by Jeff Klima
We got the apartment-complex manager to sign off on our work order, promising to make the smell go away, and got down to work. Kim went to work cleaning up the scotch bottles (which filled two and a half large trash bags) while I sanitized computer cords that snaked through the gut mulch on the bed, resembling interstate lines on a map.
Because the drunk's innards had pickled, one would have thought the smell of his rot would have dulled, but in fact the opposite was true. His aroma, the stink of his sweat secretions in the carpeting, the hunks of his flesh that had remained and changed color, the very essence of his nonexistence filled my mouth with a metallic bitterness, as if I had given a Duracell battery a blowjob.
What could be scooped off the stained mattress with cloth hand towels we took, and the rest of the queen-size mattress we folded in two as best we could, sliding trash bags over it like condoms. His rotting remains would end up at the dump, scattered in innocentlooking black bags along with his porno tapes and empty whiskey bottles. I think he would have liked it that way.
* * *
Dirk rolled with me on our next call, out to Huntington Beach, surf mecca of Southern California, for another rotted alcoholic. This one had collapsed in his kitchen, stewing away until a foul brown outline appeared in the flecked white floor tile and finally puddled under the stove. His outline, marked as if done by someone with Parkinson's disease, made it appear that his last motion on earth was the act of crooning Barbra Streisand ballads into his balled fist. Whether that was the reality or not was incidental; it made him more fun to clean up.
Dirk and I had the unpleasant task of meeting with both the dead man's mother and the owner of his apartment complex, a scumbag who looked like someone you'd guess was named Howard.
It was an especially bad situation because Howard, true to his scumbag roots, was interested in one thing—getting the dead man and all of his worldly shit out of Howard's apartment complex. The mother, on the other hand, was still freshly mourning the loss of her son. We had to separate Howard from the mom and work deals with them individually.
Howard would pay for the cleaning up of the dead man—only with the firm understanding that insurance would mostly compensate him later. The mother would pay for the removal of any and all property belonging to the victim, a forty-three-year-old man named Jasper.
The mother thanked us for our compassion during the dealings as she left, all the while glowering across the apartment complex's concrete driveway at Howard. Howard asked us for one of our embroidered polo work shirts to wear while he played golf.
Dirk and I began the work on a Saturday morning. It was the weekend and Misty was available, so she came along. Dirk was in his horny mood, so he peppered her with questions and innuendo about sex and her bisexuality, delighted by the fact that she didn't have a boyfriend, because she enjoyed sleeping around. Not that he or I stood a chance with her. I concentrated on my work to avoid getting wrapped up in the sexual harassment lawsuit I was sure was brewing.
Jasper's innards had soaked into the tile so completely that we had no choice but to remove the tiles. Using a long scraping tool with a thin, wide blade, we all took turns shucking at the stinky, brown tiles. Some of them chipped off neatly in patches while other, more affected tiles separated slowly and much more soggily, something akin to tearing a wet paper bag.
Once we were through the top flooring and down to the concrete, it became apparent that Jasper, like so many in death before him, had also melted into the concrete. He, too, would be painted over.
When Howard came to assess our work, he grimly pointed out that the carpeting hadn't been removed. We pointed out that the carpeting hadn't been affected. He pointed out that he would pay us whatever amount to remove the carpeting. Dirk and I agreed.
Howard also asked if we would say we were taking the countertops out, as well as the mounted vanity in the bathroom. Dirk pointed out that we wouldn't do that, as they weren't affected either. Howard pointed out that we could say they were affected and that it all needed to be removed along with the "affected carpeting."
Dirk said he didn't understand. I explained to Dirk that he was talking about insurance fraud. Howard needed us to bill him enough over his deductible to get the insurance company to pay for his deductible as well as eat the expense of new counters, flooring, and vanity for the apartment. In turn, his sons would do the work we allegedly did, and we would keep the cash. Except for the carpeting—Howard was adamant that we remove the carpeting. We said fine. Several thousand dollars later, Dirk and I were ripping out carpeting.
Dirk was a stubborn man, though, and refused to remove the floor insulation beneath the carpeting, assuring me that we were doing Howard a favor by leaving it. I will always agree to do less work, and so the insulation stayed.
The next morning, we were driving back out to the apartment complex in a rental moving truck, breezing by the sea on a sunny day with the windows down and the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Dirk was ruining the Zen calm of the morning by talking about porn and how it should have been his destiny to break into the porn business. On top of that, he was still obsessed with his Snoop Dogg song.
I was gazing out the window of the truck, happy about all the money I had made lately, when Dirk broke through my thoughts with the typical Dirk-style question of, "Have you ever seen a snuff film?"
I turned to look at him strangely; I had not, and I was uncertain where this conversation was heading.
"I liked that movie 8mm with Nicolas Cage…it was gnarly."
I shrugged, not bothering to tell him that I thought the movie was a pretty good concept but done poorly. There was no point in pissing on his parade, and I looked back out the window. I figured he was asking because we had found Jasper's porno stash the day before in our cursory search of the apartment.
