The Dead Janitors Club (12 page)

    There were others, too, non-thug types who'd pop in. Long Beach was a melting pot, and we had a constantly evolving crew of regular customers. People you could count on to be there week after week, until one week they weren't, and you never saw them again.

    Tourists strolled the multitude of bars on Pine Avenue, each with a different ambience to get drunk in. Way down the block heading south, you had the Irish bar pumping out the strains of the Dropkick Murphys and Irish classics. Across the street was the Middle Eastern– themed Aladdin's; next door was the late-night taco place; and diagonally, the cigar bar, Cohiba. There were lots more, both independents and dives—mainstream places like Hooters and one-offs like Club 21.

    Depending on what was happening in town, you could guess what the majority clientele would be that week. Not long before I arrived, the band The Killers had played at a juke joint, The Vault, down the street and came into NYB's for the after-party. They drank up seven hundred dollars' worth of booze in the VIP section and tried to leave without paying. New York Bryan himself stopped the band at the door. They paid up.

    My first night at the club, a Thursday, we already had a drunk making trouble at 9:00 p.m. The older white guy was soused and didn't want to leave. The bartender gave me the nod to have him removed. I approached the old guy and politely suggested that he'd had enough and that maybe he should find his way home. The old guy told me to fuck off, and I lightly put a hand on his shoulder, looking awkwardly to the bartender for guidance.

    "No, no, no!" the bartender shouted, a pretty burly guy himself. "You're doing it all wrong!"

    He came around the length of the oak bar and roughly grabbed the old man above his elbows. Lifting him, the bartender bull-rushed the drunk across the nearly empty dance floor and threw him out of the gated patio, where he landed hard on the street, collapsing into the gutter. I stared, shocked and awaiting some sort of retaliation. But the old man merely stood, waved us away angrily, and stumbled off into the night for his next belt of Blanton's.

    "You do it like that," the bartender said gruffly. From that point on, I understood.

* * *

I was sitting in the driver's seat of the Corolla at an awkward angle, not wanting the blood that had accumulated on the right side of the seat to get onto my biohazard suit. I had used our wet-dry vac to suck up all the broken glass I could, but I was still haphazardly working around the car, collecting the horrific remnants inside. I found an old, withered french fry sharing space in the cup holder with a dollop of brain and a tooth on the front passenger floorboard. I think it was a bicuspid.

    I had given up on trying to scrub the car seats clean. They oozed new blood whenever I put my brush on them, and I finally accepted the truth—they had to be cut out. This time, though, I wasn't going to do any extra work for free. The sun was fast disappearing behind a rise of dingy tenements, and if I wanted to be out of there with all
my
bicuspids intact, I had to take the proper steps.

    I knocked on the door and brought the old man out, the smell of Mexican food floating out with him and making me hungry. I tried to convey to him that I needed to charge him extra to cut the seats out, using that same slow, choppy English that we fools think will work.

    I could see he wasn't getting it when his daughter came home, pulling her car past the truck and up into the garage. Thankfully, she spoke enough English to broker a new deal that I kept down to an extra hundred dollars and he reluctantly accepted. He wanted me to save as much of the seats as I legally could, though, because he still had to drive the car. If I were him, I would've just started taking the bus.

    As I started cutting away haphazardly at the fabric of the front seats, I glanced up to realize I had company. A
vato
, a Mexican gangster, bald-headed with a thick
cholo
mustache, was staring at me from behind square black sunglasses and grinning severely. His lightly built frame wore a wife-beater undershirt as an outer shirt and tan shorts with tall white socks tucked into dark slippers.

    I nodded at him convivially, never breaking what I perceived to be eye contact and never saying a word, pleasant or otherwise. I kept on with my work but never took my eyes off him. He leaned closer into the car, smiling dangerously, daring me to say a word, but I didn't. I couldn't let him know he frightened me.

    Finally he turned and walked away. A bit later, two other similarly attired young men approached, both of them wearing full white undershirts instead of wife beaters. Neither one possessed the fullness of mustache the first one had had. I gave them the same treatment, though they didn't dare come as close as the other had, and finally they, too, walked off.

    I began to feel like a fool, like I had overstepped my boundaries and wandered into silly-white-man land. Surely they weren't trying to intimidate me; they were merely curious, the same as in any other culture or neighborhood. Surely they were just nosy neighbors, and I was an overzealous ignoramus.

    As I was finishing bagging up what I had taken of the seat covers, leaving little more than wire frame and splotches of yellow, molded foam, the original gangster returned. This time he walked up to me, and from the corner of my eye I could see children inside the houses stopping to watch out front windows, just as apprehensive as I was. He stopped within a few inches of me, and though he was much shorter, I could tell that he knew he could take me in a fight. I held my breath, knowing that it was dry and bad.

    He pushed his sunglasses up while looking at me and said in clear, clipped English, "You clean up in here, okay. But that blood out there, on the curb," and he pointed off somewhere down the street, evidently referring to a separate crime scene, "that blood stays."

    Better men might have acted differently; I, on the other hand, nodded to him, finished up, collected a check from the house, and left the ghetto. I was mad at myself for being scared, but I didn't fool myself; I knew that I would one day have to come back. There would be other crime scenes in the Santa Ana ghetto; of that I was certain. I just hoped they wouldn't be anytime soon.

Crime scene cleanup was the last thing on my mind when I moved to Fullerton. I had come with a purpose: I wanted to get my bachelor's degree in advertising. But I chose Fullerton, instead of, say, Chicago or New York or one of the other great advertising hubs, because of a girl.

