The Dead Janitors Club (19 page)

    I looked at the tiny window, so impossibly high up in the building, and then down at the mixed-gravel-and-concrete landing spot. Blood was concentrated at the point of impact, with smears of brain and face blasting outward from there. Chester had hit the pavement headfirst. Then his body had bounced, flipped over, and come to rest about four feet from where it had first hit, eventually bleeding out into a stack of long, metal roof shingles piled against the base of the building. I picked up a chunk of the brain with my gloved hand and looked at it, imagining that I saw the tiny image of a little, naked boy seared into one of the wrinkles, clear as day.

    Snapping back to reality, I suited up and began to work. Lacking the proper tool to pick up hunks of brain from the ground, I had to reach down and toss them into the black bag by hand while throwing imploring looks to the horrified prisoners, as if I was somehow worse off than they were.

    The prison employed some of the minor offenders as firemen for a dollar an hour, and as such, they were allowed to hang around unshackled, watching me work. I couldn't believe that any of them were "minor offenders," as the bald thugs stained with facial tattoos looked like the first ones I'd have to gun down if my prison-riot fantasy came to fruition.

    "Do we need to sign anything?" the mustachioed guard interrupted, and I scrambled for my clipboard, filling in all the basics quickly. I handed the clipboard to the guard, who, in turn, handed it to Williams. Williams looked around for someone else to deal with it, because he didn't want the responsibility either. Finally, Mustache called for a senior officer on his walkie-talkie.

    When they heard that I was going to charge thirteen hundred dollars to scrub up one of their comrades, the prisoners–volunteer firemen made cracks about how I was the one who should be in prison, and how they were all going to start crime scene cleaning businesses when they got out. Great, more competition; exactly what we need, I groused silently.

    Eventually someone arrived who was willing to shoulder the responsibility of my bill and I was back at it, working fast with all the guards and prisoners standing around watching, expecting something more profound than the basic janitorial work I was performing. I added the child molester's thick eyeglasses to the bag of trash, as well as several hunks of skin-covered skull fragments with long, dirty, unwashed gray hair extending from them. His hair would have been shoulder length if the shoulders had still been attached.

    I wished I had included a "residual staining" clause in that contract as well, because the sun-dried blood wasn't coming out of the concrete there either. Finally, dehydrated and frustrated, I stood.

    "All right," I announced. "It's now considered 'treated waste.' You can go ahead and spray the area down with your fire hoses."

    "What about that piece?" one of the onlookers asked, pointing to a surprisingly large piece of brain resting on the hood of a nearby prison van.

    Nonchalantly, I plucked the piece off and threw it into the bag along with the rest. "It's fine," I concluded, lying. "Brains don't carry disease." I had no idea if that were true or not. "Just nobody eat off that hood," I joked, but none of the men laughed.

    When I drove back through the gate, I had to give the guards back their now sweat-stained elastic pants. I struggled to pull them off, but my shoes were wet from the fire hose and had to be removed first to get the pants off. My socks were full of holes with my toes poking out through the top on one and my entire heel hanging out the back on the other. I guess I just needed one last embarrassment before I could finally get out of that place.

We finally received a phone call from Cowboy Glenn at Orange PD. Since he'd agreed to use us, we'd been holding our breath waiting for some contaminant to infect the back of an Orange patrol car. And the moment had finally arrived. I rolled down there in Dirk's truck, establishing us as a bona fide company with
a truck
and not just poseur crime scene cleaners with a shitty little red car.

    Pulling up to their south entrance per their instructions, I waited for the police to open their electronic gate. And waited. And waited. I was about to give up and seek out the main office when an annoyed electronic voice crackled over an unseen intercom: "Pick up the phone!"

    I spied a callbox obviously situated just outside my window. Feeling like a schmuck, I opened it and picked up the tan phone receiver located within.

    "Dispatch," the voice answered, and I couldn't tell if it was the same one from the intercom.

    "This is Jeff Klima…from Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners. I'm here to clean a car," I said eagerly, keeping my ear to the receiver.

    "One moment," the voice chirped.

    The metal gate crawled open before me, and I was admitted. Being allowed into the lion's den was an exhilarating experience, and I really felt like a vital part of the law enforcement family. An older man in civilian clothes met me at the top of the ramp and beckoned me down into the underground. I drove past all the ordinary cars and trucks that the average officer took to work every day and descended down into the fluorescent-lit abyss.

    Inside the underground parking garage, rows of gleaming blackand-white police patrol cars sat in lined formation, awaiting use. The man beckoned my big truck into an unused parking space and waited where he was for me to climb down and go to him.

    He was old and leathery, the kind of roughneck they'd cast as a gruff ranch hand in a western movie. He even wore blue jeans and a button-up shirt tucked into them, no-nonsense style. I was certain his steely eyes could look into my soul.

    "You're the guy, huh?" he said, as if disappointed by what he saw.

    I nodded, remembering Dirk's advice that I act like we did this sort of thing all the time.

    "Answer me one question—why should we use you?" This was not a man who wasted words.

    "We are a company built on pride. We make sure that we always do a great job…" I began, laying a line of PR bullshit that he wasn't having.

    "Why don't we just do the work ourselves?" he interrupted.

    I stood there, my mouth hanging slightly open. This was everything I hated about meeting strangers. I didn't have the answers he wanted, and I was afraid to say something that might make him angry. I noticed another man standing behind me in dress slacks. By their expressions, I could tell that neither man was going to let me off the hook.

    "We…take the liability off you?" I finally guessed, my voice cracking under the pressure.

    "Exactly," Glenn confirmed, nodding at the man in the suit. "They take care of our liability," he reiterated, his attention fully on the other man.

