The Dead Janitors Club (44 page)

    Most disquieting was a trip into a filthy, shaded parking lot behind a porno store. He let the truck run as seedy, curious homosexual men looked on from their places in the alley.

    "They filmed scenes from
8mm
here," he said referring to that pseudo-snuff film he liked so much. "Now it's a popular homosexual hangout." He let the truck idle there in that dark alley for a moment.

    "What's going on?" I asked, glancing out at the shadowed figures hunched in corners pretending not to be curious about us.

    Dirk slid his moistened fingers across the tightened fabric of my shorts, hands moving cautiously, his eyes rising to meet mine. I placed my hand atop his, producing an electric crackle as flesh met flesh.

    "Your first mistake was that your eyes were bigger than your mouth…" I said, reaching in a controlled motion for my zipper. "Your second mistake was in thinking that you would be on top."

    Okay, okay! So nothing happened. Dirk's not gay, and if I were gay, it certainly wouldn't be for a guy like Dirk.

    But seriously, I know that in reality that anecdote goes nowhere. It's boring. Dirk just showed me some boring, fucking alleyway. I guess I don't have one of those crazy lives like people who write good, compelling memoirs…I'm impressed you stuck it out this long.

* * *

The money from the mass suicide finally came in, and along with the check from the Beverly Hills cleanup I had just enough money to pay off chunks of my overdue credit card bills, some back rent, and a piece of my hospital bills. And then I was right back where I'd been all summer long: flat broke.

    Kerry kept at it, nagging me about getting out of the business altogether, but I was resolute. We'd made it through the summer, and if the previous year had been an indicator, we were priming the money pump and ready for a big payoff. Statistics had been correct about the lean summer; surely they would also be accurate about the bountiful autumn, rife with death and despair, right?

    Fuck statistics.

    Eager to tell people that I'd cleaned up a celebrity, I scanned the online obituaries for any mention that would confirm our cleaning of "Mr. Metro." It took a couple weeks for his obituary to pop up, but then I found him. "Mr. Metro" was actually some mid-level accountant (a well-paid mid-level accountant) for MGM and not at all the highfalutin studio mogul that Dirk was certain he was.

    Devastated, I relayed the information to Dirk, who took it worse than I had. We'd both been hoping for someone of note to add to our cache. What good was living in Southern California if you didn't clean up someone famous? I was glad I hadn't stolen anything from the house—how embarrassing would it have been to get caught shilling some mid-level accountant's antique crap on eBay in the guise of "Mr. Metro"?

    Autumn gave way to winter, and all too soon we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a gun called Christmas. I was poor again— really, really fucking poor. And I was going on a trip with Kerry to visit my folks in Eureka for the holidays. I had no money for any of it. Kerry knew this and offered to pay for the trip, but there was still the little matter of gifts. Everyone had gifts for me, and I couldn't show up, the big brother, the son, the important crime scene cleaner, empty-handed.

    Kerry said she didn't care if she didn't get anything, but that was a bald-faced lie. If a girl ever says she doesn't care if she gets a Christmas gift or not, no matter how cool or bohemian or Jehovah's Witness she might seem, she's a fucking liar. Women want gifts, and they will fuck up your existence in the wildest ways if you don't provide them.

    From big shit like withholding sex or cutting off your wiener or divorce to little shit, shit that you wouldn't even think was intentional, a woman without presents will calculatingly ruin your life. I know this seems like a misogynistic generalization, but, fellas, it's not. Once they're sure they have your love, girls want gifts.

    So I had to do something. I started applying for seasonal stuff, or even just doing odd jobs for people, but it was all too late. The mortgage crunch assured it would be a very lean Christmas for everyone, and even in Orange County there just wasn't any quick money floating around.

    The week I was to leave on the trip, I actually reduced myself to attempting to make gifts out of wood or paper or found objects. I was pathetically untalented, though, and most of the gifts were shaping up to look like smaller, rougher versions of the objects that they'd been previously.

    It was at my most pathetic, my most poor, my most desperate wishing-on-a-star moment that one of those mortgage brokers who had helped ruin the economy found himself ruined, put a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His kid's presents "from Santa" were hidden in the attic compartment above his bedroom, so they didn't catch any blood…not that his kids would be having a merry one anyway.

    The broker had made a plenty big mess of his bedroom, though, and it had been paid for by credit card, so we didn't have to worry about waiting for anything to clear, like we would with a check. Dirk was able to hand me a nice fat paycheck before I left town that I could finally buy gifts with.

    It was my Christmas miracle.

I saw the first bumps on my arm a day after cleaning up another dead gay guy in a hotel room. I'd cleaned up AIDS, hepatitis C, and so many other biohazards that I'd grown invincible…or so I thought.

    When I first started the job, I always wore my complete bunny suit the way I'd been taught. But the ones Dirk bought were so flimsy that they would rip and shred under our bending, moving, and straining, usually to the point that having them on was more ridiculous than not.

    When the first summer heat wave hit, I made the executive decision to tie my protective suit off around the waist, like I was a goddamned house painter and not someone interacting with deadly viruses. That style stuck, and both Dirk and I wore our suits like that when we didn't have clients around whom we were trying to impress with our "professionalism."

    Soon I was leaving my bloodstained suit on when I broke to eat, forgetting it was even there. Sometimes in my gorging I'd drop a fry or piece of burger down the front of my shirt and then pop it into my mouth without a second thought as to where it had been.

    Being fearless in the face of death became a badge of honor, and soon I was leaving my gloves off while cleaning up small areas or spots I'd missed after already shedding my gloves.

