Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners

by Alan Emmins

  But should somebody in Neal’s position behave differently? Can they be expected to tiptoe around the dead? To care? Surely not. If crime scene cleaners felt anything for the dead they clean, they would not last but a few months in the job. To tiptoe around death, they would have to more candidly acknowledge their closeness with it.

  Even so, I don’t think Neal’s behavior and antics are thoughtless. At the same time as drumming up media attention, he is self-protecting. His songs are a buffer against the fact that he has somebody’s brains on the end of his scraper.

  For me, having met Neal and having spent time with him, even coming to respect and like him, I can’t see how it should be anybody else in such final moments. If I were to one day find myself dead and splattered against a wall, I would want it to be Neal who came to scrape me up, and if not Neal, somebody very much like him. Don’t cry for me, crime scene cleaner! Just do a really good job.

  THE CAVALIER MAN

  Neal and I are driving around town in an erratic manner. He has chores that need doing: mailboxes that need emptying, invoices that need sending, and checks that need to be deposited in the bank. Even though there is no immediate rush, Neal still darts about like a man very short on time.

  “Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, as he jumps out of the truck to post his mail.

  He strides off at a pace in his red Crime Scene Cleaners T-shirt and beige shorts and disappears into the post office. A few seconds later he bursts back out into the sunlight. He jumps back into the truck and starts the engine quickly, causing me to wonder if he has just robbed the post office.

  “You know, I got sick once, don’t ya?” he asks as we pull sharply away from the curb. “Oh yeah, I got real sick once. I thought I was going to die. And in the last week I was really starting to get my head ready for that. I lost thirty fucking pounds in a month. Thirty, dude, and I don’t have that much weight to lose.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “Never did find out. The day I was to have a liver biopsy—you know what a liver biopsy is, right? It’s where they take a piece of your liver out and test it. That’s serious. That’s real serious! My liver was shutting down. My liver and my spleen grew enlarged. Fuck, I was sick, dude. I was living on Gatorade for three weeks. I was sick for about a month and a half.”

  “Do you think this was something you picked up on a job?”

  “Oh, I know the job I got it at.”

  For some bizarre reason, Neal goes quiet. I don’t know why. I sneak glances at him to see if it is an emotional story, to see if the fact that he nearly died catches in his throat even today. But it doesn’t look like it. He turns the music up and starts singing.

  “Neal?” I call out over the music.

  “What’s up, dude?”

  “What about this job, the one where you got sick?”

  “You wanna hear about it?” he says with a smile, and this time, without missing a beat, he continues with the story. “Well, I was in Vegas. We had press. There was a documentary crew with us and I was just, you know, too cavalier about it. I went in there without a respirator on and the lady had died of liver failure. There was urine everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Dripping outta the mattress. Pouring outta the mattress! And I fucking inhaled that shit, man! And I got sick the next day. The next day I couldn’t eat. My last meal was like, lunch the day of that cleanup, and I didn’t eat another meal for about forty-five days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t make myself eat, my body just wouldn’t take it in. But I could drink Gatorade, so I was drinking gallons of Gatorade every day. It was the only thing I could keep down, and man, I dropped weight. I fucking dropped some weight. It scared the shit outta me. And I was sick, my body was just sick. I couldn’t do anything. One week, I can remember, I was sitting in my chair and the phones were ringing and I just did not give a fuck! And man I always answer my phones. I didn’t care. I let ’em ring. I was hurting. I went to the hospital and I had so many tests, I had so much blood drawn. I had colonoscopies done. I had MRIs done. I had CAT scans done. And then the ultrasound that they do on the women, I had that done, too. They just could not figure out what the fuck was going on. They kept asking me, ‘Are you drinking? Are you drinking?’ I don’t drink! I don’t fucking drink, man! My enzyme counts were all off. It scared the shit outta me! That last week I said, ‘Fuck, I’m dying.’ So I started getting ready for that ’cause I didn’t know when, but I was sick enough that I thought it was going to be soon.”

