by Alan Emmins
I say good-bye to the man, pat the dog on the head, and go about my own business.
Should I have done more? I wonder as I wind my way along the road. Probably. So much for cleansing myself of death. Instead, here I am worrying that I have just left this lonely and stranded guy to commit suicide. I pull into the next viewpoint and study the map. Pismo Beach is even on my way. I could.
But I have seen this camouflage-clad, bearded outsider before: he’s been in dozens of movies, as have I, the guilt-tripped unsuspecting idiot with a car and an empty passenger seat.
I drive back to the last viewpoint, willing myself to turn around and not do this. But something keeps me going. I don’t want this guy to commit suicide.
Of course, I wouldn’t know either way. But I would know that I had not offered to help him travel in a direction in which I am going anyway.
And now, as I look at the boulder where he once sat, I can see that I never will know, because the boulder is now empty. I am half tempted to get out of the car to see if I can find a set of footprints running off the edge of the cliff. But I don’t. I smile and think, Enjoy the five dollars you just scammed from me, and drive off once again in the direction of San Francisco, promising myself I will think no more of death until I am face-to-face with Neal Smither.
After nine hours of driving I make it to Santa Cruz, where, tired and terribly lonely from my time in the car, I am going to spend the night. I had had plans of finding somewhere nice to stay, but having got myself stuck on a traffic-jammed one-way system, with no idea where it goes, I give up on the idea. I am tired and hungry and pull into the first cheap motel I see.
I dump my bags in the room and quickly head out for food. I walk toward the ocean, imagining a cold beer in a pretty little beachside café. Any of you who know Santa Cruz will know that this is a notion of utter madness. The part of Santa Cruz where I find myself looks like a meth slum. People who are clinging to the bottom rung of society sit on stoops and lean against lampposts. One woman holds a steaming tin can in a paper napkin as she shovels forkfuls of goop into her drawn face. Her expression suggests that she doesn’t know where tomorrow’s tinned meal is going to come from.
“Excuse me, can you tell me if there are any cafés around here?” I ask a girl who looks very attractive from behind. She’s tall and slim with long, flowing, neatly brushed blond hair.
“What do you want?” she asks, turning to me. Her face is drawn and covered in sores.
“Er, um, I don’t mind really, I’m just hungry,” I tell her, even though the sensation of hunger has now left me.
“There’s a 7-Eleven two blocks up,” she says, pointing.
A 7-Eleven you say? How appetizing! As I move away I realize that I am walking in fear. I’ve quickened my pace, lengthened my stride, trying to bring myself back to my motel, where I wonder about my safety even behind a locked door. Luckily, the motel has a vending machine and I am able to ease my hunger with a pack of Oreos and a Snickers bar. Closing my door behind me, I notice a sign on the inside that reads: FOR YOUR PROTECTION, WHEN IN ROOM ENGAGE DEAD BOLT AND SECURITY LATCH.
What? I am not safe even behind a locked door? I need extra security? A dead bolt? Is there simply no escaping death in the USA? Maybe I have been in Copenhagen too long. Denmark is a small country of only five million people, and therefore all incidents are scaled down in number. We live, for the most part, free of fear and concern. I turn on the TV and flick through the channels. Surely there is something to occupy my mind? Surely this, the land of entertainment, has something for a scared little Englishman cowering on his dirty little bed.
“They were having a barbecue on top of the bodies! I’ll tell you what goes through my mind when I hear it, it’s called D. P. DEATH PENALTY!”
Yes, the land of entertainment does have something for a scared little Englishman: More death!
It seems that even before I make it to Neal Smither and the Crime Scene Cleaners I am surrounded by death on all angles. It seems that every way I turn, people are rubbing my nose in death. I am not used to it. It is freaking me out. How on earth can I expect to survive a month with Neal Smither and his Crime Scene Cleaners if I can’t even handle the onslaught of death thrown my way by entertainment and strangers on mountainsides?
