The Dead Janitors Club (3 page)

    He was insistent that we smoke it, but I only knew enough about marijuana to know that smoking it at age eleven was pretty much the last thing we should do. Instead, I coerced Ricky into selling it to the two teenagers who ran the campsite where we were staying. Needless to say, they were all too delighted to indulge in what was probably mostly just stems and trim.

    The end of our friendship pretty much came when we were about thirteen and Ricky's dad accused me of breaking into his garage and four other garages along the six-block span between our houses. It was a fair assumption at the time, because I had turned into a pretty reckless kid with a sneering attitude toward any authority figures in the church. His parents and my parents forbade us from seeing each other, and apparently I was still just enough of a mama's boy to obey.

    Ricky and I fell out of contact, although I occasionally ran into him when we both had the small-town good fortune to attend the same high school. He had been held back in first grade or kindergarten at the elementary school he attended, so I was already established by a year in high school when I ran into him again.

    He had made further exploration into the drug world, and we had become two vastly different people, as I was still happily drug free and writing for the school newspaper. Still, we always said hi to each other when we passed in the halls.

    By the time Ricky's sophomore year rolled around, he was trying to get back with his ex-girlfriend and kick the drugs, which seemed like a pretty good move for him. So it was an enormous surprise for me to arrive at school one morning and find out that Ricky was dead.

    The previous day, he had called the fire department, where his father worked as a volunteer fireman, and asked them to come clean up his body before his mom got home and found it. Then he shot himself. He was sixteen years old, younger than me by five days no longer.

    After the funeral, his father and I talked for the first time since he had accused me of B&E all those years before, and we made everything as right as it could possibly be under the circumstances. Now every time I go up to visit my parents, who still live in Eureka, I stop by Ricky's grave and marvel about all the wonderful things that I have seen and done and learned in the years since his death, and that I wish he could have experienced as well.

    Ricky made a choice, though. Christopher Simons never even got to do that much.

* * *

Finally having decided that small-town life was too small for me, I moved down to Santa Clarita, a northern suburb of Los Angeles. For the nineteen-year-old man that I was, full of piss and Fritos, Southern California had always felt just a bit more like home. All my aunts and uncles lived there, and besides, I knew that if I was going to become a bigwig in advertising, like I planned to, I'd have to be in a major metropolitan area.

    The move also completely freed me from the indoctrination of the church, which was, in hindsight, the sweetest part of all. Once I had turned eighteen, I was no longer required to go to church by my parents, who hoped that by my eighteenth birthday I would have discovered my spiritual side and would want to go willingly. Nope, I was a non-Mormon on midnight of September 10.

    By the morning of the 11th, I had practically forgotten what a Mormon looked like. I escaped before they could get their "secret underwear" on me. Mormons are friendly people who mean well, but I smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and cuss like a shit farmer with a sore dick. I like to think I was rejecting them before they could reject me.

    The first opportunity I had upon moving back to Los Angeles, I got a job at a porn shop. My parents weren't all that happy about it and chalked it up to petty defiance, but they were seven-hundred-plus miles away and I was looking to sow my wild oats.

    Porn fascinates me. My relationship with porn is one-sided (as most relationships with porn usually are, ba-dum-chee). Strangely, I'm not that interested in actually looking at the porn itself. Watching some party girl get anally reamed from multiple angles by a bunch of well-hung meatheads, I just end up thinking about whether or not that girl will have to wear a diaper when she gets older.

    It's just the idea of porn and the world of people who watch or participate in it, or both, that I love. I don't know whether it is the effect of porn's forbidden aspect on my force-fed religious soul, or whether it is that I have always been shy and awkward around girls and am shocked to witness folks who had no shyness or inhibitions whatsoever.

    At the porn shop, we had a DVD player beneath the counter to make sure that the DVDs people were returning were really defective and not just boring. The other employees used to sit and watch porn on it for hours. On my shifts, I would smuggle in Disney musicals.

    Don't get me wrong; I've happily watched far more than my fair share of porn and have seen some shit that would make you want to wash your eyes while viewing it. But for me it was always enough to just be around naked people getting fucked. I didn't have to watch them. I knew they were there.

    The store was a really nice place, surprisingly. It was nestled in a little strip mall between a tattoo parlor and a bunch of auto part stores, and the clientele was mostly comprised of upper-middle-class types, both male and female.

    Doctors, lawyers, Hollywood laypeople, and some of those auto part store employees made up the customer base. Frequently, they were more than happy to oblige me, solicited or not, with tales of their sexual misdeeds and fantasies that they probably wouldn't even tell their psychiatrists.

    Average couples came in frequently, and on several occasions normal people in the throes of an affair would frequent the place with their lovers one week and their husbands or wives the next, throwing me a pleading glance not to betray their secrets. It was a high-dollar place, and I sold many women of all ages their very first vibrator, patiently, calmly explaining the sizes and shapes and functions of each, doing my damnedest to make sure their first porn-shop experience was a pleasant porn-shop experience.

    "Dirty Pete," the owner and my boss, was something else entirely. He was an ex-rocker from the eighties whose band had opened for some really huge acts, though he himself had never made it big. With longish, dirty-blond hair that looked like it had been washed with beer more times than with shampoo and a small hoop earring to let the "youngsters" know he was still "with it," Pete had the sad scowl and chubby cheeks of a party animal gone stale. He had drifted into porn and, somewhere along the way, opened up a shop of his own in Santa Clarita.

    Between the drugs he doubtlessly still indulged in and his creepy and constantly suspicious Asian girlfriend, Dirty Pete was an increasingly paranoid individual. On the day after he hired me, he installed closed-circuit video cameras throughout the store that he alone could watch from a briefcase monitor. He somehow "forgot" to tell everyone that the cameras also secretly recorded audio. In addition to being paranoid, Pete was scummy, anal retentive, and prone to yelling at everyone and then apologizing to their faces before talking bad shit about them behind their backs. He was one of those people who would promote you the day before he fired you, just to keep you guessing.

