters. After all, he is bringing up three grandchildren as well. “It is hard,” the janitor admitted. “The main thing in educating children is the acquisition of knowledge, physical and psychological preparation. Nobody likes competition. I do not have any competitors, and one needs to enter such a business where there is no competition. My grandchildren will have another profession, they will not be janitors. We will choose something.”
Seeing that we were already cold, Oleksandr advised us to do sports. “You do not have dumbbells, you say? Then get them. Do pull-ups. Run and swim. Make 200 sit-ups! People need to train, to get blood flowing,” the man smiled and took off the top hat to wave us farewell. “And now I have to leave for another area to make some money. They are waiting for me.”
