So when people ask me why I got into the crime scene business, I can't say that Ricky and Christopher instantly pop into my mind, but they are definitely baggage that I pull along with me on every scene I work.
It probably was only an intense yearning to finally rid myself of the misery that was retail employment that prodded me into the business of scooping up the dead, though. I had my thumb out on the employment expressway, and crime scene cleaner just happened to be the truck that stopped.
CHAPTER 3
a new hope
Don't worry about life. You're not going to survive it anyway.
—Unknown
The two and a half years I spent working at Beverages & More after leaving the porn biz were dismal, a real drain on my soul. That fact really bummed me out, considering that working in a wine shop was probably the best retail job on the planet. To me, though, that only made it the cutest girl in an ugly contest.
I wanted to be a good and exemplary employee, one of those guys who whistled while he worked and always had a grin ready, no matter what the situation. But retail was retail, no matter how much "sampling" we were allowed to do at the liquor store. All too quickly, the work once more became mind-numbing and repetitive.
I needed something more challenging, more creative, and with my school loans completely wiped out for the year, something better paying. By then, fall of 2004, I was back in school at California State University, Fullerton, working toward my advertising degree. BevMo was flexible around my class schedule, but the well of my humanity was drying up quickly.
While toiling at BevMo, I had begun to grow surly toward the customers and increasingly lazy in my job performance, which swerved violently against everything that I had resolved to do as a retail employee. During the day, while the manager (shockingly, a really good guy) was there, I would perform above and beyond expectations in my menial tasks as a way to endear myself to him.
The second he was gone, though, I would head into the stockroom and crack open a few German beers while whiling away the hours playing mini-golf on the store's inventory computer. If the night supervisor was finally able to convince me to get off the computer, which he frequently couldn't do, I would go outside under the guise of gathering shopping carts, only to disappear into a nearby Circuit City for an hour to browse their DVD selection.
It was as if I was subconsciously begging to get fired but smart enough to realize that I needed the income, so I would eke out what needed to be done while the manager was around, just enough good work to make him think that the night supervisor was full of shit.
I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the ramshackle, dustbowl north territory of Orange County. The Joads would have flipped their shit if they had moved from the scenic Midwest and wound up in dismal North Orange County. The more prototypical Orange County residents derisively referred to the area as "NORCO." It's the industrial sector of Orange County, a place mostly left out of that show
The O.C.
A lot of the folks who cleaned estates and mowed lawns for the elite living in "South County" commuted down from their homes around me in NORCO.
I was living with my brother Chris, four years my junior. He wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and be an entertainer, maybe the next David Letterman or Jon Stewart. Chris was a tall, handsome but chubby kid who spent hours every day on a skateboard until he thinned out. He worked at Home Depot, and Disneyland before that, while attending a junior college in the area with an emphasis on TV and radio broadcasting. Chris and I were not all that close growing up, but as adults struggling to survive on our own, we were bonded in the manner of best friends. Lacking money, know-how, or experience, we forged an existence that was both sour and sweet, taking on adversity headlong because we knew no other way.
When we moved in, there was no refrigerator in the apartment. Neither of us had a truck or knew anyone in the area, so we ended up buying a fridge at the local Goodwill store and pushing it on a dolly the two and a half miles through the ghetto streets and hills back to our apartment, mocked by thugs and passersby along the way, only to find out the fridge was too big for the kitchen. As Charles Dickens wrote in
A Tale of Two Cities
, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…"
We lived in Sycamore Terrace, the most affordable apartment complex in town. Well maintained, the complex was built on the edge of the dangerously seedy area of Fullerton, the kind of place where white guys had no business jogging or riding skateboards at night. But for two brothers sharing one bedroom, the price was right at nine hundred dollars a month, plus utilities.
The neighbors were nice folks, if not all a bit clichéd. Across from us upstairs, we had the snooty couple who never talked, even when we said "hi" to them. Downstairs from them was a hardworking Mexican family with a young son who rode his plastic-molded car up and down the cracked pavement of our shared walkway.
Next over was the fitness addict, Doug, who could never remember our names and always had ridiculously hot-sounding women over to his house for drinking, smoking weed, and sex of the rough variety. We rarely saw the women, but through concrete walls that were more water than rock, everyone could hear them. Regularly, Doug would strut around the complex, shirt off to showcase the thin, red slits raked the length of his back that could only have been made by fingernails in passion.
Chris and I spent many nights on the patio, drinking beers, playing chess, and enjoying the company of the occasional passerby. It was a nice place, maintained by maintenance guys who looked like ex-cons and made you want to hide your electronics equipment before they came to service your apartment. I could have called it home for a long time.
* * *
But the good times couldn't last. I was enrolled in school, working as many hours as I could squeeze around my class schedule, and paying monthly dues to a school fraternity I had joined to make friends. I had barely enough cash to survive as it was—the proverbial weeks of eating nothing but ramen noodles and drinking non-Blue-Ribbon Pabst (yes, they have another,
cheaper
brand) were a big part of my life. And then the apartment complex raised the rent.
I didn't like to think it was a personal attack; I'm sure they raised everyone's rent. But it was a little suspicious, because not too long before the rent change, the apartment complex had stolen my car.
Let me explain: I raced out of the apartment one morning, fairly running toward my car, already close to being late to work at BevMo. I was in the midst of an experiment to time out exactly how long it would take me to get to work and punch in with not a moment to spare. This particular morning, I was already playing to the late side of things.
