The Dead Janitors Club (11 page)

    My screams lost to the roar of the engine, slicing toward me at 29 knots, I flailed in vain at the precision-smooth pontoon metal sides, my arms akimbo again, desperate. This time anything messianic didn't seem the least bit jackassed. I begged at the pontoons to let me crawl forward and escape what I could only register as imminent
death
.

    The propeller, part in the water, part out, was spinning too fast for me to make out the individual blades powering the craft that was encapsulating me and was now too close to write off as an escapable nightmare. I would be shredded and emerge as one of those comically red stains in the otherwise serene, blue lake water.

    With the same adrenaline coursing through my veins that allows mothers to lift cars off their endangered children, I pushed off from the bottom of the boat, praying to a God I didn't believe in that the effort would be enough to keep me submerged deep enough and long enough so that wicked steel propeller would pass over me and allow me to glimpse daylight again. It wasn't.

    My head resurfaced, popping up corklike directly to the left of the passing blades, their razor edges fanning at the tip of my nose with unholy menace. My arms followed my head to the surface, and in a moment too instantaneous to process, my left arm was swept into the twisting thrust of the propeller.

    A violent yank wrapped the length of my appendage around the propeller head and swept my beautiful arm up into the mechanical process. A second later, it spat me back out and left me in the boat's swirling wake. I was incredulous to be alive, but certain I was missing my left arm from the elbow down.

    And yet when my shoulder extended from the water, there was my arm, intact and aloft. Matt, of course, took my raised hand to be a gesture of thanks for quick thinking on his part and gamely waved back.

    A nice long slice ran the length of my arm, not deep enough to warrant immediate medical care but enough to cause me an awkward explanation when I returned to work the next day, bandage wrapped on my forearm and back from being "home sick."

    The scar has since faded and is now mostly lost behind hirsute sprigs of dark hair that betray my Eastern European heritage, but the point was not lost on me. Even though we humans control the actions that lead us on our life paths, sometimes an outside influence smashes in and makes the decisions for us.

* * *

Dirk called me up a couple of weeks after my gig at the Animal House to let me know that once again we had business. But he wanted me to come down to Santa Ana, where he worked, to talk about it.

    I had never been to the sheriff's department, or any police station, for that matter. So, as a kid from a small town with no inner-circle access or political connections, I was pretty hyped about my visit. I had visions of walking down a concrete row with prisoners eyeballing me, catcalling, and maybe even spitting on me.

    But I'd be grim, resolved, and wouldn't let 'em see they got to me.
I've got my freedom, and they don't
, I'd think. Then, as we were leaving, I would grab my balls and flip them all the bird, letting them know that the whole time, they were the ones getting punked.

    What a disappointment when Dirk asked me to meet him in the alley.

    Our latest was a special case, a murder. A sixteen-year-old gang member had been riding in the passenger seat of his parents' car, driven by one of his cousins. A rival gang rolled up on them and opened fire. It was an assault from the front and side; the driver was wounded, and the kid in the passenger seat was blasted apart. Bad luck is a son of a bitch.

    The car had been through all the steps: it was towed from the scene, forensics did their kit, the car was impounded, and then finally it was released to the parents. Now it was sitting in their driveway, bloodied, riddled with bullet holes, and in serious need of a cleanup. The parents were hoping to salvage it, since it was their sole means of transportation. There was just one problem—communicating this to me. They didn't speak a word of English, and I only knew cuss words in Spanish. I would need a translator.

    When I was in high school in my twenty-seven-thousand-person town, there was a requirement that in order to graduate you had to take two years of a foreign language. The choices were French, German, and Spanish. The smart kids, recognizing the direction the world was heading, all took Spanish. The second smartest group of kids, wisely identifying that two business languages of international trade were English and French, chose French. The dumbasses all took German. Guess which one I took?
Ja, und ich sprechen sie Deutch nicht
so gut, senf.
(Loose translation: Yes, and I don't speak German very good now, mustard.)

