Posters covered the windows of the garage, making the room unnaturally dark. I could make out the vague shapes of engine parts strewn about the murky darkness. The place had probably been a chop shop before the dad bit it, I reasoned.
Shadows of inanimate objects gave the room an ominous feel; it suggested the sort of scene where you flick on a switch and all your friends and family jump out and yell "Surprise!" But if my friends and family were in here, I knew they were already dead. I searched for a light switch, fanning my hand across the drywall, hoping I didn't connect with a black widow spider or a broken forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor.
Finding no switch after a brief search, I left the oppressive heat of the insulated garage and went back out into the Compton sun. From there it was a short trip back into the living room where the family was still huddled, as if in prayer. I rapped my clipboard against the doorframe twice to get their attention. I was wearing my sunglasses indoors now, having put them on just before entering the house.
"I can't find a light switch…I won't go back there without light. It's a safety hazard."
"I'll turn it on," the teenaged boy volunteered from his place in the prayer huddle.
"No!" The woman barked sharply, making both the boy and me jump slightly. "You shouldn't have to see that mess."
I glanced around the innards of the house, with its brown color scheme and picture frames I recognized as being from the Dollar Tree. She kept the place tidy, which was nice, but it was probably also an indicator that she was a stay-at-home mom.
"Are you a stay-at-home-mom?" I asked point-blank as she led me back out to the garage.
"No, I work," she said quietly, proudly. I could see that she was indeed seriously affected by having to go inside the garage.
She opened the door and, reaching into the darkness, flipped on a switch and then stepped quickly back out into the yard, desperate not to see.
"That light switch is pretty far in from the door; I wonder if that's up to code…" I mused aloud and pretended to jot something down on my clipboard.
"Smells in here," I felt it necessary to add, though I'd smelled worse; he was probably still pretty fresh. I rounded the corner into the garage and stopped short. "Holy Toledo," I exclaimed, unable to suppress my surprise. Dad hadn't done his poor Compton family any favors.
It had been done with a shotgun, but it looked more like the work of a grenade…or several grenades taped to a larger bomb. If there had been anything for the coroner to take away, I would have been surprised. It seemed as if I could account for just about every piece of the man, blown into portions no larger than a Bazooka Joe bubblegum wrapper (and just as colorful).
The unfortunate part of his situation, other than leaving a wife and kids to fend for themselves, was the engine parts. Because he had engine parts scattered around his garage when he pulled the trigger, the chunks of him flew far and hard, embedding themselves into every nook, cranny, and chink available. The carpeted garage was oversaturated with the familiar red, lumpy mush.
Impressively, he'd managed to overkill himself. Somehow, some way, pieces of his brain had found a way to curve a corner, landing hard around a fabricated inner wall eight feet away. Stalactites of dripping guts hung from the ceiling in scattered rows. The wall posters had absorbed their fill, and worse, the flies had gotten to him by that point in the afternoon, and the air was thick with their buzzing.
I stood over engine parts rife with flesh, imagining using an unwound coat hanger to scrape biohazard from the intricate inlays of the metal, because a toothbrush would be too big to reach down and in with. It would involve multiple days of intense work, and it would have to be done cheaply, because there was no way the family could afford to pay me what it was worth in my mind.
I just couldn't justify it. I had recently pocketed a thousand dollars to clean cocktail sauce out of the carpet in a posh Los Angeles hotel because the managers thought it was a bloodstain. (To me, the shrimp tails tossed on the floor nearby were a dead giveaway that it wasn't.)
I had made another grand cleaning up an advertising big shot who killed himself in the bathroom of his boutique, beachfront Venice Beach agency with a high-powered hunting rifle. He had pulled the trigger and blown most of his head off. Apparently that hadn't done the trick, because he had had to pull the trigger again to take the other side off.
He had attempted to kill himself five years earlier, but when that failed, he had bought a life insurance policy that covered suicide…if he didn't kill himself within the first five years. The second that clause was nullified,
blam
…and then, I guess,
blam
again!
I had made decent money on those jobs. The ad guy was a lot of work, but even still, he was nothing compared to what I was seeing in that garage, and there was no way I'd be seeing adman money on this job.
Even more frustratingly, the garage was cluttered with bulky and heavy odds and ends that had been splattered with grisly human pulp, and the contents of several open cardboard boxes were effectively riddled with bio. Disgusted with the man's lack of consideration for me, I spit into one of the open cardboard boxes and left the garage to call Dirk.
Dirk, of course, was still unavailable to help, but he was also adamant that we needed the money and should bid really, really low to get the contract. Dirk had recently spent a good amount of cash on an ozone generator for the business, which was essentially an industrial machine that filtered the bad smells out of the air by somehow drawing odor to statically charged panes of glass like magnets. To me, an ozone generator seemed about as necessary a purchase and as practical as magic healing stones or a wool baseball bat.
We finally ended up using it (and charging the customers extra for its use!) on a decomposing body scene, though we didn't use it to get the decomp scent out of the air but merely the smell of cigarette smoke out of the garage. We left the machine running for two days straight, and it didn't do a fucking thing. At least we could have used the wool baseball bat like some sort of half-assed wall sponge.
I knew that the family was in a bind—the Compton cops had made them call a company to do the cleaning, and they happened to choose us. So I had them over a barrel as far as the work was concerned. But whether I wanted to deal with a payment plan stretched out over the next twenty years was something else entirely.
I could have done the work cheaply, something like a pro bono case, or because it was the sort of thing that good people did. Instead, I popped a new piece of gum in my mouth, pushed my sunglasses up on my nose, and with one thumb keeping a beat on my metal clipboard, walked back into the house.
