The Dead Janitors Club (33 page)

    Picking up what appeared to be a prop life-size severed hand from a Halloween display, I noted two things: first, that it had a motor that made the fingers wiggle, and second, that the middle two fingers were covered in Vaseline and bits of poop.

    "Why can't anyone normal die?" I lamented loudly. I threw the hand into the trash bag and continued digging.

    At the bottom of the second of three large sex drawers, I found two lunch-sack-size brown paper bags. I glanced around quietly, ensuring my privacy, and hoped that I'd found money. If I had, it was quietly going home with me.

    The bag contained not money but Polaroids, hundreds of them, all mashed into the bags. I reached into the midst of the stack and retrieved a handful, curious about their content.

    After a quick glance through my newfound acquisitions, I summoned the others in the group to join me, secure in the knowledge that what I had was not of any financial value. Once the workers had assembled around me, I treated them to an eye-popping display of dicks. Short dicks, fat dicks, black dicks, brown dicks, shaved dicks, bushy dicks, all manner of dicks recorded on photo paper and crammed into a bag.

    The carpeting of the bedroom was instantly recognizable as background in the photos, but otherwise it was a staggering variety of close-ups of dicks. The dicks weren't alone either (well, some were); the majority of the pictures showcased the athletic prowess of the urethra, as many of the dicks had been stretched open at the tip to accommodate other objects.

    In some, penises were devouring action figures—their small toy heads absorbed down to their shoulders in the male organ. In other pictures, Hot Wheels toy cars were seen exiting the urethra as if it were the Hoosac Tunnel. Sometimes the objects were glass rods or metal Phillips-head screwdrivers, objects that I had thrown away earlier.

    The other bag contained more of the same, with asses and anuses thrown in as well. Objects of various sizes and shapes had found their way into a multitude of assholes, including glass tubes containing small rodents. In one particularly nasty photo, an open-mouthed vase with a long, fat neck was jam-packed into a butt.

    "You won't believe this," Kim gushed, seeing the photo. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned still gloveless, holding that very vase by the neck, the very neck that was mostly inserted into the chocolate starfish of a man's very hairy ass.

    "It's the vase," she confirmed, excitedly disgusted. All doubt that it was, in fact, the vase was removed by the presence of a thin veneer of Vaseline fog that coated the majority of the vase's upper region.

    "You do realize you're holding, without gloves, something that has been in a man's butt, don't you?" Dirk asked her, as incredulous as Doug and me.

    "Ohmigod!" she shrieked, realizing. Fortunately, she had the good sense to toss the vase neatly into the full trash bag, where it sunk into the midst of other sexual craziness. The fact that I cannot detail the horror and revulsion that wrenched her normally attractive face into a grotesque mask highlights for me that I have no future as a writer. The horrified noises she made as she scrubbed at her hands beneath impossibly hot water were some that I will never forget, nor forget to laugh at.

    "Don't touch the faucet," we cautioned her, teasing. "I think there was a picture of him fucking that, too."

    Jasper's mom, per her deal with us, had rented a storage garage at a nearby facility that closed at 7:00 p.m. Dirk was adamant that we complete the excavation of the apartment and make it over to the facility that day, not wanting to incur the rental fees for one more day of moving-truck use.

    Kim had exited the project shortly after washing her hands down to a couple layers of skin, and so it was up to Doug, Dirk, and me to finish cleaning house. We raced, taking what we wanted of the dead man's possessions and throwing the rest into the back of the moving truck, abandoning neatness in the face of a deadline.

    At 6:35 p.m., having worked ten hours on the project and drenched in sweat, we finished. But the three of us didn't have time to collapse. Now that we'd filled the large truck with Jasper's crap, we had to take it to the storage facility and unload it.

    We raced across town to the facility and made it inside the electronic gates with ten minutes to spare. Figuring that once we were inside the gates we had all the time in the world to unload the haul, we calmly set about rigging a system that would allow us to take stuff from the back of the truck to the second-floor garage.

