Entering the source of the smell, the bedroom, it appeared that his nouveau, post-furniture, minimalist aesthetic extended in there as well. Save for one lumpy mattress, the middle of which was coated in the gelatinous, slimy green residue of a rotted fatso, the entire room existed at cockroach height. His computer, on which he conducted his day-to-day "operations of financial wizardry" no doubt, was set on the ground with the monitor residing in the middle of an empty pizza box, as if the pizza box were some sort of revolutionary new desk.
His eyeglasses had flopped to the ground in front of the bed, as if cast off during an orgasmic frenzy of pizza eating. His clothes were in the closet, at least, but they were bagged up in large garbage bags not unlike the ones I would use to haul away their owner.
Around his bed, in his closet, and on most of the available flooring in the bedroom stood testament to what this lonely man's life had amounted to: porno and scotch. The gaudy oversize box covers of the cheap porno were familiar stuff to me, stuff we'd kept at the porn shop under the sales-tag designation of "bizarre." Lots of movies featuring girls who had extra hairy genitals, pregnant women getting raped, and the calling card of every fat computer nerd, extreme bondage.
I could picture his Friday nights when he was sitting around sucking back belts off the dark-green plastic 1.75 liter bottles of Clan MacGregor's miserly scotch, stroking his doughy pecker, and wondering what life would be like if I…I mean he…were someone cooler.
I didn't even want to speculate what would be found on his computer in some file labeled "private," but in a scenario like the one that found our fat friend rotting away, I could assume that he was purchasing what the other dirtbag, the one with the video camera aimed at his bed, was filming.
Kim reacted much more vocally and harshly toward the dead man on the bed than she had to our cool guy in the hotel, which I found a bit shitty. It was so typical of pretty girls to write someone off because they died fat and smelly. I'll bet, stinky pervert or not, if he had shopped at a United Colors of Benetton, she would have found him more endurable. I reminded myself to pick up some Benetton clothes.
Taffy had scrounged up respirator masks for Kim and herself, and the two of them were dishing about our melted fella, gabbing away like a couple of Chatty Cathys. Kim had the innate ability to make friends with anyone, anywhere, over anything. While her work performance was shit because of it, she did good PR work for us with the locals, and she was easy enough on the eyes. She was worth every penny of twenty-five dollars an hour for both those attributes.
We got the apartment-complex manager to sign off on our work order, promising to make the smell go away, and got down to work. Kim went to work cleaning up the scotch bottles (which filled two and a half large trash bags) while I sanitized computer cords that snaked through the gut mulch on the bed, resembling interstate lines on a map.
Because the drunk's innards had pickled, one would have thought the smell of his rot would have dulled, but in fact the opposite was true. His aroma, the stink of his sweat secretions in the carpeting, the hunks of his flesh that had remained and changed color, the very essence of his nonexistence filled my mouth with a metallic bitterness, as if I had given a Duracell battery a blowjob.
What could be scooped off the stained mattress with cloth hand towels we took, and the rest of the queen-size mattress we folded in two as best we could, sliding trash bags over it like condoms. His rotting remains would end up at the dump, scattered in innocentlooking black bags along with his porno tapes and empty whiskey bottles. I think he would have liked it that way.
* * *
Dirk rolled with me on our next call, out to Huntington Beach, surf mecca of Southern California, for another rotted alcoholic. This one had collapsed in his kitchen, stewing away until a foul brown outline appeared in the flecked white floor tile and finally puddled under the stove. His outline, marked as if done by someone with Parkinson's disease, made it appear that his last motion on earth was the act of crooning Barbra Streisand ballads into his balled fist. Whether that was the reality or not was incidental; it made him more fun to clean up.
Dirk and I had the unpleasant task of meeting with both the dead man's mother and the owner of his apartment complex, a scumbag who looked like someone you'd guess was named Howard.
It was an especially bad situation because Howard, true to his scumbag roots, was interested in one thing—getting the dead man and all of his worldly shit out of Howard's apartment complex. The mother, on the other hand, was still freshly mourning the loss of her son. We had to separate Howard from the mom and work deals with them individually.
