The Dead Janitors Club (16 page)

    Rimming the rest of the tub, showcasing for us where the water line had been, was a nice ring of human grease that had dried tight to the porcelain. I shook my head, knowing that had I stayed at Beverages & More, I would never have had to deal with this…but I also would never have gotten the opportunity to deal with it either.

    We went back outside to lay some consolation on the lesbians while attempting to explain to them the extent of the cleaning that was necessary. Neither wanted to go inside the house to see firsthand, which was fine with us. If they didn't want to look, it came down to our word on how much the cleanup would cost.

    On the way over, my boss and I had dared to dream that we again could charge $1,535, hoping that such a scenario was possible. It was, and more. Emboldened by their reluctance to enter the premises, I suggested to my boss that we up the price to $1,635! He almost shit himself at the prospect but then nodded in agreement. I went off to suit up, conveying the look of professionalism, while he, having not pissed off the bereaved, quoted our price.

    The bunny suits were mostly a prop, Dirk had once informed me. We didn't really need them, except to guard against getting blood on our clothes.

    "They're mostly for show," he would say, likening the cleaning of a crime scene to a performance art. "There aren't any diseases that can be caught from old blood."

    Upset by the price Dirk had quoted, the "he" of the lesbians took off again, and I settled back against the truck, awaiting another long night. Finally her partner called her back and the negotiations were finalized, with Dirk agreeing to come down in price to around nine hundred dollars. It felt like a slap in the face to do the job for less, but money was money.

    It was agreed that they would leave, we would clean, and they would come back when we were finished. It was a fair proposition, but first we had to reassure the "he" that our company was licensed and bonded by the state (I still don't know what that means!), and that we weren't there to steal anything. The idea that she even considered that notion horrified me, particularly because I had had a glance around and would be damned if there was anything worth taking. Last time I checked, my hard-on for thievery didn't extend to old TV Guides or mason jars full of buttons.

    As I messed with my crates back at the truck, I heard the sudden rustle of plant life behind me. Instantly I thought of all the horror films I'd ever seen, where some soulless behemoth leapt out of the bushes to twist some dickhead teenager's head completely the wrong way. Or maybe he would simply squeeze my head until my eyeballs popped out.

    I turned quickly, expecting the worst, and instead saw the watchful eyes of the neighborhood, come to stare. Eerie and unsettling, all the neighbors and their children stood amid the foliage of front yards, watching silently. I smiled and nodded, but none of them responded. They were just curious, but their curiosity was born of fear, and they didn't dare make the bold strides forward to confront me. I found it very intimidating.

    With Dirk manning the blood on the tub, I started on the floor, first using the scrub brush to work at the human jerky, and then finally resorting to flipping it around and using the tapered lip of its handle to scrape piece by gummy piece off the floor of the bathroom and hallway. Apparently the house hadn't been wide enough to get a stretcher through, so the paramedics had had to tote her pliant, slimy, grease-soaked corpse through the hallway, dropping flesh hunks as they went.

    After several hours of intense cleaning, Dirk and I each sought out menial tasks, since neither wanted to be the one who inserted his hand to unclog the greasy drain. Finally I snapped, sensing a losing battle. Holding the black trash bag open, I reached into the foul water until my gloved fingers connected with something agonizingly squishy, for which I grabbed and yanked. The drain opened up with a broad sucking noise, and I disposed of the loose flesh into the bag, trying hard not to look as I tossed it in.

    There was a medical laboratory smell to the piece, which was about the size of a marshmallow, and it made me think back to when I had to dissect a frog in high school. I could feel the wetness through the thin layer of my latex gloves, and the natural, oily grease found in skin made my gloves slick to the touch. And still, for the sake of the job, for the sake of not having to go back to working for minimum wage, for the sheer knowledge that I had held a piece of a human being that most would run screaming in horror from, I persevered.

I'd put off Dirk's pet project of soliciting the police departments for as long as I could. Every time he'd phone me regarding the solicitation of new business, I always had some compelling reason to delay the cold calling for just a few more days. The last thing that my fumbling, awkward side needed was to try to sell a half-cocked janitorial service to cynical authority types with guns. And then one morning, Dirk had an epiphany.

    Even while on his job as a sheriff, Dirk still managed to dedicate large amounts of his time to helping our crime scene business grow. Dreaming up new gimmicks to increase our presence in the community, he'd finally hit upon the "million-dollar idea."

    Being in the property and evidence division of the sheriff's department, Dirk was in a special position to make an "innocent" phone call. Dialing the police department for the city of Orange, a nice little suburbia adjacent to Anaheim, Dirk got hold of their fleet commander, a tough Old West cowboy type we'll call Glenn Johnson. Glenn was a no-bullshit kind of guy, so when Dirk called, claiming that the sheriff's department needed a line on a crime scene cleaning company, Glenn had just enough salt in his veins to take the bait.

    Despite Dirk's claim to the contrary, Glenn was adamant that he'd never used a cleaning service to perform biohazard service on the patrol cars and jail cells, and that the officers of Orange had always done the work themselves. Dirk persisted, saying that he'd heard Glenn had used this new cleaning service, "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners," and that he'd heard Glenn really liked them. Dirk was eager to call the company himself, but he wanted to make sure that Glenn really had, in fact, liked them.

    Now, I don't know what stars aligned for this scheme, but again Glenn was interested. He, too, was sick of the officers exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. He didn't give a damn what the fat cats upstairs wanted and was eager to employ an outside service to clean the piss, shit, vomit, blood, and general whatnot out of the jail cells and police cruisers. And if Dirk had heard positive things about this "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners" from somewhere within the law enforcement community, well, that was good enough for old Glenn. And lucky for Glenn, Dirk just happened to have their phone number handy.