  “What do you mean you were getting ready? How did you get ready?”

  “Just mentally, I started to get ready for it. Started to figure out what I needed to do for Lyndey. I was scared. I was really scared. And then, dude, one day, I woke up and it was like I had never been sick. I felt—”

  “Hungry?” I laugh.

  “Well yeah, I ate that day. And I didn’t eat a little, I just gorged myself. But there was nothing. I mean I felt weak, of course, but the sickness was totally gone.”

  “Did you go mad? Were you just running around like a madman now that you were better?”

  “No. I was in shock, I was scared, like, ‘It’s gone into remission. It’s gonna come back.’ So I slowed down a lot.”

  “So, how quickly did you get back into work?”

  “Oh, immediately! I had neglected everything for a—Oh, look at this asshole!”

  I am trying to see what asshole Neal refers to, but I can’t stop laughing. It’s typical Neal: “oh, I slowed down all right—to about two hundred miles per hour.”

  “What asshole?” I ask.

  “The fucking asshole behind us with red and blue lights on his fucking head. This son of a bitch is gonna give me a ticket. You watch.”

  “License and registration?”

  Neal says nothing, but hands over his documents.

  “You know these windows are too dark?” the officer asks.

  “Yeah, I do, but … You know …”

  “Well, if you know already, why have them? You’re getting a ticket.”

  “Yeah, I always do.”

  “You always do? When you get a ticket you have to have the tint removed, then get the ticket signed off to state that the tint is gone. Or at least within regulation.”

  “Oh, I’ve done that many times, officer.”

  “So what? You go get it put back on again? Why would you do that? You like paying the fines?”

  “I like paying the fines a lot more than I like people staring at me all day, hell yeah!”

  “Well, here you go. Have a nice day now.”

  “Dink!” says Neal as we drive away. “I’ll set my fucking … Mormon friends on you, asshole.”

  “Who are your Mormon friends?” I ask as we get going again.

  “They’re my friends, dude. I gave a talk to them two nights ago. They wanted me to talk to their leaders about what I do and what it costs.”

  “How did this come about?”

  “Well, the motherfucking Mormons have been knocking on my door for like a fucking year. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ and all that. And one day I got to thinking, the Mormon organization is worth fucking billions, I wonder how these boys like their coffee. Of course, they don’t drink coffee, but I invited them in all the same.”

  “And what, you’re going to join them just to get their business? You’re now committed to the sectarian dollar?”

  “Alan, don’t mock it. Do you have any idea how much money the Mormon organization is worth? Shit, I kid you not. If there are other religions out there that I can potentially make money off, damn, I’m signing you up. I’d get you room and board at Jonestown if it were still around.”

  Neal and I drive along, laughing. I am wondering if Neal really would sign me up to a religious sect, but going by the expression on his face, he is not considering if he would sign me up to a religious sect, but which religious sect to offer me to first.

  “Hahaha,” Neal breaks out in giggles. “You’d look real cute as a Mormon, Alan.”
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  THE DARK LORDPERFORMS A JEDI MIND TRICK

  We are on our way to Richmond to price up the clearance of a garbage house. You have more than likely seen them on TV. They pop up now and again in films and docudramas. Whenever there’s a need to portray a local nut whom all the kids in the neighborhood are scared of (though there’s always one little fat kid who pretends not to be scared in order to win some kudos), the hoarder in the house full of trash and cats is a character often opted for.

  Garbage houses with lost and forgotten, sometimes crazy, sometimes just old, proud and lonely people inside litter every state map in America. Cleaning garbage houses after the long-forgotten occupants die and decompose in their beds is a big part of Neal’s business.

  As we arrive at the house, the owners, or at least the very, very new owners—the ones who flew in from out of town to organize the clearout and the quick-as-you-can sale of the house—are waiting for us on the driveway.

  The windows have all been boarded over and the front door fitted with new locks. The new owners won’t be going into the house with Neal and me. They say the smell is too strong.

