by Alan Emmins
When the crying finally stopped, Neal calmly explained his services to the woman and told her how much it was going to cost.
“I hit her with a price and I knew immediately: ‘Oh my God, this is for me!’ Because I’m good with people generally. I can speak real well when I need to. I was able to talk her down and get her to understand what it was I was pitching to her and I gave her the price and she didn’t hesitate and I mean not one bit. She couldn’t write the check fast enough. I had never seen anybody so keen to hand over money before. It was just incredible. I think, if I could have written the check out faster she would have had me do it. And I pretty much knew right there and then, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, this is for me.’ Yeah! I was excited, dude; this is what I had been working towards. But still, I knew I had to do a good job—there’s no excuse for a bad job in this game. It’s very visual, you know. Clean means clean. You look and you look hard, that’s how I did it on that first job, and I just kept doing it that way ever since. If two months down the line somebody finds a speck of blood under the handrail or some dried brain inside the lampshade, or a skull fragment in the potpourri, then you ain’t getting recommended when her friend Doris’s daughter slits her wrists on the living room floor, you know what I’m saying? And I want that job too. I want all the jobs.”
Four weeks passed before Neal’s phone rang again. It was a building supervisor from a residential complex in Oakland Hills.
“I didn’t know shit about the job, but I could smell it from outside as soon as I got there, it was that bad. I could tell by the smell what it was going to be like. I called my sister and had her come out and help me.”
An elderly man had died of natural causes on his sofa. The sofa was positioned in front of a large window that let in the hot Californian sun of mid-July. At first glance, the job wasn’t as bad as Neal’s nose had thought. The sofa had caught most of the body fluid. There was a small puddle underneath the sofa, but little more.
“Compared to the smell, the mess was relatively small and so it should’ve just been a case of pulling the couch and cleaning up the relatively small mess underneath. But the real funk—that didn’t kick in until I jostled the couch, which stirred up all the liquids that had sat stationary for a month. It was off the fucking chart, dude. So anyway, I grab the sofa just like, ‘Oh, you’re coming with me.’ I picked up one end and body fluid just started to gush out the other end all over the wooden floor and, shit, I just panicked. I just could not believe my fucking eyes! Or my nose! The job started out as just your regular grandpa decomp, you know, but when it mixed it was just like a volcano of smells, man. To this day it’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled, by far. I’ll never forget that one. The problem was it was so humid that this stuff never got the chance to dry up. It just putrefied and putrefied and putrefied! This stuff that was coming out—let me tell ya—was this thick brown grunge-type liquid. There was already more than a bucketful and I was panicking, ’cause I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to clean this shit up, it was that bad. I was just freaking out. My sister was outside throwing up. I mean the guy had been like a four-hundred-pound dude, beached on the couch. The couch had caught everything and held it like a Ziploc. But I don’t know, I guess adrenaline just took over, ’cause I just grabbed that motherfucker, and I was screaming, and I dragged it outta there. It was extremely heavy and hard to manhandle, but I just ripped that motherfucker out. Left a nice brown stripe behind me. But I just had to get it out—the leakage was going beyond anything I was capable of cleaning at the time.”
Neal worked with the building supervisor again a few weeks later, but this time it was Neal who called him.
“I learned very quickly that the media are hungry for stories. If you look through the magazines and newspapers, there really aren’t that many good stories to focus on. I knew by the reaction that I got from everybody who heard what I was doing that this was an intriguing subject. So I started contacting newspapers and magazines, radio stations, and soon everybody was just lining up to do a story on Crime Scene Cleaners. It was crazy. The building supervisor I told you about, from the whale decomp, he was doing interviews with me on the radio.”
Today, Neal’s office walls are lined with framed articles about Crime Scene Cleaners. Some he had shown me before, on my first visit. Many of them are new. As the years pass, the media outlets seem to get bigger. The articles on the wall start with the local presses, but over the last six years Crime Scene Cleaners has been covered by everybody from Hustler to the San Francisco Tribune. Even I had a call from CNN a year or so ago; they wanted me to do an interview about my time spent with Neal. The articles and the growing media attention, the increasing coverage of the outlets, seem to suggest that Neal is using the media for his own means after all, and rather successfully, too.
