by Jeff Klima
I bit back the tears as long as I could, and I was ashamed to be so publicly vulnerable, but fraternity life had stirred a light of humanity in me. I could hold it all in no longer, and I bared my naked soul as the tears tumbled down. I had lost a brother.
We had made it through most of our candidacy process as a unified front, defying the actives' expectations of our togetherness, and then there was a gaping hole and it wasn't the same. The others had an equally hard time with it. Deuce dropped next, and then Deluxe after him. Each one's loss a sickening blow to the beautiful experience I was having. We had been through the wringers together and were so close to becoming actives ourselves, and yet we were dropping like rotten apples from the tree. I couldn't quit, though; Sigma Nu had broken open something in me, and I craved the honesty and comfort that came from a brotherhood.
For me, the hardest loss for Beta Theta came during our I-week, a week when we all camped out at the frat house studying for our National Test. It was the final barrier between us and being able to wear the badges of pride that were the Greek letters "ΣΝ." Put through a battery of mental, physical, and emotional exercises, we were sleepdeprived and struggling to keep our GPAs afloat.
The night before the National Test, we were sent out on a latenight mission to T.P. a sorority house, which was clearly symbolism for…well, the hell with it. It was supposed to be fun. We drove over in two cars, feeling tired and wanting it all to be over with so we could go back to sleep.
We were just getting into the thick of hurling roll after roll of toilet paper over the roof and through the trees when the house lights suddenly burst on. Instantly we fled, each guy taking off in a separate direction, the brotherhood collective yielding to an "every man for himself" mentality.
I was in no mood or shape to run all the way across campus back to the frat house, so I decided to take my chances and head back to the cars instead. Along the way I teamed up with Spacey, who had the same thought I did. Spacey was an airhead, but he was good people and I could relate to him, as long as we talked about girls or skateboarding.
Back at the cars, we were surprised to find it had all been a setup. The girls had known we were coming, and they were in the act of dusting our cars with baby powder, Silly String, and eggs. Spacey and I, not ones to take shit from sorority girls, engaged them in a smashingly good baby powder, Silly String, eggs, and water fight, all of us getting good and messy.
I wasn't someone who was comfortable around girls entirely, so the fight was a good chance for me to flirt and interact. I made the most of it, but somehow, some way, something went wrong. One of the girls ran quickly into the house, flanked by two others, and Spacey stood there sheepishly. Another girl suggested we leave.
Together, Spacey and I took a long, wet, and dirty walk back to the fraternity house. Apparently he had grappled with one of the other girls in a manner that the girls had evidently deemed "inappropriate." Spacey didn't really think so, but he had been cited by the active frat members before for inappropriate actions toward girls at parties, so this didn't look good.
Spacey was already on thin ice, and we both knew that Sigma Nu was serious about how the sororities viewed its members. Spacey asked me what I thought he should do, and I looked at my brother, covered in flour and Silly String, and I said, "Quit." He did, packing up and leaving that night, saving the actives the trouble of ousting him. I didn't go back to sleep that night.
When I took my National Test, I knew I had passed it. I had settled in after C.R. and become an all-star. I was ready. I knew I had what it took to be a frat boy and to believe in the nobility and dedication that had been entrenched in me since my initiation. I had succeeded. I'd broken down my security barriers and opened up to my brothers as they had opened up to me. I was worthy of their trust. As such, I was no longer to be considered a boy in the fraternal manner; I was a gentleman, a knight in the Legion of Honor.
When I was inducted into the fraternity that evening and given a sweatshirt emblazoned with the letters of Sigma Nu, I felt the pride that came with being a trusted gentleman. And I wasn't alone. I had done it with those who had survived, the men, pledges no more, who I embraced as brothers. We were active members of a fraternal organization. At long last, we knew what it was to be men of respect and honor. Then we got shit-face drunk and ate gummy worms out of a stripper's pussy.
CHAPTER 8
they're droppin' like flies
Person 1: What's the difference between toilet paper and a shower
curtain?
Person 2: I don't know…
Person 1: Here's the guy!
I've become an expert on poop. It isn't by choice, mind you, but goddamned if poop doesn't show up almost every time someone dies. The sphincter muscle goes slack on a corpse, and bam! Poop slides out, leaving the body in a sad sort of poop cocoon. Maybe that's a bit extreme, but how often have you seen the phrase "poop cocoon" in print? This book is all about firsts.
Fecal matter is broken down into seven different types on the Bristol Stool Chart, which is a fantastically descriptive medical grading of human excrement. Types 1 and 2 are those dry, constipated lumps that are either in small pieces or a long, bulging pickle shape. Types 6 and 7 are more on the diarrhea side of things. Type 6 is that torn, shredded-edged shape with a soft consistency, while Type 7 is purely liquid. Types 3 through 5 are the healthier, more normal poops that leave the bowels like a rocket sled on rails. I most often deal with Type 6. It is the "death poop," or as I referred to it in the field, the "alcoholic's choice."