    "And are you licensed and bonded by the state?" Glenn probed me further.

    "Absolutely," I lied, still not sure what that meant.

    "Good for me," Glenn spoke to the other man again.

    "Me, too," the man said. Apparently Dirk had already discussed rates and everything with them over the phone. We were charging seventy-five dollars to clean a car and one hundred to clean a jail cell— no matter what the circumstances. If it was dust from a mosquito fart or if a lunatic had ripped off the top two layers of his skin and thrown them around the room, we got paid the same. Personally, I was hoping for a lot more of the former. The money was secondary; we were really hoping that by getting in good with them, we would get the call any time they had a real crime scene.

    Cowboy Glenn and the other man left me to the car, a black-andwhite Crown Victoria wrapped several times in yellow police tape and with a biohazard symbol smartly taped in the back window. As if that weren't enough, an orange traffic cone had been propped up on the trunk.

    I unwrapped all the tape, throwing it into my black trash bag, and opened the door to the backseat. Shining my expensive flashlight across the hard, plastic bucketlike seat, I could see the snotty glob of blood that had been smeared across the seat position often referred to as "sitting bitch."

    It was prisoner blood, something that gave me a chill. When a little old lady gets bored with life and blows her brains out, you say, "Gross," but you quickly deal with it. When a prisoner bleeds, three big letters come to your mind: HIV. I suited up fully, wishing now that my boss had sprung for clear plastic face shields like our competitors had.

    In place of facial safety equipment, I opted to hold my breath, tilt my nostrils downward, and close my eyes as I used a white cloth rag to absorb the red splash of mucuslike consistency. When it was all gone, the blood-slicked towel having been thrown into a trash bag and that trash bag having been placed inside another trash bag, I cleaned the rest of the car.

    I'd told Glenn to check back on me in fifteen minutes, but I was so intent on impressing him that when he showed up, I told him it would take another fifteen minutes. In that time, I detailed the whole backseat, shining the clear plastic window between the front seat and the back, polishing the glass on all the doors, and even shining up the black plastic floorboards. For a finishing touch, I sprayed a quick blast of our deodorizer, which had a rich, pleasant bubble-gum smell, just to knock out the odor of the chemicals.

    I stood waiting proudly beside the car when Glenn showed up and gave him the flashlight tour. I illustrated how I had taken the time to extract each seatbelt to its fullest extension and scrubbed both sides, how I had polished the metal plate that protected the officers up front from backseat donkey kicks, and even vacuumed out the front half of the car, removing candy-bar wrappers that roamed beneath the driver's seat like tumbleweeds in the desert. Most importantly, the blood, and any trace of it, was gone.

    Glenn nodded appreciatively and used his own pen to sign the contract I handed him. I put my own pen awkwardly back in my pocket, but it didn't matter; it was official. We had a contract with a police station, and that was guaranteed business. Dirk had claimed that we were professionals, Glenn had put us to the test, and I had passed it with flying colors. Despite my slovenly appearance, I had earned the old roughneck's respect.

    I lost it about two minutes later when I tried to back the truck out of the narrow parking garage.

    Dirk's truck was an "extended everything" behemoth, and before I'd met him I'd never piloted a truck in my life. I couldn't see what was behind the tailgate; I didn't know the numerous blind spots; and I wasn't used to sitting quite so high. So backing up wasn't done with a confident, smooth reverse into a casual pull-forward motion. To make matters worse, the parking garage had been built with narrow lanes that would perfectly accommodate normal-size police cruisers but didn't have much space for an oversize truck.

    Under Glenn's astonished gaze, I tried to execute a thirty-point turn, creeping dangerously close each time to inserting a tail pipe through various patrol car windshields. My side-view mirrors were only good for seeing Glenn's disgusted face closer than it would normally appear. While I didn't hit any cars that day, I'd once more managed to smash the hell out of my dignity.

    To my credit, we received a call from Orange a week later, summoning us back to clean another car. This time it really was AIDS-contaminated blood. A note left on the front dashboard of the car confirmed that the officer had transported a bleeding prisoner who was HIV-positive. I took all the same steps as before, not really knowing, but hoping that I was doing it all correctly and that nobody would get sick as a result of my methods. I still didn't have any training about blood-borne pathogens.

* * *

If I'd had any idea that second Orange PD call would be my last crime scene call of any kind for two months, I might have saved my money better. Believing that the good times were here to stay, I went into summer with no savings and the full expectation of more work.

    Each time I placed a fumbling, frantic phone call to my boss wondering why no one was calling us or no one was apparently dying, he told me that he didn't know. Surely people were kicking the bucket, but either their survivors didn't know we were out there, or nobody wanted to pay us to do the work. Each phone call would end with my boss and me repeating our mantra: "Pray for death."

    The miserably hot summer days faded into miserably hot summer nights. Chris and I were living in the frat house with no air conditioning and a hole in the ceiling that somehow vented dry, blazing furnace air down on us from the attic. Out of desperation, we'd attempted to block the hole with a boogie board, but someone had long since stolen the board for a beach trip. Kerry, miserable about my situation and hating that I wasn't working, convinced me to take a part-time job back in my old vocation: bouncing.

    My frat bro Donkey Kong had started working at Heroes, a sports bar in downtown Fullerton. They were in need of burly guys to maintain law and order. It was mostly a cadre of fit, aggressive wrestlers from various colleges in the area. They all talked about how much pussy they could pull down, and how much pussy they used to pull down while working there before management had ceased their midshift use of a loft space across the alley for "quickies." I was hired after the "good times" were over, and as such, the other bouncers didn't trust me. It probably didn't help that I wasn't interested in talking about their wrestling stories or listening to tales about the glory days of pussy-getting.