And they just keep coming.
“At least once a month I have a reporter or a film crew with me. Damn, I got this woman from Japan, she calls me up like twice a week to interview me at three fucking A. M. and she can’t understand shit I say. She asks how much we make a year. I say, ‘Midseven figures.’ And she’s like, ‘Wha mi se figa?’ But I love it. Death sells. That’s why, I mean, I knew when I started this that I was going with the name Crime Scene Cleaners. You’ve seen the way people look at my truck. That thing is so eye-catching. People can’t believe what they’re seeing. It really sticks in their minds, you know. They come up to me if I’m in a line in the bank or getting coffee, if I’m in one of my T-shirts, which I always am, and they’ll be like, ‘Crime Scene Cleaners! Wow! What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen? ’”
It is ridiculous that it happens now, right as Neal is talking about being admired by his public, but five young guys have just entered the diner where Neal and I are sitting. They do not slide straight for a booth. They come down to us.
“Dude, is that your truck outside?”
I am sitting there thinking, It has to be a setup, he must be paying them.
Neal looks at me and gestures to the boys. “You see. Freaks, man.”
And as Neal and I sit there laughing, one of them adds, “Awesome!”
They crowd around the booth and without missing a beat start asking about jobs. Actually, one specific job. It seems one of the kids saw Neal’s trucks parked outside a house on his own street. He wants some details. But Neal isn’t biting.
Something catches Neal’s eye out the window. Parked in front of his truck is a very shiny, very fast-looking sports car.
“Is that yours?” he asks the kid who is doing most of the talking.
The kid smiles; he could not be any happier right now.
“Yeah,” he says.
“That’s a fucking fast car, dude!” Neal says very seriously.
“It’s off the chart,” the kid agrees. “I’ve had that—”
“Dude,” Neal cuts him off. “Be careful. Or you’re gonna have me scraping your brains off the road one day.”
All the boys erupt into laughter.
The waitress comes over and hands them several bags packed with food. It seems they were waiting for take-out. A few seconds pass before they spin away from the curb.
Turning to me, Neal says, “Where was I?” He signals to the waitress for more coffee and continues from where we had left off. “Oh yeah, but I never turn down press. I want this company to be the best, the biggest, and the most successful. I’m a pretty impatient guy. I’m very type A and extremely competitive, and all of that on top of itself tends to make for a fairly formidable—you know—opponent. ’Cause I’ll tell ya, I won’t be as smart as everyone but I’ll fucking outwork ya. I just will outwork ya and I’ll play a lot dirtier, too. You know, you better wanna win with me because I do want to win and I make no bones about it. The difference between us and other companies that do this is they try to get rich off every single job! We don’t, ’cause I want all the jobs, and we’ll do them at a decent price—and we get them. One of our biggest competitors back east, he does the cleanup
but they make most of their money on the restoration, so they don’t have to do a good cleanup job ’cause they’re gonna rip the shit out of the place and rebuild it and double bang ’em and make more money on the rebuild. Which is clever, but I don’t have that skill. I’m a janitor, I can clean anything, but I can’t drive a nail to save my life.
“What you gotta know is, when I started I didn’t get a job for months. At the start it was just me and my Chevy Geo Metro, my briefcase, and my phone. And I was an anal nervous wreck: ‘Oh my God, I’ve spent all this money and nothing’s happening, why isn’t it going?’ But I just kept bombarding people, got my name out there. I knew that once people knew about me and what I was doing, this shit would advertise itself. Gore sells, my friend! Initially my goal was one job a month, then it went to one job a week and then three jobs a week, then one a day, and then it was, ‘I wanna make a thousand bucks a day,’ and so on and so forth. Now in the Bay Area alone we’re doing around a hundred fifty jobs a month. You gotta realize … I mean just look around, this country is shit scared of death, you know what I’m saying? So if you can be the middleman between them and death, they’ll pay you a shitload of dough!”