    But since 7:00 p.m. had come and gone, the doors inside the storage facility had auto-locked, and maneuvering through them and the elevator (which could only be controlled from the second floor after 7:00 p.m.) became something of a logic puzzle.

    My exhaustion had clouded with anger and was not helped by my being outside alone when the caretakers of the property showed up. They were a middle-aged Mexican couple who spoke no English, but it was clear that they wanted us out. The facility closed at 7:00 p.m., and that meant everything.

    "Five more minutes," I begged them, gesturing with my hands. The man nodded reasonably and they left. Twenty minutes later, they were back and we were still nowhere near finished.

    Dirk joined me outside while Doug stayed inside to man the elevator and keep the electronic doors open. Dirk spoke a few halting words of Spanish, so he attempted to reason with them, himself as frustrated by the situation and as tired as I was. The couple and Dirk would not reach an agreement, it seemed, when the Mexican man suddenly stormed off with his wife in tow.

    "I think he finally understands," Dirk said, bitter. "We're not going to keep this truck an extra day and finish tomorrow. Not happening."

    We scrambled, though, to finish, a bit nervous about what the absence of the caretakers really meant. Finally, a little after 8:00 p.m., we were completely exhausted, soaking with perspiration, and all miserably angry about the long day, but at least the truck was empty. Dirk climbed into the cab, followed by Doug and then me, all of us squeezed onto the U-Haul's long bench seat.

    Dirk was about to start the engine when the Mexican couple rounded the corner in line with the crotchetiest, most curmudgeonly looking old white man that I have ever seen. His pants were hiked up aggressively north of his belly button, and clomping toward us in Frankenstein-ish work boots, he looked as if we'd interrupted his Denny's senior meal.

    "You," he said, pointing with an angry and crooked finger, doubtlessly riddled with arthritis. "You," he said again, pointing at the truck and at all of us inside as if it were all one big package. I climbed down from the truck, fuming, to confront the old-timer. Dirk followed my lead. Doug stayed put in the cab, seated "bitch."

    "Sir, we thought that you just had to be
in
the facility before seven, not completely out of here," I tried to reason.

    "No excuse," barked the man. "They told you to leave, and you lied to them."

    I felt the blood rise on the sides of my neck, and I was reminded of the Sewer House and the miserable couple we'd contracted to help clean it.

    "How could they tell us?" I snapped. "They don't speak any English!"

    I imagined that Doug, inside the cab, was proud.

    "You should have known. Now you're trespassing!" the old man said, returning my glare.

    I stepped forward once more with the intention of pummeling the old bastard to the ground.

    "What are you going to do?" He smirked the confident sneer of a man who has never been thrown a good beatdown. "Hit me? I'll call the police!"

    I started to tell the old man that Dirk was a police officer, but Dirk shushed me, not wanting to bring that into the situation.

    "Sir, we're sorry. It was all a misunderstanding…" Dirk attempted. "We're all done now. We're just going to leave."

    "No," the old man said viciously. "You're not leaving now."

    "You can't keep us here," I challenged, balling my fists up.

    "What do you mean we're not leaving?" Dirk said evenly, still playing the diplomat.

    "You've wasted an hour of my night…I'm wasting some of yours. I'm not opening the gates for at least an hour, maybe more. You're stuck here."

    "You can't keep us here," Dirk uttered, his diplomacy shattered.

    "Call the police," the old man taunted.

    "Jeff, get in the truck," Dirk said hotly. "We're running the gates."

    This was one of the coolest moments of my life. A childlike sense of wonder and joy blazed through me as I climbed back up into the cab of the truck, eager to cause mayhem, exhaustion forgotten.

    "We're ramming the gates," I told Doug.

    Dirk fired up the big truck's engine with a mighty roar, reversing hard away from the old coot, the wide-eyed Mexican couple, and all the stresses of the day. Backing down an alleyway, Dirk pointed the truck in the direction of the back gate, a broad one-piece affair that I imagined would shatter open with a nightmarishly sweet clang. That gate would know the full power of the
Crime Scene Cleaners.

