by Jeff Klima
Getting in touch with the Florida brother was an equally large pain in the ass, but Dirk wouldn't do the work without his signature on the invoice. Though the brother hemmed and hawed about it, he eventually agreed to let us proceed for nineteen hundred dollars, which included removing all decomp and doing our best to deodorize the place. Wisely, I once again included my clause about "residual staining occurring on the porous surfaces."
Since Dirk was too wrapped up in work to concentrate on the daytime crime scene business himself, he turned to the next most logical source for a specialist in biohazard remediation to help me with the project: craigslist.
Of course, instead of contracting for a service technician with experience in handling hazardous material, Dirk, to save money, put out the call for a general-purpose handyman who would be paid twelve dollars an hour for his time. I couldn't wait to see what that would dredge up.
* * *
The day of the cleanup, my "handyman," Doug, was late. Of course, June was really late, as usual, so I had time to brief the guy before she arrived. I was less than relieved to find that Dirk had given him only the rawest details of the impending workday and that Doug, a broken-down, scummy-looking drifter sort with ugly yellow teeth, wasn't too comfortable with the idea of a "decomp smell." He also couldn't stand Mexicans, which he proudly informed me within two minutes of us meeting.
Since June was Mexican, I begged him to be a little sensitive on the issue and pleaded with him to act somewhat professional, as if he'd been with the company a long time and didn't have a problem with decomp.
"Okay, but no promises. I gotta real strong gag reflex, and if I hurl, I can't help that."
"That's fair," I reasoned. "It's a pretty strong smell…even she wears a mask…if you puke, she'll understand."
"Hey, what do Mexican firemen name their kids?"
"What?"
"José and Hose B!" He laughed as if it were hilarious. June pulled up in her Beamer, and I gave Doug a withering glance.
When she walked up, I stepped in front of Doug and said, "June, this is Doug. He's been with the company for a while now."
Doug reached around me to shake her hand and said in a pleasant voice, "Pleased to meet you, June." I relaxed only slightly.
When Doug stepped into the house, he scoffed. "Is this what it smells like? Hell, I could deal with this…I've smelled way worse in my day."
I quietly reminded him that of course he'd smelled worse; he'd been with the company for a while.
With the carpeting cut into sections and removed, I could fully appreciate the horror that the wooden floorboards beneath had become. Slick with creamy brown unidentifiable guts, the wood had actually puckered from the absorption of the house's owner. It was something that one would expect out of The Amityville Horror. Freaky dolls + owner being sucked into floorboards = creepy, talking house. With a crowbar and gloves, Doug pried out the affected boards, sending sharp, dry splinters across the room.
Almost as bad were the flies. Maggots had been lunching on the doll collector, but most of them had long since turned into flies and died, littering the floor, bed, and all furniture with a thick mat of insect husks. (Later, when Dirk opened the filter on the shop vacuum I took to the job site, the smell of dripping, soggy decomp and the thousands of dead flies overwhelmed him, and he elected to throw the vacuum away instead of dealing with it.)
As Doug worked, though, removing floor layer after floor layer, it became evident that he'd forgotten our talk outside.
"Yeah, the goddamned Mexicans, stealing everyone's jobs and sneaking into the country. You give me a flamethrower and an hour alone at the border, and I'll get some borders enforced."
I didn't know if he was talking about burning down the chaparral or actual Mexicans, but once he got going on the subject, it was impossible to quiet him. He quoted numerous statistics and conspiracy theories about Mexicans that all sounded made up to me. Doug was certain that he had an inside line on a Mexican plot to cede control of California back to Mexico via Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
I shushed him when his racist ramblings became too blatant, but mostly I just let him go. It seemed that anti-Mexican babble kept him focused on his work, and I just wanted him to get through with it. Plus, June was off in some other room, still searching for the elusive will.
When we'd finished and Dirk's truck was overly full of hunks of wood flooring and bags of carpeting, June came in to survey our work. We had to cut down through all the levels of the house until we'd reached the dirt. Even then, there was still a layer of slime atop the moist, cool, dark soil under the house. I didn't have an answer for what to do about that, so I used a long strip of floorboard to scoop the obvious pieces out of view.
"Is it finished?" June asked, clearly wanting to be done for the day.
"It sure is," I confirmed, not knowing what else I could cut out or remove. I deployed several cans of deodorizer, which I left spraying as I sealed the room up. For good measure, I also dropped one into the darkness of the evil doll chamber.
June was intent on taking another small stack of money with her when she left, but I let Doug handle that as I went to sit in the truck. I'd overdone it once again on the amount of punishment I'd inflicted on my back and knew that it would just add to the amount of bed rest I'd need.
It wasn't until June's Beamer had turned the corner off the street that I reached into an envelope of cash Dirk had given me for the payroll. Doug had worked intensely for four hours, spewing slurs the whole way, but he had worked hard nonetheless, doing work that I could not.