The next job is a callback and Neal is not happy about it. Politely, he explains why to the customer.
“Doctor, the real-estate agent called in two companies to bid on this job originally—myself and my biggest competitor in the area. She bid ten thousand dollars for the job, which of course I didn’t know. I bid forty-six hundred. So of course I get the job. Now, when that job is done, the real-estate agent goes and hires my biggest competitor, who originally bid the ten thousand, and he gets her in to inspect my work. So do you think she’s gonna find something? She has to. She’s gotta try and justify what her other five grand was for because the real-estate agent ain’t gonna call her again if he finds out she costs twice the going rate.”
“I understand that,” the doctor says. “But I gotta problem: the house is sold and the buyer won’t complete until this is—”
“Sir, don’t you worry. It’s gonna be dealt with today, I assure you. But, you know, I’ll clean up in the attic again, but I think you need to get your exterminator back, and if after today you find rat droppings up there again … you know what I’m saying? If your exterminator guy hasn’t dealt with the problem on his side, then you’re gonna be calling us every day.”
As Neal works up in the musky, dark attic, collecting rat droppings and spraying the floor with enzyme, I ask him if he often bumps heads with this competitor.
“Oh, now and again, you know.”
“Do you know her personally?”
“Oh yeah, she used to work for me.”
“She did?” I ask, surprised.
“Yeah, she was with me for some months, and once she thought she knew it all she went off and started her own company.”
“Does it bother you that she did that?”
“Bother me? Hell no. Hey, it’s what I did. What’s good for me is good for everybody else. What bothers me is this kind of bullshit, where she tries to muddy my name. She should never be inspecting my work. Any idiot knows you don’t have neighboring competitors inspect each other’s work. She was probably embarrassed at having bid five grand more than me for the same job. I would have been. She probably took one look at the house, was introduced to the doc, and just saw dollar signs, you know. But that’s fine, she can play any way she wants, it doesn’t bother me none. When I start to hear that she does a better cleanup than me, then I’ll pay attention. Until then, I don’t really pay her much mind. But this is bullshit; I never try to get work by putting other companies down or picking fault in what they do.”
As unbelievable as that may sound, I can vouch for Neal’s word on this. I overheard him on the phone this morning with a customer who was making an inquiry. When Neal gave an estimate for the job, the customer must have thought it high. I listened as Neal recommended two other companies, told the customer that they both have good reputations, and that the wise thing to do would be to have all three companies come and quote on the job.
Crime Scene Cleaners currently bills over $4 million a year. The success of the company is down largely to Neal’s marketing strategy, which focuses on death, the peculiarity of his company, and the bizarreness of his own character. He is anal about doing the best cleanup, but he grabs media attention by playing to the continual need for entertainment. It’s what enabled him to stride ahead of his conservative competition early on. Before Neal launched Crime Scene Cleaners, companies with regular-sounding cleaning-company names used to be the only people to call for crime scene cleanup. Sure, they were certified to clean up biohazards, but none of them marketed death as Neal did; they marketed only cleaning.
“A cleaning company is a cleaning company is a cleaning company. ‘I got a shitload of blood to clean, should I call PPF Cleaners? Sullivan and Sullivan Janitorial Services? Miraculous Maids or Crime Scene … What the fuuuuck …? Specializing in homicide, suicide …’ That’s normally when my phone rings. People generally don’t forget the name of my company.”
Neal is right—people generally don’t forget him or the name of his company, and that fact has not gone unnoticed. Over the last few years, several other companies have cropped up, offering the same service under a similar name and actually trying their damnedest to be Neal Smither. I have had phone calls from them, after they saw my original article on Neal, asking me to go out and write about them. I wasn’t interested because I already had the Crime Scene Cleaner story, but during these conversations and e-mails I couldn’t help but notice an undertone of jealousy. One guy seemed positively angry that I wouldn’t write about him. It apparently wasn’t fair that I would write about Neal and not him. Where was the justice?
