The Dead Janitors Club (46 page)

    Now I wouldn't do anything as selfish as taking anybody out with me. (How I've changed from the days of my youth when I thought about becoming a serial killer!) But I would make it a point to gather a large crowd to bear witness to my final moments.

    Stripping the whole affair of any seriousness, I would do some standup or sing a silly song, something that would make people say, "Hey! Troubled or not, this guy has a fun-loving personality…we should invite him to our next barbecue." Then I'd hope a police sniper would notice that underneath my trench coat, I was packed to the gills with dynamite and Tootsie Rolls, rigged to go off when he shoots me between the eyes.

    About a second later the metropolitan downtown would be a confetti rain of Jeff and Tootsie Rolls. (No, I'm not going to spring for expensive candy if I'm going to kill myself.) There is just something wonderful about the knowledge that some asshole in the crowd would gather up some of that candy to snack on later.

    Now, since you have not heard on your local news that some LA fat ass painted the cityscape with hunks of his viscera and budget candy, you have probably surmised that the bumps on my arm were not, in fact, fatal tumors sapping the life out of me.

    No, I broke down and had them checked out, and they turned out to be chemical burns from using the heavy concentrations of cleaners and solvents so instrumental to our work. Because I was not wearing my protective bunny suit correctly, I had exposed myself to my own unsafe tools. Whether my foolish actions will resurface down the road in the form of more serious health problems remains to be seen, but for the moment, I'm fine. When I stopped using the chemicals, the burns went away and haven't resurfaced.

    But my brush with what could have been a brush with death sobered me to my position in life and gave clarity to the second of my concerns: What would I regret if I knew I was going to die?

    As it stood, my single biggest regret in life was not mailing that letter several years ago—the one that would have exposed Dirty Pete, my boss at the porn shop, for the piece of shit that he was. I regretted letting Christopher's death be nothing more than a minor inconvenience in Pete's day-to-day activities.

    Even if nothing came of it, I told myself, I would feel better about me. It is too late to mail that letter and have an impact for the better on the lives of those involved, but now I had an opportunity to make a difference once more. I was through with being a weasel; it was time for a new perspective in life, even if that new perspective meant being a rat.

    I realized that I wanted something consistent in my life, something that I could believe in. Policemen, firemen, paramedics, doctors, nurses, all of these positions function first and foremost as guardians of human frailty. These are the people whom we need in our hours of terror and uncertainty. Above all, these are the strangers whom we should be able to trust implicitly with our well-being.

    The people who undertake these assignments should be above reproach, not tainted by the characteristics that we associate with used car salesmen or lawyers. And what I should have realized much earlier was that the crime scene cleaner, while he doesn't have the same responsibilities as a police officer, also serves people at their most fragile.

    I had been allowed into people's homes and trusted to do a job well, recognized as a professional who eliminated dangerous biohazards for the benefit of remaining loved ones, and it was all too clear to me that I had failed. Dirk, and even Schmitty, who from his perch up north was more than happy to collect the checks we sent him, never instilled any sense of morality or quality control. We had all blown it.

    I can't speak for our competition. I don't know the standards by which the other crime scene cleaning companies of the world govern themselves; I only saw them in action on jobs where cheapskates called us in collectively to outbid one another. Based on their appearances, though, and by the caliber with which they conducted their search for biohazard, I would say that those companies weren't much better than we were.

    Crime scene cleaning is a new industry, and it still has a lot of bugs to be worked out. Most people never even know our industry exists until the police mandate that they call us in to erase a loved one from their walls and carpet. The kinds of people whom crime scene cleaning attracts as employees (me not withstanding) are pathetic. I'd put us on the same level as "carnies." We are the dirty, wretched refuse of society who have no qualms about cleaning up the dead.

    Hopefully, O.C. Crime Scene Cleaners was the worst of them. Our ignorance and our indifference toward our job and its responsibilities potentially endangered us and other people, innocent people who foolishly trusted us without ever stopping to check for certifications that we didn't have. It scares me to realize that any jerk-off who wants to make a lot of money fast can go to a hardware store and walk out with a dangerous new career for less than thirty dollars.

    Some spray bottles, a few basic household chemicals (Simple Green and bleach), gloves, paper towels, and a trash bag or two is all it takes in most cases, and for that and the price of registration on the list of biohazard remediators in your state, any unscrupulous asshole can enter your home at the behest of the police department to wash away your loved ones. The police didn't even stick around in most of our cases, and when they did, if I ever asked what they thought of my level of quality, all of them would essentially shrug and say, "You're the expert."

    To handle blood or infectious waste in the state of California, legally you are required to "have formal training in blood-borne pathogens, operate under a written blood-borne pathogens plan, have use of approved safety equipment, been offered hepatitis vaccination, and be provided with sanctioned methods of transporting, storing, and disposing of biohazardous waste."

    I didn't know any of that. I had to get it off the website of a rival crime scene cleaner (whether they actually adhere to those standards themselves, I couldn't say). And while I certainly liked Dirk as a person, I could no longer let him endanger innocent people in his pursuit of early retirement. So one day I placed a call to OSHA.

    OSHA, for those of you living on Mars with your head up your ass, is the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. They are the federal government entity that regulates companies to ensure the safety of both workers and the general public—in other words, people like you. OSHA had been our unseen nemesis for two years, a threat just past the horizon, never catching wind of our actions and likely oblivious to the crime scene cleaning industry at large.

