The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  "I've actually got to get to my other job…" she said with a shrug. "If I call in sick and my boss sees me…"

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I interrupted, cursing the news media once more. I was alone once again.

  We finished the murder house by 7:00 a.m., and I gave Misty the shitty job of scrubbing the blood out of the front-porch bricks where the mom and daughter had fled the scene. I was worried about staining, due to the porous nature of the grout, but of course I wasn't too worried, as we'd included my standard clause in the contract.

  As we packed up and left, it signaled to the media that the show was leaving town and they, too, packed up, scavenging after their next kill. I spit on the front lawn at their departure. They'd probably at least have some downtime before their next breaking story. Lucky bastards.

  * * *

  As I drove alone to the Motel 6 in Compton, the bed of the truck already filled with stained carpeting and bags of blood, I was happy for the work. We'd pulled down a nice paycheck on the homicides; Dirk had at least done that right before leaving me hanging. And the Motel 6 gig, while not exactly a sizable payday, well, I was just grateful that ol' Tom Bodett didn't know anyone from the Orange County Public Guardian's office.

  I thought about stopping for breakfast, because my stomach was growling over the sound of the radio, but I knew my finances couldn't yet account for that. I was a pathetic, hungover, exhausted, and broken sight, having just cleaned up multiple murders, and I didn't have enough pocket change to buy a Sausage McMuffin, hold the egg.

  In the daylight Compton is not such a bad place. It is a classic low-income area with all the trappings—worn-down people walking aimlessly up and down the sidewalk, escaped newspaper inserts blowing up and down debris-spotted streets, and rusty chain-link fences keeping trespassers out of dirt patches where factories once stood. Now even weeds didn't last there. In the early morning it doesn't seem like the dangerous stomping ground of legend from so many rap songs, more like a dying town that cultivates only weary unrest. Now, I'm sure there are certain areas of Compton that I would be foolish to navigate even in the daylight, a goofy white man out of his element, but none of that was on display.

  While it wasn't the location the company put on the front of their brochure, the Motel 6 at least looked hospitable. There was no violence there, rather, just everyday suicides. I cleaned up the room quickly, finding a nasty-looking syringe between the mattress and the box spring. It wasn't the first one I'd found at a Motel 6, and I wondered if it wasn't their version of the mint on the pillow.

  The guy at least had the good sense to kill himself in the bathroom, which was easy on cleanup. Motel 6 clearly had learned over the years to use nonporous material in the bathrooms and easily removable carpeting in the rest of the unit. Like moths to a flame, so go the despondent to off themselves at Motel 6.

  I didn't have to take the mattress, which I vocally thanked the dead guy for; by that point in the morning, I couldn't exert a single bit more energy than was absolutely necessary. I was past thirty hours of no sleep, dehydrated as hell, worn down from my hangover, and ready to drop.

  I called Dirk from the parking lot, intent on asking him if I could just drive his truck home and swap him vehicles many, many hours later. I was already going to have a bitch of a time getting from Compton back to Fullerton in the traffic of the 105, which seemed to last all day, rush hour or not.

  "You're not going to believe this," Dirk said, his happy-go-lucky cadence sounding to me like dripping shit. "Corona PD just called… Someone threw up in the back of a cop car…They need you, man."

  * * *

  Torrance to Compton is not a bad trek, but West Compton out to Covina was about the length of civilized Southern California. My eyes fluttering from exhaustion, I nosed the truck for the long drive east.

  We had our contract with Corona PD, so it wasn't just a simple case of "Can't do it; see you on the next one," and I knew that. I also knew that it would be a small miracle if I made it out to Corona without crashing the boss's truck. I might even have done it on purpose, but with no personal insurance and no company insurance, if I got hurt on a job, Dirk and I used to joke, we'd have to bury me in the desert.

  They say there is truth in every joke, though, and I repeatedly slapped myself in the absence of caffeine to stay on the road. (That can't be something you want to see driving next to you: a scraggly looking motherfucker with a truckload of bloody carpet and trash bags, jabbering aloud and slapping himself as he tears down the road out to the middle of nowhere.)

  Corona PD, if I haven't told you, sucks. Aside from their having a bunch of asshole cops and an uncovered parking lot where the patrol cars bake in the desert sun, they only called us out for the really nasty work. Whereas Orange PD once called us out over a prisoner spitting on the back window of a patrol car, Corona PD made sure that whenever we were called out, we worked for our money.

  I've cleaned up vomit before, many times, in fact. I'm not quite the connoisseur of puke that I am of poop, and I was extremely tired and already at the end of my rope, but let me assure you that none of that held sway when I looked in the backseat of the cop car and realized that this was, without a doubt, the most heinously violent, chunky, rancid, smelly, wretched, slimy, multihued vomit that has ever existed on this planet.

  Honest to God, I should have saved a cup of the stuff just to convince the naysayers and beat all claims to that title. I cannot imagine the putrid demon soul that unleashed this nightmare hose of chuke (chunky puke) across the backseat, windows, floorboards, and beneath the plastic seat dividers up into the front seat, but for your benefit I will try.