Howard would pay for the cleaning up of the dead man—only with the firm understanding that insurance would mostly compensate him later. The mother would pay for the removal of any and all property belonging to the victim, a forty-three-year-old man named Jasper.
The mother thanked us for our compassion during the dealings as she left, all the while glowering across the apartment complex's concrete driveway at Howard. Howard asked us for one of our embroidered polo work shirts to wear while he played golf.
Dirk and I began the work on a Saturday morning. It was the weekend and Misty was available, so she came along. Dirk was in his horny mood, so he peppered her with questions and innuendo about sex and her bisexuality, delighted by the fact that she didn't have a boyfriend, because she enjoyed sleeping around. Not that he or I stood a chance with her. I concentrated on my work to avoid getting wrapped up in the sexual harassment lawsuit I was sure was brewing.
Jasper's innards had soaked into the tile so completely that we had no choice but to remove the tiles. Using a long scraping tool with a thin, wide blade, we all took turns shucking at the stinky, brown tiles. Some of them chipped off neatly in patches while other, more affected tiles separated slowly and much more soggily, something akin to tearing a wet paper bag.
Once we were through the top flooring and down to the concrete, it became apparent that Jasper, like so many in death before him, had also melted into the concrete. He, too, would be painted over.
When Howard came to assess our work, he grimly pointed out that the carpeting hadn't been removed. We pointed out that the carpeting hadn't been affected. He pointed out that he would pay us whatever amount to remove the carpeting. Dirk and I agreed.
Howard also asked if we would say we were taking the countertops out, as well as the mounted vanity in the bathroom. Dirk pointed out that we wouldn't do that, as they weren't affected either. Howard pointed out that we could
say
they were affected and that it all needed to be removed along with the "affected carpeting."
Dirk said he didn't understand. I explained to Dirk that he was talking about insurance fraud. Howard needed us to bill him enough over his deductible to get the insurance company to pay for his deductible as well as eat the expense of new counters, flooring, and vanity for the apartment. In turn, his sons would do the work we allegedly did, and we would keep the cash. Except for the carpeting—Howard was adamant that we remove the carpeting. We said fine. Several thousand dollars later, Dirk and I were ripping out carpeting.
Dirk was a stubborn man, though, and refused to remove the floor insulation beneath the carpeting, assuring me that we were doing Howard a favor by leaving it. I will always agree to do less work, and so the insulation stayed.
The next morning, we were driving back out to the apartment complex in a rental moving truck, breezing by the sea on a sunny day with the windows down and the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Dirk was ruining the Zen calm of the morning by talking about porn and how it should have been his destiny to break into the porn business. On top of that, he was still obsessed with his Snoop Dogg song.
I was gazing out the window of the truck, happy about all the money I had made lately, when Dirk broke through my thoughts with the typical Dirk-style question of, "Have you ever seen a snuff film?"
I turned to look at him strangely; I had not, and I was uncertain where this conversation was heading.
"I liked that movie
8mm
with Nicolas Cage…it was gnarly."
I shrugged, not bothering to tell him that I thought the movie was a pretty good concept but done poorly. There was no point in pissing on his parade, and I looked back out the window. I figured he was asking because we had found Jasper's porno stash the day before in our cursory search of the apartment.
"I've seen a snuff film," he said, somewhat darkly for him.
I looked back at him, curious, as the existence of true snuff films is somewhat up for debate. A snuff film, for the pure of heart (If you're pure of heart what the fuck are you doing reading this trash? Get the fuck outta here…), is a videotaped murder, usually in somewhat of a sexual context. They were kind of an urban legend in the porno world, with the occasional customer at the porn shop asking about them or professing to "know a guy who knew a guy…" I was doubtful, so I pressed Dirk for the details.