"That is a mighty big mess your fella left you with…" I said, sounding more like a Southern sheriff than even I had meant to. "Yes, sir." I shook my head for effect, as if I had just seen some war atrocity. "The bottom line is you can't afford my company."
The widow looked at me; her kids looked at me; and through a single, small mirror hanging over the couch like wall art, I looked at me. And I hated what all of us saw. And they hated me too…at least the mom did, knowing full well the intent of my words.
"I'm not even going to offer you a price here," I shrugged, "except to say, 'Picture the most money you could imagine me charging to clean something like this. Now quadruple that.'"
I felt like a bastard as I said it. And yet, I meant it. Old Jeff would have helped them out; New Jeff just wanted to get the fuck out of there and over to a nicer zip code.
In the end, I recommended that they call Might-T-Clean, our biggest competitor. Maybe those assholes would take on a charity case.
During the long drive home, I called Dirk and told him that I bid the gig fairly, but that they wanted to "entertain some other offers." I could hear the desperation in his voice as he hoped they'd choose us. The idea of him sitting beside the phone waiting for a call that wouldn't be coming made me laugh.
It wasn't funny, though, that we frequently charged people a grand more than our competitors (from what we could gather from follow-up calls to those clients who'd declined our services) to do work that potentially would be of much lower quality. But if private citizens had it bad, private companies had it worse.
I remember heading out to clean up a nonfatal shooting incident in the parking lot of a major fast-food chain that we had an account with through our corporate headquarters. Since Schmitty had dispatched the call to us, he was entitled to his cut, and he wanted his cut to be big.
The fast-food chain was on a "per job" basis, meaning that each scene carried its own price tag (unlike our Motel 6 account, which had a flat rate for all services rendered). Schmitty thus gave the order to Dirk, which was passed verbatim on to me: "Charge the fuck out of them." Contracted account or not, I was to fleece them for all I thought I could.
Granted, in business the philosophy is that something is only worth what someone will pay for it, but this was one step beyond. We had an exclusive contract with the corporation, so the local franchises didn't have any choice but to pay what
we
thought our services were worth. And according to Schmitty, our services were worth a fuck of a lot.
I set out with the notion of charging them at least fifteen hundred dollars, but when I got there I was shocked to see that the job didn't require anything more than quickly wiping up a couple tiny blood spots and sweeping up some windshield glass in the parking lot. The job took me maybe ten minutes, and I used their broom and dustpan to do it—and charged them twenty-five hundred dollars for my time. This left the franchise owner furious in my wake and bitching about how one of his employees could have done it for "seven dollars an hour." I gave him my "welcome to capitalism" wink and was on my way.
But that sort of thing was in the past—that was the kind of thing that someone without freaky bumps polluting his body could do. I'd begun a sort of metamorphosis into something else, something I hoped would resemble a better kind of person.
CHAPTER 25
mr. klima goes to washington
The villain is the hero of his own story.
—Unknown
The joke in crime scene cleaning is "If we die, who is going to clean us up?" Our clients, feeling clever, say this to us frequently, each believing that they are the first one to consider it. Hell, we say it ourselves conversationally to break the stress of what it is we do. In cleaning up the deceased, we have to separate ourselves from them and not consider how easily it could be our body on the slab and a different batch of assholes wrist-deep in what was once our face.
And yet with those bumps on my arm and no money to have them looked over by a professional, the "industry joke" was anything but. My anxiety overwhelmed my sense of invincibility and forced me to weigh the possibilities of my own demise. I have to admit that I didn't like the conclusions I came to.
As much as I don't like to consider myself "expendable," I certainly am. I don't have any dependents to care for; the fate of the world doesn't necessarily hang on my shoulders; and if I blipped off the map tomorrow in a plane crash, few outside my immediate family would mourn me for an extended period of time. In short, I am as human (in the most negative connotation of the word) as the rest of you.
I've never fooled myself into believing that human beings were anything more than self-aware animals, ranking above the rest of the fauna only because we believe we do. I'd like to believe in heaven; it seems like it would be a comforting place. At the same time, though, I don't like to believe in hell. The two of them together are so intimidating that I find more solace in the notion of just ceasing to exist. I will slip out of consciousness at some point, and that will be that. No heaven, no hell, no pearly gates or divine being sitting in judgment.
Do I like this idea because, with the way I've lived my life on earth, I think I am in danger of going to a "hell"? I don't know. With my health scare looming, it wasn't so much "hell" that I was considering so much as: 1. How would I go? and 2. What regrets do I have?
If the bumps on my arm turned out to be AIDS, cancer, or a series of tumors that were devastatingly inoperable, how long would I endure? Because I don't currently believe in life after death, that means I don't believe in any religious repercussions of suicide. And that belief is a freedom unto itself. I just know that if I'm fucked anyway, I'm not going to waste something as potentially hilarious as my life. I've seen too many wasted lives, both professionally and personally.
But strictly professionally speaking, I've also seen too many wasted deaths. Your death is your last chance to do something profound, something that resonates…something that endures. If you perceive yourself as worthless in life, don't make your exit vanilla as well.
If my bumps turned out to be fatal, do you think I would take a razor to my wrists in the bath? Do you think that I would do anything as mundane as allow the disease to consume me? Fuck no. As some figure from my past, notable only for their motto, once uttered to me: I don't want to be laid in my grave; I want to slide into that motherfucker sideways!
Ten-four to that! We should all truly aspire to such an entertaining exodus. If my bumps turned out to be the end of me, I decided, I would pack myself with dynamite and candy and then go down to the steps of city hall with a megaphone.