The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  Her car guided me down streets that got smaller and smaller, past houses that were situated closer and closer together, and finally she turned onto an impossibly narrow street where her tiny car sailed along. In the truck I had to creep slowly, cautious to not slam my side-view mirrors into the beat-down cars polluting both sides of the pockmarked asphalt strip.

  Even I, an ignorant, small-town white kid, knew where I was. It was a place you didn't really believe existed when you grew up in a pleasant suburb, a place that for many in this country's urban areas was just another fact of life. I was in the hallowed stomping grounds of rap culture. I was in "the ghetto."

  Obviously I was, and largely still am, an ignorant, sheltered individual from a place where people leave their doors unlocked at night and don't worry too much about their kids running around late at night. For those of you like me, "the ghetto" is that part of any given city where the poorest of the city's inhabitants congregate and call it home.

  In Eureka our idea of a ghetto was the trailer park. We knew the idea of a ghetto, and that was what we could perceptibly link it to. But we were wrong, because a ghetto is something so much more than a hamlet of poor folk. "The ghetto" has shifted to being something more sinister, a place built largely on fear and mistrust. For many in this day and age, being from the ghetto is a thing of dangerous pride.

  Ghetto culture has its own way of communicating, from the graffiti tags that look like scribbles to most of us, to the clothes, to the tattoos. There are signs all around, and if you don't decipher them correctly, you could find yourself in real trouble, innocent visitor or not.

  Leslie parked her car in the driveway of a one-story, tan-colored house with a three-foot-high rock wall built around the property. On top of the rock wall, linked metal spikes jutted skyward, flecked with white paint to form a gate. Rust revealed itself through wherever the paint had chipped off.

  I had no other place to park, and not knowing the appropriate rules of conduct for where I was, I was forced to stop the big truck in the middle of the street. I was frustrated that Dirk had once again sent me out alone to do the work that would net me a third of a half, whether he helped me or not. But he was a sheriff, and there wasn't a whole lot I could say to that. Foolishly, I hoped that someone would take offense to the truck being stopped there and firebomb it…while I was outside of it, anyway.

  Making sure to lock the truck, I pushed the clicker on the key ring multiple times so that the alarm-activated beep would sound out as a warning to the ne'er-do-wells that my truck was definitely locked and off-limits.

  I walked up the short driveway, noting a manually operated gate with equally sharp fixtures on it that could be rolled across the driveway and padlocked. The front windows of the house had bars on them, and if the family had anything of value, it was not in plain sight.

  I passed the car on my way to meeting Leslie at the front door. The back window was gone, shot out, shattered, and lying across the backseat, and the front and back side windows were either rolled down or missing. The windshield on the gray Corolla was shattered but held intact by safety glass. Large holes were pinged out where the bullets had forced their way through and done major damage. I didn't stop to look inside, but I could tell the car was going to be bloody.

  Leslie waited for me to arrive before she knocked, and I introduced myself to her a moment before I introduced myself to the family. The woman looked like somebody's mother, a tired, middle-aged Mexican lady with sadness as a permanent fixture in her eyes. Her husband, a middle-aged mustachioed gent smiling at me with yellow teeth, looked like my uncle's gardener. I greeted them, embarrassed by my whiteness, and spoke directly to them, but speaking slowly as if that would help them understand me. Leslie translated, her voice tight, and I could sense a vague irritation at my inability to communicate.

  Walking back to the car and putting my tight, black gloves on, I felt the heat from the late afternoon sun beating down on me. Sweat soaked my black polo, which no longer had that fresh, new look.

  I then laid out the basics for the family. I couldn't do anything about the windshield or the bullet holes that had cut into the frame, leaving sharp contorted gashes that I could fit my index finger through. I didn't know a thing about cutting into or removing car seats, so I told Leslie to convey to them that I would clean the seats as best I could and vacuum the glass out of the backseat. I felt fairly safe in charging them $435 for the cleanup. I felt bad, but I couldn't see fit to charge a couple less just because they were poor. I was straining to promote equality, after all.

  I didn't need Leslie to translate that the number was a large one for them. The man sent his wife scurrying back into the house while he discussed the number with another man, maybe his brother, who had just joined us. Finally they agreed and signaled to Leslie to tell me. I nodded enthusiastically, grinning broadly as if they had just shown me to my room at their resort, forgetting that I was negotiating over their dead son's blood.

  Once the contract had been written and signed for the agreed amount, Leslie informed me cheerfully that she was leaving. I would be alone, the large, stupid, white guy with the nice truck, unarmed in the ghetto.

  Inhabitants from other houses had taken notice that something was happening at the house. I could see them poking their heads around bushes and off of porches as I steered the Silverado into the driveway to take Leslie's place. The father gestured to inform me that he could close the gate and lock my truck in, but I waved him off with a show-no-fear mentality. I had to show the other creatures that this beast was not afraid.

