The Dead Janitors Club (28 page)

    The team, myself included, busted ass once more, and finally by the day's end the house had achieved a new level of sparkle. With the exception of the heavily spotted carpeting that the P.G.'s office said we were off the hook for, the place looked like a model home.

    Dirk came out once more and signed off on the place, freeing me from its curse. But there was still the situation of money.

    We had spent a few grand of the money collected from the house on paying off the workers and the sanitation company. The bottom line, Dirk said, was that Public Guardian's office didn't know how much money we had actually taken from the house. It was all a matter of our accounting.

    Dirk had broached the subject lightly, gauging my reaction, but it was a needless proposition. I was a huge advocate of the money serving as our recovery fund and the Public Guardian getting very little of it. I could just imagine it going into some file somewhere, unimportant to all parties concerned.

     I don't know what he turned in to the Public Guardian's office, but when I got a paycheck that month, it was happily much bigger. Cash, an electric guitar, a trumpet, and some other odds and ends weren't a bad haul for all the work I had mostly watched get done. But I still knew we could do better.

I didn't grow up a sports fan. My father was allegedly a Dodger enthusiast when we lived in Los Angeles, and he went to ball games on a semi-regular basis. He even went to several games when the Dodgers won the Series in '81, the year I was born, and brought me back a World Champion Dodgers hat that my mom saved for me over the years. It was a side of my father that I never knew.

    When we moved up to Eureka, land of no sports teams or major cities for at least six hours in any direction, he focused only on his magic and his acting. This was great for me, of course, growing up. Lots of kids had dads who were sports fans; I was the only kid in my grade that had a father who was a magician. It helped me make friends when he'd come in and perform for the school, getting me out of class to help him set up his act.

    I had played Little League baseball and youth basketball for a year, each only to realize that I sucked. I wanted to give football a try, but its games were always on Sunday, and Sunday was "church day." I was a big, blocky kid by that point, and some full-contact sports could have made me develop some masculinity. Instead, I was immersed in the world of Doug Henning, David Copperfield, and knowing the difference between
The Tempest
and
Twelfth Night
.

    It wasn't until high school that I realized what I'd missed with sports. Doug Henning and Shakespeare don't get you laid in high school; football gets you laid. Shakespeare can at least get you laid in college; Doug Henning will never get you laid. I had a very goofy existence in high school trying to talk sports with the other guys and failing miserably.

    So I had lived a fairly sports-free life…until I started dating Kerry. Kerry's family was very into sports…super into sports, you might say. And so with that, I developed an affinity through immersion, going to hockey games and watching football all day religiously on Sundays and again on Monday nights. The Dodgers, the Lakers, the Ducks, NASCAR, drag racing, golf, bull riding, and any other sport that was on, we watched. And I grew to love it.

    I still didn't know any of the players, most of the positions that they played, or why nobody in sports liked Bill Buckner, but I was right there every day, rooting for whatever sport was on. I loved the fighting in hockey and was mesmerized by a quarterback getting the ball on the opposing team's one-yard line and having two minutes to march ninety-nine yards upfield to win the game. I screamed my fucking head off when D-Fish sank a turnaround jumper for the Lakers with four-tenths of a second left on the clock to beat the Spurs.

    Sports was humanity and power and testosterone-fueled superhumans sobbing at victory and defeat alike, so passionate for the game or even just for the bonus they would have gotten if they'd managed ten more yards. And we in the stands or at home, watching around the television, bonded or glared, loving and hating another human being because of the swing of a bat or the catch of a pass.

    Nothing was as tense at Kerry's house as the day my Denver Broncos upended her and her father's Pittsburgh Steelers in the only game they played that season. There was nothing like the sheer majesty I felt when Kerry and I watched the Anaheim Ducks beat the Detroit Red Wings in the sixth game from box seats that we lucked into. That year the Ducks won the Stanley Cup, and there I was, a superfan by immersion, living and breathing with every play.

    And so when I got the call from Dirk one day to roll out to Dodger Stadium, it was like a newfound dream come true.

* * *

Dirk "happened to have the day off," but I couldn't blame him for wanting to go. Everybody needed a good name-dropper crime scene in their repertoire. And by Southern California standards, Dodger Stadium was a hell of a good one.

    I still had my walking cane, but I had taken to leaving it in the car merely as an incidental. I still wouldn't lift heavy objects, but Dirk was fine with that. I think he felt really bad that the company couldn't provide me with health insurance or workers' comp.

    We cruised up the 5 freeway, him driving and me with my shades on, staring out into the expanse of LA. It had been a long time since we had rolled somewhere together, and I wasn't used to having the company. I hardly ever even listened to the radio, so I missed the silence when I would ride with Dirk, who chatted like a cabbie.

    If he didn't have conversation in his life, I think Dirk would have exploded a long time ago. He was obsessed with my previous career in porn and fascinated by it all, with almost a child's awe. He was always asking questions about what porn stars were really like and what was the craziest thing anyone had ever bought. He was a big enthusiast of pornography and would've loved to work in the porn business, except his wife wouldn't let him. She was the dominating type and not in the kinky whips-and-leather way.

    Dirk was also stuck on the song "Sexual Eruption" by Snoop Dogg. The lyrics had been changed to "Sensual Seduction" to make it more radio friendly. Dirk misheard it as "Sexual Seduction," though, and it had been adopted as his singing catchphrase to be spouted at any occasion.

JEFF: Man, this is crazy going to Dodger Stadium…
DIRk (singing): Sexual Seduction...
JEFF: I wonder what happened.

DIRk: We'll find out when we get there…We're supposed to talk to a Joe…or is it José?

