by Alan Emmins
The skull pieces, teeth, and jawbone are discarded into a regular trash bag like regular trash. I guess there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be, but as well as being a harsh reality it is very depressing to observe.
“These are the ones that make you feel bad,” Neal reflects over the sound of scraping. “They really do. Did you see the photographs in the other room? I mean these people were in their late seventies or eighties. From what the officer told me, the wife was in late-stages Alzheimer’s and the husband just couldn’t take care of her anymore is what it amounted to. You know, they’ve probably been together their whole lives and he didn’t want to give up. So they had made a pact. You know, when she got to a certain stage he’s gonna kill her. And that’s what he did: he blew her brains out in the living room and then came in the bedroom and blew his own brains out. You know, I don’t know if they so much affect me, but these are the ones I have sympathy for, as opposed to Johnny Dirtbag who’s blown his brains out to tell mom and dad ‘Fuck you!’ because he had his car taken away for the weekend.”
“Do you think about it a lot while you work?”
“No. Not typically. Not anymore. I just think about what I’m doing, make sure I do a good job.”
Steve is emptying the drawers of the bloodstained cabinets in the living room. He is looking for legal documents such as wills, bank statements, or deeds. If he finds any such documents, they will be filed in a box and handed over to the relatives later. Everything else is to be discarded.
Cleaning bloodstains off walls can be long, hard work. Neal works on sections that are two feet square. With a stiff brush and a chemical enzyme, he scrubs hard in a circular motion. It’s not like a detergent commercial that you might see on TV; the blood doesn’t come off in one white-toothed sing-along swipe. Quite the contrary. The work is tough and the results of the hard, incessant scrubbing come slowly. The enzyme that Neal uses is a mixture of ingredients that have been blended to break down blood without eating into the surface that it sits on. It makes things slower, but it means that Neal doesn’t cause as much damage as he repairs. Once the enzyme has liquefied the blood, he wipes it up with industrial tissue that he goes through at an expeditious rate.
“Enamel-based paint is the best surface for cleaning blood from a wall. It wipes up real easy. But with a textured wall you have to play with the blood a little more. You have to be gentler ’cause you don’t wanna take the texture off the wall; you don’t wanna remove the paint. It’s really just a matter of learning how each wall surface is gonna react to your enzyme. So what I do is I apply it in a mist and attack a small area. I wipe it up and look at the wall; if it needs repeating I repeat it. When I’m doing a wall I always attack small areas, small sections at a time, maybe two feet by three feet max. That way, if my enzyme isn’t working well with the wall finish, I haven’t ruined a six-foot square of wall. In this game we have to guarantee everything. It’s body fluid, so mom and dad are already, you know, extremely skeptical. There’s a lot of salesmanship involved, but you still have to do a good job. It’s the ceiling that really pisses people off, or where you might find the bad work if it’s a new guy working for you, ’cause the arms just start hurting immediately if you’re not used to working with your arms above your head. Right off the bat I can tell a lot about a new worker by checking the quality of the ceiling after he’s cleaned it. I can tell from that if they’re just freaks who wanna tell their friends they are crime scene cleaners, or if they have some pride, both personally, but also … You know, the thing is, if it’s a kid who’s killed themselves, mom and pop don’t wanna move a plant to one side a month down the line only to find a missed blood splatter. I mean that’s just not on. And that’s partly what I do—I play a game with it, I simply will not leave a speck behind for the parents, or loved ones or whoever, to find.”
Neal seems to work even harder on the ceilings. It’s as if he is angry. He wants this part of the job to be over ASAP so that he can get his own blood back into his arms.
“I could use a smoke right now,” he tells me as he works away. “What I used to do on jobs like this is I would tell myself that I can’t have a smoke until the walls and ceiling are free of brain and sediment and are wiped and clean of any bloodstains. Otherwise I’d be taking a smoke break every five minutes and this job would take twice as long. I quit smoking six months ago, but I still think about it that way; I still pretend I’m gonna have a cigarette break after a certain amount of work.”