I find myself presented with a simple choice: I can give myself willingly to the television, knowing that nearly every channel (including most of the cartoon networks) will be pushing death in one form or another, or I can hide my camera and laptop under the bed and once again head out into the real world.
Less concerned than I was earlier, but still walking fast, I head toward the colorful neon lights that adorn bar windows around the world. I buy myself a Corona and place fifty cents on the pool table where two rough-looking Hispanics are playing a game. There aren’t many people in this dirty bar, with its barmaid who looks like she was recently sheep-dipped and its walls that are covered in pictures of yesteryear: pictures of a time when the boardwalks were bustling with a holiday crowd. Some of the people in the bar are staring at me and in fairness to them, I do stand out a little. I am the cleanest person in the bar by at least a month.
When it’s my turn on the pool table I stroll over and offer a hand to my opponent.
“Hey, I’m Alan.”
He shakes my hand but doesn’t speak. I rack up; he breaks. Nothing goes down but the white. I am surprised when I make my first three shots. I feel certain that I will miss soon. But I don’t. Instead, I find myself naming the corner pocket for the black, a dead straight shot of about twenty inches. I lie across the table with one leg cocked up on the side and draw the cue back. Happy, because I have never stepped up to a pool table and cleared up before.
“You have to pot the black there!” the Mexican says.
He is pointing to the pocket that’s nestling under my crotch. I stand up.
“Why?” I ask.
“ ’Cause you mus’ pot the black in the opposite pocket to da lass ball you pot. Your lass ball went in dis corner, the black must go in dat corner, or you lose, my friend.”
I have never heard of this rule before. But I am still a bit nervous about my surroundings, so I shan’t mention that this would have been a nice piece of information to have been furnished with from the outset. Instead, I adjust my angle and actually feel a little relieved at the impossibility of the shot.
I pull the cue back, follow through gently, remove my right leg from the table, and watch as the eight ball comes toward me. Rolling slowly, it disappears into the pocket that the Mexican said I had to aim for. It was a ridiculous shot, one that I couldn’t make again in a hundred attempts. It was the kind of shot that could get a stranger beaten up if he was in the wrong bar, in the wrong part of town.
I look at the Mexican with fear in my eyes, and remembering a line from one of my favorite British films, Withnail and I, I have the urge to scream, “Please don’t hit me, I have cancer: if you hit me it will be murder!”
“What you say your name was?” he asks, looking me in the eye.
“Alan,” I croak.
“Hey, Wendy, a beer for my friend Alan! That was good game; where you from?”“England,” I gush with relief.
I am soon engaged in conversation with a crowd of guys at the bar, all of us drinking lots of beer. I am asked why I am in America. I tell them that I’m on my way to San Francisco, to work with a guy who cleans up suicides and homicides.
“He do what?”
The conversation continues for a few minutes in Spanish without me.
“What about da bodies, do … are they there?”
As the interest grows and the voices get louder, more and more people come over. If someone’s friend enters the bar they are called over to listen to my Neal Smither stories. I tell them stories from my previous visits with Crime Scene Cleaners; I tell them about the scene of the shotgun suicide that Neal took me to last year. They seem genuinely freaked out by the tale. They can’t believe that somebody makes his liv
ing in this manner.
“He makes a lot of money from this,” I tell them.
“I stay poor,” a man named Diablo tells me, not living up to his nickname.
The interesting thing about the conversation is that nobody has ever given any thought as to how such bloody scenes get cleaned up. Who cleans up the mess left by the triple homicide that took place in the house across the road? Nobody seems to have an idea. I notice that their grasp of the topic of death has largely been defined by Hollywood. We can imagine all the many and varied ways in which people can die, can be murdered, from the blood squirting from a slit throat to the bloody and charred pulp of a blown-up torso, because we have seen that thousands of times on TV. But we can’t imagine how that blood is cleaned from the wall, or how the brain is scooped from the floor, because that part is very rarely, if ever, featured in films and TV dramas. It has not been depicted to us, so we can’t begin to imagine it or even accept that somebody real has to clean it up. For the most part, people seem confused about this. Clean it up? That stuff doesn’t get cleaned up; they just pull the set down and move on to the next film.