"I've seen a snuff film," he said, somewhat darkly for him.
I looked back at him, curious, as the existence of true snuff films is somewhat up for debate. A snuff film, for the pure of heart (If you're pure of heart what the fuck are you doing reading this trash? Get the fuck outta here…), is a videotaped murder, usually in somewhat of a sexual context. They were kind of an urban legend in the porno world, with the occasional customer at the porn shop asking about them or professing to "know a guy who knew a guy…" I was doubtful, so I pressed Dirk for the details.
"I wish I had never seen it," he began. "They told us that we could leave the room if we wanted before they showed it, but I wasn't gonna miss it," he said turning his head away from the road to look at me for long intervals, conveying his sincerity. The look he was giving me made me sit up and take listen.
"It was shown when I was in training at the sheriff's academy. There was this girl…she looked like she was fifteen or sixteen…lying on this bed naked. And then this boy comes into the frame, and he looks like he's probably thirteen. Anyways, someone off camera tells him to have sex with the girl…and he's young so he can't really get his dick all hard, but he kinda does…and he starts fucking the girl, really going at it…and she's moaning…and then, this hand holding a gun lowers into the frame and shoots the little boy in the back of the head.
"Well, the kid drops down dead on the girl, and she's all covered in blood and screaming, and then this naked guy wearing a mask comes into the frame and he moves the kid. And this naked guy is holding a knife and he has a huge dick. Well, he starts fucking the screaming girl while she's all covered in blood, and he holds the knife to her throat…"
Dirk looked back at the road while I stared at him, horrified and wishing that he hadn't told me about that, just as you probably wish I hadn't told you. But you, as I did, wanted to peek into that world and you've got to live with the vision that you got.
"The tape ends at that point, but they're pretty sure the man cut the girl's throat," Dirk finished grimly. I shook my head and looked back out the window at a sunny beach town that somehow now seemed a bit less sunny. Dirk instantly went back to being his un
affected self.
"Sexual Seduction…" he sang, without irony.
Dirk apparently wasn't done talking, because he wanted to impart more twisted knowledge.
"I've seen all kinds of sick videos at the sheriff's department," he said with a smile. "There was this one that this guy made…he set up a video camera to record himself so he could watch it later and…whatever…well, he was into autoerotic asphyxiation…that's where you like to choke yourself during sex…"
"I know what autoerotic asphyxiation is," I interrupted, thinking back to my own kinky youth and my lucky tan belt, Denise.
Dirk smiled a "Been there, done that" smile at me, and I smiled a "No, you haven't" smile back at him.
"Well, this guy got himself a rope," he continued, "and he strung it up in his garage and fashioned it into a noose. Then, naked, he got up on this ladder and slides a broomstick into his ass. Well, he's jerking off like crazy, and he slips off the ladder…well, the rope is too long and so he drops down, his feet not quite reaching the ground, but the broomstick goes up through him, turning him into a Popsicle…"
I shuddered at the reveal and thought warmly back to my lucky broom, Gretel.
"The last image on the videotape is the garage door opening, and the mom and kids coming home in their minivan to find him hanging there."
We thankfully reached our stop before he could lay any more human misery on me.
Misty was again busy that day (it was hard to believe that I had a coworker who actually worked less than Dirk), but Kim and Doug, our Mexican-hating contract hire, both showed up at the prospect of work. Kim went to task on the kitchen, chucking out Jasper's many empty vodka bottles. Being glass, they revealed that Jasper had been a classier drunk than the fat wastrel who'd preceded him.
Dirk and Doug took on the living room while I went to work on the back bedroom. I unloaded bookcases and a desktop under the watchful eyes of Jasper, who regarded me from the top of his tall dresser in a photo of himself decked out in an orange hunting vest. He wore eyeglasses and had a thin beard, giving him an "everyman" look.
It was mostly mindless work, unloading a lifetime of collected memories and possessions from a person's home. The lot of it seemed so meaningless and trivial to me, and yet to Jasper it probably was the stuff of dreams. But in addition to those nice, fluffy, cute dreams about puppies and wealth that we all have, Jasper evidently had some other dreams. Wet ones.
Upon our initial casual search of the house, we knew that Jasper kept porno on hand. What we didn't realize was how deep a rabbit hole his affinity for sex was. There has to be a link between alcoholism and a love of freaky pornography. I pulled open drawer after drawer of raw sex, now wearing gloves to protect my hands from his sexual proclivities. Jasper was evidently bisexual himself, because although most of his porno tapes featured women, the literature and toys he collected tended toward the man-on-man style of lovin'.
Picking up what appeared to be a prop life-size severed hand from a Halloween display, I noted two things: first, that it had a motor that made the fingers wiggle, and second, that the middle two fingers were covered in Vaseline and bits of poop.
"Why can't anyone normal die?" I lamented loudly. I threw the hand into the trash bag and continued digging.
At the bottom of the second of three large sex drawers, I found two lunch-sack-size brown paper bags. I glanced around quietly, ensuring my privacy, and hoped that I'd found money. If I had, it was quietly going home with me.