What I noticed through these little chinwags and correspondences was that the people who were following in Neal’s footsteps seemed to be doing it largely for the fame. They were after notoriety. They wanted press about themselves. Neal wants press about Crime Scene Cleaners, and he will do most of it, but he would just as happily, and often does, let journalists follow one of his other workers. Neal is not driven by fame or having his picture in the paper; he is driven by removing all traces of the recently dead, and money. That’s why he is more marketable than those who have followed in his footsteps. He came up with the idea of Crime Scene Cleaners and fought for it, was anal about its success. The cleaners I spoke to got their idea after seeing footage of Neal. It’s as if after seeing him they seemed to think, Hey, that’s a cool idea. If I clean dead people I’ll end up on TV. I’ll be a celebrity in the local bar.
But Neal doesn’t have that desire. Neal is an especially unusual individual and I saw this from the moment I met him, on pretty much an hourly basis. It wasn’t just the shock tactics. He had many and varied ways of surprising me.
One midafternoon we were on the road, speeding from job to job and checking up on the staff. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing and Neal was doing his no-handed kamikaze driving routine. There were three police cars that needed to be cleaned of blood and vomit. We rushed over to make sure that the job was being handled properly by the staff. Neal at that point wasn’t getting his hands dirty; his art at that moment was one of delegation.
“Man, I’m feeling burnt out now right now, I just can’t clean right now. Luckily, I have a lot of staff.”
“Why are you burnt out? Did something happen?” I asked.
“Yeah, you could say that. I was on a cleanup, a suicide decomp. The body had been lying on the kitchen floor for a long, long fucking time. There was shit everywhere; you know, after a time the body just oozes liquid, the whole thing just liquefies; the maggots get it. I slipped in some shit and I went down right in the middle of it. Oooh yeah, that was groovy! I was slipping around in shit, blood, spinal fluid, maggots; the works. I mean, I couldn’t get up. I was just slipping and sliding in this goo, in this human fluid. Oh, it freaked me out just a little bit … oooooooooooooh.” Neal gav
e an uncharacteristic shudder before answering his cell phone. “Okay, what’s the address? Has Eric finished the last job? Ok, send him over and tell him to suit up. I’ll be there soon to price up.”
After checking on his staff and the police cars, we got back into Neal’s truck and drove in silence for a couple of minutes. To break the quiet I asked Neal what the job was that we were heading to.
“Suicide,” he said matter-of-factly. “Alan, I wake up every morning and pray for death and it just keeps coming.”
The house we arrived at was completely smashed. Furniture was upside down. Drawers were splintered across the floor, and their contents spread everywhere. Every room seemed to be in the same condition. The smell was rank, but tolerable in comparison with a decomp earlier that day. Standing in the main bedroom was the wife of the suicide, attended to by Neal, Eric (a young, shaved-headed twentysomething who had been working for Neal three months), and myself.
We all stood in silence, looking at the splattered wall.
“High-caliber pistol to the head?” Neal asked eventually.
“Yeah,” the wife answered, sounding slightly impressed by Neal’s observation.
“The brain matter on the wall gives it away,” Neal replied. “Anyway, here’s what we’ll do. Everything with matter on it will be pulled and burned. The bed, the sheets, comforter, pillows, and carpet will all go into the furnace. We’ll pull the baseboards from the bottom of the wall in that corner where all the blood is concentrated. Once the carpet’s gone, we’ll scrub the boards where the blood is, get out what we can, then we paint a sealant over it so nothing can get out and nothing can rot. We’ll deodorize the whole house ’cause it smells pretty funky in here. We dispose of everything, it’s all burned, and you don’t have to worry about a thing.”
“How much is this all going to cost?” the wife asked.
“Eleven hundred bucks,” Neal stated.
“Will it still smell?”