Stopping short of the parking area, not quite seeing my car in the space where I thought I had parked it, I was nonplussed. During this period of my life, days and nights were a little blurred together, and as a result, I wasn't always sure where I had parked my Cavalier.
I jogged around the perimeter of the apartment complex twice, frantic now as I became certain that the car was no longer there. The place had an electronic gate around it, so I was doubly worried about the abilities of high-tech thieves preying on shitty red sports coupes. Sweating, gasping, and desperate to remember if I had paid the antitheft insurance premium that month, I floundered into the complex office to report my vehicle stolen.
The assistant manager, a fat lady with eyeglass lenses doubtlessly made from the viewing ports on a space rocket and nappy hair that would have been a delight to Don Imus, sat behind a desk glowering, almost awaiting my arrival. I told her my plight, and she splayed a collective of Polaroids on the desk between us.
"Was it one of these?" she cackled.
The Polaroids were close-up photos of car license plates that looked trapped in the square frames of their pictures. One of them was indeed mine. I nodded my head yes.
"The car's registration was expired, so we had it towed," she said cruelly.
My car's tags had expired in October, and this was now the first week
of November.
"I thought you guys were an apartment complex, not a tow company," I said, incredulous. Other than mentioning that towing companies paid a nice kickback to apartment complexes to have vehicles towed off their property, she didn't feel like discussing the matter. Then she told me where I could pick up my car. It didn't seem to matter to her that my tags were, in fact, paid up and somewhere in the mail.
I was able to catch a ride to the tow company from my sister, who was in town meeting a potential roommate. To both of them I looked like a total loser. My boss at BevMo, good guy that he was, ended up being completely understanding.
At the beginning of the next month, when I paid our rent, I underpaid by $210, the cost of the towing fee, which I felt I had been improperly charged. I included a letter in the rent envelope "from my attorney" detailing how the apartment complex had wronged me and how the cost of the tow was theirs to pay.
I thought I had gotten away with it, and that the karmatic powers of the universe had sorted themselves out. However, a couple days later I received a call from the apartment complex manager. She was a curvaceous Latina girl with big boobs and low-cut shirts to match, and she definitely had the fiery temper to round out the equation. To this day, I can't explain quite what she said to me, but her tone was that of wicked and icy non-restraint, full of innuendo for a fate easily worse than death.
My only response was something to the effect of, "Ma'am I am terribly sorry about all this. I will come in this evening and give you a check for the remaining balance."
It was like getting chewed out by Satan. I wanted to continue my crusade and fight the good fight, but this bitch had caught me off guard and knocked me cold. I had never considered myself a pushover, but here was a test of manhood, and I was evidently lacking. With one phone call, she had reduced my sensibilities to that of a child's. My will defeated, I paid up.
Amazingly, though, I received a check from the tow truck company a couple weeks later, compensating me for the full amount of the tow. I think it was the apartment complex's way of admitting that they'd been ticky-tack assholes, but it was the sweetest moment of my life up to that point, and I would have framed the check were we not running precariously low on that aforementioned Pabst.
When the apartment complex suddenly raised our monthly rent by more than $170 a month, I couldn't help but wonder if that apartment complex manager wasn't Satan after all. She had placed what I thought I had wanted in front of me, only to snatch away something far more valuable, my home.
Chris and I couldn't afford that kind of increased payment, and our options seemed to be: 1. We could crawl back home to Eureka, defeated, or 2. Be homeless. My brother was enthusiastic about the second option, having always wanted to embrace his earthy, hippy side. I, on the other hand, was more inclined to create a third option.
My fraternity had a large house on Fraternity Row that was essentially four two- and three-bedroom condos linked together. I knew they had a single empty room, and Chris and I could be just the guys to fill it. The fraternity graciously suspended their bylaws to allow my brother, a nonmember, to move in. Chris and I were now officially and unofficially frat boys.
While the rent was cheaper living in a single room of the frat house, the kitchen wasn't something you wanted to cook in, due to the high proliferation of cockroaches and ants constantly investigating any and all food items. And so the cost of eating out for every meal put us right back in our original quagmire. We were also having a fine, drunken time on a nightly basis, which further drained the wallet. So the bottom line was that not only did I need to find a new job, something out of retail, but it had to pay better, much better.
* * *
Dirk Whitmore was a sheriff for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, working in the evidence storage rooms as a property handler, one of those "civilian cops" who didn't seem to want to walk a beat and be a real cop. Dirk also had a side job as owner of a DJ business that he managed on nights and weekends. But Dirk, like me, was after more money, and had grown weary of spinning "Celebration" for drunken revelers at graduations, birthdays, and funerals alike.
Somewhere along the way, he had happened upon a fairly new industry that was poking its uncertain head around Orange County, crime scene cleanup. Always having been more of a doer than a thinker, Dirk immediately contacted one of the forefathers of the crime scene cleaning industry, a guy named Schmitty.
I don't know how the industry started, but the occupation of crime scene cleaner seems to have emerged out of the late eighties or early nineties. Like a teenager's acne, at first there were no crime scene cleaning companies, and then suddenly there were several, each spawning itself and wholly independent from other companies in other cities.
Schmitty himself got the idea around 1995 from watching the movie
Pulp Fiction
. In one scene a character called "The Wolf" aided the protagonists after they'd accidentally shot someone's head off in a car. The Wolf showed up and discreetly helped them clean up the mess. Schmitty wanted to be The Wolf.