The Dead Janitors Club (8 page)

    Regardless of it not being implicit in the contract we had drawn up, we removed any and all chunky spots from the carpet, leaving only bony branch lengths of blood soaked in. I stood, ready to carry out my crate, strip off my bunny suit, and find an all-night convenience store with a cooler full of Dr Pepper. Dirk had even managed to save the painting by decontaminating it with the enzyme and then scrubbing lightly at it with a brush so that only some of the oil paint smeared. I was proud of us.

    Then I heard it. "We missed some."

    I followed Dirk's finger, pointing at the ceiling, where, mixed in with the dust and stucco, there were some unmistakable chunks of that melon-looking brain matter, too high for us to reach safely without a ladder.

    Exasperated, I said, "I got this," and stepped up the two feet of the raised brick lip of the fireplace. Holding on to the oak mantel with one hand so that I could hang off the edge of the fireplace and extend upward, I reached out over the carpet toward the ten-foot ceiling, with my free hand gripping my brush.

    Stretching my left arm as far as it would go, I could just barely reach the ceiling. Scrubbing at the patches of brain, I rolled them into tight cocoons from the friction. Stucco dust dropped from the scrubbed areas overhead, and I blinked once while continuing my work, until as I opened my eyes, I felt the gentle, cold splat of something soft connect with the naked orb of my right eye.

    Automatically, I blinked again, but it was still there. Dropping down, I reached my latex glove toward my eye but then thought better of it and stripped the glove off quickly. Trickles of sweat ebbed from my pale fingers as I shook loose the feeling of the powder resin from the glove. Using my thumb and middle finger like fleshy tweezers, I managed to extract what was undeniably a hunk of melon-colored brain that had become stuck to my eyeball. I stared at it, incredulous—praying the sweet little old lady with a table full of medicine vials didn't have AIDS—and then dropped it into the trash bag with its friends, Dirk staring all the while.

    "I guess we should wear goggles from now on," he reasoned matter-of-factly. I couldn't decide how I should have reacted, so I just rolled with it good-naturedly. We were "professionals" after all, and this sometimes happened to professionals, right?

    Bagging up the rest of the mess, we threw some black trash liners over the carpeting and once more tried to reason Martin into letting us take it.

    "No, no…I'll throw newspaper over it," he maintained. Shrugging, we once more turned on our blood-detection flashlights, letting the intense ultraviolet purple beams wash over the area, showing Martin there was no blood left. "Good job, guys," he said softly. "Really nice work."

    Hoisting the recliner into the back of the truck at 12:30 a.m., along with the bags and the little table, I was glad he didn't let us take the carpeting after all. I was sweaty, exhausted, and repulsed, and my new shirt hung wet and limp around my skin. Driving home with the blood-soaked, chunky recliner sticking out of the truck bed like a gleaming beacon, I was surprised that we escaped cop detection. Dirk being a sheriff or not, there had to be something not OSHAcompliant and illegal about our method of biohazard transportation.

    The two of us were tired, so Dirk decided to leave the recliner and bags in the truck to deal with later, and let me go home. Soaked with sweat and dusty from the Riverside experience, I pointed my little red car in the direction of the frat house. Kerry and Chris were eagerly waiting for me on the front lawn when I walked up slowly, stumbling, dehydrated, and exhausted.

    Kerry had taken Chris to the game in my place, introducing him accidentally throughout the night to her parent's seatmates as "her brothers' boyfriend." The Ducks won, but that story paled in comparison to my own, which I gladly regaled my listeners with, complete with photos taken specifically for this moment on my cell phone.

    I hadn't made enough money to pay rent that month, much less my credit cards, but in the eyes of my doubters, I was vindicated for the moment at least.

Vindication doesn't buy what money does. All vindication ever bought anyone was a little freedom. And I had too much freedom—so much, in fact, that my bills still weren't getting paid. Sure, I'd thrown small piles of cash in all of my creditors' directions, enough to let them know I wasn't trying to screw them, but not enough so that they would stop calling me.

    I was confident, though. I'd broken my cherry, popped my bubble, shot my load—whichever sexual euphemism best applied to cleaning up "Grandma Shotgun," as I'd taken to calling her.

    Another month slipped by, and I was still boasting about her to my frat cronies without a shred of new story material on the horizon. Dirk called me every other day to reassure me that he was working on scaring up new clients, but he was so tonally awkward about the lack of business that I didn't have the cojones to ask about his "surefire business connections" within the world of law enforcement.

    He asked if I wouldn't mind calling a few of the law enforcement agencies in the area during our downtime to see if I could scare up some business on my own. Despite having cleaned up the splatter of Grandma Shotgun together, in my mind we still weren't fully in business together. As far as I was concerned, I was still more or less auditioning for the part of his partner.

    "Sure," I said, trying to sound confident. "Send the list of contact numbers over on email."

    I've mentioned that I'm shy, but let me convey to you the scope of my shyness. I hate talking to people. I can't make small talk; I can't chitchat. It's hard for me to even have in-depth conversations with neighbors. Job interviews have always been a nightmare. Typically, I just write off my chance of getting the job if there's more than a cursory interview involved.

    I only got the job at the porn shop because after they interviewed me (an interview that, typically, went poorly), they hired some other asshole. And when the mother of that guy, who was in his thirties, found out where he worked, she came down to the store and loudly chewed him out. They fired him on the spot. The owners needed someone else quickly, and I was the first applicant to call them back.

    I try not to go into stores alone; I don't eat in restaurants alone. I tend to avoid doing things that require me to talk to people I don't know. I'm like J. D. Salinger but without the talent. So imagine my excitement about trying to solicit business from policemen.