Somehow, that is typical of Neal. The very things that would drive others crazy, or at least have them running for the nearest pack of cigarettes, actually drive Neal on in the direction of his choosing.
Finally, after several hours of scrubbing, Neal stands outside the house, shouting into his cell phone, “Come on, asshole, I don’t wanna be here all night! Jeeeeesus!”
He’s waiting for Steve to get back from the landfill so that they can start emptying the dining room.
For somebody with little esteem for the dead, it’s amazing to see how much respect Neal has for the property that they leave behind. In the bedroom, he gently eases the baseboard from the wall with a hammer and a screwdriver, being careful not to leave marks in the wall. He works as much with his ears as his hands, as he listens for the sound of the wood splintering, easing off a little whenever he does. He peers behind the baseboard, looking for the nails so that he can get right in behind them, limiting the chances of breaking the baseboard.
“Do you always remove the baseboards?” I ask.
“Generally we only pull the baseboard out if liquid has gone underneath, ’cause there’s no way to just clean behind it if you don’t pull it. It’ll just keep leaking out from under there. Like, maybe not now, but you’ll get a real hot day and if there’s stuff behind it could leak out; it would smell a bit, too, I imagine. Usually, how it breaks down is that, if it seems like they can’t afford to replace the baseboard, we clean it. If they can afford to replace it, then it’s coming with us. My job is not to sit there for hours on end cleaning the baseboards. But you know, for some people money is that tight and so we do what we can, when and if we can. If it’s ten p.m. and there’s another three jobs waiting to be done that baseboard is coming up and I couldn’t give a shit how many pieces it breaks into. But like, here I gotta wait for the other truck to get here before I can start on the other room, so I have the time.”
Together we go about pulling the carpet up, starting on one side and rolling it back across the room. It’s heavy and does not come easy. About a quarter of the carpet is stained. Underneath the blood has seeped out, gone through the foam pad, and stained at least half the floor. At this point, a family member enters the house to see how the job is coming along.
“Oh wow! You really get it this clean?” he says. “Hi, I’m Dave. You spoke to my wife on the phone.”
“Hi, Dave. Neal Smither, Crime Scene Cleaners. Yeah … Well, I’m not done yet. You can’t get bloodstains out of floorboards. That’s soaked in there and it ain’t coming out. But what I do is I scrub it clean, disinfect it, and then paint a sealant over it, so you won’t be able to see the stain and it’s of no danger. It’s clean and sealed, and it can’t rot the floor or anything like that.”
“And the other room?” asks Dave.
“Yeah.” Neal pauses. “Don’t go in there. We’re about to start the initial cleanup. It’s been emptied, the paperwork has been filed like we were asked, but it’s still a big mess.”
“Okay, well, when should I come back, ’cause I gotta write you a check for this on completion, right?”“Oh yes, you do. About four hours I’d say, but you can just call me and make sure we’re done or I’ll call you.”
“Okay, well, give me a call.”
I start taping black bags over the ends of the carpet so that no fragments can fall out when it is moved. I also split a couple of bags and tape them around the middle. Neal and I carry the carpet out to his now empty truck.
“You’re damn straigh
t you gotta pay me on completion, damn. I don’t know why you’re asking me, I made it very clear on the phone,” Neal says to himself.
“Do you have much trouble with people paying?”
“Used to. When we would send the invoice in the mail, people would be like, ‘How much? All he did was clean.’ You know, most of the time the invoice would go to someone who didn’t see the mess before we cleaned it, so they see the invoice for a couple of grand and they’re like, ‘Get outta here.’ Now I don’t give them any time to think. In the here-and-now, people will pay you a lot of money to clean up dead bodies. They don’t want to touch what we touch, but you need to get that money at the time or else … Not all of them, though.”
“Have you ever had somebody try to not pay you at the end of a job?”“Hell yeah!”
“What did you do about that?”
