The Dead Janitors Club (31 page)

    Old people posed another problem as well. When people advance in age, their balance gets unsteady, and they constantly need to put their hands out in hallways and against walls to keep themselves upright. This, coupled with dementia and senility, results in what we in the crime scene business call "train tracks." "Train tracks" are created by an old person's inability to fully wipe after using the restroom, and as such, their dirty fingertips, trailing down the wall, steadying the body, create long thin smears of contamination along midlevel surfaces. (This is why you should never touch the walls in an old person's house.)

    Dead alcoholics would become a hallmark of this period, but another hallmark was the consistency of Motel 6 jobs. At Motel 6 after Motel 6 in Southern California, we were constantly getting the call out for some manner of craziness. Gunfights, murders, suicides, regular fights; in one extreme case, a man took a screwdriver to the eye (not self-inflicted).

    It all became a part of the daily mill that had become my life. I believed that with the county at our backs and death in our sails, the good times were there to stay. I was frivolously spending the untaxed money I was making on lavish dinners and unnecessary toys, ignoring the debt of school loans and credit cards, leaving those bills for another day. (To save himself money, Dirk had me operating as an "independent contractor" instead of an employee.)

    Yet, on another level, I was burned out on working and worried about the long-term effects of the job on my mental and physical health. I had begun to smell death everywhere, with a heightened awareness of the malodors of rotting blood and decomposition in supermarkets, on streets, and everywhere else. It was having a chilling effect on my psyche as I began to picture horrific crime scenes in the most common of places, knowing that something bad had likely occurred there at some point.

    In parks, hotel rooms, and stores, I could visualize how the yellow police tape would be laid out, hanging off shelves and available surfaces; picture how the blood would look, depending on how long it would have the chance to sit; and where the brains, skull fragments, and various other bits and pieces would hit and come to rest. It was an unsettling time for me, and it culminated in a scene close to home.

    Early one morning, Dirk rousted me with an aggravating phone call. The bleating plea of my phone had replaced the clang of an alarm clock as my least favorite noise. He had received a call out for an apartment complex in Fullerton with an address that seemed awfully familiar. It was for Sycamore Terrace, where Chris and I had lived happily until they stole my car and raised our rent. I drove down reluctantly, still exhausted from crime scenes the previous day and yet morbidly eager to revisit my old haunt.

    The apartment complex looked newer and fresher somehow, as if they had decided to class up the joint the day after we moved out. I parked in the "prospective tenant" parking, which was fiercely off-limits to actual tenants, and wandered in. The curvaceous Latina manager who had chewed me out during the battle over the Red Rocket was manning the front desk when I walked in. She looked as good as ever.

    I ambled up to her, feeling the weight of the bags under my eyes, and introduced myself namelessly as "the guy from O.C. Crime Scene Cleaners." She studied me for a second, finding something familiar in my face perhaps, and then let it go. She summoned a maintenance guy to take me to the scene. I recognized him as one of the thug employees who'd made me fear for my electronics equipment during my live-in time.

    He led me down the familiar pathways that I remembered oh so well, past the laundry room I'd used, the pool and workout room I didn't use, past the billiards room I had used once. It was all unnerving as he marched me back, each fork in the path we took leading me closer to my apartment.

    When I had first got the call, I had been elated that something could have happened in my old apartment…that the next tenant had been murdered or a washing machine had exploded, launching a thick bolt like a guided missile through the thin walls of the apartment and into the ocular cavity of some masturbating new tenant.

    But as I drew nearer and nearer to the possibility that it might indeed be my old apartment, 1571, letter H, I hoped it wasn't. I was already having enough frustration with my current station in life, and I didn't want the added knowledge that I had ever been that vulnerable. That the guy who replaced me in my porn job was murdered was bad enough; to know I could have died in the safety of my comfortable apartment might have shattered me.

    The maintenance thug stopped in the courtyard of my old apartment, with some stranger's furniture taking up residence on the patio that I'd called mine. My stomach dropped as he considered it, spinning around slowly, unsure which of the five or so apartments in the near vicinity was the one. I realized then that, after all, I wanted it to be mine.

    Now knowing that it was indeed in the courtyard of apartments that I'd once called home, I realized that I had known all the neighboring tenants to some degree, from simple hellos to involved conversations to actually hanging out and drinking with them. The only tenant I didn't know in the area was the one currently taking roost in my old home. If anyone, I wished death on that person. At least I didn't know him.

    Finally turning, the maintenance guy selected the downstairs apartment diagonal to mine. With an awakening jolt, I realized it was the Mexican family, the ones with the little kid who would sit on his plastic car and roll it noisily over the still-present cracks in the pathway. I could easily remember the grinning kid on his car, the mother nervously trailing after, embarrassed for the amount of noise her son was creating. It had been irritating then, but now that I feared that something had happened to the little guy or his shy mom, the noise seemed somewhat endearing.

    As soon as the door was unlocked for me, I could see it had the potential to be "one of those days." Splashes of blood greeted me on the furniture, carpeting, and walls throughout the living room, and the trails seemed to continue through all major access points to the room.

    I walked into the kitchen, following a thicker blood trail that made the leap from the living room carpet to the hard tile of the kitchen. The trail stopped—or, actually, started—at an open cutlery drawer containing numerous serrated-edged steak knives.

    "What happened to the family that lived here?" I asked, my curiosity overwhelming my wish to stay anonymous.

    "They weren't here when it happened," the bald thug responded casually, unaffected by the carnage around him. I figured he'd seen his share of shit on the street.

    "What did happen?" I probed.

    "There was an uncle living with them, and he became suicidal. They left him home alone, and he took a knife and he slashed both his wrists and cut his own throat.

