Harassment is what gets frats bad publicity, and everyone suffers because of it. We never harassed our guys, but unfortunately, one of the bros didn't feel that way. We'll never know which of the group betrayed the herd (some of us had our ideas), but an anonymous phone call was placed to the school when we were at our weakest.
It was definitely a bro, as the caller spilled information that only a bro would know, such as specific incidents and our rush activities. Not happy with the way we'd done things, rather than address the chapter the Judas spilled it to the school, which then got the Sigma Nu national governing board involved. It was looking like Sigma Nu wasn't going to be a chapter at Cal State Fullerton anymore.
After national came through and met the guys, surveyed the charges, and assessed the situation, they decided that the situation was overblown. We weren't guilty of hazing, which they took seriously and for which they had closed down numerous chapters in past years. The national representative made his recommendation to the school that our punishment not be severe.
But the school went in the other direction and handed down the most severe non-expulsionary sentence in its history. Our ties to the school as a social organization were cut for three years. No rushing, no promoting, no partying, and no participation in any Greek events. If any other Greek organization associated with us, they, too, would be punished. We were lepers, as far as Cal State Fullerton was concerned.
The message was clear—while they weren't kicking us out, with no fun and no recruiting for three years, we would wither and die all by ourselves. We'd be eligible for review in a year, but by that time we'd see our numbers diminish significantly. We'd toed the razor line of expulsion and walked away, and this time the fraternity was determined to clean up its act. In past years we'd ignored any punishment we got and partied harder. Now we were dead in the water. With only enough members left to cover the cost of our house, the actives began looking for alternatives.
I'd been ready to move out for months, giving my thirty-day notice and then redacting it when it became clear that the house couldn't go on without everybody there chipping in their rent monies. It was bad enough that I was in debt to the guys for over a grand; I should have been kicked out for all that back money owed. But that was when the house wasn't hurting for brotherhood and I was still a god.
Now I just looked like some freeloading asshole. My money owed wasn't affecting the present status of the chapter and I was paying the rent currently, so I had a stay of execution, but the earth beneath my feet was eroding fast. The trust was long gone.
* * *
Kerry loved me and, not recognizing a sinking ship when she saw one, offered to move out of her parents' house and get an apartment with me. We'd been together for three years, and she'd put up with all of my shit. More and more, she seemed like she was The One. Maybe it was just that I was a user and saw a good person willing to bail me out of a bad situation, but I like to think it was love.
A good deal came down the pipeline in December of that year. A two-bedroom house with a big yard, a driveway where the streetsweeping police couldn't hassle me, and very reasonable rent came to our attention. It was a wonderful situation, because the landlords were friends of Kerry's parents and didn't run a credit check on me. I had no intention of being a bad renter, but crime scene cleaning had taken its toll on all aspects of my life, financial and otherwise.
I went back and forth with my frat brothers, trying to get an answer out of them about our current situation. One minute they were intent on renting a smaller house; the next they were going to stay at the frat and work to make ends meet. I couldn't move my stuff into Kerry's and my rented house yet, because new carpets were being laid and we were going out of town to celebrate the New Year. I needed an answer, but they couldn't give me one.
So, with a day left before our trip, I called my cousin Brad to meet me with his truck to get what I could out of there. We moved almost everything—including the arcade game, the kegerator, my bed, and a standing suit of armor that Brad and his father had gotten me as a gift one Christmas—into the garage of the new house, working in the rain. (Who said it never rains in Southern California?) We worked until the night got too dark and then had to give up. I left town hoping that the rest of my stuff would still be at the frat house when I came back.
It was New Year's Day when I found out the frat didn't have a house anymore. The few brothers left had made the snap decision to up and move out, basically telling the landlord as they shut the door behind them. I still had friends among the new bros, and they had grabbed what they could of my stuff, but other than that, what was left had been stolen or destroyed. This included my high-school yearbook. What kind of a sick fuck steals a person's high-school yearbook?
Walking into the frat house the morning I came back hit me hard. As part of their exit strategy, the new brothers had hacked apart or thrown off the balcony most of the furniture and mobile components of the house. Toys, games, books, and kitchen essentials had been ripped apart, thrown, and smashed.
Two big restaurant booths that had facilitated many drinking games and poker nights had an ax taken to them, not as some beautiful gesture of release, but as an act of anarchy and chaos. Scavengers from the neighborhood and other fraternities had looted the house as we'd once looted another expelled chapter's house.
The landlord was understandably furious about the mess we'd left and the way we'd disappeared and threatened to sue. Alumni weren't notified or asked for help in saving the chapter. When they showed up expecting to drink and hang out, to bond with the new guys and swap stories of pussy had and pussy lost, they were angry. Everyone was angry. The frat had been through far too much for these youngsters to just give up the fight and walk away. They'd all gone back home to live with their parents. They weren't men of honor, just boys who didn't give a shit.
Personally, I think it was all the fault of old guys like me. We'd been stopping the hazing to a certain degree with every new generation, because we didn't want to lose pledges, but it had come at the cost of their brotherhood. They weren't molded into men who'd bend over backward to help one another, who'd come pick you up in the middle of the night to keep you from driving drunk. Some might say that real brothers would never put one another in that position, but hey, shit happens.
The young ones were sheltered whiners, never understanding what that frat house and a band of brothers could mean to someone like me. We never broke through their emotional walls and made them believe in the liberating splendor of true brotherhood, as had been done with us. In the end, non-hazing cost us our home and almost our chapter.