    I was positively frothing with the possibility, and Doug seemed pretty amped as well. Far behind us, the old man and the caretakers watched our every move.

    As we sidled back to blast through the hinged-metal span lying before us, we collectively noticed a small metal arm that stood to the side of the back entrance on our side, with the exit button for the gate. In a moment more anticlimactic than the one you are about to read, Dirk pushed the button.

    The gate slid open sideways, creaking slowly as if it were an extension of the old man himself. My belief in life imitating action-movie dramatics was the only thing shattered that day.

    "Good thing," Dirk reminded me, calmer. "We didn't buy insurance on the truck."

* * *

In a move that I have since come to regard as telltale Dirk, he called Howard the next morning to tell him that we were finished. Or maybe Howard called him. Either way, the next call was Dirk to me, bitching and complaining that Howard was upset that we'd left the carpet insulation. Of course, Dirk was unable to return to the scene (probably for another "trip to Disneyland"), so I had to go and do all the work myself. I dragged Chris along and paid him fifty bucks to help.

    And what happened to those twin bags of Polaroids, you ask? Well, they went to the dump along with all the other smut. Dirk and I'd had a brief discussion that involved whether or not we should include all the sex stuff with Jasper's other possessions to let his mom know what a weirdo her son was. Ultimately we decided not to…it was the decent thing to do, I guess.

    Still, I wished I had kept a few of those photos. Living in a fraternity house, there were all sorts of pranks one could pull with a lunch sack full of gay pictures. Fortunately for the benefit of pranksters worldwide, Jasper wasn't the only pervert who would die on my watch.

The end for the Crime Scene Cleaners began with a van crash.

    It was an unspectacular van crash, but I should have recognized it as an indicator of the future. The van in question belonged to the Public Guardian's office, and our latest confidante from their office, Billy, was piloting it. Billy was a goofy, fumbling, lisping man, the kind of guy that other guys would have written off as gay. His blondish mop of hair was pushed heavily to one side, as if it were the mother of all comb-overs, and he had a jauntiness that belied his actual age, which I would approximate as early fifties. And he had a really overly manicured blond mustache.

    Upon arriving that morning, Billy had turned into the driveway of the target house a little too suddenly and jarred the side panel of his van into our large, rented, metal dumpster. A violent, banshee-esque shrieking ripped through the still air of the neighborhood, which was adjacent to Koreatown, causing any and all early morning passersby to stop and look.

    Befuddled, Billy then backed the van up with the ragged corner of the dumpster still embedded in its side. Doug, his buddy Kool, Dirk, and I watched in shocked amazement, wincing as the reverse caused a sharper screech.

    Finally Billy, lost for ideas, mashed down on the accelerator, producing a final deafening squeal that brought the last of the neighbors from their homes. The van bounced up onto the grass lawn of the home and came to a jarring stop, a nasty gash of sharply contorted metal punched in and raked along the side of the county vehicle.

    Kim arrived in the aftermath, along with one of my frat brothers, Bobby G., whom I had recruited for the assignment. All of us stood in shocked amazement. Billy bounced from the driver's seat of the van, took a look at the damage, then took a look at Kim, and shrugged it off. "Not my van" was how he essentially phrased it in his lisping, goofy cadence.

    The house in question had belonged to another hoarder. It wasn't one that Chris and I had surveyed together; rather, it was one that Dirk and I had looked at, watched over by the stern eye of the head of the Public Guardian's office. The house was a "get" for them, and they were taking it seriously.

    It wasn't much to look at as far as dwellings go—a shoddy one-story deal in a shitty neighborhood filled with two-story homes. Behind it, the deceased's home also had five independent structures—two one-room guesthouses, two large sheds, and a large, enclosed sunroom that spanned the back of the house. This all combined to make the one regular threebedroom, two-bathroom home into one hell of a large task.