The Dead Janitors Club (2 page)

    The top cat apologizes briefly and instructs Osama to unlock the door. His assistant steps forward nervously, holding a small handful of painter's protective breathing masks, but the master waves him back. The top cat then simply states that they will be downstairs when I am through and stands by the open door to let me pass, which is definitely a good sign for my pocketbook. He doesn't want to see anything more than a bill.

    I step past him into the room, not waiting for the others to join me. They don't. The room, which is more opulent than I had anticipated, stifles the clip-clop of executive shoes moving away from the door in unison.

    Decorated to allow for the matched prestige of the lobby, the suite is three rooms—a living room, a bathroom, and, down a slight hallway, a bedroom. I check first for the presence of a minibar that I could get into trouble with, but finding none, I plunge down the hallway toward the bedroom.

    The place doesn't have the rank odor of death attached to it, which is nice but mostly expected. Unlike homes or apartments, which can be left unchecked for months in the right circumstances, hotels have a quick drop-to-flop ratio (that is, from the time the bodies drop to the time the maid comes in to flop out the bedding and the towels and then cross herself while jabbering hysterically at the sight of some ruined and eviscerated ex-human).

    I check the bathroom en route to the bedroom. The bathroom is immaculate, much to my dual relief and concern. Concern because the tiled multi-surfaces of the bathroom are generally conducive to easy cleaning. Relief at the overall cleanliness of the bathroom, however, because I indulged in a meal of Jack in the Box late the night before, and it is beginning to push its way out. Few things are more of a bummer than having to take a dump amid the unsanitary and potentially disease-riddled innards of some jilted, joyless corpse.

    Walking into the bedroom, I can scarcely contain my glee for the moments it takes to complete my survey of the room. It is clean, save for the bed, which is a king-size wreck of tangled sheets, dark-red blood (which means the unlucky fucker bled through), and one very, very soiled remote control. Finally I can laugh, exhaling a great torrent of cheery exclamations, doubtlessly heard through paper-thin walls.

    It is a dream scene. This wrecked life, its remnants spread gashed before me on the large bed, in its temerity was probably too miserable to run screaming through the room splaying its hacked-at wrists outward, polluting the walls with its cherry-red essence. No, whoever it was stayed perfectly still, mummylike in the center of the bed, bleeding slowly out into the night, the linens catching the life that he or she let slip away.

    I even flip the mattress upward, as experience has taught me, smiling broadly when I ascertain that nothing has even leaked down to the box spring. Sometimes when people rot, their guts collect inside the mattress, and when you go to move the damn thing, all their guts go splashing out onto the flooring. But that isn't the case here.

    So as I wrap up my inspection and get ready to start cleaning, I'm feeling pretty good about this one. It's a simple job that will net me five hundred or so dollars for less than an hour of work. I bet they even have HBO on the living room TV that I can kill time with so these sharply dressed ethnic men will feel as if they have gotten their money's worth. Too bad about the lack of a minibar, though.

* * *

Of course, I wasn't always this way—this racist, uncompassionate whelp who sees dead bodies as dollar signs and trauma as a means to a fancy dinner out with my girlfriend. No, I wasn't always like this. I used to be unhappy.

    Picture yourself standing in a line at a retail store. It's a long line, and the clerk has to wrap and bag every item of the customer several people ahead of you. You grow irritated because the store hasn't bothered to open any other checkout counters, even though there are three people ahead of you and two people behind you.

    All the customers are equally displeased, as they all have many places to go and this particular clerk seems to be taking forever. It has easily been six minutes since you got in line to check out, and you need the items that are in your cart, so you can't just step out and refuse any further patronage of said nameless store. You're also tired from having to navigate your SUV all over town and deal with traffic and other hazards of shopping. You just wish the clerk would hurry up.

    Finally it's your turn and the clerk apologizes politely, if not seemingly a bit insincerely. You let him reach over the counter and into your cart to grab your purchases so he can scan them, refusing him any help whatsoever. All the while, you tell him how irate you are at having been so shabbily treated. He apologizes again and offers to get the manager to help make it right, but you are tired, and the manager will most likely just be a more slovenly, older version of this idiot who stands before you.

    You aren't going to go down that road again, and you tell the clerk this in a biting, grating tone that perfectly conveys how you feel. As he sets the last of your bags in your cart, you make a tart aside about how you don't know if you will be a repeat customer anymore. He blinks a couple of times and the corners of his mouth twinge, and yet he says nothing other than to wish you a better day in a flat, emotionless tone.

    Mostly forgotten, you steer out of the store, pushing your cart away and feeling better now that you are almost finished with your day and had the chance to do a little venting at some moron's expense. Really you aren't a bad person, or even a mean person, but sometimes life doesn't go your way and you have to let someone know it.

    If you can picture that scenario perfectly, then know that I, Jeff Klima, hate you. I more than hate you, in fact. If you had tried that scenario outside of that retail environment, I would have beaten you to death. I still might. You see, for two and a half years I was that clerk at a Beverages & More, an upscale chain of wine shops in Orange County, California.

    You mistakenly thought that the clerk, me, was responsible for the corporate policy that understaffed the store and required that the glassware bought by the customers preceding you had to be wrapped nicely in bubble wrap or paper bags to avoid breakage.

    Know that while you had to stand there inconveniently for ten minutes or less, I had been standing there for five hours. And the bullshit amount that they called my paycheck didn't make it any more pleasurable or tolerable. And believe me, I was trying to do something about my situation.

    But I didn't have an SUV—I was in debt up to my ears from rent and school tuition that didn't come anywhere near getting paid on what I made in a month or a year, and it wasn't easy trying to be responsible and stay alive free of mom and dad while driving around in a beat-up Chevy Cavalier that I paid for myself.