Poop can range in colors, which you'd know, depending on whether you've ever hopped off the bowl to take a look, that or you are frequent recipient of the "Cleveland Steamer" or "Hot Plate." (If you don't know, don't ask.) If you're like me, you've had to scrub poop from beside toilet bowls on a regular basis.
Poop can range in color from black to white (white comes from drinking barium, a thick liquid that's used for x-rays of the digestive system). But, depending on what you eat or drink, poop can also be blue or, if you've eaten a lot of vegetables, green. It sometimes is yellow, which happens with nasty diseases or an overabundance of bilirubin. (Bilirubin is red blood cells that have broken down in the liver and end up in the small intestine as an orangish color. In the intestine, bilirubin mixes with stomach bile to form that nice, healthy brown color that most good little boys and girls who eat all their dinner have.)
The bitch about poop is that when some people are near death, their mind retreats to a place of bitterness and simplicity, an almost infantile state of being. Poop becomes less a by-product of digestion and more like a crayon.
I actually first noticed this trend before I started in crime scene cleanup. A girl who hung out with the fraternity, perfectly pleasant in all respects, became known as a "frat slut." It wasn't her fault entirely. She just became so used to spending time with all the frat boys that they became her biosphere, and she banged the lot of them. Not all, mind you, I add with some bitterness, but an impressive number by guy standards. By girl standards, she was ostracized from the group and so became depressed. I'm sure we could get into a whole psychoanalysis of this girl's psyche, but our topic here is poop, and so her emotional problems, as far as you and I are concerned, aren't the issue here.
One night, after the fraternity had sent her home due to her predilection to drink and then become braying and abrasive, she decided to kill herself. Whether she really wanted to die or simply was making a grandiose call for attention remains unclear. What's important is that after she'd slit her wrists in the bathtub, she'd also defecated and then used the poop and the blood to write not-so-cryptic messages of hate on the walls of her apartment.
I know this because I had never seen a suicide attempt before, and I broke into her apartment through a window to check out the aftermath. A little creepy perhaps, but I'm also the same guy who near-stalked a girl to Fullerton and who cleans up dead people for a living, so let's dispense with the shock.
The next time I
saw ca-ca as wall art wasn't when I viewed the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art but rather at a small, pleasant house in Claremont. It was our fifth gig in nearly as many months. We'd been referred to the homeowner by the Claremont Police Department. Pleased with the work we'd done for them on the minister's suicide, the police had dropped our names to the victim's relative.
This was interesting for two reasons: first, we'd only gotten the minister gig because the two Claremont cops mistakenly thought we were another company they'd had a positive experience with in the past, and second, because those same officers had gotten their asses chewed out as a result of us. Apparently the Claremont Police Department wasn't too happy about one of their officers signing off on the nine-hundred-dollar cleaning fee we'd hit them with.
The police department refused to pay, and Dirk had to call them to point out that their representative had signed the contract. Eventually they paid, but I heard it was not pleasant for the involved parties. Still, we'd once more been recommended, and I was all too happy to show up on the doorstep of a one-story, light-colored house for a little dark work. Dirk had once again begged off, citing that he had to attend to his real job.
I was to meet the owner of the house at the site, but she was running late, which gave me time to wander around the neighborhood. It was one of those pristine places with nice parks and a homeowners' association that regulated the number of trees you could plant in your front yard. I had a real hatred of homeowners' associations for exactly that sort of reason, but I had to admit the area looked nice.
The owner, frantic after her long drive home from work, was apologizing even as she pulled up. The house was a mess, she said. The forensic team had been out there for the past several days on the speculation that the incident had been murder. They'd finally ruled the matter a suicide, but not before coating the house in a dingy black dusting of graphite. (As CSI enthusiasts doubtlessly know, graphite powder is a dark, fine powder that's sprayed across doorjambs, knobs, walls, telephones, remote controls, and any other surface the suspected perpetrator might have contacted while inside the house murdering. The powder sticks to the oil exuded from the fingertips in the shape of fingerprints. It is also a tremendous pain to get off the walls, but I didn't know this at the time.)
I was excited because I had consulted my father, whom I considered a very sage man, on the matter of my frustrating financial woes. I was now working regularly by crime scene standards, but I still wasn't making any money. My buddies, working as bank tellers and waiters, were out-earning me, and they didn't have to contend with gang members threatening them or strange brains in their eye sockets. To top it off, I was having trouble making money off people's heartbreak and trauma, and I didn't think I had it in me to be a dirtbag.
My father empathized with my position. In his younger years he'd done construction projects for acquaintances and had had difficulty charging them an amount that would make the project worth his time. He'd compensated for this by creating a simple equation: take the number that he wanted to charge them and double it. My father, being very intelligent, said I would be surprised how well this would work.
I walked around the lady's house that day, surveying the wreckage and calculating a number in my head. It was easy to see why the police had thought it was a murder. Bloodstains streaked throughout the house into numerous rooms, and a bistro set in the kitchen had been upended and destroyed. That, coupled with the copious amounts of graphite powder, made for a very unsettling scene.