CHAPTER 23
pray for death: redux
Do what we can, summer will have its flies.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our now sworn enemy, the Public Guardian's office, was pissed off that we'd cleaned up the Targus house. Apparently they bitched to whomever would listen that our being in there before they could secure all the valuables and assets meant we'd "compromised the integrity of their work."
It eventually worked in our favor, though, because the residual smells of the downstairs bedroom were compromising the integrity of their noses. I had to run back out there one day and deploy a bunch of deodorizer bombs. The rotted smell had taken up residence in the walls, seeping in like some low-end paint.
I did my best to warm up to the Public Guardian representative and look professional, despite showing up in the Red Rocket, which could barely crawl up the massive hills to reach the house. She looked sorely out of place among the Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs.
Hell, a Lexus would have looked out of place up there, and Red, with her numerous scrapes, dents, and overall cheapness, didn't do our company any favors. She was over ten years old, which was like being
109 in car years. But she made it to a gasping stop in the driveway, and I patted her dashboard appreciatively.
Apparently I made a winning impression on the guy from the P.G.'s office. He was new to the game and possibly didn't know our reputation yet. I acted professional and pretended that I knew what the hell I was talking about when it came to odor neutralization. He seemed to respond positively enough, even telling me he'd call me the next time he had a gig. He would learn our shady history soon enough, I decided, but I gave him a business card to use until he did.
Dirk was starting to learn something about quality-control issues himself. On the Targus job we'd actually used a biohazard-removal company to pick up the bags of soiled material we'd taken from the house. Typically, the bags of blood and guts would end up at the dump, preceded by us removing the magnetic business decals from the side of Dirk's truck. The signs at all the disposal places definitely read "No Dumping of Biohazardous Material," but due to our white skin and innocent faces, no one had caught on.
There was too much waste on the Targus job for us to get away with disposing of it illicitly—and the stink of it all was far too obvious. So Dirk called a local company that we'd used a few times before, just to keep anyone from getting suspicious about what we did with biohazard. It was expensive, and it came out of our bottom line, but the fact that there had been a job was good enough for me.
Summer, if the previous year had been any indication, would be a bad season for us. It was hot, dry, and somehow devoid of death. One would think that with that whole "hot temperatures raise tempers" notion there would be a buttload of summer-related murders—or even just old folks keeling over in the dusty heat. But that wasn't the case.
I was going to make good money off that suicide, though, and like a squirrel storing nuts, I was planning to sit on that paycheck and make it last the whole summer, if necessary. I felt like I was beginning to understand the ebb and flow of the death business. Sure, we'd had our problems in the past, but that was all part of the learning curve.
In the wake of the mass suicide, I was feeling very up about the crime scene business and had begun to assimilate a deeper philosophical meaning to it. I'd come to think of those of us who cleaned up dead bodies as survivors of some bigger scheme. Like we were a cosmic force sent to deal with the horrors of death, and that in dealing with it, we would emerge stronger for it. I thought of us as a unit, banded together in the face of misery and despair. It was about then when I had an incredibly moronic epiphany:
we should all get tattoos.
I promptly set about designing an emblem—something that would strike fear in the hearts of weaker organizations, something that would show our solidarity and our dedication to the cause. It had to be dangerously original and yet ominously familiar…something akin to a pirate flag or a shark fin.
I started toying with the idea of a giant biohazard symbol. With its jagged corners and rounded intersecting half circles, it certainly looked foreboding. It was subtle, yet it sent a message that we were not to be fucked with. It was perfect. And then I found out that homosexuals who were HIV-positive often got a biohazard tattoo. That was not the kind of message I was looking to send. While we did frequently work with AIDS blood…no…no…it was just a bad idea.
I revisited the idea of the pirate flag and, with enough cobbling and the help of the oh-so-basic Microsoft Paint program, created our logo. Based on the Jolly Roger's skull and crossbones, instead of generic crossed bones it had crossed mops! But those crossed mops weren't merely decoration behind the figurehead of our skull; instead they were slammed through the skull, penetrating it from all angles like violent spears. And there was blood. A whole fucking mess of blood, splattered over the skull, emanating from the four points of impact and out onto the surrounding area of the wearer's skin. It was dark yet colorful, dangerous and yet funny, clever but not nerdy.
Below each tattoo we would get the date of our first cleanup inscribed. For Dirk and me, that would be March 14, 2007, the day that old lady put the shotgun in her mouth, sounding the death blast that gave our company life. For Misty it would be a slightly less impressive start: Happy, the dog that had been gunned down by police officers. For Kim it was the gay guy who jammed a knife in his heart in the Miami Beach–style hotel. Russ would have the mass suicide— not a bad one to pop his cherry on. Hell, even Doug, whom I hadn't spoken to since that debacle with the will, could be in on it. He would list the date when he'd arrived to help clean up that creepy doll lady's house, a solid decomp, if there ever was such a thing. We would all be united for life, a team fighting together against the corrosive elements of death. All we needed was a name.
When I presented the tattoo concept to Dirk, he was genuinely honored that I wanted to get a lifelong brand that would celebrate our work. While he adopted a "wait and see" aspect regarding tattooing himself, he gallantly stated that the company would pay for any one of us who wanted to get the tattoo ourselves.
I got mine done before he had the chance to change his mind, using my company-issued credit card to pay for it.
"The Dead Janitors Club?" the tattoo artist asked, reading the name arcing just above the skull. "What's that?"
I proudly told him about the unity and friendship borne out of being a "dead janitor," and the risk and reward of being a human vulture. I think it impressed him.