    And you didn't make it any easier on me when you were buying Bordeaux that you didn't need to add to your collection. You made me feel on the outside what you must feel like on the inside: a real miserable son of a bitch.

    If, on the other hand, you can't picture that little scenario, then welcome aboard. You seem like a friendly, cheerful person, and I can definitely deal with more of that in the world of the living. So if you're interested in blood, guts, funny stories, and the crazy couple of years I had going from being a shat-upon liquor store clerk to becoming a bad-ass crime scene cleanup guy, then hang the fuck on, because I've got a hell of a tale to tell you.

The number-one question I get asked about the crime scene business is "how can you do it?" Typically I give the polite, short answer: "Someone has to," accompanied by a wan shrug. But in truth, that isn't even the tip of the iceberg. I do it for two very good reasons, and though I can't pretend they are the main reasons, they definitely are part of it.

    I was born on September 11, 1981, the son of a magician and a psychologist. My father was a stage performer, and my mother was a school psychologist who analyzed the inner workings of children's minds, so it was no surprise that I wound up a bit odd.

    In fact, my whole family is a bit odd. Everyone is on medication for a myriad of very real disorders, with the exception of me. And I probably should be, too, but I'm terrified that medication will dull the spark that makes me the individual that I want to be. Or at the very least, I'm worried that medication will shrink my penis.

    There are six people in my immediate family: my parents, who are still happily married; my older sister, Shaine, one of those religious types with a bipolar disorder; me; and my younger brothers, Chris and Ben, both creative types like me, who are prone to bouts of depression, anger, and attention deficit disorder. We're probably bipolar-lite, the lot of us.

    We grew up in Sun Valley, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, in a house my mother inherited when her parents died. While it had been an ideal place for my mom to grow up with
her
brothers and sisters, the neighborhood had long since been seized by gangs, and I don't mean those crazy-fun dancing gangs from
West Side Story
.

    By the time we were born, the area had become a dangerous place to live, a ghetto, where bullets zinged down alleys in pursuit of victims and street brawls with chains and bats were commonplace.

    My parents once told me a story of how my sister Shaine and I, roughly aged three and four, were playing in the backyard of our little house on Haley Street. They say I walked into the house asking my parents where the kitty cat was. My mom wanted to know why.

    "Because a man out back wants to see Shaine's pussy," I said.

    My dad flew outside in time to chase some creep back over our six-foot concrete wall. It wasn't the last straw, but it was damn close.

    In January 1990 we packed our bags and moved north to the very top of California. Eureka was a charming little burg, nestled between the mountains and the bay, with a population somewhere around twenty-eight thousand. My mom had visited Eureka in her youth and had always wanted to move there. For better or worse, it was the polar opposite of Los Angeles.

    In Los Angeles I had been a popular kid on the playground, funny and well liked by the ethnic mix of low-income urchins who attended Canterbury Elementary School. But those Eureka kids were different. To them I was just another poor, big-city kid from far away, looking to get invited to their birthdays and clog up the dodgeball court with my presence. The elementary school in Eureka already had plenty of well-liked, funny kids and didn't seem to want to welcome another one, so I switched to the second most natural role for me, the quiet loner.

    Ricky Moses was one of my first friends in town. We met at a Mormon church. We were just five days apart in age, but we truly bonded over religion…or, rather, our dislike of it. Both of us were raised Mormon, and our parents made the two of us attend the church services, which was an absolute ruin of a beautiful Sunday. So naturally we clicked in thinking up methods to find our way out of the church and into the redwood forest surrounding it.

    Ricky was a bad kid in a good way. His round face, overloaded with freckles that ran clear up to his curly red hair, always reflected the fact that Ricky didn't give a damn about authority, which was something that impressed me immensely. I instantly became the Tom Sawyer to his Huck Finn.

    Religion hadn't been a problem for me in Sun Valley, because none of my school buddies' parents allowed them to come over to my house, thanks to its ghetto location. So church was where I went to be with kids my own age. I didn't like getting dressed up every Sunday morning, but I didn't know any other reality.

    When I moved to Eureka, though, my eyes were opened to the splendor that was a Sunday afternoon. Kids were out riding bikes, exploring, signing up for peewee football, or just lounging and basking in their freedom. At the Klima house, however, Sunday was "family day," a day when we all hung out with each other, couldn't have friends over, and couldn't leave the house, other than to go play among ourselves in the backyard.

    Church evolved from my social life into my social prison. Worse, with the exception of Ricky, all of the other kids at church whom I could socialize with were feebs and wieners.

    But Ricky was like a twelve-step program for me that combated my naturally shy disposition, a personality trait that I inherited from my mother's side of the family, one that hadn't yet formed while I was living in Sun Valley. My brothers and sister were all performers, taking after my father, so they had all adapted and made friends easily in Eureka. Ricky was all I had. So when Ricky joined Boy Scouts, I joined Boy Scouts, too, even though my heart wasn't in camping or tying knots or earning merit badges. Eventually scout campouts became cathartic for me while giving Ricky all the more opportunity to get into trouble through such activities as pooping where we shouldn't or stealing other troops' tents. Fishing poles were another frequently heist-worthy item, made easier by the fact that they could easily be thrown away after use. Ricky was a hell of a friend and got me into some crazy (and scatological!) adventures that, left to my shyness, I would otherwise not have known.

    Ricky got into drugs at a ridiculously young age, though, which was an adventure that I was too afraid to join him on. When I was just out of the sixth grade and just through my school's anti-drug D.A.R.E. program (which had made perfect sense to me), Ricky brought a bag of marijuana along on a campout.