  Such houses are called garbage houses not least because they are full of garbage; it also has a lot to do with the fact that the garbage is arranged exactly as it is on a garbage dump. It’s as if somebody plucked the roof off and then an oversized truck came along and dumped the garbage inside the house. It’s packed in really tight. It even looks like it’s been bulldozed into position, but of course it hasn’t. This is the human hand at work. The plastic bags are piled up high and mixed in size and color and contents, exactly like at the local dump. Actually, now that I think about it, I think I know what happened here. The occupant, while out for a stroll one day, saw a nice garbage mound and decided, to save on time and labor, to build a house around the mound itself. The only thing this enclosed dump site lacks is several hundred scavenger birds circling and squawking above. There are living things circling, though they are not squawking. They buzz and fly at face height.

  But the smell is of greater concern and importance. I follow Neal through the house wondering how long I can hold my breath for. I haven’t forgot his “I nearly died” story, and I am not wearing a mask.

  In the first room there is a bed piled high with garbage bags, blankets, magazines, bottles, letters, and empty air-freshener cans. On the other side of the mound is a dressing table, still equipped with beauty products, which are covered in dust and cobwebs. There is also a TV. The standby light glows, but the screen is a mass of dust. More cobwebs hang between the television and the wall. It’s as if the occupant got bored and stopped living in the room one day without as much as a glance back as he or she started tossing garbage in there.

  The kitchen is an abominable mess. Here the occupant decided to dispense with the formality of garbage bags. Sauce bottles, drink cartons, food packets—just about everything you can imagine—have been tossed in here loose. Flies flit back and forth, hopping from plastic bottles to empty cans. I am not convinced that they are going to find what they want anymore, but they show no sign of giving up.

  The smell is always there, but sometimes it manages to get deep down in the lungs. My stomach gags. I have to go back to holding my breath if I want to keep my latte down.

  The bathroom is the only room that has been kept free of debris. At least the occupant realized that human waste should be disposed of in the traditional manner. But this room, while free of empty ketchup bottles, is still rank. It’s like something you might expect in a film about people left to rot in dank, infested prison basements.

  “Alan, keep it in!” I hear Neal say over my shoulder. “Dude, you can’t throw up here. Hold it in. Hold it in. Alan, concentrate … Hold it in!”

  Neal sounds like a counselor as he coaches me through the process of not vomiting. Still, it works. It does take several gags before I have myself under control, but I do get the better of the reflex. The problem is that there are six other rooms to inspect.

  Neal reaches all the rooms ahead of me, kicking doors open on arrival. They are all jam-packed. I don’t want to go into the rooms anymore, so I just peek in through the doors. I have the feeling that it will never end, that as we continue down the twisting hallway, pop in and out of rooms, we will always be greeted with more doors and, hence, more garbage.

  Even the hallway is packed full of garbage, scum, and flies that send me skittering about in my bids not to touch or tread on anything. But this garbage, it’s not all food cartons and sauce bottles. Jutting out at odd angles are signs of life: an old clock, a jacket, a birthday card. There are signs of a life lived here, but where there’s space for a human being to have lived in it I don’t know. I can’t even begin to think where this person slept.

  In one of the last rooms, I find out. On a small tan fabric sofa, opposite a television, are the body fluids of the recently decomposed. This room is deep inside the pit. Whenever this person went to the toilet, opened the door, or pretty much did anything, it would have involved quite a trek from this room, through mounds of garbage and clouds of flies.

  Back outside, on the driveway, I want to fall to my knees and drink the clean air. But the clients are waiting for us there and so I put on a brave face and try to maintain my calm.

  “Okay, we’re looking at—at least six large Dumpsters here.”

  Neal begins to tell them what is needed and what the cost will be: “I’ll put four guys on it and it will take two full days. It’s going to cost you about forty-five hundred dollars. Now you don’t have to answer right away. Like I said, my name is Neal. I’m the president of the corp. You need anything, you just get me on the phone.”