Inside the envelope, Dirk had left me four twenties. Doug, having worked for four hours at twelve dollars an hour, was owed forty-eight dollars. My back spasms were sharp and jarring, and seeing no easy, quick way out of it, I rounded up and paid Doug sixty. He had done good work, and not only had he not pissed off June, but he hadn't puked.
Later, when Dirk found out that I'd given Doug extra cash, he did his damnedest not to rage at me over the twelve bucks, but he firmly reminded me I could have driven to a store to make change. I reminded him that he could have, too, and not left me with only big bills. We both walked away, and I had to remind myself repeatedly that no matter what, the job was still better than retail.
CHAPTER 14
the sewer house
A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.
—William Arthur Ward, American author and educator
The Public Guardian's office must have been somewhat pleased with our work, because it got us invited to participate in the other side of their business: hoarder sanitation.
Dirk called one day asking if I would pick up a key from him and bring a camera. I figured it was finally the awkward moment where he was going to suggest that I get to know him better, a lot better (in the gay biblical sense, if you know what I'm hinting at). Fortunately, instead he sent me over to document one of these so-called hoarder houses so that he could formulate a bid for the county. If we got the gig, he said, it would be a nice little addition to our revenue stream. I didn't know exactly what a "hoarder house" was, but my understanding was that it would be a dirty house.
I picked up Chris along the way just to have someone to talk to. The house was out in Stanton, near where I'd just had a loony racist cut the floorboards out of the doll lady's house. While the area surrounding the neighborhood (Stanton) was shoddy and run down as expected, the neighborhood itself was not.
The homes, while not expensive-looking, were nice places where people kept their lawns uniformly trimmed and everything had a pleasant quality to it. Initially, Chris and I assumed that Dirk had given me an address for the wrong neighborhood…and then we saw it. At first glance it seemed unimpressive, with the exception of two ratty cars in the driveway. Aside from a little overgrowth on the front lawn and the need of a coat of paint, the house seemed boringly ordinary. But that was only at first glance.
If you looked harder, the oddities of the
abode leapt out at you. To start with, both of the cars were completely filled with trash—and not just any trash, mind you, but really sinister old trash. Cupcake wrappers that featured the old package design of the Hostess company, newspaper bits that looked like they had gone through a hamster's digestive tract, and wadded balls of tissue paper were the immediately visible items, but inside the car's shell there was more, so much more. Only the driver's seat was visibly empty of trash. I snapped a picture.
Chris and I were shocked at the sheer volume of trash that had been wedged into the car, but that only served to prepare us for what was to come. The trash just inside the gate was a drum roll, a slow buildup of dirty baby diapers, cooking magazines from the 1980s, and random detritus rolling toward a crescendo. The closer to the front door we got, the higher the trash piled up, until it formed twin arches extending down from the sidewalls like fast-food-box ornamentation. I snapped another picture.
The front door was scuffed, as if someone had tried not very hard to force their way through. Clearly the person had never broken down a door in the name of service as I once had. I unlocked the door and pushed it open, only to be dazzled by my new definition of what a dirty house was.
* * *
I used to think I knew what a dirty house was. When Chris and I were growing up, our parents worked long hours. We were frequently home with our two other siblings to do as we pleased. And what apparently pleased us was living in filth. Apple cores would be pushed between seat cushions rather than walked out to the trash; pots and pans with clinging macaroni residue would be stuck behind furniture rather than set in the sink to be rinsed. Toilet paper used as tissues would be set on tables with the intention of them eventually reaching the garbage, but the paper would invariably find its way to the floor. The laundry pile created by six people in a busy household was enormous, and if left unchecked, it would spread out to every corner of the house, mixed in with jackets and dirty socks left on the floor.
My father would rage about the mess, but we were stubborn, lazy children who benefitted from a society turning away from physical punishment on the young. My mother, who'd grown up in a dysfunctional house, a hoarder house by today's standards, probably found the mess cathartic and was almost an ally in our messiness. Certainly she wanted to escape the dysfunction and wanted to have a clean home, but we didn't listen. We were raised to be creative dreamers, and as we saw it, our dreaming precluded us from keeping a tidy home. Eventually my parents got tired of hounding us to straighten up, and we hellions won our right to be filthy. (While the frat had prepared me for crime scene cleaning, growing up dirty prepared me for the frat.)
I remember the first moment that I was truly ashamed of the way my siblings and I were living. I was in high school and had just set a Dr Pepper can on the very top of the heap in the trash can. The pile was already mountainous, threatening to tumble over, and so I had used a Jengalike concentration to keep it from upsetting. My preciseness didn't really matter, because a layer of trash on the ground already surrounded the trash can. But I was resolved not to be the one to tumble the heap and had just succeeded in my efforts when there was a knock on the door.