The worst of it was in the bathroom, where the rampage had both started and ended. An abundance of poop, smeared across the white walls of the shower, was what finally convinced the forensics team that it was suicide.
Rather than crafting messages, as my friend the frat slut had done, this chap had chosen to make a series of squiggles and overlapping lines of putrid, dark-brown funk. I didn't know it at the time, but that dark-brown color was indicative that the victim had been constipated, but evidently not so constipated that he couldn't make a nasty mess for me to deal with.
The shower curtain had been pushed aside, and I had an unfettered view of the man's mashed dark stool lying down by the drain. It was small and hard-looking, with divots forced into one side where his fingers had gripped the thing. I was fascinated to see that he had wielded the scat not like a pencil, resting it on his middle finger and the webbing between his thumb and index finger (I'm a lefty, apparently we hold the pencil differently), but rather like a knife, using his whole hand.
It was a blunt instrument to him rather than a tool of finesse; one could appreciate the evident fury in his motions. Anger had caused him to revert back to a primitive level where his mind couldn't formulate the necessary words to express what he felt about abandoning life. We, the living, were left only with a bizarre set of symbols that even Robert Langdon would have been clueless to decipher.
The departed had been the homeowner's uncle. He had lived there with his sister, the homeowner's mother, for some time, but his sister had wanted him out. It was her home, and he was crashing the place, cramping her old-lady style. Finally he had pissed his sister off so badly that she'd gone away to stay with a friend, refusing to come back until he'd moved out. Sometime during the week between when she'd left home and the daughter had come by to check on the situation, the man had slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
Apparently, though, the length of time it took him to die was not what he'd expected, and he'd left the relatively easy cleaning environment of the bathroom to wander across the off-white carpet of the living room before sitting for a spell in a light-colored chair there. Then he'd moved into a second bathroom, where he spent some time checking himself out in the large mirror over the sink.
After that he just went fucking nuts. I tracked his bloodstains into the sister's bedroom, where he'd violently torn through her clothes hanging in a closet before running into the kitchen to wreak havoc on the aforementioned bistro set. Probably feeling faint due to blood loss, he finally managed to find his way back into the original bathroom, lie back in the tub, crap into his hand, and got busy with the wall.
Figuring out what to charge the homeowner was a nerve-wracking experience. I was determined to try my dad's strategy, but I was terrified of the word "no." If she said no, I knew I wouldn't be able to back down and suggest a cheaper price. I'd never been a haggler; I didn't understand the delicate art of ripping people off back then. If a salesperson told me the price of something and I declined it, and then he tried to reel me in by quoting a cheaper price, I would have been tempted to shit in my pants with anger (and then possibly throw them at the guy). It just didn't seem to be good business to me if a salesman could offer me a lower price initially and didn't.
So I resolved to charge the woman $1,535, take it or leave it. The $1,535 was double what I thought the job was worth, and it also seemed like a real number. I figured if I quoted her $1,500, she probably would be suspicious. As if that was some number I just tossed out…Then she might start trying to haggle and lowball me, and I would end up doing the job for peanuts. But $1,535, that was mysterious. That made it seem like there was some complicated pricing system, the details of which would be unpleasant to hear.
As soon as I dropped the number like a bomb into the midst of the conversation, not at all as confident in saying it as I would have liked, we both froze. In the silence that followed, I was ready to apologize, to cry out that I wasn't some huckster, some charlatan, some demon out to fleece her dry. I was thinking about quoting her a cheaper price, something many hundred dollars cheaper than the number I had found the audacity to utter aloud, but she spoke first.
"I'll get my checkbook."
I started in the bathroom. Grimacing, I gripped the poop, my gloved fingers slipping just above the grooves. My fingers are bigger than his, I thought, as I chucked the thing into the depths of my trash bag. I hit the walls next, using plenty of industrial paper towels and several furniture-stripping brushes to massage th
e ample brown smears from the grout lines.
When I was finished, the bathroom was immaculate, a glowing white testament to the power of Simple Green, paper towels, and elbow grease. While the homeowner made phone calls from the kitchen about how horrible the whole affair was, I moved on to the living room.
"All finished in the bathroom?" the lady asked me, walking out of the kitchen.
"Oh yeah," I beamed. "That place is glowing."
Whether she didn't believe me or was simply curious to see what my definition of "glowing" meant, she marched into the bathroom.
The tub beamed her reflection back at her from the scrubbed fiberglass and porcelain shell. I wanted her to drop to her knees and weep at the majesty that was my cleaning job. I wasn't a neat and tidy person in regular life, but crime scenes brought out the Mop & Glo in me. All business, however, the woman pulled the shower curtain across the length of the tub with none of the gusto or showmanship of a magician. Suddenly, it was my turn to weep.
The accordion-like folds of the white plastic sheet revealed a Rorschach test of unimaginable horror and carnage. Whatever the man hadn't done to himself in the rest of the house, he had saved for himself here. An exuberant thrust of blood sprayed viciously outward and then collected in the folds of the curtain like raindrops in a spider's web.