The bag contained not money but Polaroids, hundreds of them, all mashed into the bags. I reached into the midst of the stack and retrieved a handful, curious about their content.
After a quick glance through my newfound acquisitions, I summoned the others in the group to join me, secure in the knowledge that what I had was not of any financial value. Once the workers had assembled around me, I treated them to an eye-popping display of dicks. Short dicks, fat dicks, black dicks, brown dicks, shaved dicks, bushy dicks, all manner of dicks recorded on photo paper and crammed into a bag.
The carpeting of the bedroom was instantly recognizable as background in the photos, but otherwise it was a staggering variety of close-ups of dicks. The dicks weren't alone either (well, some were); the majority of the pictures showcased the athletic prowess of the urethra, as many of the dicks had been stretched open at the tip to accommodate other objects.
In some, penises were devouring action figures—their small toy heads absorbed down to their shoulders in the male organ. In other pictures, Hot Wheels toy cars were seen exiting the urethra as if it were the Hoosac Tunnel. Sometimes the objects were glass rods or metal Phillips-head screwdrivers, objects that I had thrown away earlier.
The other bag contained more of the same, with asses and anuses thrown in as well. Objects of various sizes and shapes had found their way into a multitude of assholes, including glass tubes containing small rodents. In one particularly nasty photo, an open-mouthed vase with a long, fat neck was jam-packed into a butt.
"You won't believe this," Kim gushed, seeing the photo. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned still gloveless, holding that very vase by the neck, the very neck that was mostly inserted into the chocolate starfish of a man's very hairy ass.
"It's the vase," she confirmed, excitedly disgusted. All doubt that it was, in fact, the vase was removed by the presence of a thin veneer of Vaseline fog that coated the majority of the vase's upper region.
"You do realize you're holding, without gloves, something that has been in a man's butt, don't you?" Dirk asked her, as incredulous as Doug and me.
"Ohmigod!" she shrieked, realizing. Fortunately, she had the good sense to toss the vase neatly into the full trash bag, where it sunk into the midst of other sexual craziness. The fact that I cannot detail the horror and revulsion that wrenched her normally attractive face into a grotesque mask highlights for me that I have no future as a writer. The horrified noises she made as she scrubbed at her hands beneath impossibly hot water were some that I will never forget, nor forget to laugh at.
"Don't touch the faucet," we cautioned her, teasing. "I think there was a picture of him fucking that, too."
Jasper's mom, per her deal with us, had rented a storage garage at a nearby facility that closed at 7:00 p.m. Dirk was adamant that we complete the excavation of the apartment and make it over to the facility that day, not wanting to incur the rental fees for one more day of moving-truck use.
Kim had exited the project shortly after washing her hands down to a couple layers of skin, and so it was up to Doug, Dirk, and me to finish cleaning house. We raced, taking what we wanted of the dead man's possessions and throwing the rest into the back of the moving truck, abandoning neatness in the face of a deadline.
At 6:35 p.m., having worked ten hours on the project and drenched in sweat, we finished. But the three of us didn't have time to collapse. Now that we'd filled the large truck with Jasper's crap, we had to take it to the storage facility and unload it.
We raced across town to the facility and made it inside the electronic gates with ten minutes to spare. Figuring that once we were inside the gates we had all the time in the world to unload the haul, we calmly set about rigging a system that would allow us to take stuff from the back of the truck to the second-floor garage.
But since 7:00 p.m. had come and gone, the doors inside the storage facility had auto-locked, and maneuvering through them and the elevator (which could only be controlled from the second floor after 7:00 p.m.) became something of a logic puzzle.
My exhaustion had clouded with anger and was not helped by my being outside alone when the caretakers of the property showed up. They were a middle-aged Mexican couple who spoke no English, but it was clear that they wanted us out. The facility closed at 7:00 p.m., and that meant everything.
"Five more minutes," I begged them, gesturing with my hands. The man nodded reasonably and they left. Twenty minutes later, they were back and we were still nowhere near finished.
Dirk
joined me outside while Doug stayed inside to man the elevator and keep the electronic doors open. Dirk spoke a few halting words of Spanish, so he attempted to reason with them, himself as frustrated by the situation and as tired as I was. The couple and Dirk would not reach an agreement, it seemed, when the Mexican man suddenly stormed off with his wife in tow.
"I think he finally understands," Dirk said, bitter. "We're not going to keep this truck an extra day and finish tomorrow. Not happening."
We scrambled, though, to finish, a bit nervous about what the absence of the caretakers really meant. Finally, a little after 8:00 p.m., we were completely exhausted, soaking with perspiration, and all miserably angry about the long day, but at least the truck was empty. Dirk climbed into the cab, followed by Doug and then me, all of us squeezed onto the U-Haul's long bench seat.
Dirk was about to start the engine when the Mexican couple rounded the corner in line with the crotchetiest, most curmudgeonly looking old white man that I have ever seen. His pants were hiked up aggressively north of his belly button, and clomping toward us in Frankenstein-ish work boots, he looked as if we'd interrupted his Denny's senior meal.