    It was a scary call for me, because I didn't know what the result of my actions would be. Would I go to jail? Would I get slapped with a fine? Would Dirk go to jail? He was married with a kid and a solid career as a sheriff, so the last thing I wanted was for him to end up in jail. I would have preferred to go to jail to have spared him from it; I didn't have a family, much less a young, impressionable son or a career in law enforcement. But I knew that it had to stop. Once before I'd done the wrong thing in a bad situation, and my emotional well-being had suffered for it. This time there would be no mistakes.

    Dialing, I felt like the king of the rats. I tried to summon Marlon Brando's character in
On the Waterfront
as my role model, but all I could manage was Elia Kazan, the director of the film. He had gone before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and provided names of suspected Hollywood communists. Allegedly, Kazan made
On the Waterfront
to paint his stool-pigeon antics as something heroic. I certainly didn't feel heroic.

    After two short rings that even sounded governmental, a gruff voice picked up. He didn't bother identifying himself, only asking what he could do for me, the rat.

    "I want to lodge a complaint against a company."

    "Go on," he said as if he'd heard it all before, and likely he had.

    "It's a crime scene cleaning company."

    "Crime scene cleaning, huh?" his voice raised slightly. Maybe he hadn't heard them all before. "What is the nature of the offense?"

    "I've got a laundry list of complaints, sir."

    "Go ahead."

    "Well, to start with…I've worked for the company for over two years and never had any sort of training ever, me or anyone else. Nobody knows what they're doing over there."

    "Okay."

    "Are you getting this?"

    "You hear that?" he said, stiffly, and in the background I could vaguely hear a light scratching sound. "That's the sound of me writing." He was probably scratching his nutsack. "What else?"

    "We throw biohazardous material away in normal trash cans, take it to the dump, and just toss blood-soaked stuff out most of the time. I've thrown AIDS-infected stuff into the trash cans of rival fraternities, that sort of thing."

    "What else?"

    Suddenly I stumbled. What else was there? I promised the guy a laundry list of complaints, but I was so anxious about making the call that I hadn't actually written any of our offenses down. The stealing wasn't his jurisdiction, nor was any of the other bullshit that came to mind. In desperation, I blurted out: "Brain fell into my eye. That's how we decided we needed to get goggles."

    He kind of laughed at that and then took the company info down, as well as my name. My visions of helicopters, foot soldiers, and doors being kicked down dissipated after that laugh, and I wasn't at all sure if that made me happy. While I didn't want to get Dirk into trouble, I felt bad for everyone who would continue to be at risk from the company and its habits.

    The G-man's promise to "send a letter" that would "request details of the company's safety practices" didn't sit well with me at all. Dirk wasn't stupid; he would squirm out of it and clean up his act for a while, but then he would go right back to how he'd done things in the past and I would be left to fuck off.

    I didn't know what else I could do, though. I wasn't sure I wanted the responsibility of crime scene cleaning in the hands of the government. They fucked up my mail delivery on a near-daily basis, so I could only imagine what they'd do when it came to cleaning up my grandma. That thought alone was almost more than I could bear.

    At the same time, private corporations doing the work had led to the creation of our company and likely others just as unscrupulous as we were. In the end, I did what any other person does when they want to bring light to some bullshit self-serving cause: I wrote a tell-all book.

    Fuck it; let America decide if they want to let the Dirks of the world thrive off their misfortune. All I can do is push the issue to the forefront and enable you to make up your own mind. Maybe you're someone who has more knowledge, more power, or more courage to act than I do. Maybe you're not. Maybe you're just some dickhead reading this the same way that dickheads the world over read the graffiti on bathroom walls. But that doesn't matter to me. The fact that I've gotten you this far convinces me that, for once, I did something right.

After two years in the crime scene business, taking money from grieving widows, experiencing the wonders and pains of being on call 24/7 and the highs and lows of my personal finances, I was done. I was still comfortable with the work itself, but the emotional baggage that came from being in league with Dirk had brought me to the point where I could no longer cope.

    Another dry spell early in 2009 (usually busy months for us) had Dirk bewildered. To me, it made perfect sense. We'd fucked over and chased away the business connections in Southern California that had sustained us the previous year, and there simply wasn't anyone left to give us work.

    I took a hard look at my life and was disgusted by what I saw. I hadn't paid my taxes in two years; I was flat broke—in serious debt to the fraternity, to the school, and to student loans. I'd maxed out my credit cards trying to keep afloat, and there was no quick income in sight. At least with BevMo I had known when money was coming. Dirk once again owed me cash, and once again couldn't afford to pay. I wasn't such an alpha male that I was going to break his legs over it. Instead, I knew it was time to find a new job.

    None of the crime scene cleaning companies in the area were hiring, which was probably for the best, as I was more of a liability than anything else. I turned to what I had been studying all those years at college: advertising. But by that point the economic downturn was in full swing, and I was competing for scarce jobs against people who had decades more experience than me or with a sense of ambition and family connections coming out their assholes. I reeked of burnout and had the surly, disenfranchised demeanor to go along with it.

    Adamant that whatever job I took offered all of the perks and none of the negatives associated with crime scene cleanup, I was going to be tough to please. I required a job that I could mostly do from home, where I could set my own hours and make a lot of money. I wanted a consistent paycheck. No more phone calls from indifferent police officers wanting me to mop up drunk puke at three in the morning and then again at six, and never, ever again would I have to cold-call on any business for anything.

    Incredibly, I got an audition from a high-powered lawyer seeking a brilliant copywriter (his words) to revamp his company websites and press releases, of which there were thousands. I guess he thought they would be valuable in wrangling in new business; I didn't question it, as he was the multimillionaire and I was the slacker wannabe.