The Dead Janitors Club (47 page)

    Through emails and phone calls, we both agreed that my copywriting skills were superlative and an ideal fit for his company. I passed his numerous written tests with flying colors, which pleased him. Flexible about the hours I'd work, he was agreeable to a large salary, plus he was a big Lakers fan, which pleased me. It would have been perfect.

    But somewhere along the way, I had picked up some stupid-ass notion of loyalty. Looking at Dirk, I saw a business that had struggled through its existence for two long years. I knew I should have stepped away gladly, leaving a sinking ship for one with real potential. And yet, I couldn't.

    I was Dirk's first mate, and while I wasn't exactly prepared to go down with the ship, Dirk had taken a chance on me at a time when no one else would. I didn't feel like I owed him anything, but I couldn't just leave the business high and dry. I was certain that without me, what was left of O.C. Crime Scene Cleaners would collapse. And while that would have been best for the denizens of Orange County, I had helped to build that pathetic company from scratch, and that counted for something, too. I even had a tattoo to show for it.

    And so the copywriter job that everyone agreed I would be perfect for fell through in the way that anything one has mixed feelings about usually does. Missed emails, an incoherent live interview, and an overwhelming abundance of self-worth sent that job packing. The lawyer paid me generously for my time, and once again, I was left to fuck off.

* * *

Dirk had the notion that, as a business, we were not dead in the water; a sudden growth spurt could quickly realign our trajectory back into the black. The first step of his plan was to change me from the "independent contractor" he had claimed I was so that he wouldn't have to provide medical coverage, tax information, or a 401(k), to a vice president of the company.

    It was the same old trick he'd used way back at the beginning of the business, the bait and switch to screw me out of whatever he didn't want to pay for at the moment. Except now he wanted me to make even less money—never mind that he already couldn't pay me what he owed me.

    I might have considered that a fair compromise had there been genuine logic to it, some semblance of a plan to increase the overall revenue stream, thus balancing my loss. No, he whined, it was because he wasn't making enough money from
his
business. When it was about weathering the hardships, it was
our
business; when it was about income, it was
his
business.

    In exchange for my lowered income, though, he said without irony, I would have the eventual right to stock options in
our
company. As if we were somehow going to split off from Schmitty and one day soon go public. I nodded seriously, as if genuinely considering the offer. But I felt like the biggest fucking moron on the planet, he who deserved all manner of bad things to happen to him, the loyal company man.

    Dirk's second plan for the salvation of the company was location. We had pigeonholed ourselves professionally by relegating the business to Orange County when, really, we were so much more than that. We were Riverside County and San Diego County, and most importantly,
we were Los Angeles County
. We'd done large amounts of work in those other counties, and yet we were potentially ostracizing them by considering ourselves "Orange County."

    And so, with the speed that spurred all of Dirk's ideas to fruition, we had new shirts, new hats, and a new logo, all of which proclaimed our true intent: Southern California Crime Scene Cleaners. Like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan before us, we were expanding our empire.

    An empire needed troops, though, foot soldiers to do its bidding, so Dirk turned to that most unreliable of employment centers— craigslist—to once again bring about our salvation.

    Dirk was certain, in that way that people who aren't even a little bit fucking certain always are, that he could find people willing to buy their own equipment and do their own legwork to collect clients, all under our banner, and that these "entrepreneurs" would pay us 50 percent of their take.

    Dirk would divide Los Angeles into sections; each new hire would then control a section and respond to the multitude of calls that were certain to blaze up from their respective area with just a bit of applied promotion. Once we had the Los Angeles leg of our business in order, we would then branch out to Riverside.

    I agreed that growth would help us. Maybe even a business plan with a series of long- and short-term attainable goals would do the trick. But did I think that we would find souls willing to, in effect, start their own biohazard remediation business and turn half their proceeds over to us? Hell, no.

    So you can imagine the size of the crow I ate when Dirk's posting received more than three hundred enthusiastic responses in the first hour. It seemed that I had vastly miscalculated the impact of the recession, for apparently Los Angeles was teeming with eager business investors.

    Incredulous, I asked Dirk if he had mentioned in his post that people would in fact be paying up front for their employment, aware that what he was proposing was essentially a pyramid scheme. And as Dirk once again fumbled for the words to explain that he had not exactly conveyed this to any of our would-be hires, I again nodded politely and made a mental note to kick my own ass.

    Dirk was adamant, though, that our good intentions would shine through and we would find diamonds in the rough, the building blocks of our empire. He proceeded with his plans to conduct two separate group interviews with the candidates he handpicked from his list. At my urging, he at least implied that there would be some costs involved.

    We finagled free conference-room use from an apartment complex where we'd (unbeknownst to them) thrown away much of their biohazard and set up the two meetings where we hoped to find the cream of the crop. Hating my life and unwilling to stake my financial future on "stock options" or pyramid schemes, once again I secretly began a search for a new job.

    I'd blown it with the lawyer, and no real advertising firms were beating down my door, much less sending me emails confirming that they'd received my résumé. With Kerry paying all the bills for both of us, I decided I needed to broaden my employment horizon.

    On the day of Dirk's job seminars, I slipped out at the break to turn in my résumé for a job as a repo man.
This is what my college degree
has gotten me
, I thought.
I'm going to have a career repossessing prop
erty from other deadbeats.
They never called me back. Even the losers thought that I was worthless.

    Dirk's seminars had attracted seven interested candidates, including a hot chick with big tits. Many more people had been invited, but after Dirk had revealed his true intentions about "some costs being involved," we no longer had the cream of the crop to choose from.