    He was also incredibly secretive and instructed that if anyone called or came in the store looking for "Dirty Pete," I was to say I had never heard of him. I'm sure he was in trouble, but I didn't want to guess what kind. I worked for him for two years and never even learned his real last name. But I guess he trusted me somewhat; Dirty Pete had plans to one day run a porno empire and promised me that if I stuck with him and remained loyal, he would make me a millionaire.

    I had other plans, though.

* * *

After two years of dually managing Dirty Pete's Santa Clarita shop and another one that he owned down on Melrose Avenue in the heart of Hollywood, I was burned out on the porn industry. If you let it be, porn and hanging out with the porno crowd is a twenty-four-hour party that would have thrown even Ricky Moses for a loop. Everyone parties with everyone, and almost everyone fucks everyone else and does drugs. Fortunately, AIDS was a nonissue because of tight regulations created out of the industry having learned its lesson in years past.

    During those two years, though, even just existing on the fringe of things, I met porn stars, got high, saw many uninhibited customers naked, and learned to use the word "cunt" in a casual conversation about fucking.

    Girls at bachelorette parties at the store, drunk or on drugs, or both, would frequently try to get me to whip my cock out for their delight. But what with me genetically having a fat upper-penis area (or F.U.P.A.) that made my dick look small, particularly in the presence of the monstrous polyurethane-molded cocks I sold, I frequently said no. For a shy, small-town, ex-Mormon, it was an electric, Technicolor, blistering jack-off experience (and that's a good thing).

    I wanted to go back to college, though, and focus on getting my degree in advertising, where I would put my creative brain to the test in minting millions of my own dollars. I love advertising. It is a weird hybrid of psychology and creativity that sums me up completely. I am advertising personified, I will explain to you if I get drunk enough.

    Advertising makes sense to me in a way that few things in America do. What other occupation in the world allows you to find ways to sell cigarettes to children the day before you write a jingle about diarrhea medicine? Maybe an elementary-school custodian, but that's about it.

    Yet as underhanded and manipulative as Dirty Pete was to everyone who worked for him or had been fired by him, he had still given me a job and eventually trusted me enough to give me managerial experience. Perhaps I'm a softie, but I didn't want to leave him high and dry when I left town to go back to college, so I set out to hire someone honest to replace me.

    Christopher Simons wasn't even looking for a job when he strolled into the porn shop with his fiancée, Janine. But he was a friendly guy who loved porn and made the mistake of complimenting me on how cool and classy the store looked. I hired him on the spot.

    He was a thin black guy and, based on his light skin, probably had some white guy thrown somewhere into his ancestry recently. He wore baggy jeans to match his baggy sweatshirts and smoked cigarettes incessantly. Personable but poor, he was the kind of guy who, if there weren't any people to bum cigarettes off of, would grab a used one out of the ashtray to light up.

    Over the weeks that I trained him, Christopher and I would sit and talk about life and what we wanted to do with ours. Christopher wanted to be a record producer and was working with a buddy who had studio access to help move his dream along. I just no longer wanted to work in porn.

    One day Dirty Pete and I had a falling out over some money that had gone missing. Whether it really was missing or he was just setting me up as the fall guy that all previous managers of the store had been at one time or another, I'll never know. I set the keys on the counter and walked out. The stores were now under Christopher's command.

    I moved down to Orange County, a culture clash of the extremely poor and extremely wealthy, and would never have looked back, except for the day I read in the newspaper about Christopher's murder. He was working my old evening shift, around New Year's Day, when a young man walked in with a gun. The punk stole a two-hundred-dollar Jenna Jameson fuckable pussy and anus mold, complete with a fake pubic-hair landing strip, and on his way out shot Christopher in the chest.

    The man shot two other people in the surrounding shopping strip with his small-caliber rifle before returning to the store, fearing that Christopher might have lived. Leaning over the counter, the bastard shot Christopher in the face, finishing him off. The guy then went to a nearby fast-food restaurant, called the police, and shot himself. He lived.

    Dirty Pete, the class act that he was, taped down cardboard over the blood and bits of Chris's skull that the coroner couldn't get out of the carpeting and was open for business the next day.

    While I had indirectly caused Christopher's death, I never thought I felt guilt over it. But as I'm sitting here typing this now, the article about his death hangs framed on the wall behind me.

    At the time, I was angry about what Dirty Pete had done. He was crooked and always terrified of old business partners whom he had doubtlessly screwed over coming and finding him. I knew he was dirty, because I frequently had to commit mail fraud for him, shipping strange packages out to Australia for him and lying to the post office about the contents. I don't know what was in the packages, but it wasn't the clothes and schoolbooks he instructed me to tell the postal clerks that it was.

    In the aftermath of Christopher's death, I wanted to bring Dirty Pete down. He'd eighty-sixed his humanity long ago and needed to be taken down a peg. I wrote a letter to the FBI detailing the numerous boxes I'd sent, the days I sent them, and the addresses to which I'd sent them. I didn't know what I hoped the Feds would do, if anything, but I was angry for Christopher and probably for me, too.

    The letter sat on my desk, printed and ready, for weeks. I just couldn't commit to dropping it in the mailbox; it felt too much like I was being a rat. I never, ever wanted to be a rat. Finally I destroyed the letter, dropping it into my aunt's paper shredder.

    That action didn't feel too good either, so to compensate, any time I told people about Christopher's death, I told them I mailed the letter and that the Feds hadn't done anything about it. That way, at least in the eyes of the people listening, I didn't come off like a coward.