I answered it to find an attractive older woman standing before me. She informed me that her car had broken down. This being the age before widespread cell-phone ownership, she asked if she could use our house phone to call her daughter. I allowed her in, and as I turned to hand her the cordless receiver in the kitchen, I could see that her eyes were not on me but on the abundance of trash and laundry scattered through the house. The coup de grace was the trash can, and I saw my Dr Pepper can with the sides I'd mashed in to make it sit like an angel atop a Christmas tree.
I suddenly felt the shame of my life's sloth like a lightning bolt. I didn't regret the woman's presence in the house, but the fact that I needed her there to figure it out for me. If I had any concern that I would slip back into a state of unclean living after she left, it disappeared when I found out that she had a daughter who attended Eureka High with me. A daughter who was pretty and more popular than me, and who would doubtlessly hear from her mother about the schoolmate who was kind enough to let her mother use the phone but who lived like a pig in his own filth. And the daughter would tell my classmates. It was almost as bad as if they'd found out I'd been raised Mormon.
I walked the halls in mortification for weeks, awaiting somebody's comment, but it never came. The necessary damage had been done, though, and I cleaned up the house big-time. Of course, my brothers and sister hadn't had the same epiphany, and they continued to make their messes, but I swore that I would never sink to that level again. And with the lapse of living at the frat house, I haven't.
Since most of my siblings have moved out and everyone has grown up, my parents' house also is now what my dad long wished for. Spotlessly clean and cheery, it looks like a grand collaboration between Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade. My mom probably wouldn't mind if there were a bit more laundry around, though.
* * *
Because of my background, I thought I knew what a dirty house was, but that corner house beat my definition to shit. I'd been stopped from fully opening the front door by an unseen presence, so I knew it was either going to be a poltergeist or a very messy home. But even those expectations fell way short.
Wedging the door open wide enough to stick my arm and digital camera in, I began snapping pictures of the living room. The amount of trash visible through my forced opening in the door alluded to the condition of the rest of the house. An awesome mound, peaking and sloping into another pile, formed an unsettled mountain range of refuse that spanned the length of the home, with the summit of the tallest mountain easily extending over ten feet into the vaulted ceilings. Clearly, the living room wasn't filled with floor-to-ceiling trash only because the occupants had not been there long enough to accumulate the trash necessary to reach the eighteen-foot crossbar.
A multitude of spiders apparently had, though, because my digital photos revealed spider webs that could easily ensnare Frodo and all his pals. Spider webs extended from the ceiling down to the lowest levels of the trash, which in some places was only four feet off the ground. Walking around the back of the house, we found that the backyard and most of the remaining rooms were much worse.
Few things are as ironic to me as a pile of trash made from the containers of cleaning supplies, and I tried to convey that message to Dirk as I showed him one of the photographs I'd taken. It simply defied explanation, and I begged him to take a look at the house so that he could see that what I was relaying to him was true. But it didn't seem to matter, because he seriously considered fifty-five hundred dollars an acceptable bid for our services cleaning it all up.
I begged him to charge ten thousand or even twenty or thirty thousand dollars, but he stressed the importance of competitive bidding. He said we didn't have to take the cars and that they'd be gone by the time we started, so we could rule them out of the equation. By the way he figured it, we'd get a crew of ignorant people in there, pay them fourteen bucks an hour, get three giant dumpsters at five hundred a pop, work over a weekend, and the two of us would pocket around two thousand dollars each for our troubles. I wouldn't even have to work. With my back the way it was, I would only need to sit in a comfortable chair and supervise. I begged him once more to reconsider his numbers, which he finally did, raising the bid to sixty-five hundred. After all, we wanted to impress the county with our ability to do great work for cheap.
I didn't know anything about how the county via the Public Guardian's office conducted business in such affairs, but from the moment I walked around the house, I felt a connection, and I was confident the gig was ours. I knew that we were destined to intersect, that house and I, and so I wasn't surprised when a week later Dirk informed me that we'd won the bid.
Since he was still so involved with his sheriff duties, he informed me that once more I'd be doing the supervisory work alone. For that reason, I fought to have Doug on my excavation crew
. If I was going to be out there for long hours watching people bust their ass, I wanted some hilariously uncomfortable racial tension to entertain me. Doug said he knew a guy who was a real hard worker, and to complement the mix, the oblivious Dirk threw in two Mexican guys.
I was frothing for the start date, anticipating the impending project to be Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Do the Right Thing. So my disappointment was palpable when Doug showed up with his buddy, a Filipino guy named Kool. Apparently Doug wasn't a complete racist. He was more of an "I hate foreigners less than I love money" racist, and begrudgingly, everyone got along just fine. Working in their favor was that the two Mexican laborers did not understand Doug well enough to be offended by his comments.
The dumpster Dirk ordered had arrived before any of us got there, and from the get-go I knew there would be a problem. While what the sanitation company referred to as a "forty-foot roll-off" was large, it was nowhere near what we would need dumpster-wise to put a dent in the trash.