"I wish I had never seen it," he began. "They told us that we could leave the room if we wanted before they showed it, but I wasn't gonna miss it," he said turning his head away from the road to look at me for long intervals, conveying his sincerity. The look he was giving me made me sit up and take listen.
"It was shown when I was in training at the sheriff's academy. There was this girl…she looked like she was fifteen or sixteen…lying on this bed naked. And then this boy comes into the frame, and he looks like he's probably thirteen. Anyways, someone off camera tells him to have sex with the girl…and he's young so he can't really get his dick all hard, but he kinda does…and he starts fucking the girl, really going at it…and she's moaning…and then, this hand holding a gun lowers into the frame and shoots the little boy in the back of the head.
"Well, the kid drops down dead on the girl, and she's all covered in blood and screaming, and then this naked guy wearing a mask comes into the frame and he moves the kid. And this naked guy is holding a knife and he has a huge dick. Well, he starts fucking the screaming girl while she's all covered in blood, and he holds the knife to her throat…"
Dirk looked back at the road while I stared at him, horrified and wishing that he hadn't told me about that, just as you probably wish I hadn't told you. But you, as I did, wanted to peek into that world and you've got to live with the vision that you got.
"The tape ends at that point, but they're pretty sure the man cut the girl's throat," Dirk finished grimly. I shook my head and looked back out the window at a sunny beach town that somehow now seemed a bit less sunny. Dirk instantly went back to being his unaffected self.
"Sexual Seduction…" he sang, without irony.
Dirk apparently wasn't done talking, because he wanted to impart more twisted knowledge.
"I've seen all kinds of sick videos at the sheriff's department," he said with a smile. "There was this one that this guy made…he set up a video camera to record himself so he could watch it later and…whatever…well, he was into autoerotic asphyxiation…that's where you like to choke yourself during sex…"
"I know what autoerotic asphyxiation is," I interrupted, thinking back to my own kinky youth and my lucky tan belt, Denise.
Dirk smiled a "Been there, done that" smile at me, and I smiled a "No, you haven't" smile back at him.
"Well, this guy got himself a rope," he continued, "and he strung it up in his garage and fashioned it into a noose. Then, naked, he got up on this ladder and slides a broomstick into his ass. Well, he's jerking off like crazy, and he slips off the ladder…well, the rope is too long and so he drops down, his feet not quite reaching the ground, but the broomstick goes up through him, turning him into a Popsicle…"
I shuddered at the reveal and thought warmly back to my lucky broom, Gretel.
"The last image on the videotape is the garage door opening, and the mom and kids coming home in their minivan to find him hanging there."
We thankfully reached our stop before he could lay any more human misery on me.
Misty was again busy that day (it was hard to believe that I had a coworker who actually worked less than Dirk), but Kim and Doug, our Mexican-hating contract hire, both showed up at the prospect of work. Kim went to task on the kitchen, chucking out Jasper's many empty vodka bottles. Being glass, they revealed that Jasper had been a classier drunk than the fat wastrel who'd preceded him.
Dirk and Doug took on the living room while I went to work on the back bedroom. I unloaded bookcases and a desktop under the watchful eyes of Jasper, who regarded me from the top of his tall dresser in a photo of himself decked out in an orange hunting vest. He wore eyeglasses and had a thin beard, giving him an "everyman" look.
It was mostly mindless work, unloading a lifetime of collected memories and possessions from a person's home. The lot of it seemed so meaningless and trivial to me, and yet to Jasper it probably was the stuff of dreams. But in addition to those nice, fluffy, cute dreams about puppies and wealth that we all have, Jasper evidently had some other dreams. Wet ones.
Upon our initial casual search of the house, we knew that Jasper kept porno on hand. What we didn't realize was how deep a rabbit hole his affinity for sex was. There has to be a link between alcoholism and a love of freaky pornography. I pulled open drawer after drawer of raw sex, now wearing gloves to protect my hands from his sexual proclivities. Jasper was evidently bisexual himself, because although most of his porno tapes featured women, the literature and toys he collected tended toward the man-on-man style of lovin'.