    One time a bathroom sink had become blocked and had filled with blood and water. The ratio of blood to water was enough that it was impossible to peer through the water. Since blood was present, we were responsible for cleaning it and unblocking the sink. Dirk decided that one of us needed to reach a gloved hand down into the bloody mess and fish out whatever was blocking the drain.

    I never thought of taping my gloves to my sleeve, so when I dipped my hand into the depths of the red mess, I felt it wash against my naked wrists, the still liquid heavy with pulp. I was lucky that there weren't razor blades or needles down at the bottom blocking that sink instead of the paper-towel wad that it turned out to be. Considering the nature of that particular suicide, razor blades and needles would have been far more likely.

    "Sometimes you gotta get messy to do the job," Dirk said when I came up with bloodstained wrists. It became his credo from that point on. I was just happy something had finally replaced "Sexual Seduction."

    With all the safety precautions we either ignored or outright didn't know, it should have come as no surprise to me that I was putting myself at risk for something serious, something lifethreatening. And not just me, either. I had a lot of loved ones and innocents who were directly in line to suffer from my incompetence. So when I saw those small blisters popping off my flesh, my first thought was, "Oh, fuck."

    Sad to say that exclamation wasn't so much for my loved ones or even for me. Instead, it came from the realization that I still had no health insurance and a long overdue bill from the one hospital I knew that would even accept someone with no insurance. My back injury had resurfaced to screw me again.

    So I did the only other thing I could think of, given my circumstances. Using a sterile razor blade, I sliced the bumps off and went about my day. When they reappeared days later in different places, I hacked those ones off and went on ignoring them.

    Secretly, I was freaked out, worrying that I had a serious health problem on my hands. I was already spooked by the fact that I had been smelling death everywhere I went.

    Crime scene cleaning wasn't that old an occupation so no studies had been done on the long-term effects of repeated interaction with blood and guts on a janitorial level. Of course, coroners had been dabbling in the messy arts for years, but my job was different, less safe.

    It didn't help any that somewhere along the way Dirk had learned that the gelatinous mound that we'd dealt with at so many jobs was in fact the spinal-cranial fluid from victims with severe head wounds. It was where most of the really nasty diseases could be found in bodies, both living and dead. It wasn't brain after all; it was disease embodied, and I'd dealt with it far too carelessly.

* * *

It wasn't just the physical and mental baggage from cleaning crime scenes that I was dealing with, either. My emotional compass had vastly skewed in the last two years. I'd lost my compassion for people.

    I've always prided myself on being a "people person" in the sense that I always saw the individual along with the big picture. Empathy was one of the positive traits that I'd picked up from my mother. In high school it didn't matter who you were—nerdy, cool, fat, ugly—I'd be nice to you. Not because I expected anything for it, but because it was the right thing to do. We were all on this crazy planet together.

    And then at some point in my crime scene cleaning adventures, I'd just stopped liking people. Retail work had weakened my empathy; crime scene cleaning killed it. I'd begun to break people down into market segments and to see them as walking piles of money. If the person paying the bill, the survivor, had a really nice car in the driveway, I was very comforting and falsely sincere, listening to their stories and memories with a child's sense of wonderment. In turn, they would compliment my kindness and understanding, and pay my exorbitant fees.

    If the car wasn't as nice, or the home didn't reflect an economic status that would mean more money in my pocket, I was a gumchewing asshole, bored with life and straight to the point. Especially when it came to a suicide call in the heart of Compton.

    Unnaturally hot, the clinging warmth seemed to collect over the ghetto like an impenetrable bubble. Climbing out of the truck, I felt like a heat lamp was pointed directly at me. Dirk had begged off on accompanying me once again. That in itself was frustrating enough, but to make matters worse, the house bearing the address I was seeking looked poor. I'd cleaned mansions in South Orange County and Beverly Hills; what the hell was I doing risking life and limb by walking into some shithole shack on the dirty side of Compton?

    A shy teenager answered the door, and I thought about being nice to him on the off chance that he'd be in the NBA someday, but the reality was that he wasn't tall enough. And he wasn't stocky enough for football.

    "Is the surviving owner of the house available?" I asked, chewing hard on my gum and really letting my lips smack together.

    "My mom's here," he said, clearly used to my type of personality. Without an invitation, I stepped past him into the house, with the sort of swagger typically found on some government asshole.

    The mom, dressed to fit her surroundings, was on the couch trying to look strong for the children whom she probably could no longer afford to feed.

    "What's the nature of your problem?" I asked gruffly. If there had been a Range Rover in the driveway, she probably would have gotten a hug.

    "My husband is dead," she pointed. "Out back, in the garage."

    "There isn't some crazy big dog that's going to attack me if I go back there, is there, ma'am?"

    She shook her head "no," and I toted my clipboard along through the kitchen and out the back door, which was actually a sliding plastic panel. I drummed my fingers on my clipboard and wished I were cleaning up some high-end hotel. At least they could pay me what the job was worth.

    I hoped that the dad had done the family a favor and died in a six-foot hole in the ground, because that looked to be all that they could afford to have me clean up. I would kick some dirt into a hole for a month's worth of food stamps.

    Some paint was peeling from the side of the garage, and I flicked it off in front of the woman, watching as a bigger chunk than expected flew off. If she disapproved, she didn't say anything. She stopped at the entrance to the garage.

    "I can't go any farther…please…he's in there."

    I scrutinized her for a moment, trying to determine if I was being played for a fool. I wanted to ask her if she was setting me up to be killed, like it was some gang initiation or something, but she had started to cry and I figured those tears were probably legit. She turned and walked back into the house, and I, sweating under my personal Compton heat lamp, walked into the garage.