“I went out to my truck, unroped it, dragged that big, bloody, fluid-filled mattress back in there. I got the bedclothes and they were just off the fucking chart; if I remember right, it was a decomp. Grandpa died in his bed and his shitty kids didn’t find him for like a month. This was in July, so it was hot. I mean we’re talking strong odors. We’re talking maggots. I ripped open those plastic bags and just threw the shit back in the room.”
“What was the guy saying? Was it a guy?”
“Yeah, it was a guy. He was like, ‘You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Listen, you fucking dink, you knew the deal: I clean, you pay. You don’t pay, I dump the shit back.’ You see, he thought, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get this guy to clean, then I won’t pay. What can he do once he’s cleaned—unclean it?’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck yeah! That’s exactly what I can do!’ So then he tried to backtrack and wanted to pay me half. I was like, ‘Fuck you. Keep your money. I don’t need it.’ But generally, people are shocked when we leave. Extremely happy—extremely happy and extremely shocked and I guess dismayed that they’re having to have this done to begin with. There are just so many emotions involved.”
The scrubbing and disinfecting of the bedroom floor takes no time at all. Neal leaves it to dry and will seal it as one of his last jobs. He heads into the living room and starts all over again.
“Some of them are just much sadder than others. I don’t really get involved in that part of it anymore, ’cause frankly I don’t care. You guys wanna live like that and blow each other away? Fucking A. Go for it. Just leave my card where your relatives will find it! But every now and then you’ll get one where you think, ‘God Almighty! How do these people do that to each other?’
“Another sad one that I did a while back—and this made world news, actually—was a sausage producer in the Bay Area, a sausage-making factory. His facilities probably weren’t as clean as they should’ve been, so the inspectors were, you know, fighting the hell outta him, making him clean his place. And he finally couldn’t take it anymore and so the next time they came in he was ready for them. He shot three of them dead and just wounded the other two. So when we get there, you know, he’s in jail, he’s gonna go to death row, or actually he’s on death row right now. But his ninety-two-year-old mother, who had just lost another kid due to cancer, is now stuck with a kid who’s on death row and this sausage factory. So she’s gotta take care of his business, she’s gotta take care of the police, she’s gotta take care of the federal inspectors, the press, the cleaners; plus her son is on death row. So at ninety-two years old she has to take care of his screwup. You know, those are pretty disgusting.”
“Do you get angry about things like that?”
“Yeah, I get angry! But what can you do? I mean, it’s not your family. It’s not your business. You’re there to clean the mess and get out. It’s just sad. Those kinds of things are just sad.”
After another hour or so, the room is looking well on its way to being clean. Two more of Neal’s minions in white trucks return from another finished job.
“Okay, boys, one of you has got to go empty my truck at the dump for me. Who’s it gonna be? Shall we flip for it?”
“Nah, man, I can’t: I gotta date,” one of them says.
“I’ll do it,” says the other. “But you owe me next time one of us has to do a late.”
“Are you taking flowers?” Neal asks.
“Nah, man, it’s only a date.”
“Do you wanna take her this?” Neal asks, holding out a piece of skull. It’s about the size of a small hand. “You can tell her it’s an ashtray. Tell her you made it for her at night school. I’ll clean the brain off? Or you could just take it home and have your morning cereal out of it?”
Everybody in the room is laughing.
“I’ll stay and help here for, like, thirty minutes, if you want?”
“Nah, you’ve got a date, go get cleaned up. Don’t forget to wash behind your ears. Where you taking her?” Neal asks him.
There’s a good vibe in the room, the vibe of four young people laughing and joking with one another, discussing dates and good restaurants. It’s as if all the people in the room are immune to the fact of death.
“The guy at the landfill is gonna piss his pants when he sees me again,” the cleaner who is about to drive away with a loaded truck says with a laugh. “This is like the fifth time today.”
“You should always make friends with dump people,” says Neal earnestly, “ ’cause if they lock us out, we’re fucked. You just gotta make friends with them. If they don’t like you, you’re not getting shit done and I mean nothing. Realistically, they have more clout than the governing agencies.”