  * * *

  I'd gained a fair bit of eye-widening bravado in my time as a bouncer at a thug club in Long Beach, the LBC (Long Beach, California, for those unfamiliar with rap music lore). It was as simple as being a big guy who needed money and showed up at a club that needed a bouncer. I was still at Beverages & More in those days, back before I knew what a crime scene cleaner was. As a desperate bid to pick up extra cash during the slow retail season, I signed on to work as one of five security guys in the bar on weekends—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

  The place was called New York Bryan's, or NYB's, and the owner, Bryan, appropriately, was one of those "throw 'em in the trunk of a car" goombah types from Brooklyn. Fond of leather jackets and a St. Christopher necklace, Bryan was barely two years older than me and already owned his own nightclub. Some would say he was connected, but I didn't believe that.

  I had never been a bouncer before; the closest I'd come was working door security at a Humboldt rave where techno dorks would give you weed in lieu of the entry fee, and the whole place was kind and high. NYB's was different. The clientele wasn't hippy-dippy, freelove, peace-craving music enthusiasts. Instead, these were flash-anddash gangsters, small-money rollers who parked their Escalades and Benzes at the red-painted curbs out front, ignoring parking tickets to the point that the cops stopped giving them out. The rollers had money to burn, and Bryan had a bevy of girls they'd thumb bills at to keep the entourage supplied with drinks.

  There were others, too, non-thug types who'd pop in. Long Beach was a melting pot, and we had a constantly evolving crew of regular customers. People you could count on to be there week after week, until one week they weren't, and you never saw them again.

  Tourists strolled the multitude of bars on Pine Avenue, each with a different ambience to get drunk in. Way down the block heading south, you had the Irish bar pumping out the strains of the Dropkick Murphys and Irish classics. Across the street was the Middle Eastern– themed Aladdin's; next door was the late-night taco place; and diagonally, the cigar bar, Cohiba. There were lots more, both independents and dives—mainstream places like Hooters and one-offs like Club 21.

  Depending on what was happening in town, you could guess what the majority clientele would be that week. Not long before I arrived, the band The Killers had played at a juke joint, The Vault, down the street and came into NYB's for the after-party. They drank up seven hundred dollars' worth of
booze in the VIP section and tried to leave without paying. New York Bryan himself stopped the band at the door. They paid up.

  My first night at the club, a Thursday, we already had a drunk making trouble at 9:00 p.m. The older white guy was soused and didn't want to leave. The bartender gave me the nod to have him removed. I approached the old guy and politely suggested that he'd had enough and that maybe he should find his way home. The old guy told me to fuck off, and I lightly put a hand on his shoulder, looking awkwardly to the bartender for guidance.

  "No, no, no!" the bartender shouted, a pretty burly guy himself. "You're doing it all wrong!"

  He came around the length of the oak bar and roughly grabbed the old man above his elbows. Lifting him, the bartender bull-rushed the drunk across the nearly empty dance floor and threw him out of the gated patio, where he landed hard on the street, collapsing into the gutter. I stared, shocked and awaiting some sort of retaliation. But the old man merely stood, waved us away angrily, and stumbled off into the night for his next belt of Blanton's.

  "You do it like that," the bartender said gruffly. From that point on, I understood.

  * * *

  I was sitting in the driver's seat of the Corolla at an awkward angle, not wanting the blood that had accumulated on the right side of the seat to get onto my biohazard suit. I had used our wet-dry vac to suck up all the broken glass I could, but I was still haphazardly working around the car, collecting the horrific remnants inside. I found an old, withered french fry sharing space in the cup holder with a dollop of brain and a tooth on the front passenger floorboard. I think it was a bicuspid.

  I had given up on trying to scrub the car seats clean. They oozed new blood whenever I put my brush on them, and I finally accepted the truth—they had to be cut out. This time, though, I wasn't going to do any extra work for free. The sun was fast disappearing behind a rise of dingy tenements, and if I wanted to be out of there with all my bicuspids intact, I had to take the proper steps.

  I knocked on the door and brought the old man out, the smell of Mexican food floating out with him and making me hungry. I tried to convey to him that I needed to charge him extra to cut the seats out, using that same slow, choppy English that we fools think will work.

  I could see he wasn't getting it when his daughter came home, pulling her car past the truck and up into the garage. Thankfully, she spoke enough English to broker a new deal that I kept down to an extra hundred dollars and he reluctantly accepted. He wanted me to save as much of the seats as I legally could, though, because he still had to drive the car. If I were him, I would've just started taking the bus.

  As I started cutting away haphazardly at the fabric of the front seats, I glanced up to realize I had company. A vato, a Mexican gangster, bald-headed with a thick cholo mustache, was staring at me from behind square black sunglasses and grinning severely. His lightly built frame wore a wife-beater undershirt as an outer shirt and tan shorts with tall white socks tucked into dark slippers.

  I nodded at him convivially, never breaking what I perceived to be eye contact and never saying a word, pleasant or otherwise. I kept on with my work but never took my eyes off him. He leaned closer into the car, smiling dangerously, daring me to say a word, but I didn't. I couldn't let him know he frightened me.