     The police and I have had a rather
sturm-und-drang
relationship over the years. Authority, particularly when used with the word "No," has amped up my dislike for social interaction. The police, who always seem to secrete a sense of false authority, make me the angriest. Obviously they have a very real authority, no matter what I say about their secretions.

    One cop in particular contributed to my sentiment for those boys in blue with their guns and rules. "Officer Butler" first came into my life when he stopped me for "driving erratically." I was eighteen and had my driving permit. (I never wanted to drive, but my parents were sick of chauffeuring me to work.) I was driving with a girl who was over twenty-one.

    I wasn't driving erratically, but it was a Saturday night and I figured that Officer Butler created a reason to pull me over to see if I'd been drinking. (See also the famous police excuse that "The light over your license plate is out…" If they say that, ask if you can get out and check.)

    I hadn't been drinking, but when Officer Butler found out I only had a learner's permit rather than a license, you could see the authority blast through him. Butler was the type of police officer who wore his riot gear all the time, even though that stuff was optional. For him, finding me with just a learner's permit was like Christmas in July or a Kentucky redneck cornering a "faggot."

    A little sneering smile crossed his face as he said something about how I wasn't supposed to be driving with a learner's permit. I pointed out that I was over eighteen, my passenger was over twenty-one, and I was well within the scope of the law. Officer Butler didn't like that, but he evidently didn't know the law himself. He concluded our introduction by telling me sternly that he could impound my vehicle and arrest me if he wanted, but this time he was letting me go with "just a warning."

    Over the years, he also handcuffed Chris and drove him home for skateboarding outside a bank, and then stopped my mother for driving at dusk without her headlights on and accused her of drinking. My mother is a lovely Mormon lady who absolutely does not drink—and he hassled her.

    You might side with the policeman, saying he was just doing his job, but later Officer Butler shot and killed an unarmed man outside a grocery store. That tells you the type of policeman he was. So after he harassed my mom, who truly is the sweetest person on earth, I decided that forever after I hated policemen.

    As I've matured, my opinion on policemen has changed somewhat. I recognize the good, even heroic, and other thankless things that they do. Now there are several whom I work with on a regular basis and some I wouldn't hesitate to call friends. But then, even though my new boss was a cop, I didn't want to call other cops and beg them to send us business.

    Dirk, not noticing the reluctance in my voice (or more likely, choosing to ignore it), said he'd email the list of law enforcement agencies right over. Being the forthright person that I was, I printed the list and set it in my "Fuck That" pile, right under my subscription renewal for dick-enlargement pills.

* * *

In the meantime, the horror story I told people about my one and only crime scene was rapidly growing in detail and intensity. At this point perhaps I should mention that I have a tad of dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personalities. While I'm not as bad as my mother, who reverts to a childlike state of innocence every so often, for all my shyness there's another aspect of my personality where I turn into a complete chatterbox.

    That aspect of my personality got me elected senior-class president in high school, nearly got me sued four times as a writer on the school newspaper, and had me give a hilarious speech at graduation while wearing a huge sombrero. The dichotomy of my two personalities is unsettling, to say the least. Basically, whenever I feel vulnerable, the shy guy takes over; when I have something to offer, I am untouchable.

    So when I was before a crowd of peers telling my crime scene story, it grew to include my talking the old man out of killing himself and finding the dead lady's cache of Nazi paraphernalia. An attractive girl in the group would then ask for another story, and I had to awkwardly inform her that there weren't any more. I was a one-trick pony.

    But that was about to change.

    Dirk called me up out of the blue one day and told me to pack up my crates. We were off to Claremont. Claremont is a small city along a major highway about twenty minutes north of Fullerton, but more importantly, it's in Los Angeles County. That was the big time for us.

    We had started a crime scene company in Orange County not only because my boss lived and worked there, but also because Los Angeles was teeming with crime scene cleaning companies. Mongol hordes in the form of rival companies virtually had the metropolis on lockdown. And now we were on our way into their outskirts to do their work and see what sort of crime scenes they had to offer.

    We pulled up in the middle of a pleasant suburb, parking on a tree-lined and well-lit street that was the polar opposite of Riverside with its sewer breath. A small off-white home that might have housed Ward Cleaver and his brood sat proudly among other homes equally as proud. The police car out front was the only indication that something was askew in this charming little neighborhood.

    At the front door, not knowing what else to do, we rang the bell, hoping that this was the right address. It would be very awkward if we'd gone to the wrong house and someone answered the door only to find two men standing there wearing polo shirts that read "Crime Scene Cleaners."

    A pleasant policeman in uniform answered the door and led us into the well-lit home. This time I had prepared myself for the sight before we knocked, effectively readying myself for a scene where neither of us knew what to expect.

    The house was immaculate, and I wondered how the owners had the time to keep it so clean. My first crime scene had been a welllived-in ode to all things collectible, but this house was most definitely what I thought of as a home. Plain and uncluttered, it seemed as if it could be a showroom for other houses, featuring the dream layout your home could have if you bought one of the surrounding properties.

    Only a few picture frames, not hung on the wall but instead standing freely on the polished tile countertop separating the kitchen from the dining room, indicated that anyone lived there. One picture in particular caught my attention. It was of a middle-aged man who was bald on top but had a crescent ring of hair that started above one ear and carried around to the other. The man's thick glasses made his eyes appear owlish and almost perennially surprised, and a short, small grin betrayed an otherwise serious expression. But it was the view over the top of that photo and into the kitchen that stopped me short.

    A pond of blood, the circumference of a throw rug, lay on the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor as though someone had dropped the world's largest red egg onto it. And in the center, comprising its yolk, was a piled-up, large crimson mass with a jellylike consistency.