  I imagine it was a woman, black widow-like, because I'm sure that some of the upchuck consisted of hunks of former mates and bits of her offspring that didn't crawl out of the nest fast enough. She was a big lady—had to be to contain the sheer amount of hurl that was spread rich before me. I imagine that she had ratty, dirty, long, curly hair; wicked pustules threatening to burst off her overstretched cheek meat; and an incredibly surly, loud, and brazen disposition.

  Anywhere else I might have considered her as a candidate for a biker skank who nobody wanted on the back of their chopper, but this was Corona, and there was a good chance that she was the mayor of the city. Also she was wearing a straw cowgirl hat. Why? Why not.

  I set to work scooping, yes, scooping up the volume of throw-up. I worked tirelessly under the blazing sun to do so, constantly averting my head, willing my nostrils not to pick up the scent of the cooked barf.

  One time at the frat house, we found some of Phil's mom's homemade chunky turkey soup left over from a Thanksgiving that had been several months ago and rotting in the fridge. Instead of leaving it in its large plastic bag and properly disposing of it, we instead emptied it into a bucket, where the smell of the stuff made several guys retch.

  Of course, any and all puke was collected in the bucket, as well as the urine of all present parties. One guy even took a shit in the bucket, creating a revolting mixture that we all somehow forgot about and left sitting on the patio when we went off to drink. Several days later we remembered it was there and threw it into the street for the street sweeper to slop up. I will forever remember the way that mess churned and sloshed as it was collected in the spinning brush of that street-sweeping machine. And yet the puke in that cop car in Corona was way worse.

  I finished hours later, the remnants of the stink keeping me alert for my drive over to Dirk's office to retrieve my car. It had been a long day, too long, and made worse by my drinking. I had cleaned up four bodies and some insanely bad yak, but I had survived.

  That night, I tumbled into bed feeling complete, like I'd done a day of honest work, and rest would be the greatest reward. It was how I imagined farmers and firemen and other hardworking blue-collar joes felt at the end of a long day. I could feel a measure of pride in myself as my eyelids slipped shut and sleep came.

  My cell phone woke me up early the next morning, yanking me f
rom deep slumber. I was refreshed, having slept from 4:30 in the afternoon until that jarring, irritating ring, but it interrupted me from a scummy, lascivious dream where I was a sultan and in command of my own girls' roller-derby team. Let's just say that I made them keep their skates on…Where the dream was actually headed, I'll probably never know, because goddamned Dirk woke me up.

  "The guys out at Corona PD want to have a word with you," he said.

  Me being me, I naturally assumed they wanted to congratulate me on a job well done, so I called them with an air of bravura that was quickly shattered.

  Forty minutes later I was headed out to Corona to reclean a cop car free of charge. Apparently the cop driving the car the previous night became sick at the horrible smell still lingering foul as ever in the car and had puked his guts out. So now there was more to clean.

  I never was able to get the smell out and told the men that if they couldn't put air fresheners in the car and deal with it, they would have to rip the seats out. Only then would I come back and clean again. Lo and behold, they ripped the seats out, and I went back a third time at my own expense to deal with that bastard car. Now maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that it was hands-down my worst puking job?

  I don't know if that car was put back into service or not…I can't believe it was. But they never called us again. That feeling of pride that had enshrouded me earlier was gone, replaced by a feeling more appropriate for a jerk-off in my position. Reality is a bitch.

  So when people ask me these days how it is to clean up a kid, I don't bullshit them talking about how you can feel the sorrow and the pain, the profoundness of the moment. I just tell them the dirty truth: cleaning up kids is better, because they bleed less.

  CHAPTER 20

  child molesters don't last anywhere…

  Molesters do not wear an ugly mask. They wear a shield of trust. —Patty Rase Hopson, activist

  I was feeling very frustrated by the whole crime scene experience. If it hadn't been before, it was now crystal clear that we were on the Public Guardian's shit list, and that revelation was unhinging Dirk. Also, it didn't help that a rival crime scene cleaning company had filed a complaint with the city that Dirk, being both a sheriff and a crime scene cleaner, had a conflict of interest. Dirk, in response, began lashing out at anyone he viewed as a "traitor" to our company.

  As far as I was concerned, he told me that I was not a very good manager of other people when we had large projects. According to him, I let people slack off, which caused the projects to take longer, lose us money, and make the Public Guardian think less of us.

  Of course, since he needed me, he didn't personally tell me that I was so ineffective. Instead he went to my crew members and individually consulted them about taking over my job while retaining me solely for crime scene work. My role would switch to that of worker drone. Of course, my guys relayed this information to me. Rather than consulting Dirk about his actions, I stayed silent, just watching to see what else he had in mind.

  Taffy Spears, Dirk's pal from the Public Guardian's office, the one who'd hooked us up with them in the first place, became some sort of evil entity in Dirk's burgeoning delusional state. Using his sheriff position, he ran a background sweep on her, only to find out that she'd recently bounced a check to an auto mechanic's and that they were threatening legal action against her unless she paid up.

  Dirk decided that the most sensible course of action to restore our good graces with the Public Guardian's office was to blackmail Mona. He literally wanted to call her and threaten to release her personal information if she wouldn't give us work. Tempted as I was to see what trouble Dirk could wind himself into with this, I had to stop him.