    But I watched as Dirk spun the same line of bullshit he had pulled on me, showing everyone the same article mentioning the sixfigure income—only now his speech had become more grandiose and profound, as he had experience to draw on. Their eyes, as mine once had, glazed over with the idea of lavish consumerism. They too would be screwed over by Dirk, which wasn't his intent. He was genuine about everything he said, but he was also genuinely misguided in his ambitions. Of course, he also knew how to spin some lies.

    I listened dispassionately, feeling like I was wasting my time, and only broke in once, in disgust, to correct Dirk's claim that we'd cleaned up "several celebrities" but due to "contractual obligations" were not allowed to reveal their names. Dirk was hurt that I shot him down in public, but our future franchisees had at least the semblance of a right to know what they were actually getting into.

    At the end of the day, we had three people clamoring for the work, costs be damned. Both of us were delighted to see that the hot chick was among them. She was an older broad named Penny, a total fucking MILF, as the hipsters would say, though it looked like any kid who had breast-fed off her had caught a mouthful of silicone (not that it wouldn't have been totally worth it).

    The other two, from different sections of LA, were an old woman from Brooklyn (by way of Beverly Hills real-estate brokering) and a doughy middle-aged guy who seemed good with numbers. The Brooklyn dame, Bitsy, had a sharp tongue and was oblivious to tact. I pushed for her because I was curious to see how she would react to decomposing flesh. I was betting that she would hurl and then make some off-color remarks to the widow.

    I was against Melvin the dough ball from the start, because he immediately started spouting his love for Jesus, which would have been fine if he were auditioning for a job as a priest. I'd always had back luck with overly religious types and never quite found the restraint not to mouth off a bit around them. Dirk wanted Melvin badly, though because he seemed like he had the acumen to make a buck or two.

    We sent the three out with a promise that we would hold a training seminar for them, the same training seminar that I had never received. In the meantime, if we got a call in one of their sections, they could tag along.

    Needless to say, we never trained them, and all too quickly the first call came in for a decomp at an Extended Stay America hotel in Melvin's zone, early on a Sunday morning. A fireman staying in the room had died while working on loan from Utah. I was quick to point out to Dirk that Extended Stay America was a corporate account through Schmitty and not something that Melvin had produced. Dirk was quick to point out that he himself couldn't make it, probably because he was busy sitting around drinking coffee and staring at a wall.

    Alone and fuming, I called Mel on my way out, anticipating that he'd meet me there. Mel refused to show up to his new job until church services were over. Needless to say, I wasn't going to hang around a stinky hotel room waiting for God-boy to finish up. Dirk for once agreed, and so Mel was fired before he was officially hired. And then there were two.

    Bitsy, the tough-talking New York woman, pissed and bitched that she couldn't deal with the headache of setting up a business after all and decided that instead of working for us, she was going to move down to Florida to live with her sister. And so, all too quickly, from that initial list of more than three hundred, there was only one.

    Dirk was eager for the hot chick to work out, so he talked up her new career as best he could, enticing her to stay. Penny was married with children, but if nothing else, she was eye candy for the business. Dirk half-joked that we could make extra money by releasing a "Girls of Crime Scene Cleaning" calendar. With Misty, Kim, and Penny, I had to give it to him—it would have been a bestseller.

    It took several weeks, but finally we received a call out for another decomposing dead body at another hotel. This one was a girl, dead of a drug overdose, who'd expired on the mattress. Dirk gave me the call out to go with Penny and train her in the mystic arts of scrubbing and cutting. He couldn't make it to this one either, but this time Dirk truly sounded remorseful.

    I had been turning in another résumé, this one to a strip club (as a bouncer, I swear) and ended up being two hours late for my rendezvous with Penny the MILF. Driving fast in the work truck and cursing up a storm, I was already irritated by having to do a training gig. So when I rounded the corner, the tires of the truck squealing, and saw some dickhead with a video camera pointed at me, it didn't help matters.

    It turned out that Penny with the big tits wasn't as interested in having a career in crime scene cleaning as she was in having a career in reality television. She was an attractive woman living in Los Angeles, so that should have been obvious to me, but go figure. She was going to use the day's footage to secure a production deal with some "industry connections" she had.

    The dickhead with the expensive video camera was her husband, a Eurotrash type with a goofy accent and a penchant for low-angle "power" shots. Even as I called Dirk to bitch about the Eurodork's presence, he was filming and lisping for me to "act more natural."

    I climbed back into the cab of the truck and slammed the door. It wasn't the thought of being on camera that got me. Dirk had once conspired with Schmitty to bring in a crew from the National Geographic Channel to film an hour-long special on us. The film crew never materialized, though, and I finally had to chalk it up to Dirk being Dirk. It was for the best that they hadn't appeared anyway, because we were going through one of our slow periods and the National Geographic Channel would have ended up with a one-hour special about crime scene cleaners playing cards.

    Now, with a camera actually on me, a more pressing concern had materialized. None of what we did complied with any state legislation concerning the handling of biohazardous materials, and I was ill-equipped to teach someone else how to clean up a crime scene. If any true crime scene professionals saw footage of me attempting the work, I would be crucified.

    Dirk, of course, sided completely with Penny and her massive tits. The work would be filmed, regardless of whether it was done correctly or not, because, as he didn't have to tell me, he wasn't going to be the one doing it.

    To my enormous satisfaction, the hotel employees had drastically overstated the horror of the scene, and Penny found her camera filming little more than what appeared to be a small pee stain on the sheets. It was a beautiful crash course for her in how the job was occasionally nothing more than glorified janitor work. Still she scrubbed at that minute stain with all the phony zeal of your typical wannabe actress.