    Dirk, full of prankster merriment, then called to put me on notice that I could expect a call from Orange and to harangue me into employing a similar method on every other law enforcement agency in Southern California. He had done "his part" and delivered our first one; the rest were up to me.

    Finally out of excuses, I picked up the phone. All I had to say was that I was looking for the "fleet commander" or person in charge of vehicle maintenance.

    "The service will sell itself," Dirk said confidently. Once the other agencies found out that we worked with Orange, they would be chomping at the bit to work with us, too.

    Dirk had previously supplied me with a list of phone numbers for all the various Southern California police departments. Of course, what he neglected to mention was that each phone number was the direct line to that department's chief of police.

    Rather than some office phone that the sergeant in charge or, say, an operator could answer, only then to refer me around the police station, Dirk had supplied me with direct access to the top brass at each police station. And the top brass, by and large, hates phone calls from solicitors. Especially stammering, awkward ones calling under a pretense of urgency.

    Chief after chief took me through the third degree, demanding to know what business an imbecile like me had calling his or her line and then possessing the audacity to ask him or her to transfer me out. Most, after I explained that I was attempting to make their biohazard issues easier on them, simply hung up the phone. The reedy squeak of my phone voice gave me away. Any man who talked like that on the phone couldn't do them or their agency a damn bit of good.

    If I did manage to get passed along to an operator, she would then inform me that their police station didn't have any sort of "fleet commander" and that the best person to decide if they needed biohazard service for their cars was the chief. I quickly abandoned that method of attracting new business.

* * *

In the meantime, I had received a call for service out in Claremont once again. I made a mental note to have our business send those two officers a fruit basket. It was only when I reached the neighborhood in my Cavalier that I realized I was back at the shit-smearing-uncle house.

    Confused, I rang the doorbell and hoped that no one else had died as a result of my cleaning job…say, by slipping on a wet tile floor and cracking their skull open. A wrinkled old lady answered and introduced herself timidly. She was the mother of the homeowner, sister to the dead man, and the catalyst for his rampage. She'd moved back in and had noticed something that apparently I had missed.

    I was led into a bedroom that was occasionally used by a visiting granddaughter. There, unnoticed by the homeowner or myself on my initial visit, the uncle had gone into the granddaughter's bedroom and rifled through her white wicker dresser, probably looking for lacy panties that he could wear on his head. His deep-red blood stood out sharply against the twisted thatches of whitewashed wicker, and I was incredulous that the mess had been overlooked. It was also, according to Dirk, not my problem.

    I had called him for guidance as to what to do for the old lady, and he pointed out to me that their check was already in the bank. We weren't in the charity business, he said. Since I had already gotten the homeowner to sign off on the work we'd completed, if they wanted us to do additional labor, they'd have to pay for it. Besides, Dirk reasoned, how did we know that it wasn't from a different crime scene? I had no choice but to charge them.

    The blood had already found its way down into the spacing in the wicker, so cleaning it was going to be a pain in the fucking ass. We'd already charged the hell out of them, so two hundred dollars sounded like a more than reasonable number when you compared this job with the work we'd already done. Granny was born of Depression-era stock, though, and I could tell from the look on her face that two hundred dollars seemed like more money than anybody had ever paid for anything, ever.

    For two hundred dollars, her look declared, she could have bought a house, two cars, a bushel of prunes, seven mules, four donkeys, a small airplane, and brunch at the finest café in town, not to mention cool lemonade and a hot slice of all-American apple pie heaped with vanilla ice cream for dessert. I was practically a con man, coming into her daughter's house and asking outright for that kind of money.

    The moment she snapped "absolutely not," I knew I was fucked. But cleaning the dresser looked like a bastard amount of work, and knowing that Dirk was behind me on this gave me the confidence to stand firm. I felt bad for the lady and didn't want to screw either her or her daughter over. Money was money, though, and I was through with getting the shaft.

    The old woman was a shrewd judge of character and could see by the look on my face that I wasn't budging either. Why, with two hundred dollars, I could pay 1/2000th of my student loans off. That or buy some primo weed and a slice of hot apple pie heaped with vanilla ice cream.

    It was while I was daydreaming about weed and pie that she asked me to leave. My expression switched from ecstasy to extreme befuddlement. There was blood on the wicker dresser, for God's sake! Who was going to clean it up? Eisenhower? The dismissal flew directly in the face of my vow to perform my cleaning duties to the best of my abilities. I couldn't just leave with possibly infectious blood curdling on the granddaughter's dresser, no matter what Dirk claimed about old blood not being harmful. And yet the old lady wanted me gone.

    Feeling ashamed of my greed, I offered to at least spray down the dresser with our germ-killing enzyme for free, hoping to convince her that I was good people after all and not out to rape her pocketbook. Her demeanor was as cold as that aforementioned lemonade as she allowed me to do that. But the moment I was finished, she was at the front door, holding it wide open so that it could hit my ass on the way out. Clutching my crate of cleaning supplies, I left, head down, feeling like a company man, bought and sold.

* * *

Shortly thereafter I got a call to go to Culver City to clean up after a murder. A young soldier at the National Guard armory there had had a problem with another guardsman and, in an attempt to resolve it, had taken a bat to the rival's skull. When the MPs discovered the killer, he was in the midst of trying to scrub up the gymnasium where the murder had occurred.

    The military police had to mace him to the ground. As a result of this, Dirk excitedly informed me, I would need to use my expensiveas-hell, full-face gas mask. Mace, when it dries, crystallizes into a powder that lies dormant until you reactivate it with water, which was found in most of my cleaning supplies. To catch a face full of reactivated Mace would be a very bad day for me, Dirk warned.