Wrong. Death is not a special effect. It does get cleaned up, and across most of America the man behind that cleanup is Neal Smither.
The chitchat in the bar flits from death to death. From Neal to a crash scene somebody’s cousin saw a month back, to an uncle who is an EMT and the many war stories he has shared over drinks.
What strikes me from this conversation is that there’s a clearly marked line of separation between the average person on the street and those who deal with death on a regular basis. There’s an aura, a morbid fascination, around EMTs, firemen, policemen, morticians, and even, in the case of men like Neal Smither, those who clean up the scenes of death. It’s as if they have become part of an inner circle, a secret society that lives within the realms of something that for most stifles us with fear. They are respected for their work, but also looked upon with an air of suspicious awe: suspicious because maybe they know something about death that the rest of us don’t want to know; maybe they are in league with the dark one. Admire those who work with death, the people in this bar seem to be saying, but do it from afar.
I ran out of money about an hour ago. Having not planned to hang out in a bar all night, I came ill-equipped. As much as I try, however, I appear unable to run out of beer and tequila. That’s not entirely true. The tequila in front of me is the same one that was put there forty-five minutes ago and it will remain there until somebody else drinks it. If I were stupid enough to drink it I would be done for. I would later be found in the gutter. Even without the tequila I am swimming in the realms of drunken splendor.
A bunch of the guys, José, Bob, Diablo, and some other guy whose name I can’t remember, are leaving. They offer me a ride back to my motel. Foolishly, I find myself getting into the car. As I am squashed in the middle of the backseat, the fear I experienced earlier today comes flooding back.
I am asking myself how I can be so stupid as to be in the back of a car, driven by a drunk Hispanic I’ve only known for a few hours, sandwiched between some of the dirtiest guys I have ever met, when my motel is just half a mile up the street.
As we wheel-spin from the side of the road I am truly in a state of panic. My throat is tight; my legs feel heavy and my arms weak. The guys all seem different now. Their laughter has turned somehow demonic. I tell myself that I must get out of this. I will fight if I have to. I just know in my heart that fighting won’t get me anywhere. I am little match for four guys. I have no heroic notions about my physical abilities. What I have is a rather pathetic yearning to beg for my life.
As the car turns away from the street where my motel is (oh dear God where are they taking me?), I start to consider best-and worst-case scenarios. At this point, scared as I am, I would be happy with a beating. This thought lifts the spirits a bit. Yeah, a beating’s not so bad. I could live with a beating.
After stopping at a liquor store for more booze, the car doubles back and I am dropped off outside my motel. One of the guys, I think Diablo, cries out, “God bless the Queen,” as the car screeches off up the road. I scurry back to my room with a light sheen of sweat and panic about me, realizing, as I enter the room, that I left the television on:
“… that trial out of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, of the man who is accused of poisoning his wife. Perhaps you’ve been following this and would like more detail …”
I switch off the TV, aware finally and stupidly of where all my fear came from. Every image that sent me spiraling further into panic—the cars, the demonic laughter, driving in the opposite direction to my motel—they are all scenes lifted from films.
I go to bed knowing that this death business is actually not for me. I have serious concerns about what is going to happen to me when surrounded by real, and not make-believe, death.
DUDE, I’M DYING … CHA-CHING!
It’s midday by the time I arrive at Neal’s house in Orinda, and the neighborhood is peaceful, as was the developer’s objective. The street is situated within a golf complex; it is lined with million-dollar houses on either side. Large shiny cars are parked on driveways.
Think sprinklers.
Think Chanel suits.
Think white curbstones with house numbers on them.
Nobody answers when I knock on Neal’s door, so I follow the noise of a chainsaw that sounds as though it could be coming from behind the house. As I turn the corner I see a large branch fall from a tree. There’s a workman in the garden who collects the branch and feeds it into a shed-size shredder. Neal is at the other end of the garden, with a leaf blower. To his right there’s a collection of freshly cut tree stumps.