  For a minute it looks as if Neal is going to walk off. Does he want the job or is this part of another Jedi mind trick?

  “No,” one of the women says quickly and firmly. “We want you to do it. We want to get the house on the market. Can you do it this week?”

  It strikes me as a little odd that the two women are so well groomed for this occasion. Their clothes are well made; gold brooches and diamond rings sparkle in the sunlight. Their hair is styled in big dramatic balls. You can’t get your hair buffed and buoyed up like that without professional rigging, specialist tools, and a team of trained assistants. It is clear that they both have visited the hair salon recently, I would even go as far as to say today.

  And why not? I suppose. Maybe they are going to a party after. Maybe they didn’t know their relative was dead and they just popped around to pay a surprise visit on their way to a gala. You could hardly expect them, on finding the dead relative, to turn to each other and say, “I don’t know about you, but I feel a little overdressed.”

  “How does Wednesday grab you?” says Neal, making me jump, making me realize I have been staring at his clients. Even though I turn away, I am still focusing on them. I can’t picture the relationship between the two women before me and the person who must have lived in this house. Where do they connect? Two are overly turned out to meet a crime scene cleaner and the other was living in foul conditions.

  “Oh, that would just be great,” one of the women says. “I am so grateful to you, you don’t understand.”

  “You bet. Anything of importance we find we’ll put to one side, any deeds or money.”

  “You will? Because we caught one of the neighbors in here. We think they were stealing money.”

  Neal is on the phone as we drive away in the truck, but he is paying enough attention to notice that I am once again about to vomit. Without discussion or signal he pulls sharply into the edge of a grass verge. I open the door, lean out, and throw up. He hands me a tissue while still on the phone. I lean out, gag once more, and wipe my mouth. Neal starts driving off while the door is still open.

  “Dude, if I was that way inclined,” he tells me as I close the door, “I could’ve hit her up for another grand at least!”

  I start laughing immediately. Neal thinks I am laughing at his words, but I am not. Are there
to be no inquiries into my well-being? I was only hanging out the door being sick, after all.

  I feel sad about the situation we left behind. Why are the family members there so quickly after death when there is a house to be claimed, and not when there’s a life to claim? It’s very easy, of course, to sit here wiping vomit off my chin while rewriting somebody else’s life, making decisions based upon my empty conclusions. Maybe there are a thousand valid reasons why. But still, at this point, with a body stain on a sofa, a house full of garbage, and two well-dressed and at times embarrassed relatives on the driveway, it is cutting and depressing.

  “Why did you say that about finding money? Is it normal to find money in such places?” I ask Neal, wanting to get away from my thoughts.

  “Fuck yeah. You gotta understand, these people are old. They all lived through the Depression, where all the banks went belly-up. These people lost their houses, their savings, their lives. So they don’t trust banks. So yeah, in houses like that where somebody elderly has died, you generally find a lot of cash, or lots of bonds. We found like twenty grand in one house just like that, just envelopes everywhere full of cashed benefits and bonds. It was just so much money. Did you hear she said they thought the neighbors had been stealing? That’s common, too. Neighbors get in there and pretend to help, maybe they go grocery shopping for them once a week, but really they’re just robbing them.”

  “Why do you think people choose to live this way? Buried in their own garbage, I mean. Do you think they are mentally ill and should be in a home?”

  “I don’t think it’s a choice as in A-B-C. Some of them are mentally ill, but, dude, often it’s because these people are just proud fucking people. It’s pride that gets them in this mess. They get old and eventually they can’t contain themselves and they don’t want people to know. They don’t want people to see them like that. They’re too proud to ask for help. They lose their grip on the house, can’t physically cope, but they wouldn’t dare call anyone in because they don’t want to be dependent on anybody. They don’t want people to know that they can’t cope. Then the place gets to a point where they’re too embarrassed to let anybody in. Before they know it, they’re completely bedridden and that’s that.