JEFF: …

DIRk: What was the craziest thing that ever happened to you while you were working in the porn shop?

JEFF: In the porn shop? Hmm, I don't know…I used to have this porn star that would come in, bring me weed, dry hump me… DIRk: So you might say it was…(again, singing) Sexual Seduction…

    The truck climbed Chavez Ravine to the waiting gates of the stadium's outer limits. After bandying with a guard who'd just turned away some random Dodger fans wishing to see the stadium and who took much convincing that we were legit, we were on our way as the truck crept through security and into the parking lot.

    I expected to see a mob of reporters or major scene activity, or both, as we drove around the perimeter toward the first baseline, but it felt more like an abandoned city. Construction trailers dotted the landscape, heavy machinery was set up for work, and yet there was no one around. We crept through the mess of trailers, the throaty growl of the Chevy truck announcing our presence in the early evening.

    Two men in hard hats eventually stepped out to consider us, and we waved them over. "We're looking for Joe…or José?" Dirk asked of them when they reached the side of the truck. I expected him to tack on a "Sexual Seduction," but he didn't.

    The men looked confused about both names. The one with a walkie-talkie asked into it, "Do we have a Joe or a José working on the crew?"

    "No Joes, lots of Josés," came the response.

    "We're from Crime Scene Cleaning," Dirk clarified.

    "They say they're here to clean up the crime scene," Walkie-Talkie reported.

    "Send them to Access Route 3…tell 'em to wait for a security crewman to escort them in. I'll send one over."

    Arriving at Access Route 3, we were impressed to discover the cavernous mouth of a tunnel extending down into the bowels of the stadium. Tall, Dodger-blue metal doors protected the entrance, though one had been left hanging open and swinging slightly in a still-winter breeze.

    There were no reporters or indeed any sign whatsoever that anything had gone down at Dodger Stadium. It was as if the park was keeping an extreme wrap on the situation. The beginning of the season was still two months off, so I'd ruled out fan or player death.

    Fifteen minutes later, our security guard, an older Mexican gentleman in dress blues, arrived in a small security pickup truck. He was an overly friendly type who spoke English slowly and with a lot of effort, tacking on "my friends" to any sentence in which he addressed us.

    Security Guard led us through the industrial cement hallways beneath the stadium, a location few ever get to see. There was no smell of beer, hot peanuts, or soft pretzels beneath the poured concrete innards of the historic park; rather, it was full of long, dark hallways, creepily antiseptic.

    After a bit of walking that could have been achieved much faster by a quick zip on one of the idle motorized carts Security Guard wouldn't let us go near ("I don't want to lose my career, my friends…"), we stopped at Access Door 33. Bent metal doors, contorted by God knows what, were strapped closed by yellow caution tape. Across the hallway, we could hear the hum of electronics doing their thing. The three of us beneath the stadium were otherwise alone.

    We ascended wooden planks set up for the construction that had been halted in the wake of the tragedy. The rickety boards, spanning gulches of concrete, groaned under my footfalls. I hopped from one to the next quickly, eager to avoid an accident myself.

    It turned out to be a fall. We could easily surmise as much from the impact point upon the unpaved concrete of the stadium's base. The worker had dropped from a distance in excess of forty feet, falling quicker than he could shout and meeting a gruesome demise on the jagged roughness below. That same quivering mass of red present at the disgraced minister's home was present once again, although this time it had been mulched viciously by the impact.

    Security Guard, though hesitant to leave us, was also clearly uneasy about being in the presence of some seriously bad juju. The temptation of the forbidden overwhelmed him finally, though, and he crept forward to take a look. The repulsion stretched across his face reminded me that most people weren't used to this sort of thing. I didn't see the scene as much more than one less rat in the race.

    Finally having satiated his blood curiosity, Security Guard retreated out of the access tunnel, across the wooden plank bridge, and back out into the safety of the corridor. There, the soft glow of ceiling-mounted fluorescents offered sanctuary. Inside the cavern where we were, there was only the hard burn of a pointed work light and soft red guts.

    The worker had fallen from his perch down into a sealed-off hollow cavern that comprised one of the load-bearing struts for the stadium. It was as if he'd fallen between the walls of a house, only the "walls" were comprised of thick, hardened concrete. Workers had had to drill through two feet of poured structure to access the splattered mess that had been their fellow employee. The excavation didn't make Dodger Stadium any less safe for the public, but it opened up a whole new mess of problems for us.

    The newly exposed cavern measured roughly twenty-five feet across and at least sixty feet high with measured concrete steps etched into the ceiling. The steps were the underside of rising rows of bleachers alongside the first base line. They were the good seats, where the rich people sat. I whistled at the prospect of how far beneath Dodger Stadium I was.

    We'd had to crawl over the chunky patches of blood and ripped skin to access the chamber, as the work crew had chiseled out the wall in exactly the place his body had fallen and hadn't factored in the need for a crime scene cleaner to move in and out of the space. Though the cavernous chamber was dark where our meal ticket had breathed his last, the glow of a construction light from the corridor revealed an outline of the sharp sloping rise of concrete that was the floor of the room. It wasn't so much a floor as it was the bottom of a pit. It was unpaved and rough, and had been poured by numerous cement trucks fifty years beforehand, their drivers oblivious to the damage the knobby concrete would do to a fellow worker's body half a century later.

    I clicked on my flashlight, first to highlight the trauma we'd be dealing with, and then to play the beam across the room as I walked up the incline of the floor. The cavern wasn't airtight, because ragged and dark tunnels extended through the side walls of the subterranean cavern and into numerous other caverns probably similar to the one I was in. It was a creepy place, and I was eager to return to the safety of the blood and guts far below.