    "That would do it," I confirmed as if I were an authority on killing oneself. I followed the blood trail around the apartment as it crisscrossed over itself in numerous places. Evidently, after hacking open his neck and forearms, the uncle had run through the two-bedroom apartment flailing his arms wildly, attempting to dispatch all eight pints of blood in as broad an area as he could.

    It was heartbreaking to survey, knowing that the family was not a rich one—the father worked as a handyman at an apartment complex not unlike Sycamore Terrace, and the mother worked nights somewhere. They traded off on raising their young son.

    The kid's bedroom had been converted so that he and the uncle could share the space, and the uncle, based on the amount of blood spilled, had spent some time in that bedroom, contemplating the kid's toys. The push car that the boy had noisily ridden around the complex, waking me up early in the morning after late nights at my bouncing job was in there, too, splashed with an unnatural red on its white body.

    Pulse juice lay splayed across both beds in the room and the one in the master bedroom as well, where the despondent uncle had also taken the time to bleed into the wife's panty drawer.

    From there, sensing that the end was coming, the man had snatched a crucifix off the wall and gone into the front bathroom, where he lay down in the tub to die. While there was an abundance of blood throughout the rest of the apartment and all its rooms, it was paltry compared to the damage he'd inflicted upon the walls and ceiling of the bathroom. Only in small patches could you discern the original paint color of the walls, and the tub, for all intents and purposes, was now permanently stained red. His body had ejected all the blood it had contained, leaving the man a pale, dry husk clutching tight to a crucifix. Though his body was gone, the crucifix remained in his place, the small Jesus coated in more blood than he himself had ever spilled.

    I stepped outside to call Dirk and request his presence on the job.

    "Can't tonight," he intoned in an awkward, quick voice he'd adopt whenever it seemed like he was telling a lie. "Taking the kid to Disneyland."

    "I can't do this by myself," I pleaded with him, thinking of the sheer amount of furniture, mattresses, and carpeting that would have to be discarded, not to mention the repainting of the bathroom, which would never see those same walls clean again. I tried to convey the magnitude of the job that was before me, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.

    "Call one of the girls to help you, but make sure you bid it low so we get the job," he suggested before hanging up.

    "Did you used to live here?" the Latina manager asked when I walked back into the main office. I nodded, ashamed now for not mentioning it earlier. "I thought so," she concluded. "I never forget a face."

    I wanted to make some further comment about how she fucked up my existence with her rent-raising ways, but instead I good-naturedly handed her my bid and told her to call if we got the job. There were two other companies arriving to compete for the business. I didn't know what their bids would be, but I felt confident the number I'd scribbled out for her would be more expensive…a lot more expensive. There was no way she'd be calling to offer us the gig. I was right, of course, and it earned me a nice, relaxing day off.

Death, like the Macarena, is a trend. Sure, everybody does it, but not everybody does it the same way…like the Macarena. As an expert in the death business—and to a certain extent, the Macarena business— I've seen many of the more common ways people have left the planet. But sometimes one way in particular suddenly becomes all the rage. The latest trend seemed to be the maggot-eaten leftovers stemming from unattended alcoholism.

    The death rattle of an alcoholic is not a pleasant one for anybody concerned. For the family members, it is akin to watching someone slowly poison himself or herself; to the alcoholic it is a painful process of body parts ceasing to function and fluids and secretions being forced into other parts of the body. Upon death, a lot of black, bloody phlegm gets coughed up and surrounds the top half of the body, while feces, similar in appearance to the phlegm, tends to surround the lower half. For the crime scene cleaner, it's a smelly, messy way to earn a paycheck.

    Our new best friends at the Public Guardian's office called us out to a scene for a fat, drunken wreck of a human being who died on his mattress and stayed there until the smell got the police involved. We were working with Mona Spears herself, our chief liaison from the P.G.'s office. She had the kind of big ass that looked like it was incorrectly bolted to her slightly smaller frame. Despite a hard-on for nicotine, she was friendly enough, though. Mona had helped secure us some past jobs, and everything between her and us was hunky-dory. So when she called us out to help with the fat man, we were quick to respond.

    Dirk once again begged off on the work and sent me with Kim instead. Kim was eager because she'd broken her "death cherry" on the hipster at the Hotel Pepper Tree and was frothing for more guts. She wanted to know the pungent sting of decomposition, and I was eager to give it to her.

    Kim's zeal for the dead was intoxicating, and I fantasized on more than one occasion about her and me out on some Natural Born Killers bender: Kim, me, a bottle of whiskey, shotguns, and her clit ring…just out for anything. I never told her about those fantasies, though. Those aren't the kind of things that you can tell just anyone. (Hi, Grandma!)

    The dead man's aroma was hovering in the building of bi-level apartment cottages like a nimbus cloud, and I could smell him from the parking lot. It said a lot about the neighborhood that a smell that bad could go unnoticed for that long. Even Kim was rethinking her zest for the assignment when, as we got closer, she realized that the odor wasn't some neighbor scrambling bad eggs.

    Upon opening the front door of the man's abode, Mona backed away quickly, choosing instead to take a smoke break on an adjacent stairwell. Kim requested a respirator mask before we proceeded, and being manly, I strode in quickly, wishing I weren't so manly.

    The place was a home absent of furniture. He was a computer programmer in some capacity, what with his box-loads of parts and makeshift computing equipment spread across the floor. He couldn't have been that good a programmer, though, because I recognized most of the components as being older than I was, and his movie collection was all in VHS. The living room of the one-bedroom apartment looked the way it might if you had asked someone in the early 1980s to describe what a hacker's apartment would look like in twenty-five years.