  In the meantime, against all belief, work, sans the Public Guardian's office, continued to find us. Dirk called me with an early evening gig that came through the City of Santa Ana police force, not the sheriff's department. Dirk's constant badgering of fellow officers had finally managed to put some food on our table.

  The police were still on scene when we reached the courthouse building in Santa Ana. We drove the truck straight up on the sidewalk, because the placards on the side of the truck now read "Crime Scene Cleaners" with our embossed company logo and the tacky "Integrity. Respect. Compassion." tagline that Dirk thought was so poignant. It would have been more fitting had it read "Dewey, Cheatem & Howe."

  We drove along the walkways and up to the police cars, cruising past awestruck junior officers until we found a sergeant who coolly clued us in on the details. The dead man was yet another child molester. Waiting to be formally charged with child molestation the next day, he had been up on the eleventh floor of the courthouse for some bullshit reason.

  Deciding he didn't want his soon-to-be fellow inmates to do the job for him, he ran for the open-air veranda and pulled a swan dive off the balcony. Surprisingly, a pursuing cop managed to snag his leg as he leapt, but the cop couldn't hold on. Down, down, down the Chester went, eventually making like Humpty Dumpty all over the pavement walkway. The general consensus of all policemen present was that they wouldn't have made a grab for the jumper, lest his weight pull them over, too.

  A person falling from a great height is one of the messier jobs in the crime cleaner's repertoire. This guy, like his prison counterpart, had bounced but, unlike his prisoner counterpart, had also truly exploded. Whereas the prisoner's head had cracked open and splattered brain everywhere, this current son of a bitch had me hunting up huge chunks of his liver and other innards in the dark of the night. He'd really done a number on me, firing bits of everything everywhere, splashing hunks of his stomach and skull in a blast zone that radiated out about thirty-one feet from impact.

  Dirk had a real reluctance to buying tools for the business, as evidenced by the company truck he'd been promising me for a year and a half before I got it. There was also the matter of a power washer; my frat brother had moved and taken his power washer with him, which was too bad, because it would have come in handy on a slew of outdoor jobs we took on.

  There was the old man who'd died from falling off his concrete porch and smacking his head open on the business end of a rake, or the job I did at a Motel 6 in Fontana where a man, knifed in the gut, had dragged himself along a hundred feet of walkway and rounded a corner before finally collapsing by the stairwell.

  Stuff like that required serious equipment to do the job correctly, equipment that Dirk didn't want to shell out for. Instead, he believed in his method of using a small furniture-scrubbing brush like a glorified toothbrush and scrubbing the blood out inch by inch. Of course, he usually wasn't the one out there doing it.

  We also lacked the proper lighting for any sort of outdoor work, instead relying on a building's atmospheric lighting and a single box light that I'd purchased on impulse for a different job using my corporate credit card. We'd called Kim out for that job, and she had come eagerly at Dirk's request, though I was a little sketchy about using her or anyone from the will fiasco. It was nice to have a third party working there, though, and she was great leverage in helping me convince Dirk that we should stay and do the work that evening rather than having us abandon the job in the absence of light.

  That way I wouldn't have to come back early the next morning to finish by myself before any federal employees showed up for work around 5:30 a.m. (That was another strategy of Dirk's whenever the hour got late: "I think what we'll do, Jeff, is have you come back early tomorrow morning and finish up.")

  A week or so later, such things happening in twos and threes, I got a call from the Orange police department for our second non-scrub job for them (the first had been that old man with the rake). The second was another jumper, though not a child molester this time. But she, too, had done a good job of making her effort a fatal one. I had become openly mocking of any crime scene call that didn't involve a fatality (such as that poor Motel 6 bastard who caught a screwdriver in the eye). Consider it the cynic in me.

  That second jumper was a middle-age
d woman with financial woes. I could certainly relate. Fortunately for me, the lady had the good sense to kill herself in the late morning, so I was able to get in gear by early afternoon and take full advantage of the light. She'd jumped off the four-story parking structure of an executive building and down onto its driveway, blocking all the Mercedes and Lexuses housed within from leaving until she had been cleaned up. Everyone has his or her own way of striking back at "The Man," I guess.

  I spent a lot of time on that job just jawing back and forth goodnaturedly with the policeman who had to stay on scene until I was finished, the scene technically being a city sidewalk. I had a lot of empathy for the guy; since he was the low man on the totem pole, he got stuck with all the shitty jobs. I could definitely relate.

  Hanging out and listening to the stuff he'd had to deal with as a policeman, just the bullshit civil stuff, the wife beatings, the kooks who called in complaining about missing wills. It gave me a certain respect for police officers everywhere…until I had to clean one up.

  Dirk had cultivated an acquaintance with the lead homicide investigator for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, and that friendship had yielded us a somewhat touchy gig from the department. The head investigator was allowed to assign a company to come out and do the work on the proviso that the job stay under a grand. Over a grand, and he'd have to legally offer it through a bidding process. The sheriff's department had caught wind of how we'd stuck it to the local cops when we cleaned up the courthouse jumper.