    She worked at the porn shop with me, and she was beautiful. Blonde and smart with a couple of major talents (yes, I'm talking about tits here), she was well read and articulate. I was sure she was only working at the porn shop to conduct independent research on the sexual proclivities of the middle class or some high-minded experiment of a similar nature. She was too good for porno.

    I was a loner, living in Santa Clarita with no friends at all, and it was only too easy to fall for her. The beautiful coed and the dirty drifter: it had all the makings of an adult movie plot. I had a bad habit of falling in love with just about every girl I met, though, and I was destined to have my heart broken.

    She moved to Fullerton to major in English, and I hadn't had the temerity to ask her out on a normal, civilized date, what with the two of us working in porn. In my mind, people who came together through porn, be it on the retail side or the production side, couldn't possibly have healthy, lasting relationships. My warped sense of the world convinced me, though, that if we met in a different setting, we might be able to have something magical.

    So when she enrolled down at CSUF, I secretly did the same. We would find each other in some sunlit hallway, both of us bending to retrieve a dropped notebook, our fingers would meet and then, finally, our eyes. The recognition would set in and then the realization that destiny had pushed us together (cough). It would be passionate and romantic, like something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

    When I abruptly quit my job at the porn shop, she disappeared from my life, and I just trusted to kismet that I would run into her again in the fall in a different town, a different place, as a different person. Well, I never saw her again, so that completely fucking backfired.

    Whether she didn't get accepted or she changed schools or she knew that I was secretly enrolling to follow her and have a chance at falling in love (which I always thought of as vaguely romantic, but
everyone
around me considered creepy), she never ended up at the campus. Or maybe she did, and we just had two completely different schedules.

    Whatever happened, I was suddenly stuck in Fullerton, with only my younger brother Chris for support. And while becoming close with him was great, I needed something else.

    On my first day at CSUF, I was in shy mode the entire time I walked around the campus, keeping my head down and terrified that someone might ask me something. I was twenty-two, only a few weeks from my next birthday.

    My first class was a basic tutorial on media, for which I had parked on completely the wrong side of campus and had thus spent a considerable part of the morning huffing and puffing my fat ass across the grounds to reach. Finally I stumbled into the class and, looking around, saw that my shy self was already in trouble.

    It was a large class and already quite full; there weren't any open seats in the back or toward the end aisles where I could slide in, take notes, and disappear once class was over. No, I would have to take a seat down in front, where the talkative kids sat. The ones who actually asked questions and had questions asked of them. I seriously considered shit-canning the class for the semester, but it was one of the major prerequisites for my advertising major. So, resolutely, I buckled down and took a seat.

    I kicked myself the whole time. Typically my neuroses would have had me coordinating my schedule against a map of potential parking and arriving at the class far before anyone else to ensure the best possible seat for someone of my disposition. Instead I'd spent the previous evening drinking a thirty-block of Miller Lite cans with Chris and then skating around the apartment complex to show any cool fellow tenants that we newcomers were "with it."

    The classroom seats themselves were problematic for me, as they were those swiveling computer chairs that are attached to the desk and not really built for fatties or lefties. I slid my sweaty self into the desk with one of those embarrassingly loud maneuvers that had the whole class staring at me.

    In the act of wedging myself into a seat, I knew it was no use continuing in the vein of the quiet, shy Jeff, and so self-preservation necessitated that my other side take over.

    "Hi," I said, nodding to the guy sitting to my left, a Jewish-looking hipster with a goatee. "And hello," I added to the girl sitting next to me, a dark-skinned beauty who had the makings of a model.

    Throughout the class, the girl and I got to talking, first out of polite boredom and then with a genuine interest in one another's backgrounds. She was beautiful and smart and had a couple of major talents. (Here I'm talking about kickboxing and singing.) I was already forgetting the reason I'd moved to Fullerton in the first place.

    The goateed Jewish guy, Anthony, butted in to invite the girl and me to a "Back to School" BBQ that his frat was throwing at the end of the week. I took a flyer, never expecting to use it for more than emergency toilet paper. This was the same attitude that would make crime scene cleaning so appealing to me down the road. As someone with social issues, I found myself only too at ease being left alone with the remnants of the dead. I could talk to them, and they wouldn't point out that I had man boobs.

    That Friday evening, though, with Chris and me sitting around bored, the flyer came flashing back into my mind. Chris was immediately as skeptical as I was about someone wanting
a Klima
at their party, and both of us were only all too aware how it ended for Stephen King's Carrie when she took a chance on the popular kids.

    So we took steps to arm ourselves, me toting a pair of brass knuckles, and Chris his Walther PP-7 replica James Bond pellet gun. We googled the location of the party and set out grimly, expecting the worst. I knew it would be worse if wild, chatty extrovert Jeff had been invited to the party and introvert, fumbling nervous Jeff showed up, so I did my damnedest to summon the wild guy.

    The dichotomy of my personalities was such that I had absolutely zero skills when it came to consoling the family members of my future clients. Either I was entirely too chatty, extending well-worn platitudes about "making the best of the time they had with the victim," or stammering to explain the technical aspects of my job that prohibited the relatives from just doing the work themselves.

    Chris and I were concerned upon entering the party at the frat house, which looked more like someone's shitty, dirty house with a shitty, dirty backyard. It definitely wasn't what 1980s college movies had led me to believe about frat houses. I had offered to bring beer, but Anthony had maintained rather gravely that beer was not necessary.

    "Kegs," I thought excitedly, impressed, and yet when we walked into the party, no kegs were to be seen. Instead it was an eclectic mix of normal-looking guys and girls hanging out drinking soda pop. Immediately, Chris and I realized that it was far more terrifying than being ambushed by popular jerks;
we were at a religious party.