  Finally he turned and walked away. A bit later, two other similarly attired young men approached, both of them wearing full white undershirts instead of wife beaters. Neither one possessed the fullness of mustache the first one had had. I gave them the same treatment, though they didn't dare come as close as the other had, and finally they, too, walked off.

  I began to feel like a fool, like I had overstepped my boundaries and wandered into silly-white-man land. Surely they weren't trying to intimidate me; they were merely curious, the same as in any other culture or neighborhood. Surely they were just nosy neighbors, and I was an overzealous ignoramus.

  As I was finishing bagging up what I had taken of the seat covers, leaving little more than wire frame and splotches of yellow, molded foam, the original gangster returned. This time he walked up to me, and from the corner of my eye I could see children inside the houses stopping to watch out front windows, just as apprehensive as I was. He stopped within a few inches of me, and though he was much shorter, I could tell that he knew he could take me in a fight. I held my breath, knowing that it was dry and bad.

  He pushed his sunglasses up while looking at me and said in clear, clipped English, "You clean up in here, okay. But that blood out there, on the curb," and he pointed off somewhere down the street, evidently referring to a separate crime scene, "that blood stays."

  Better men might have acted differently; I, on the other hand, nodded to him, finished up, collected a check from the house, and left the ghetto. I was mad at myself for being scared, but I didn't fool myself; I knew that I would one day have to come back. There would be other crime scenes in the Santa Ana ghetto; of that I was certain. I just hoped they wouldn't be anytime soon.

  CHAPTER 7

  drunken madcappery, goddamnit!

  All you need to be happy in life is a hummingbird feeder and a pellet gun.

  —George Davis

  Crime scene cleanup was the last thing on my mind when I moved to Fullerton. I had come with a purpose: I wanted to get my bachelor's degree in advertising. But I chose Fullerton, instead of, say, Chicago or New York or one of the other great advertising hubs, because of a girl.

  She worked at the porn shop with me, and she was beautiful. Blonde and smart with a couple of major talents (yes, I'm talking about tits here), she was well read and articulate. I was sure she was only working at the porn shop to conduct independent research on the sexual proclivities of the middle class or some high-minded experiment of a similar nature. She was too good for porno.

  I was a loner, living in Santa Clarita with no friends at all, and it was only too easy to fall for her. The beautiful coed and the dirty drifter: it had all the makings of an adult movie plot. I had a bad habit of falling in love with just about every girl I met, though, and I was destined to have my heart broken.

  She moved to Fullerton to major in English, and I hadn't had the temerity to ask her out on a normal, civilized date, what with the two of us working in porn. In my mind, people who came together through porn, be it on the retail side or the production side, couldn't possibly have healthy, lasting relationships. My warped sense of the world convinced me, though, that if we met in a different setting, we might be able to have something magical.

  So when she enrolled down at CSUF, I secretly did the same. We would find each other in some sunlit hallway, both of us bending to retrieve a dropped notebook, our fingers would meet and then, finally, our eyes. The recognition would set in and then the realization that destiny had pushed us together (cough). It would be passionate and romantic, like something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

  When I abruptly quit my job at the porn shop, she disappeared from my life, and I just trusted to kismet that I would run into her again in the fall in a different town, a different place, as a different person. Well, I never saw her again, so that completely fucking backfired.

  Whether she didn't get accepted or she changed schools or she knew that I was secretly enrolling to follow her and have a chance at falling in love (which I always thought of as vaguely romantic, but everyone around me considered creepy), she never ended up at the campus. Or maybe she did, and we just had two completely different schedules.

  Whatever happened, I was suddenly stuck in Fullerton, with only my younger brother Chris for support. And while becoming close with him was great, I needed something else.

  On my first day at CSUF, I was in shy mode the entire time I walked around the campus, keeping my head down and terrified that someone might ask me something. I was twenty-two, only a few weeks from my next birthday.

  My first class was a basic tutorial on media, for which I had parked on completely the wrong side of campus and had thus spent a considerable part of
the morning huffing and puffing my fat ass across the grounds to reach. Finally I stumbled into the class and, looking around, saw that my shy self was already in trouble.

  It was a large class and already quite full; there weren't any open seats in the back or toward the end aisles where I could slide in, take notes, and disappear once class was over. No, I would have to take a seat down in front, where the talkative kids sat. The ones who actually asked questions and had questions asked of them. I seriously considered shit-canning the class for the semester, but it was one of the major prerequisites for my advertising major. So, resolutely, I buckled down and took a seat.

  I kicked myself the whole time. Typically my neuroses would have had me coordinating my schedule against a map of potential parking and arriving at the class far before anyone else to ensure the best possible seat for someone of my disposition. Instead I'd spent the previous evening drinking a thirty-block of Miller Lite cans with Chris and then skating around the apartment complex to show any cool fellow tenants that we newcomers were "with it."