     To help me with the language barrier, Dirk called in a favor from a coworker named Leslie, who would help translate the negotiations between me and the parents of the victim. She was a few years older than my twenty-six and only vaguely Latina-looking. But as long as she spoke Spanish, she could have been from the un-planet Pluto for all I cared.

    I took Dirk's truck for the gig; the fear was that there would be a lot of stuff to get rid of from the scene and my little red Chevy Cavalier, with its broken trunk that hadn't been opened in three years, wouldn't quite cut it. My Cavalier was an embarrassing vehicle to roll up to a crime scene in anyway. I had long been teased for having a "girl's car" and had compensated for that by never washing it, so that it would at least appear masculine and grungy.

    Of course, when you are a cleaner by trade and you arrive in a filthy vehicle, your clients tend to cast a wary eye at you. I relished the opportunity to take the truck when I could. Besides, the truck meant my not losing out on gas money that I otherwise wouldn't be compensated for.

    Leslie drove a little hatchback. Though she was officially a police officer, she wore civilian clothes and did office work, like Dirk. While I was en route to Dirk's office, he had briefed her on the address and location. She knew the area well. I tagged along behind her, having to race to make lights that she blazed through on yellow.

    I hoped she wasn't attempting to set me up for a traffic ticket as part of some scummy police sting. The sheriff's coroner for Orange County had just been charged with money laundering and bribery offenses, so it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. As she raced along, her car blended in with the weathered vehicles of Santa Ana—plain, simple cars that didn't have a lot of cash invested in them for extras like rust proofing.

    Her car guided me down streets that got smaller and smaller, past houses that were situated closer and closer together, and finally she turned onto an impossibly narrow street where her tiny car sailed along. In the truck I had to creep slowly, cautious to not slam my side-view mirrors into the beat-down cars polluting both sides of the pockmarked asphalt strip.

    Even I, an ignorant, small-town white kid, knew where I was. It was a place you didn't really believe existed when you grew up in a pleasant suburb, a place that for many in this country's urban areas was just another fact of life. I was in the hallowed stomping grounds of rap culture. I was in "the ghetto."

    Obviously I was, and largely still am, an ignorant, sheltered individual from a place where people leave their doors unlocked at night and don't worry too much about their kids running around late at night. For those of you like me, "the ghetto" is that part of any given city where the poorest of the city's inhabitants congregate and call it home.

    In Eureka our idea of a ghetto was the trailer park. We knew the idea of a ghetto, and that was what we could perceptibly link it to. But we were wrong, because a ghetto is something so much more than a hamlet of poor folk. "The ghetto" has shifted to being something more sinister, a place built largely on fear and mistrust. For many in this day and age, being from the ghetto is a thing of dangerous pride.

    Ghetto culture has its own way of communicating, from the graffiti tags that look like scribbles to most of us, to the clothes, to the tattoos. There are signs all around, and if you don't decipher them correctly, you could find yourself in real trouble, innocent visitor or not.

    Leslie parked her car in the driveway of a one-story, tan-colored house with a three-foot-high rock wall built around the property. On top of the rock wall, linked metal spikes jutted skyward, flecked with white paint to form a gate. Rust revealed itself through wherever the paint had chipped off.

    I had no other place to park, and not knowing the appropriate rules of conduct for where I was, I was forced to stop the big truck in the middle of the street. I was frustrated that Dirk had once again sent me out alone to do the work that would net me a third of a half, whether he helped me or not. But he was a sheriff, and there wasn't a whole lot I could say to that. Foolishly, I hoped that someone would take offense to the truck being stopped there and firebomb it…while I was outside of it, anyway.

    Making sure to lock the truck, I pushed the clicker on the key ring multiple times so that the alarm-activated beep would sound out as a warning to the ne'er-do-wells that my truck was definitely locked and off-limits.