Three hours later, the rooms are clean and checked. Even the hallway, which had blood splatters all the way from the living room, has been cleaned and checked three times. All bloodstains have been eradicated. There are little pit marks here and there in the walls and ceilings, but the skull pieces and flying teeth that caused them have all been scraped, scooped, and bagged. The air is pungent with the smell of chemicals, like the sealant that’s still wet on the floors, or the deodorizer that’s been sprayed in the air. It doesn’t smell good, but it doesn’t smell of fatality, either.
As Neal waits for the relative to arrive with the check, the phone rings and gets picked up by the answering machine.
“Hey, Dan, it’s Doug. Just calling to see if we’re still meeting this weekend. Give me a call.”
There’s a loud plastic click as the machine starts winding the tape back into position.
“I’m sorry,” Neal’s voice begins. “We can’t come to the phone right now ’cause we’re dead. Feel free to leave a message, but if we don’t get back to you, it’s because we’re dead. Have a nice day now.”
“Neal, for God’s sake!” I say.
“Whaaaat? Oh, here’s our man with the check. Let’s go.”
I collect my car and follow Neal to a Motel 6 in a place called Walnut Creek, which is between the town where Neal lives and the town where he has his office. It is nicely situated for me to hit the road at a second’s notice.
The motel room is dull—just like any room in any national motel chain anywhere in the world. But it is clean. In fact, it’s like a palace compared to the place I stayed in Santa Cruz. There’s no unpacking my suitcase, no getting undressed or even cleaning my teeth. I lie on the bed flicking through TV channels, but before anything takes my fancy I’m fast asleep.
THUMB MAN CHRONICLES
I am a fantasist. There’s no escaping it. It’s a pastime that has followed me energetically from childhood into adulthood. Here I am in my thirties and still incapable of watching an action movie without a small part of me fantasizing myself as a liberating hero. I am the longest-running James Bond ever. I get the gun, I get the car, I get the girl, and I get them several times over and in many and varied ways.
But oddly I don’t want to be a hero in everyday life. In that, I have no interest. Because, quite frankly, where does one find the time? Being a hero is highly inconvenient to personal schedules and needs.
For example, right now I am sitting outside a Mexican
restaurant in Walnut Creek. My table is up against a waist-high metal railing that separates the restaurant from the sidewalk. I am reading a book, pending the imminent arrival of chicken fajitas, when I am rudely interrupted by a Hmmm, I think to myself. Curious. But I am at a good part in the book (Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell on poverty) and so I continue to read without looking. As good as the book is, however, I find myself unable to ignore the fact that this crunch took place right next to me, practically at my feet.
And so of course I have to take a look.
On the other side of the railing lies a body, facedown and lifeless. I hear a chorus of gasps and recognize them as shock and horror.
I turn the page of my book and continue reading.
It’s not that I’m a total asshole. It’s just, well, I’m just not buying what they are selling. It looks like a lot of drama to me. The cries of “oh my GOD!” just seem like so much bad acting, like canned concern. I don’t want any part of it. The body next to me will no doubt stand up in a minute or so, feel embarrassed, but all the same dust off the pants and scuttle off as quickly as possible.
And so I read on.
“Mom?” I hear.
“Mom?” again.
“Are you okay? Mom?”
I have been brought up with manners, believe it or not. I shouldn’t sit here reading. I know this, of course. And given that the daughter is genuinely starting to panic and the body—the mother—continues to lie limp on the ground, I shall rise and see if I can be of assistance. But I am too late, there’s already a cooperative of males circling the drama. No more than a few seconds have passed since the initial crunch, but in that time many men have sprung into action. So I decide not to rise. I have no first-aid skills, I have nothing extra to offer, and there are now several people gathered at the scene. So, I once more give a quick, cursory glance to see if there is any chance of the waitress arriving with my fajitas anytime soon, and return once again to my book.