Strapped to Neal’s back is his two-year-old son, Jack,who appears to be having the time of his life while his father spins around and around. I decide to stay back for a minute. This is a side of Neal that’s rarely seen by outsiders.
Neal holds the vacuum hose in the air so that it ruffles Jack’s hair. The little boy is waving his arms around and laughing unrestrainedly. I have already met the Neal who celebrates death. It’s a relief to see that he puts as much energy into celebrating life.
When he’s not speaking in headlines he is clearly a lovable, compassionate fellow. “Hey, Alan buddy. How ya doing?” asks Neal as he notices me leaping away from another falling branch. He shuts down the vacuum. “How’s that wife and daughter of yours? You got a picture?”
“Sure,” I say, reaching for my wallet.
“Wow, she looks just like her mama, huh? That’s some big beautiful eyes she’s got there.” Neal’s cell phone rings. “Crime Scene Cleaners, Neal speaking, how may I help you?” There’s a pause as the caller makes an inquiry. “Okay, let me ask you some questions, that way you don’t have to explain everything to me and feel it. Gunshot or knife?”
Jack, still strapped to Neal’s back, looks out into the garden, waving his hands around and talking to himself. He’s a very happy boy; his expression tells me that there’s no place he’d rather be right now than strapped to his dad’s back.
“Shotgun, that’s all I needed to know. Let me explain our services to you. We would send someone out; if you like the estimate, they’d do the job immediately. Everything is guaranteed and one price is gonna fix the whole thing. So one price will clean it, disinfect it, deodorize it, and dispose of the waste. Averages for us: three hundred bucks for something pretty simple, to a nightmare shotgun suicide which you can pretty much guarantee is gonna be right about two thousand to twenty-five hundred bucks max, okay? What I recommend is get us in there and let us look at it, it doesn’t cost you a dime. Okay, Lisa, gotcha.” Neal’s expression hardens as the call takes an unexpected turn. “Yes, ma’am, if he moved around and made a mess that’s fine, we’ll clean it even if it’s in three rooms; one person can only make a certain amount of mess. So don’t worry … It’s two people? … In two separate rooms? I’m going to come and take care of you myself. I’m on my way.”
As you might expect, Neal’s house is clean, sanitary even. There’s nothing out of place in the kitchen, no dishes waiting to be loaded into the dishwasher and no crumbs on the counter. There are no magazines on the floor in the living room. No TV remotes protruding from between sofa cushions. On the shelves all around the living room are crime-fiction hardbacks. There appears to be just about everything from John Grisham and P. D. James to James Ellroy. You could dust them if you wanted to, but I doubt you’d find a single fingerprint, that’s how clean this place is. I realize that I am not supposed to be in here with my shoes on.
“Lyndey? Lyndey? Oh, there you are. Gotta go, baby. Alan, come on, let’s go!”
As the truck pulls away I am pinned firmly into my seat. The inside of the truck (I kid you not) is bigger than the bathroom in my apartment back home. It is like a luxury penthouse with its leather seats and its air conditioning. Neal pops a CD in the stereo and turns it up. The truck is filled with the sounds of the Harlem Gospel Choir. The music is in such stark contrast to Neal’s character that I can’t help but giggle.
“Dude, what the fuuuuck? You should hear the voices on these motherfuckers, man! CD only came out last week,” he says, as if to show me that he is always up-to-date with the gospel scene.
As we speed up the on-ramp and onto the interstate, Neal’s phone rings and the Harlem Gospel Choir is temporarily muted.
“Crime Scene Cleaners. Okay, ma’am, just stay on the line. I’m gonna get my guy on the radio and see where he is. Hold on.” Neal opens a compartment between the seats in his truck as he swerves down another ramp to Interstate 560; he removes another cell phone from a compartment between the seats and dials a number. “Where are you, Shawn? The customer’s waiting. Well, listen, get a move on. I don’t want this woman calling me to ask where you are, got it?”