    I walked up the short driveway, noting a manually operated gate with equally sharp fixtures on it that could be rolled across the driveway and padlocked. The front windows of the house had bars on them, and if the family had anything of value, it was not in plain sight.

    I passed the car on my way to meeting Leslie at the front door. The back window was gone, shot out, shattered, and lying across the backseat, and the front and back side windows were either rolled down or missing. The windshield on the gray Corolla was shattered but held intact by safety glass. Large holes were pinged out where the bullets had forced their way through and done major damage. I didn't stop to look inside, but I could tell the car was going to be bloody.

    Leslie waited for me to arrive before she knocked, and I introduced myself to her a moment before I introduced myself to the family. The woman looked like somebody's mother, a tired, middle-aged Mexican lady with sadness as a permanent fixture in her eyes. Her husband, a middle-aged mustachioed gent smiling at me with yellow teeth, looked like my uncle's gardener. I greeted them, embarrassed by my whiteness, and spoke directly to them, but speaking slowly as if that would help them understand me. Leslie translated, her voice tight, and I could sense a vague irritation at my inability to communicate.

    Walking back to the car and putting my tight, black gloves on, I felt the heat from the late afternoon sun beating down on me. Sweat soaked my black polo, which no longer had that fresh, new look.

    I then laid out the basics for the family. I couldn't do anything about the windshield or the bullet holes that had cut into the frame, leaving sharp contorted gashes that I could fit my index finger through. I didn't know a thing about cutting into or removing car seats, so I told Leslie to convey to them that I would clean the seats as best I could and vacuum the glass out of the backseat. I felt fairly safe in charging them $435 for the cleanup. I felt bad, but I couldn't see fit to charge a couple less just because they were poor. I was straining to promote equality, after all.

    I didn't need Leslie to translate that the number was a large one for them. The man sent his wife scurrying back into the house while he discussed the number with another man, maybe his brother, who had just joined us. Finally they agreed and signaled to Leslie to tell me. I nodded enthusiastically, grinning broadly as if they had just shown me to my room at their resort, forgetting that I was negotiating over their dead son's blood.

    Once the contract had been written and signed for the agreed amount, Leslie informed me cheerfully that she was leaving. I would be alone, the large, stupid, white guy with the nice truck, unarmed in the ghetto.

    Inhabitants from other houses had taken notice that something was happening at the house. I could see them poking their heads around bushes and off of porches as I steered the Silverado into the driveway to take Leslie's place. The father gestured to inform me that he could close the gate and lock my truck in, but I waved him off with a show-no-fear mentality. I had to show the other creatures that this beast was not afraid.

* * *

I'd gained a fair bit of eye-widening bravado in my time as a bouncer at a thug club in Long Beach, the LBC (Long Beach, California, for those unfamiliar with rap music lore). It was as simple as being a big guy who needed money and showed up at a club that needed a bouncer. I was still at Beverages & More in those days, back before I knew what a crime scene cleaner was. As a desperate bid to pick up extra cash during the slow retail season, I signed on to work as one of five security guys in the bar on weekends—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

    The place was called New York Bryan's, or NYB's, and the owner, Bryan, appropriately, was one of those "throw 'em in the trunk of a car" goombah types from Brooklyn. Fond of leather jackets and a St. Christopher necklace, Bryan was barely two years older than me and already owned his own nightclub. Some would say he was connected, but I didn't believe that.

    I had never been a bouncer before; the closest I'd come was working door security at a Humboldt rave where techno dorks would give you weed in lieu of the entry fee, and the whole place was kind and high. NYB's was different. The clientele wasn't hippy-dippy, freelove, peace-craving music enthusiasts. Instead, these were flash-anddash gangsters, small-money rollers who parked their Escalades and Benzes at the red-painted curbs out front, ignoring parking tickets to the point that the cops stopped giving them out. The rollers had money to burn, and Bryan had a bevy of girls they'd thumb bills at to keep the entourage supplied with drinks.